Advanced Render?

[Brian Jones]

AR is under the “Cinema 4D Visualize, Broadcast, Studio” chunk of the help – I believe it was there in 15 as well

[Jim Scott]

If you mean that you can’t find Vector Motion Blur in the Render Settings, it’s only available with the Standard renderer and is found by clicking on the Effect button. I have only R18 and R19, so I’m just assuming it is the same in R15.

[Eric Fitzgerald]

Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to post the pic. It really helped. It seems to me that the earlier documentation for Cinema 4D was a lot more helpful with that kind of visual reference. At least for us dummies ????

Eric Fitzgerald

[Jim Scott]

Ah, so you’re a dummy too. Welcome to the club.

Glad to help a fellow member.

[Steve Bentley]

Keep in mind we weren’t too thrilled with the vector blur in R15. It was fine as long as the object was always in motion but once it slowed right down or stopped there was always this little bit of blur on it. Or it popped from the frame before dead stop to the dead stop frame as that little bit of blur suddenly vanished.
If you have the time, using the physcial renderer with the motion blur turned on did a better job – but it does take longer. (you will only see max two buckets working as it renders no matter how many cores you have)

[Eric Fitzgerald]

Thanks Steve, yes I just discovered that when my star product comes to a standstill, the transparency changes radically. I will try the physical renderer as you suggested.

Thanks again for taking time to respond.

Eric Fitzgerald

[Steve Bentley]

You can also do a multi pass render with motion blur. It doesn’t attach the blur to the pixels but instead renders out a vector pass that you can have after effects figure out the blur. Its best to render out in a high color depth format like EXR.
This lets you render with the standard renderer nice and quick and then you can control the MB after the fact.

It takes a bit of explaining so heres a link to a tutorial https://greyscalegorilla.com/tutorials/your-depth-pass-is-wrong/
You can ignore all the stuff about depth passes.

The key items are:
Use two copies of the file in your project window in after effects (assuming you packed the multi pass into one file on render).
One is used for the color pass and the other is used for the motion blur pass (you must “interpret footage” this MB copy as “preserve RGB” in the color management tab to keep all its 16 bit goodness).
The depth of the file (EXR set to 16 bit in blocks of 16 scan lines).
Separate the layers of the motion layer with Extractor which comes with AE (under 3D effects).
Then use an adjustment layer to set the motion blur with something like Real Smart Motion Blur (RSMB) or CCvector blur
The stack looks like this:

Layer1 -(eyeball off) the Motion blur “channel” of the multipass render with Extractor set to motionvector.Red motionvector.green and motionvector.blue in the appropriate channels
Layer2 – (eyeball on) Adjustment layer with RSMB on it -the default is fine but the motion layer should be set to the above layer
Layer3 – (eyeball on) the RGBA layer of the multi pass render

Pre comp all of this and use the pre comp so the RSMB only acts on that bottom clip.
It seems messy but once you have done it a few times you’ll wonder what you did before.

[Eric Fitzgerald]

Steve, this looks like the way to go. I tried the Physical Renderer and it is indeed slow as you warned.

I’ve got to jump on to other things now, so I wont have time to try the multipass render until next week, but I will let you know how it all ends up.

Has Maxon resolved the Vector Motion Blur issues in the new version of Cinema 4D? Might be time to upgrade…

Thanks again,
Eric

[Steve Bentley]

I doubt they have – but I’ll try it this weekend. We’ve been after Maxon to fix it since version 2.
I came to C4d from Electric Image which had the best/fastest motion blur of any package – even by today’s standards. So that was a pretty important feature we found lacking in C4d. (when they made Monster House in C4d they said they went without motion blur to achieve “a look” – I’ll bet it was more that they ran into the same problems you did)
We’ve used the motion blur pass in AE or the physical renderer (or octane) for so long now I’ve all but given up on the standard render’s blurs. The last time I crossed my fingers and tested was R16 and it was still a problem then. (better than R14 but only when the object was moving, but once the objects stopped… – doing a separate render at the stop point with blur turned off doesn’t fix it by the way – the difference is just to great).
The physical render blur is very very good, and if you have enough cores they do contribute to making the two buckets go faster. You can also set up a render farm so it gives the illusion that there are more buckets in play as each machine adds two more buckets to the brigade. (this shows up in the grayscale gorilla tutorials as their physical renders scream with multiple buckets – at least in Nick’s demos)

[Eric Fitzgerald]

I owned a copy of Electric Image! I actually started out with Infini-D — those were the days. We had to rent a bunch of computers to make our deadlines. … and digital video was like voodoo.

…we also had a pretty good Cinema render farm back in the day. I’ve had to let all those licenses lapse to keep the overheard down. Good thing computers are so much faster now.

Not sure I can justify the $149.95 for the ReelSmart Motion Blur Pro plug-in for this project. The tutorial looks formidable though…