Newbie Questions

[Per-Anders]

Hi, and welcome. Wow I didn't even know that Imagine was still available, anyhow onto your questions.

1) By brush maps I'm asuming you mean textures and shaders. In the materials try using the layers shader to mix as many textures and shaders as you wish at once in any channel.

2) Several ways of doing this, the simplest would be as follows : Set your light to be an area light and then in the lights options under teh "Details" tab set the "Area Shape" to be "Object / Spline" then drag and drop the object into the supplied "Object" slot underneath. Add as many samples as you require. Second method if you have AR, give the object a luminous surface using the luminance channel of your material then enable GI under the render settings.

3) Turn off the Color and Specular channels of your material and turn on the Refleciton channel.

4) You can't seperate your RGB from the HSV, it would make no sense, they're physically interelated, What result would you hope to get (if you have a program that seperates the two then chances are either the program is buggy or it's layering one on top of the other using either a multiply or add method, you can do this by making two color shaders and layering them with teh layers or fusion shader).

5) Use the "Tiles" shader.

[Mavmaramis]

Thanks for getting back so quickly Per-Anders.

Imagine is sadly no longer available - but it's a very usefull detail modelling tool.

A few clarifiers.

Number 1 - Layers Shader. Could you explain this in a bit more detail. I really am a novice and just pootling about.

http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=945096
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75077089@N00/364349367/

The first linked image was the first render I ever did in C4D
The second is one I did using some tutorials from a book (the jetty & sea) - I added my own model to the scene.

Number 2. You say "under the "Details" tab set the "Area Shape" to be "Object / Spline" then drag and drop the object into the supplied "Object" slot underneath."

I'm using C4D 8.5 and as such there is no "Area Shape" under the "Details" tab.

There is however a "Scene" tab and I tried adding the object there.

Number 3. I already tried this. It kind of gives you a pseudo "chrome" look. I need ther typer of mirror such as found in the bathroom - it reflects everything without having any grey colour and you can actually see the object itself.

Also any tips for creating metals such as silver, brass or copper??

Number 4. http://gallery53177.fotopic.net/p12815684.html

This image uses the colour variables I mentioned in my example.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75077089@N00/364345670/

This being a screen capture of the Colour attributes for the object from Imagine 2.0

So what I'd like to be able to do is replicate that exact colour in C4D.

Number 5. Tile Shader. Could you please explain what the Tile shader is and where to find it?
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"We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile and nothing can grow. Too much and the best of us is washed away." - G'Kar, "Objects in Motion", Babylon 5

http://gallery53177.fotopic.net/c466738.html
http://gallery53177.fotopic.net/c373214.html

[Per-Anders]

Hi,

1) The manual covers how to use the layers shader.

2) The area options were added in R9.5, so in that case either make use of GI, or as you mentioned you wanted a tube light then pick the liner/tube area light shape preset from the options for the light. The "Scene" tab is for allowing exclusions/inclusions for what the light is illuminating, which is not the same thing. You can also clone lights along a spline shape if desired, multiple low level lights will give the same effect as an area light. In your original image, it looked more like the area light was in fact just a single point light set at the center of the beam, and set to not illuminate the beam geometry rather than a proper area light, you can do this in C4D too using the "Scene" tab to exclude the object that the light is inside of from being lit or casting shadows.

3) Make sure to follow the instructions to the letter, turn *off* Color and Specular channels, turn on the Reflection channel. If you follow these instructions to the letter you should now have a perfectly reflective surface with no other attributes, and certainly no greyness (which comes from leaving the color or luminance channels on). Remember that a reflective material reflects things, so you will need to have some sort of environment to reflect for it to appear reflective, otherwise it will just be black (or whatever your environment/sky color is). For silver and brass turn the color channel back on and give it a very low gray or orange color, then set the reflection color to be gray/gray-blue or orange/yellow. If you wish you can add in specular to have a fake reflection from your light sources, again make sure they follow what's happening in your reflection channel, i.e. give them specular color to match. If you want a polished surface that is not fully reflective then make use of the Fresnel shader in the reflection (and specular color) channels.

4) OK, that's using HSL rather than HSV, the difference is that "Luminance" is like the Value channel only once it gets higher than 50% of it's maximum it starts to desaturate in order to reach pure white, so you can't translate HSL to HSV easily instead you should use the RGB. C4D uses the Adobe standard rather than the Microsoft/windows one of HSV. You can get the exact same color by inputting the same RGB values into C4D, make sure that C4D is set to use 0-255 rather than % for this. Alternatively if you're running on windows you can bring up the windows color picker itself by simply clicking on the color swatch in C4D.

5) Again this is a question that you can find the answer for in the manual. However, in your material, click the "Texture" drop-down arrow in any channel where you want your tiles shader to be then from the menu that appears you should find a number of sub-menus and in one of those ("Surfaces" I believe in 8.5) you should find "Tiles" clicking on it's name or the little image of the shader will bring up it's options for you to edit (again the manual covers all of this in far more depth).

[Mavmaramis]

Once again I bow to the mighty Per-Anders.

1. Manual. Err....what manual?? (lol). No, seriously I have got "The Cinema 4D Handbook" by Adam Watkins on order from Amazon (hopefully winging it's way to me even as I type).

Otherwise I don't have a manual. I thought it would be helpful to actually get some kind of book - so I'm hoping the one mentioned will be usefull.

2. GI. What's this??.
To address the actual issue - although I used a striplight as an example it was perhaps not the best example.

The bridge is actually a rectangle, but the light source is not actually seperate - in Imagine any object no matter what the shape can be made into a light source. In the Attributes of the object there is a Light tab - it has a number of sub-tabs. Basic allows the setting of colour and casting shadows, Directionality (point source or parallel rays), Shape (None, Round, Rectangular) and Falloff (None, 1/R falloff, Controlled [Y Axis] and 1/RR [Reallife])

Hence my initial query about making objects (no matter the shape) lightsources.

I tried making some running lights by making the light an omni source with a small amount of visible light - in the end just using Luminance worked (kind of) but the objects did not cast any shadows and adding 10 light objects to simulate running lights was a bit of nightmare.

I am going to persevere tho!

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