Download: .fx Shader Plug-in for C4D

[manlio]

Excellent!! I'm going to download. Thanks

[fxgogo]

Excellent. That is great. I dont use realtime much, but it is good to se it being done. Keep up the good development.

[michaeli]

Great, thanks very much!!! :thumbsup: :beer:

[Per-Anders]

very good, i will check this out later, but i have a question, and that is, seeing is htis is based on nvidia's cg technology is this going ot be limited to machines running nvidia cards, or is this cross product friendly (i.e.w ill it work with my ati 9800 for instance?)

[j.loviscach]

I have not tested yet with the C4Dfx plug-in, but ATI cards should work, too. nVidia's CgFX Viewer is based on the same libraries and _does_ work with ATI, so the chances are good. I'm trying to use OpenGL ARB extensions everywhere and to make OpenGL NV optional.

[Iggy]

Sorry for my ignorance, but what does this do exactly?

[j.loviscach]

1. You can work with vertex and pixel shaders right inside Cinema 4D to see what things will look like in a game engine.

2. You get a renderer with interactive speed (near real-time) with quite high qualilty: Bump mapping, Environment mapping, Phong interpolated normals, hopefully shadows.

Regards
Jörn

[Stray]

I was wondering if you had considered making a Mac version?

Also, I was wondering if your plugin would only work in your viewer window? Or does it also work in the editor as well?

Looks very cool

-Stray

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

> if you had considered making a Mac version?

Ask nVidia for Mac versions of their Cg/CgFX libraries ...

> if your plugin would only work in your viewer window

The API of Cinema 4D is not flexible enough for that.

Regards,
Jörn

[flingster]

heh heh...good work
sounds very cool...will take a look.
:buttrock: :beer: :buttrock:

[robodesign]

This i will download too!!! It's freakin'' awesome! Hope it works on my GF 4 MX 440 :D.

Hey... just a question... will the final release be for free? :D

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

> Hope it works on my GF 4 MX 440

Uh-oh. Not on a card without vertex and pixel shader hardware ...

> will the final release be for free?

Yes. This is purely academic stuff. I'm going to write two papers about it.

Regards,
Jörn

[Iggy]

Ah, so please clarify: what Nvidia cards will this work on? I have a Geforce3 Ti200. Will it work? Thanks.

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

>I have a Geforce3 Ti200. Will it work?

Partially. Very partially, so to speak. Look in the specs of your graphics card for "Vertex and Pixel Shaders". nVidia calls this "NVIDIA nfiniteFX Engine" (which is the old version not supporting many of the .fx files) or "CineFX Engine" (which is the new version).

Regards,
Jörn

[hundredthirtyseven]

Can someone please tell me which cg libraries I should download? Or can someone tell me in just a few words how the whole process with these things work?

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

please refer to the small manual in c4dfx.zip for what to download.

Regards,
Jörn

[hundredthirtyseven]

Thx, I've downloaded everything, and then C4D started with "Fatal Error, missing OpenGl extensions". It seems that my ATI 8500 card isn't enough good, although as far as i know it has has better pixel shader support, than NV2x cards do. The same goes with FireGl 8800 drivers.
Or is there another problem?

[AdamT]

I believe it only works with nVidia cards.

[j.loviscach]

Concerning ATI cards: According to ATI specs, only the 9500 and later cards support the OpenGL extensions demanded by the plug-in.

Regards,
Jörn

BTW: Meanwhile, C4Dfx has learned to do parametric objects, deformers, HyperNURBS, etc. But I have to fix some nasty crashes before posting that code as the next alpha release.

[Tom Ellard]

I bought and installed a 256Mb Gforce 5600 to test this out.

My system - WindowsXP, Cinema 8.2m 512Mb RAM

Had some trouble opening up the shaders in the Max or Maya plug ins - they want the applications to be there! Solved that with a demo of Max.

The .fx works with the following notes.

If I select a render size bigger than 640 by 480, the animation fails to be rendered - there's a blank file instead?

Animation is always rendered using lossy codec - doesn't seem possible to change that to a uncompressed codec?

Switching on antialiasing always leads to a crash.

The hardware shader was able to render the Meg and Otto objects - but slowly :)

Can I please suggest uncompressed video and PAL (768 by 576) size output for a later version?

Excellent work.

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

Tom Ellard wrote:
> Had some trouble opening up the shaders
> in the Max or Maya plug ins - they want the
> applications to be there!

You mean the installer for the Max and Maya plug-ins quits when these applications are not present? I guess somebody at Nvidia supposed this feature would be a great idea ;-)

> bigger than 640 by 480, the animation
> fails to be rendered

Yeah, because I use the standard .avi settings of Cinema 4D which use a codec that doesn't handle larger frames. Already fixed in the upcoming version.

> to change that to a uncompressed codec?

See above.

> Switching on antialiasing
> always leads to a crash.

Better switch before the plug-in's render window is opened. There's a bug hidden in the clumsy thread programming involved.

> render the Meg and Otto objects
> - but slowly

Yes, the preparation of objects and textures is quite costly up to now. Better render long sequences of large antialiased frames. I'm planning to optimize this.

By the way: The next version (to be released in the next weeks) can emulate the standard Cinema 4D material including bump and environment maps. It can also do shadows (not on ATI cards, however).

Jörn

[flingster]

this is looking better and better...just wanted to say good stuff and good luck with it.:thumbsup:

[wingo]

Hi there,
I tried the Plugin Version 081 with a NVidia FX5200 and C4D 8.5 using WinXP but all I can see is a black window.
Does anybody know this problem?
What do I have to do to get a rendered pic in the renderwindow?

WIngo

[j.loviscach]

Hi,

WIngo wrote:
> all I can see is a black window.

You can open the text console of Cinema 4D and (hopefully) see some hints about what is going wrong. Maybe for a Cg shader a texture is missing. Note that for the emulation of the standard Cinema 4D material you need uv coordinates, a standard material assigned to the object, and at least one light.

Regards,
Jörn

[wingo]

thanks,
i forgot the light.
sometimes finding errors can be so easy :)

[Tom Ellard]

Hey! I didn't know there was a new version!

v 0.81
Testing on a P4 with HT. Cinema 8.5. nVidia 5200.

Everything works - successfully rendered a short animation of a primitive at 768 by 576. Well done!

I have a question... I can see the 'Cg way' to make a material. Create a CD4FX materal and apply it to an object. Add a light, assign it to the material etc.

But how do I emulate a standard C4 material? If I use a standard material, how do I assign the FX light to it? If I just use standard lights and materials there's no results.

Or am I being slow? :drool:

[j.loviscach]

Originally posted by Tom Ellard
But how do I emulate a standard C4 material? If I use a standard material, how do I assign the FX light to it? If I just use standard lights and materials there's no results.

If everything works as intended, you build a scene with lights, assign standard Cinema 4D materials to the objects and generate uv coordinates for them (if they don't have intrinsic uv coordinates such as cone and cylinder have).

The emulator finds the lights automatically and can use several ones. The maximum number depends on the use of shadows.

This is different from the CgFX material. Typical .fx shaders use only one light, so that the user should have a choice.

When nothing appears, take a look into the Cinema 4D console. Hopefully you'll find a clue there.

Regards,
Jörn

[Tom Ellard]

huh!

Last night it wouldn't work at all, I was trying for hours. Tonight it is working fine....

I must have done something by trying to use the Cg material, or light, some combination of settings. Let me try and break it again, I'll see if I can work out what I was doing.

Thanks again!

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