This one is my 50th quick tip (yeah!), where I show how to bake a height map out of C4D. This height map is needed in game engines for example, or if you want to have a nice starting map to paint on in Photoshop.

The chore technique consists of these steps:
– put a linear interpolated 2D-V gradient into a materials luminance channel
– deactivate linear workflow in the project settings (cmd+d on a mac or ctrl+d on a pc)
– get your uv map right, so it is a perfect square with evenly divided uv quads
– set your material to flat projection and make the gradient fit to your object with the the fit to object command
– bake out your height map :)

Links of interest:
http://cinemaplugins.com/c4d-plugins/dem-earth/

This technique gets interesting if you are using a parametric object or just want to cache some computationally intensive deformers like the Displacer for example. The basic hack consists of setting the Jiggle Deformers strength to 0% so it’s not influencing any animation but using it’s ability to cache the animation. Which will still work despite setting the deformer’s strength to 0%. (no audio)

This is me rambling about Paul Everetts new plugin Vector Pro. It’s basically a Vectorizer on steroids which lets you bypass Illustrator more often then you’d think :) Direct Link: cinemaplugins.com/c4d-plugins/vectorizer-professional/ Yes, it’s with Audio ;)

This is an interesting technique which makes use of the Rate option on the Matrix Object and the Morph Motion Effect on the Inheritance Object. We take a PLA Object, trace it’s vertex paths, make the Tracer editable and use the Matrix Object to move along those paths and with the Inheritance Object apply the animation back again on a still copy of our geometry. What good is that for you say? Well, take a look yourself :) If your object isn’t as complicated as the Dinosaur in my example one can conveniently “sculpt” the motion paths and change the behaviour of the geometry. Fun fact: If you use the rate variation option one can achieve a motion based deformation effect which looks like “motion blur”. Next one is Quick Tip #50, if you guys have suggestions, I’m all ears. Which you can be too by the way, as I’ll be recording sound this time – yeay!

This quick tip makes use of the fact that one can fracture/explode polygon selections with the Explosion FX Deformer. The key here is to understand that if you select every other row and/or the polygon selections are seperate from each other the Explosion FX Deformer seperates them conviniently in order to use them in a Fracture Object.
Take a good look at the screengrab. If you really understand the technique you’ll be aware of how powerful it can be :) We’re one quick tip away from the 50th quick tip of mine – exciting. It’s Christmas, if you guys have some special wishes for that one, drop a comment.

This is a neat hack if one has to paint objects onto a surface without overlap. All you have to do is to misuse the awesome Add Guides Tool which has an option for how far the single guides have to be distant from each other. If you want to delete guides, just use the Hair Selection Tools you saw in the video, select the guides you want to get rid of and just hit delete. In the screengrab you see just one application of many, try connecting the Clones with a Tracer and therefore paint splines onto a surface!

This is a rather old technique which I picked up from a 3D Max guy. This got interesting as with Physical Renderer there is no Cel Renderer or Sketch&Toon and it’s rather easy to use. The core concept is to take a copy of your object and make frontfacing Polygons transparent so we are left with the backfacing ones. By displacing this copied geometry a couple of cm, it gives your object an outline, letting the copy be visible through the edges of your geometry. This technique doesn’t work every time, but it’s worth giving a try if you need outlines with PhyRen. This is one of many techniques, the Fresnel or Art Shader are among the others.

The MorphTag inside C4D is a very powerful tag and can be used in many ways, I recently had a job were I had to scale down an object on a poly per poly basis and the
PolyFX Object was too slow and couldn’t be baked easily so I came up with this little technique which allows for easy baking with the PointCache Tag or SteadyBake for example. The core technique is as simple as having different polygon states which you afterwards blend together. It isn’t as versatile as the PolyFX but it gets the job done :) (In order to get the smooth Phong Shading again, just throw your object into a Connect Object when you’re done animating.) (no audio)

This seems to be a common task in the MoGraph world so here’s my take on it. All you have to do is to get straight spline connections from your points/cities on your earth, subdivide the splines, make them dynamic, make the connecting points static and use an Attractor Modifier to get them shaped into nice arcs. By the way I used the awesome and free pConnector plugin from tcastudios to get my connecting splines. You can grap a copy here: tcastudios.com/?page_id=6 My 50th Quick Tip is not far away. Maybe this time I’ll make one with an actual voice over – let’s see. No promises here :) (no audio)

This is a short and time saving tip for quickly setting up an override material in C4D. All you have to do is to select one Texture Tag, go to the Filter Manager, select all Textures with a double click on the Texture Icon and then keyframe your Texture Tag slots, that’s it :-) Hope this will come in handy. This works without any third party plugin and also with 3rd party render engines like VRay.