I wanted to quickly show a client a sad little piece of character animation I did on a doctor figure, so I output a Viewport Render Playblast to evaluate the motion. Unfortunately, the rendered movie was ludicrously dark compared to what I see in my actual M1 Mac Studio Viewport. I kept cranking the Preview Illumination Adjust up to around 8 for every light (blowing out the scene in my viewport), but the resulting render was still pretty dark. I tried turning off all of the lights assuming a default light would take over, but that didn't work either. Am I missing something simple?

Best.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

Thanks again for your reply. I used to use Syntheyes back when it was the only affordable motion tracking software out there, and I think it had a feature that would quickly correct a track when it thought things in the distance were in the front. I guess C4D doesn't have a similar feature. I tried a longer clip but got the same results. This is an Adobe Stock clip, and it seems unlikely it contains metadata regarding the lens. After Effects can track it with some masking and massaging.

Cheers!

Shawn

I'm attempting to track a pretty simple aerial shot of some turbines. C4D easily produces good 2D tracks (ignoring the spinning blades), but when I run the 3D solve it places the camera below the horizon, acting like the sea in the distance is closer to the camera than the turbines in the foreground. Adding various constraints orients the ground to be mostly level, but the camera stays under the ground looking up rather than looking down from above.

Is there some trick to forcing the camera into the proper position and orientation here? My only way around this so far is to do the track in After Effects (which works as expected) and export that comp to a C4D file.

Here's the scene file and clip.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vtsok6olt7x01pvuvkjed/TurbineTrackTest.zip?rlkey=3ecq15yqoqf4uacpvgtzhfovr&dl=0

Best.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

I have a model of a printed circuit board and I want to use some Mograph tools to make the components fly on. That's fairly straightforward. My challenge is that I want the components to fade in as they fly onto the board, and some of the components are made up of multiple materials, like brown and brushed metal for little SMD resistors or black and aluminum for various chips.

This thread includes a nice sample project to fade in clones that have a single RS material:

https://cineversity.forums.maxon.net/topic/611/clones-fading

I assume I'd have to tie in that Mograph user data into the Geometry Opacity node for every material I'm using in all of those components? There's no way to fade in entire objects, right?

Assuming that, is there an efficient way to tie that user data node into all of those materials? Or do I just have to go through one by one?

Thanks!

Shawn Marshall

Thank you for replying. I was under the impression that each pixel in a Position pass contained data as to where that pixel existed in the 3D space of the scene. Set up correctly it seems like that could tell Particular whether a specific particle would be visible or obscured. I seem to remember a tutorial from 6-7 years ago demonstrating C4D's voronoi fracture that was enhanced with little dust hits done in Particular using a position pass depth map of some sort and a camera orbiting the scene, but I can't find it. For now I got a decent solution in X-Particles. Cheers!

Is there a way to output a depth buffer of some sort as a Redshift AOV that could then be used as a Z-buffer in Trapcode Particular so its particles can be properly obscured by the 3D objects in the scene?

In the past I've been able to kind of make a Z (Depth) pass AOV work, but you encounter problems when the camera is moving. As it moves forwards or backwards the buffer values change, messing up the matte for Particular.

Imagine you have a row of columns extending along the z-axis into the distance. I animate the Particular emitter to weave between the columns, and the camera flies along the columns following the emitter.

Or to simplify it more, imagine a single column with particles weaving around it. Then the camera dollies back. The values in a basic Z AOV would change as the camera gets farther from the column, messing up the Particular Z-Buffer.

There's also the World Position AOV, and setting that to extract the Blue value to generate a black and white map seems like it might work, but I don't know how you'd dial that in to work with the Particular Z-buffer.

Is this possible to do in AE with Particular, or am I going to have to fire up X-Particles in C4D?

Thanks!

Shawn Marshall

Thanks for the quick reply; I appreciate it.

It makes sense that Redshift would become the default renderer. I assume the GPU version will still require a separate subscription.

There's no indication I saw in the video that the Viewport hardware renderer will work better with Redshift, so I guess we'll see.

Cheers!

Shawn

I assume there's been no update that allows you to generate a Viewport Hardware Preview (Playblast) that actually looks like what I'm seeing in my viewport when using Redshift materials. All of the Redshift materials appear black when generating a hardware preview to assess motion and composition. The only way to see anything is to disable materials in the viewport options.

I posted about this a little under a year ago in the old forums:

https://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/5571/#22334

On my current project (which is just a fancy syringe spinning between various angles) cranking the Threshold to 4, turning off GI, taking all of the Cut-Off Thresholds to .1, and reducing the trace depths a 540-frame render of a 1080x1920 sequence would take around 18 minutes (GPU Redshift). A true hardware Viewport Preview (materials turned off ) of the same 540 frames takes under 30 seconds on my Mac Studio.

Now that Maxon owns Redshift (and is kind of deprecating the old, built-in renderers) I would hope they'd integrate it better with Cinema 4D.

Or maybe I've missed something.

Shawn Marshall

@Dr-Sassi Thanks again for your quick response. To clarify, my concern isn't so much whether these specific 3D tracking tutorials will be ported over. My hope is that ALL of the old tutorials would be available on this new site (unless they're REALLY outdated).

I appreciate your offer to facilitate special training and forum interactions regarding 3D tracking. In this case I'd watched the 2016 series before and knew I could probably track down the guidance I'd need fairly quickly. That could be a little harder with new tutorials. I also like that the old ones are broken down into multiple chapters, making it easier to find the technique I need.

For instance, if I go to the new tutorials section, search for "3D Tracking" in the Category of Cineversity Tutorials for the Product Cinema 4D I get four results.

https://cineversity.maxon.net/en/results?term=3d%20tracking&filter=All&category=Cineversity-Tutorials&product=Cinema-4D

None seem to be a nuts and bolts tutorial devoted solely to 3D tracking. The shortest is almost 4 hours long.

If I don't specify a Category I'm presented with 78 hits that are all over the map. The old site made it much easier to find the specific discipline I needed.

Best.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

Are the tutorials from the old Cineversity site going to be ported here? For instance, I needed a refresh on 3D Object Tracking. A Google search turned up the 2016 series produced by Athanasios Pozantzis (which I'd referenced in the past) on the old site.

https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaytut/motion_tracking_object_tracking_inside_cinema_4d_introduction

The message on the old site saying "This legacy site and its tutorials will remain accessible for a limited transition period" concerns me a bit as searching for "Object Tracking" on this new site does not indicate that that 2016 series exists here.

Thank you.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics