Two quick notes on using #c4d, #mograph, dynamics, xref and #vray4c4d

While working on Scene B i've found:

• Xref - even if you activate all the options to modify Parameters for the imported object: you cannot cache simulation onto an imported geometry Xref object. After every "Save" command the baked cache is gone. So I parented the xref under a mograph cloner/fracture object created inside the actual scene. Then I set the null to the same point (weird stuff happens in complicated simulations), after which the baking seems to work.
• Vray motion blur tag will not work with cloned objects. I had to use the method by Matthias Zabiegly , which worked nicely. 

First scene testrender finished in #vray #c4d

I've managed to finish a test render of the opening shot, which is over 20 seconds long - and I'm quite happy that this time it rendered through without any technical difficulties. The technical problems were mainly caused by Apple by switching to a new proprietary implementation of SMB, which basically resulted in a LOT of issues reading files from my server. Here, some general notes on the progress here:

• Switching to NFS pretty much doubled the speed of the network. There were some problems with permissions, but it's looking good now. Unfortunately, I also need a SMB server on my Lion machine, which Apple changed, ie broke in this release, so I'm looking at alternatives (SMBup looks good). I've spent approx 4-5 hours on the Linux updates alone. Ubuntu is easy to set up, though.
• Xref When I worked on the textures for the main character, I noticed that C4d doesn't update textures of references every time. I am not quite sure why.
• The physical camera tag is pretty much unusable for rendering animations. As I am working to scale, the viewport and the rendered picture differ by much more than just a couple of pixels. Maybe I should construct some kind of workaround, where the render camera with the physical camera tag is attached to a normal pinhole camera. At least then I could layout animations.

Here is the first test.


7&UP First Test Scene from Yogi Parish / www.parish.ch on Vimeo.

Working on the first scene of #SevenAndUp in #c4d

I've finally gotten around to more or less finalize the first shot of the film. It is quite long with 500 frames and moved everything over to Vray and Xrefs. Things to note:

• Scene Scale: I didn't think it a big issue when I started, but I've realized that this is something that I should have payed way more attention to. The exact sizes should be adhered to. The "Scale Document" function has proved invaluable in this regard. Unfortunately, the animation doesn't scale and has to be adjusted manually.
• Adjusting animation scale. I've found a way to scale it manually in the fcurve window
• Select the Object Mode to scale - only the object axes are scaled then. I couldn't find a numerical solution to that yet.
• Pull the top dotted line (indicating the highest value) to the new maximum
•  Lo-Res Textures for pre-final stage - although I've used generic textures where possible, the size (200MB) slowed down the test renders considerably. I've created rasterized and much smaller versions, which resulted in a speedup of more than 20 seconds for a test render.
• Lighting is part of the xrefed model - I am not sure that this is a great idea, but works for now.

Porting a pool table model to #vray for #c4d

Finally got to work on the pool table model and ported it to Vray for rendering. DOF is very fast. I'm also moving everything to XRefs now, as the model still needs some work here or there.

A good idea might be to use different models in the XRef files - one for the simulation and one for the rendering - therefore switching off the unused one in the Master scene.

Notes on moving everything to Vray and Xref file:

• Automatic shader translation is good for a quick start, but the shaders have to be re-done anyway, to accomodate to the Vray requirements in terms of look
• Lighting is quite an issue, but more so on the side of C4D. The viewport will not display the brightness of a light correctly, once we don't use the C4D standard renderer anymore. This is extremely annoying.
• I've used IES data for the first time - this is quite nice for very smooth gradients from light to dark and much better than the spot lights. Unfortunately, only a few of the studio light makers provide IES. Kinoflo has them, though - which is very helpful. Arri offers a different format (ltd). Unfortunately, the WhitHawkIES library that's downloadable from c4dcafe.com doesn't work with Vray (most of the lights simply come out black)
• DOF renders surprisingly fast, especially when using the physical camera.
• If the Vray physical camera gets too close, the viewport and the actual rendering start to differ. In that case, it makes sense to use the Zoom factor on the Vray phyiscal camera tag. This will be a big pain when animating the camera - it would be wonderful to have some kind of automatic correction for the Vray camera. The c4d viewport camera may not be perfect, but for image composition to always fiddle with the Zoom factor, will be a pain.

 I've made some substantial changes to the model, although they are barely visible. (New method for modeling the actual table)

New version of #AfterEffects GlobalLayerSwitch script 0.9.1 ready.

 Global Layer Switch (Rendering multiple versions)

The new version of Global Layer Switch 0.91 has the following changes:

• Select the comp from a drop-down menu, but will check if comps are available at all
• Choose from the list the output template and module.
• Smaller changes inside the module.

 The new version of Global Layer Switch is available here.

It's free, but if you use it please leave a short comment here, so I know how it's doing. Thx.

Overlaying a grid in #C4d camera view ultraquicktip

A quick fix for overlaying a grid on to the perspective view:

I've had the problem when I've wanted to adjust objects in the perspective view approximately to a grid and HUD doesn't offer a grid overlay (or does it?) There are more elaborate solutions out there, but this super-quick fix did it for me.

Simply create a camera deformer and voila: you can add and remove grid lines if you want. Only caveat: To view the grid you need to select the deformer. But for a <10s fix I guess this works alright.

#AfterEffects rendering multiple tag versions

I often have to produce several different versions of a composition (usually in different languages) - and, boy, is it easy to make a mistake. I finally sat down and wrote a little script that will allow me to run multiple render versions with one go. It's not perfect but it's a start and it works nicely with Zorro.

Basically, the script parses the comment tag of all layers in all compositions in your project. Depending on your settings in the "On" or "Off" window, it will activate or de-activate a layer including sound. It will then add the extension (3 chars max) to the file name and render out that particular version.

Don't know if this is for use to anyone else, but I'm putting up a link here. Enjoy. Please leave a comment if you think this is useful. (only tested in cs5 but should work with anything after cs3)

Download JSX File

#Vray #c4d getting a clean alpha from vraysky

Here is a simple procedure to pull a clean alpha from an object against the Vraysky background. I've had so many white fringes around my object I was foaming, but the setup is simple once you know how it works.

1. Add a vraysky (VrayLight Tag under Sun/PhysicalSky switch to on) 
2. In the Sun light Tab switch the Override BG Env to Off, making the sky invisible to the camera.
3. The camera needs to have a VrayPhysicalCamera tag, otherwise it will not work.
4. The alpha *has NOT* to set to Straight Alpha in the Save tab. (it is always straight, I messed this up in the last edit, sorry)

Haven't checked out how it works with Multipass On/Off - I had multipass on in my setup.

#Vray #C4d Antialiasing optimizing - magic DMC settings.

One of the biggest issues for me in Vray4c4d that the forum posts are confusing to me. The documentation is at places hard to understand and I have huge problems understanding the instructions given.

Here I am trying to figure out what was meant in one of the forums for "speeding up animation".

The original tip went like this:

9) a very speedy very high quality render method is to use an universal DMC approach: basically it works in combining high AA subdivision with very high material and light subdivision. for that set the AA to some between 1x32 (or 1x50-1x100), as you like, and set the material and light subdivisions to the maximum value (256 in 1.2.6, in next versions 400). the trick is that the AA will divide the material and light subdivision so if you use the 256 subdivision which looks very high it actually gets divided by the AA subdivision via DMC which is therefore 256 / 32 = 8 the lowest default again. the only difference to default setting is then that you give the very adaptive vray DMC sampler all possible room to decide itself on each pixel how much to subdivide and or antialias. the result are amazing fast and clean renderings:-) 

Ha! Just what I need! Fast and clean renderings. But...!? Where the hell are all those buttons and what do they mean?

So let me try to disentangle this 

1. I am using Vray4C4d 1.2.6 with R13 Studio. 
2. Claim: By setting Antialias settings very high in different places we can get speedy renderings.
3. Some of those settings can be set in the Render settings for Vray.
4. There are 3 mechanisms for dealing with antialiasing in Vray
1. Fixed - you know what's coming at you
2. Adaptive Subdivision - The classic subdivision: The corners of every pixel are evaluated and if their difference is above a threshold, the pixel is subdivided until "Max rate" is reached or the new pixels all have similar colors.
3. DMC - this is the new (and much smarter) AA method used in Vray. It compares all surrounding pixels and then decides if it should subdivide the pixel. 

Ok, so it's all about the DMC. Two great pointers to read about on the DMC sampler and its inner workings are here:

• Official manual: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/render_params_imagesampler.htm
• And how it really works:  http://www.interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray_dmc_sampler/demistyfing_dmc.html

The essence is that DMC implements a much better mechanism deciding if a pixel should be subdivided for additional rendering compared to adaptive subdivision.

Which means, we have to LET the DMC algorithm decide on its own. The penalty for setting high subdivision max values is small and the image quality WAY better.

Another important point is that all the calculations and the number of subdivisions are related. So lets assume the following example:

• Material X has Glossiness subdivs of 256
• The Adaptive DMC image sampler has a Max subdivision of 32
• Now the actual subdivs are 256/32=8 - because DMC knows that it can subdivide the pixel if it needs to.
• 8 subdivs are the minimal number of samples that DMC will look at. There is probably no need to go to a lower number. 

The same argument works for lights (shadow subdivision), DOF and Motion Blur.

They all play together, but not quite sure about how right now.