IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) is a file format (.ies) that you can plug into your Cinema 4D lights to give them physically accurate falloff, dispersion, color temperature, spatial emission, brightness, direction, and spread.  As far as I understand it – IES files are an industry standard for lighting manufactures so that they can document the distribution of their lights intensity. They save these IES files to store the lights photometric data and publish them online, so basically they are just making a digital representation of their lights. So by creating an IES light, depending on which .ies file you choose, you are getting all of that lights attributes.

Cinema 4D started supporting IES lighting data in R12 (Visualize and up) so if you are on any version before this you are out of luck.

Tutorial

Where to get more

Cinema 4D R12+ (Visualize and up) includes around 850 IES files in the content browser that you can use, just run a search for “IES” in the search bar. But there are also many different free ones out there that you can download and use for your projects. The best collection of IES lights that I found was over at c4dcafe where the user whthawk provides a HUGE collection of 19,370 ies files that are all clearly organized in a nice .lib4d file that you can just toss into your content browser. Follow this link to download his collection.  19,000 may seem like a lot, and I guess it is, but since downloading those I’ve never needed to go further than my content browser to find anything that I’ve ever needed.
Also, if you just do a quick search for IES lights I’m sure you’ll be able to find thousands of other free ones out there, I’m still trying to get through the 19,370 I got in the whthawk collection.

The post Realistic Light Falloff with IES Lights in C4D appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

I was asked recently if it was possible to render two Cinema 4D scene files at the same exact time – Now I’d NEVER recommend that you actually use this at work or if you are trying to get something rendered out for a big deadline, but if you’re curious as to if it’s possible or you like to throw caution to the wind and do what you want, watch the video below.

What you should be doing.

As I said above, this isn’t the most efficient way to render things out of C4D. I actually rendered a few things at the same time last night just because I was curious how much longer it would take to complete, when I woke up in the morning to check on it Cinema 4D crashed on me. So again, please, don’t really render things like this.

I would suggest a few other options:

First – just put your separate C4D scene files into the render queue and let Cinema go through them one by one. I’ll usually go this route if I have a few different scene files that I need to get rendered out.
Second – you can just do a Shift + R and render straight to the picture viewer. If you’re wanting to do multiple scenes however you’ll have to just wait until the first is done then go into you’re new scene to start that one yourself.
Third – if you have access to one – just put those scene files onto NET Render and let it crank through those things.

The post Mailbag #1 Rendering Two C4D Files at the Same Time? appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

A trailer based on the tutorials of Greyscale Gorilla. More to come…

The post I am the Gorilla. Trailer. appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

A quick tour of my Digital painting technique. Some of the things that I left out of the voice over: Gather as much reference that is relevant to your subject as you possibly can! One of the biggest mistakes, and a dead giveaway that your a student or just starting out, is painting without reference. Anything helps. Obviously there aren’t any 2 legged lizard guys wielding swords in the swamps, but if you can find ref that is of skin textures, an object or subject in a similar lighting scheme, etc. it goes a long way to helping you sell the piece. Study anatomy and light! After a while you’ll learn enough to “fake” it part of the way (still gather reference though).

Check out Jose’s blog for more information and to check out other work that he has done. As always, please leave any questions, comments, or critiques below.

The post Digital Concept Painting Techniques with J.B. Ortiz appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

He’s back with more! My good friend and incredible artist AJ Haines is back again with a brand new plugin for Cinema 4D, Image2Plane. Image2Plane is a very cool plugin that basically will allow you import hundreds of images or videos to their own image planes very easily. Here is a description of the plugin straight from his site:

Hey every­one, im here to bring you my lat­est plu­gin called Image2Plane. It lets you import a file or folder of files(as many as your com­puter or video card can han­dle) into Cin­ema 4D and puts the image/video(s) into a mate­r­ial and onto a plane resized to the size of the file. It’s pretty quick too, it will do around 300 files in 10–15 sec­onds.

Check out his overview video below to see a bunch of really cool uses and techniques that he shows off using Image2Plane.

Where to get it?

AJ is now selling this plugin with Joren over at thepixellab.net you can buy it right here!

I’ve been using this plugin for about a week now and it’s already saved me a ton of time importing images, I highly recommend this plugin for anyone wanting to speed up their workflow. If you’re working with a lot of images I think this plugin is a must have.

Image2Plane works in Cinema 4D R13 and up for both Mac and PC.

The post Cinema 4D Plugin: Image2Plane appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

What I cover in this tutorial is how to animate ivy growing in Cinema 4D. You could use this to have ivy grow up a wall, across the floor, in between objects, anything you want really. Take a look at the tutorial below or read on to see how this can be accomplished.

Tutorial

Download

You can download the Ivy Grower Plugin right here.
This plugin is free to download brought to us by the incredibly talented Kuroyume over at Kuroyume’s Development Zone.  Seriously, check out his site, there is a lot of cool plugins there aside from just the Ivy Grower plugin – The guy is good.

Install

For instructions on how to install the Ivy Grower plugin just take a look at this post where I will show you how to install Cinema 4D plugins on both a PC and a Mac.

How to

Animating the ivy to grow is fairly easy, there are a few gotchas that can trip you up but for the most part this is pretty straight forward. What you’ll need to do is simulate and grow your ivy just like you normally would with this plugin – The only thing different that you will need to do is click “Create IG Spline” in the plugin attributes, IG Spline is a special spline created by the plugin which stands for Ivy Growth Spline, what this spline allows you to do is animate the growth of the spline itself.

The next step is to add a circle spline (or any spline shape you want) to the Sweep Nurbs that was created to create your ivy branch thickness, you can then animate the IG Spline to get the branches growing. After this what I do is take all of your ivy leaves instances and put them in a fracture object – for whatever reason instance objects and fracture objects dont’ seem to play very nicely together so what you’re going to have to do is select all of your instance objects and turn off “instance.” Once all of these are changed go into the attributes of your fracture object and change the type to “Explode Segments & Connect” this will make your leaves look normal again.

To get these Ivy leaves to scale up we’re going to need an effector to do the job for us, I have the best luck with the shader effector. Create the shader effector and then make sure that it is effecting your fracture objects (in the fracture object attributes click on the effector tab and just drag and drop the shader effector in there) In the shader effector attributes lets change the scale to a -1 and then in the falloff tab let’s change it to linear. A big yellow box pops up and if we start dragging it around you can see it starting to work – what you’ll have to do is rotate this box and animate the position of it in conjunction with the animation of the ivy branches the growing effect.

Other Tips

There are a couple of things that I forgot to mention in the tutorial that I will list here. First off in your Sweep Nurbs you may want to change the branch thickness scale, what this will do is give you a thinner branch at the ends and a thicker branch in the middle and beginning of the spline. To change this go into the Sweep Nurbs attributes and in the object tab click on details – see the screenshot below to see what I mean.

By turning off instances in the instance object itself you aren’t going to be able to use the technique in the first tutorial, if the object is no longer an instance than you can’t animate it with a formula effector, so what you might have to do is animate the leaves growing on and then make them animate the options turning them back into instances to get them blowing in the wind again – or just have two separate set ups and just hide one and show the other. It’s defiantly do-able to have both of these techniques working at the same time, but unfortunately it isn’t just a single click of a button.

If you missed part one of this tutorial, don’t worry – I have a link right here to where you can watch part 1 

As always feel free to leave any questions, critiques, or comments below.

The post Animating Ivy in C4D | Part 2 appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

Tutorial

How To

For a quick step by step walkthrough on how to do this, or if there is one little nugget of information I skipped over and you don’t want to watch the whole video again to remember what it was I said, here we go.

First, you’re going to need an object you want to attach your spline to, I’m going to leave this one to you – in my example I had a bass guitar attached to an amp. You can have some rope, a robotic arm that you want to connect some hydraulic hoses to, whatever it may be.

Second, you need to create your spline. In my opinion a linear spline is going to get you the best result a majority of the time, but it really depends on what you’re making. A way to decide is like this – If you want a big long cable like a mouse cable, power cord, guitar cord, or a rope then I think you should go with a linear spline. With the linear spline you can evenly and easily add more points which will give you more natural looking deformation. If you need something to already be in a specific shape, like a hydraulic hose for example, then you should probably be using something else like a bezier spline.
When you create your spline and if you need to add a few more vertices to it what you’ll need to do is go into “point” mode, select all of your points with Ctrl+A (or Command+A on a mac) then right click on one of the points and click on the little box next to “Subdivide.” (see the picture below) And decide how many more points you’ll need (you usually don’t need to many, but it’ll vary depending on how long you’re cord is)

The Third step is to actually tell our spline to connect to an object. To do this add a “Contraint” Tag to your spline (Hair Tags > Constraint). Choose what object you want to constrain to and drag that object into the “Object” slot in the constraint tags properties. The next step is the important one, you have to choose what points of your spline are connected to this object, so go into point mode a choose the point you want and then back in the Constraint tag click the “Set” button. You’ll see a little yellow line connecting your point to the center point of the object you’re constrained to. If you need to constrain different points to different objects then all you have to do is add another Constraint tag to your spline and do it all again.

The fourth step is one that if you forget to do makes everything else we just did pointless, it’s to actually make your spline dynamic. This is easy – All you have to do is right click on your spline, go to “Hair Tags” and choose “Spline Dynamics.” From there you have all of the properties of the dynamics to play with, elasticity, drag, elasticity, stiffness, etc. And you’re done. Hit play on your timeline and look at your spline go!

A couple more little things to do after this is to add a sweep nurbs to give your spline some thickness, and you’ll also usually need to add a hyper nurbs onto the sweep nurbs to get it looking nice and smooth.

Hopefully that helps you get this working the way you want. If you have any problems or comments feel free to leave a comment below and I will do my best to help you troubleshoot.

The post Connecting Dynamic Splines to Objects in C4D appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

Tutorial

Download

Just follow the link below to his site to give it a download. To use this plugin all you have to do is open or merge the file into your existing scene to get started. No need to install anything.

You can grab the plugin by going to AJ’s site here: C4D Modeling Cam

AJ is offering this plugin free of charge to everyone, if you like it feel free to donate to AJ’s site:

The post Free C4D Plugin: Modeling Cam appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

Tutorial

Setup

This is actually very easy to setup, all are you need are three things – An object to instance, an object to instance onto, and some c4d hair.

First off: Lets add some hair onto our ground plane (or wherever you want to add your instanced objects). A bunch of guide hairs are going to pop up – way to many actually. What you’re going to need to do now is in the object manager click on “Guides” scroll down to “Count” and then lower this down a bit.
After this lets click on the “Generate” tab. Under “Type” choose “Instance” and then an instance tab will appear in the attribute editor. Drag the object that you want instanced into the “Object” slot. Right at the top of this tab make sure to turn “Render Hairs” off.
If you were to render right now you’ll notice two big problems – Your instanced objects are incredibly skinny and the color of your objects aren’t showing up. To fix the skinniness of you’re objects what we’ll have to do is go into the Hair Material that is created with our hair – this is what’s telling C4D to make our objects really thin. In the Hair Material click on the “Thickness” option and chance the Root and Tip thickness to whatever looks best for your object. To get the materials of your instances to show up go back into your hair objects attributes and under the “Generate” tab click on “Keep Textures”
After this the only thing left is to is go into the “Dynamics” attributes of your hair object and change it to get your desired results.

The post Instancing Objects onto Hair in Cinema 4D. appeared first on Digital Sandwich.

Tutorial

How it works

The way that Adobe Media Encoder can read your After Effects project file is because of Adobe’s “Dynamic Link.” The dynamic link essentially connects programs in the Adobe suite together, so if you wanted to put the After Effects file that your working on into that edit of yours in Adobe Premier you can do this without rendering anything out. The goal of this is to cut out the render time and extra render files that would come up by bringing these files into each other.

To render your After Effects file in Media Encoder all you have to do is drag and drop your After Effects project file inside of Media Encoder. Simple as that. You can pick and choose how you want to encode it and how many different ways you want to encode it. It will render it in the background and you are free to do whatever you want back in After Effects with a somewhat minimal performance hit. Keep in mind that this is just a background render so it isn’t going to render faster than it would straight out of After Effects, in fact it will take significantly longer – How much longer depends on what else you are doing in After Effects or any other program. The Adobe Suite programs communicate with each other and depending on what you are doing in After Effects the Dynamic Link between them will allocate either more or less memory to the background render of Media Encoder and attempt to give you a smooth experience in AE (or other adobe programs) while still rendering. So basically the background render is low priority memory wise and the dynamic link will give you more power in After Effects to do what you’re doing which will in turn make your background render take much longer.

For more information on the Adobe Dynamic link please visit the Adobe help website.

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