Raymarching and volumetrics in C4D

[rendermania]

You wouldn't be talking about Stormtracer, would you?

http://www.peranders.com/c4d8/st/index.html

As far as I know its based on raymarching coupled with lit billboards.

[Per-Anders]

no he's talking about http://www.peranders.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=92 and http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=138895&highlight=update

eventually development turned away from all of that when remotion did his surface pack containing many features of the cosmetic surgery pack. and we just concentrated on storm tracer.

in this case though storm tracer would do what he asks (a replacement for pyrocluster) etc much faster than a standard raymarcher (it uses an intelligent marching algorithm).

[Rev9]

I know some about ST.. This is a particle sprite rendering system if I grok t properly. How does ST produce a refracrive marble with interior texture? This is why I assumed it was raymarching. I read this thread some time ago and there was response s to you amazed you wrote a rendering engine for raymarching.. I assume ST uses the rendering system of C4D which only traces/renders surfaces.. Can a raymarching shader be built that is similar to a procedural shader.. I may know not of what I speak so enlighten me..


Best Regards
BT

[Per-Anders]

as stated the raymarcher was discontinued. it was a part of the cosmetic surgery shader pack that was never released in the end. you can read and see what each thing is in the threads that i linked to.

storm tracer renders placards using it's own intelligent raymarching algorithms, there is no sprite rendering built into cinema, it would do your clouds and smoke and pyrocluster replacement stuff. it wasn't used in the "marble" examples, or in the terrain examples, as stated they used their own different volume tracer. the terrain is again something completely different.

"Can a raymarching shader be built that is similar to a procedural shader."

of course not. that's why i certainly never showed any volumetric raymarching examples rendered in c4d at all, in any threads that i previously linked to in this thread.

[rendermania]

I think what Sadie was saying is that Remotion produced stuff in the meantime that does a lot of what they were trying to do:

http://www.remotion.de.vu/

Not an expert on Remo's stuff, but he has built lots of interesting shader tools like paranormal etc.

[flingster]

there is a volume tracer shader and fractal shader in ditools 1.4...HOWEVER...they are slow and do not even compare to ST speed wise or method afaik. remo released paranormal but doesn't include any raymarching or volumetrics as i understand it..spectral does include a dispersion shader...
there are demos for ST afaik and remos stuff so you can test them out and see if they match what you were looking for...but to be honest if you're looking to do pyrocluster type stuff only with shed loads more flexibility then S&T is the daddy...can't be beat inside or outside of c4d.

[Zendorf]

Bummer to hear that Cosmetic Surgery is not going to be released...had been wondering about that for a while. Looks like Paranormal is the way to go for normal maps in Cinema. Speaking of which , am I the only one having trouble getting onto the remotion site? It crashes my browser on entry as of late. Would like to grab Paranormal and get the latest Ditools update....

[flingster]

Bummer to hear that Cosmetic Surgery is not going to be released...had been wondering about that for a while. Looks like Paranormal is the way to go for normal maps in Cinema. Speaking of which , am I the only one having trouble getting onto the remotion site? It crashes my browser on entry as of late. Would like to grab Paranormal and get the latest Ditools update....

its probably the svg viewer thing he added svg functions to the latest ditools stuff.

http://www.remotion4d.net/plugins1.html

http://www.remotion4d.net/download1.html

the good news he's using a new host...so its damn damn quick.

don't forget there was also another german guy developing a normal map plugin...and also
simplemaker pro due...i would have liked to see cosmetic surgery released but i can understand per not releasing it. paranormal 4d is a cool shader for normal map using..but it won't create the maps for you...which i think cosmetic surgery was going to help do.
watch out for simple maker pro as this will help create them also.
http://www.cinemax4d.de/home_us.html

[JoelOtron]

Cosmetic surgery looked very interesting to me also--too bad it was abandoned. I do hope Peranders/mdme Sadie continues developing his wonderful plugins. They've all been home runs in my book (that goes for Paul E as well of course :) ).

[AdamT]

paranormal 4d is a cool shader for normal map using..but it won't create the maps for you...
Actually the current version of Paranormal can make normal maps from grayscale images.

[Venkman]

Argh, why did you stop making the normal map plug-in? That stuff always gets me excited.

Does remotions normal map plug-in do a good enough job such that you felt you had to stop making yours? I downloaded the demo or remotion's and was underwhelmed, but I think that may be due to my noobiness.

BTW- will remotion's plug-in allow me to generate a normal map from a hi-res model and use it on a lo-res? Or does it need me to get a normal map elsewhere?

[Venkman]

EVILNESS!

I just looked at mdme-sadies threads and man, I want that fire shader, too! God, I am gearing my education towards making an action packed animation and cool shaders like that are what I want BADLY.

Any way we can convince you to release the shaders as is?

EDIT- it looks like the fire effects were storm tracer. Ooops. Guess I'll have to buy that.


BTW- if anyone has previous months of Xbox demo discs, there is an excellent "behind the scenes" interview with a particle artist at EA. He talks about the impressive effects he got with the Balrog in the Lord of the Rings RPG. It is a cool little insight I think can be easily duplicated with Storm Tracer and some particle emitters.

[Zendorf]

Thanks for the heads up there Flingster! It seems that the svg content was playing havok with my IE browser as Firefox had no trouble loading it up. Yeah the new remotion address does seem faster...will bookmark it.

Paranormal looks like it will do the job for what I need, which is for ZB generated normal maps. I have acheived some really nice results from Maya and XSI using normal maps for brick walls,floors and other background stuff. Renders fast and certainly a more realistic result than bump mapping.

When you start texturing and creating props in ZB it is easy to go overboard and want to displacement map everything in your scene....normal maps are a great inbetween, while reserving displacement just for main characters. Will be interested to see what is added to V1 of Paranormal , which looks to be arriving soon...

[JamesMK]

Venkman - Paranormal is definitely a great shader kit - does the job, and it comes with a few other interesting goodies as well. But I think it's important to realize that normalmapping as such is not a showstopping technique, it's just better looking bumps (a lot better looking)... so in the end, the difference is mostly rather subtle, but nothing you want to do without once you've gotten used to it.

Zendorf - You don't happen to know whether the V1 will be a free upgrade for registred users or not?

[Venkman]

I dunno, I think Normal mapping is a little more than subtle:

http://www.peranders.com/c4d8/samples/jpg/martin01.jpg

I would also post a link to the Master Chief from Halo 2 with and without normal mapping on him- and the difference is HUGE. That model is made up of less polygons than before because normal mapping can be used to do the details. It looks downright blobby without the normal maps.

So my question: does Remotions normal map shader only produce something subtly better than a bump map? Because other normal mapping techniques make a massive difference on character models.

[JamesMK]

Oh, it can definitely do that, like in the example you posted, with the proper map. I don't have anything suitable for painting normal maps, like Zbrush, so I can't really post a quick demonstration. Still, it's fully capable of producing that kind of result.

By 'subtle' I just meant that it's not flashy-hey-wow like stormtracer and so on that was discussed above :D Sorry if that was unclear.

[flingster]

Actually the current version of Paranormal can make normal maps from grayscale images.

cheers adam didn't even know that..not had a good enough look really unfortunately....i guess you could recreate the nlin shader setup now with c4d anyways...and there is also a way of using diparser shader out of ditools if you have it, to make the maps also as i understand it.

[flingster]

Zendorf - You don't happen to know whether the V1 will be a free upgrade for registred users or not?

dunno matey...will try and get remo to respond to this for you guys...not heard anything about paranormal v1.
:shrug:

[JamesMK]

We'll see then... And to use grayscale images, just use the Grey2Norm thingy included :thumbsup:

[JamesMK]

Just thought I would add a non-subtle example of Paranormal normalmapping here:

http://web.telia.com/~u48039569/stuff/pub_result.jpg

[Venkman]

James- wow that's awesome! I think it was my noobiness holding me back in that respect. With the Nlin shader and paranormal, I think I could add a lot of low rendering cost detail to low-poly objects. I'm all about optimizing for animation, baby! I'm glad to see those abilities available to Cinema users. I also heard Darf is working on something along these lines, so we'll see!

Now if someone would just make a plug-in that could create a normal map from a highly detailed character model and apply it to a simply, low poly character model. Without zBrush, I mean. :) My wallet is empty as is!

Does anyone else feel that BodyPaint should be upgraded to include normal mapping and SPD features? Think if Bodypaint integrated abilities of zBrush. It would be an awesome tool integraated into C4d! Unmatched, I say!

[JamesMK]

It's definitely a very useful technique for lots of secondary detail... takes a while to set up and prepare things and so on of course, but in the end it could potentially end up saving days of rendering for certain kinds of animations. And even without going all the way with it, I think it improves ordinary bumpmapping quite a bit as well.

It would be fantastic if some support would be built in to BP - as far as realtime displacement goes, I doubt we'll see it though... The display engine of ZBrush is heavily streamlined to handle such stuff, and I simply don't think any "ordinary" 3D package, C4D included of course, could be tweaked into coping with it. It takes something quite different from the ground up in terms of software architecture. Maybe some refinement to the raybrush bump painting perhaps would be possible to improve normalmap feedback somehow :shrug:

[Caravaggio]

Now to be clear James, what you posted was a plane object right? It looks 3d from the front, but it's as as flast as a pancake any other direction.

Yeah, I hope the paranormal guys enjoy their stay while they can. They obviously make good stuff but it seems to me the next version is going to have more shaders like this built in.

[Per-Anders]

Now to be clear James, what you posted was a plane object right? It looks 3d from the front, but it's as as flast as a pancake any other direction.

Yeah, I hope the paranormal guys enjoy their stay while they can. They obviously make good stuff but it seems to me the next version is going to have more shaders like this built in.

it's just a plane. Storm Tracer has the ability to use normal maps on it's sprites for added 3 dimensionality (as well as z-pixel displacement). of course they never face any direciton apart form straight to the camera, so it's not quite the same issue. normal maps allow a great deal of percieved added detail to be added to any object at minimum render cost.

[Venkman]

that's part of the reason I held off on getting it (besides having no more money to spend!) - normal mapping is no longer a buzzword or just a neat effect. It is used in everything from game engines to compositing elements in Shake and after effects.

I can see Maxon stepping up to create something for normal mapping, especially if they want to fit into pipelines for video game asset development where polygons become less and less important and shaders and such become more important.

[Per-Anders]

you held off getting storm tracer because it has the additional ability to handle normal mapping (as well as standard bump mapping)? o_O or do you mean bodypaint? bodypaint rocks and is quite a different thing to z-brush, and i don't think maxon will be adding in normal mapping to the program for a while yet. it'll take them a long time to modify things like viewports to allow neat things like full ogl and directx shader control within c4d viewports, as of yet we still haven't got ogl preview render creation (preview render still uses software mode only).

[Venkman]

oop- I ment paranormal. I held off on getting that for a while.

Storm Tracer is and always has been a sense of great lust for me. I want it. I just have to buy a computer soon (come one apple, update those towers!) and I promised myself I would learn character animation before diving into particle effects.

I was just looking at the ST gallery so I have a quick question:

Normal mapped sprites have obvious uses for plants and the like, but one of the examples has "normal mapped and illuminated sprite clouds". What does the normal map in this case do? Does it add more detail to each puff of smoke?

[JamesMK]

It's indeed just a plane. I guess one could compare it to a camera mapped background for instance, in the sense that it works fine until the rendered view deviates too much from the original projection.

Here's an example with the same thing, but the cam angled 45 degrees instead of head on:

http://web.telia.com/~u48039569/stuff/render_45degree.jpg

And I just bet that a Cinema release not too far ahead in the future will indeed have this stuff built into the core, yep.

[Per-Anders]

venkman - the normal mapping there is actually just extended bump mapping it helps to give some additional definition to the clouds.

jamesmk - i'm still not so sure. to be honest most of this is built in on a core level anyway. building a normal map shader in cinema is stupidly simple to do, all you do is tell cinema that the shader is directbump and then you simply return the vector (and make sure the user has put the shader in the bump channel), just remember to multiply the vector by the objects matrix unless you want the normals not to move with the object :D

[Venkman]

Sounds like a good comment to send to Maxon through their site!

Or make one yourself, and sell it for $10 a pop. I bet you'd get a bunch of orders. Of course, I'm a cheap ass punk, so I suggest low prices. :p

[JamesMK]

That basically makes it a no-brainer to add the capability into 9.1 :D

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