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Creating re-programmable stage lights in Cinema 4D
Hey all,
Back again with another light-related question. I need to model specific stage lights, such as blinders/moving heads/pars, to name a few. I need to animate them as well in terms of brightness, rotation for the moving heads and colors for the pars. While that’s all fine, it will probably take up a lot of time to animate everything keyframe by keyframe considering I need to present a 10 minute lightshow within a fictional setting.
In order to make it any easier, I was wondering if anyone could push me in the right direction with creating some sort of a DMX universe, in which all the lights are daisy-chained together in some sort of a virtual ‘MyDMX’ environment (see photo for example) in which I can simply animate the slider peripherals for movement, color, gobo etc. (I am not talking about physical lights, but 3D models of stage lights. I have seen C4DMX by Ken Kumoro, but that is not what I mean as it is for physical lights connected to C4D). If anyone has any additional tips on modelling stage lights and creating believable light rays, I am highly interested!
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1 Reply
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**warning, there’s defo not a comprehensive answer below sorry!**
The best idea is to use something like wysiwyg wysiwyg Lighting Design – CAST Software (cast-soft.com)
but inside of c4d, make use of cloners, animate one moving head and clone it, offset it.
To have the control I think you want, I think you would have to basically ‘make’ a lighting desk inside c4d, what I mean is have the pan/tilt/col/gobo/shutter/focus of each head wired to a separate slider using xpresso and user data,that would get you so far as to create the ‘channels’ of dmx, but to get the ‘shapes’ that come with most desks would require some more involved xpresso.
Maybe you could use a midi controller (or actual lighting desk) to control the user data sliders. I don’t know if that would work mind. I think Chamsys magicQ can output midi, maybe, I don’t know, maybe the shapes and automation can come from the real desk? How you utilize that midi is beyond me, I used grip tools once and a midi controller and managed to just about get a cube to rot on a slider but that was it!
Once you figure it all out though, you can use maybe cappuccino (character section) to record the actions you make.
I was an LD for 15years before I switched to 3d & VFX, and I always wanted to do this!
Depending on what renderer you’re using, but the c4d lights noise section does actually quite a decent job of faking the effects of ambient fog in the air.
You can look at the docs of real heads on websites to find the curves of the shutters as most are not so linear, that would give you better fades, also you can probably find the curves for the steppers so you get very realistic moves! And if you’re going for photo real, don’t forget the small light spill out the back of the heat sinks!
I would bet (once again, I don’t know!) that using UE or similar would be easier to create what amounts to lighting visualization software!
I’m sorry I ended up just rambling! I hope you can get it sorted, report back on here whe you do, id love to know how you get it solved. Good luck mate!
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