CINEMA 4D cmNodes v1, a new tutorial for free!

I have released my new free basic tutorial on probably the best free CINEMA 4D plugin ever – cmNodes, developed by Chris Montesano (former biomekk.com). The best free CINEMA 4D plugin? Really? Sure, because it will change your view how you see material editing. It´s the key of effectivity, speed and flexibility.

CINEMA 4D’s material editing is based on a channel system. Just imagine you have almost the same sample, a texture or a shader in Color channel, Luminance, Bump or Reflection. And you need to change it. So you must always adjust everything, channel to channel, step by step. It´s very frustrating and very uninteresting task. It usually takes a lot of time and faults are very often made...

So, just imagine you can do the same in time fraction. In a second. You will adjust a single node, adjust its settings and that´s all. It will change everything that uses this node as a source. It sounds really amazing. It´s a node system power!

Chris has developed an amazing node editor and very complex editing environment with tons of features, effects, tools and possibilities. It supports all CINEMA 4D channel shaders and features, but it changes the editing process itself.

The plugin environment is really very well designed, very flexible and professional. Chris has added many amazing effects like normal node, transform node, emboss node, blur node, many effects as curves, levels grade and so on. I can promise you, you have never seen a better free plugin before.

There is the last task. Does the plugin change material structure and so on? No, CINEMA 4D material system is still same, it´s not changed, because all material channels simply use a special shader that loads output special nodes of the cmNodes editor pool.

It´s a crucial plugin, it changes almost everything. But it´s a very complex toolset and maybe would be nice to understand the idea behind before you start. So I have prepared a basic, but still pretty solid tutorial for you. And it´s for free of course :-). So don´t hesitate and visit the tutorial on my webpage here:

http://www.c4d.cz/article.aspx?a=107

many thanks, Pavel

Thank you very much Pavel! I thought cmNodes was still being worked on, this is very good news, and thank you for getting us started with one of your famous tutorials.

This is great! Is there a way to automatically convert an existing channel based material into a node based version to edit within cmNodes?

Nice one Pavel....


Peace,
Rich_Art.

It´ s still developed, just take it as an open beta only, but I belive it´s getting stronger and stronger.

I need an auto-baking as well and an auto channel content-conversion will be great as well

Pavel

You can "explode" a material by dropping it onto a node tree. This will create a Material node that is linked to the dropped material, and the contents of each channel will be converted to a node and then connected to the correct material channel. However since there is not a corresponding node for every shader, the channels are only exploded one level deep. For example if you have a Filter shader with a nested Noise shader, only the Filter shader will be converted into a node. The Noise shader will still be nested in the node containing the Filter shader.

don´t change it so fast Chris!

Great!

thansk a lot, Pavel

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