how to create a light pass?

[Randy Johnson]

Depends what you are looking for…. you can add a plane with a luminance material and animate it passing by.

You can animate a spot light passing by. You can extrude the rest of the scene from the light….

You can animate a gradient inside the material and use a select selection to limit where it is seen.

/Randy

[Randy Johnson]

Here are some extremely rough ideas of how you can get different looks.
2437_highlight.c4d.zip
/Randy

[Sean Bowerman]

this is great! many thanks for your time. they look great… but can i ask, how do i isolate the light pass so it hits just the extruded section? your suggestion with the animated gradient sounded perfect but i have no idea how to set that up…

sorry, i’m just finding my way with C4D, any ideas would be gratefully received.

[Randy Johnson]

The easiest way is to make the extrude object editable then everything gets seperated for you. But if thats not an option you can see on the purple text how to isolate the texture… writing R1 or R2 in the material selection will keep it on the rounding of your cap. C1 or C2 will isolate just the caps.
Also in the purple example you can see that you can keyframe the knots in the gradient. You can use that in the Alpha Channel to create a highlight…. my example is inverted. I did not check it before I uploaded it.

/Randy

[Sean Bowerman]

aha! it took me a while, but i can see how you’ve done it… ok. so using the purple example, i’ve inverted the alpha so the white band is just a strip, now i have 2 (hopefully final) questions…

how do i isolate just the extruded section? R1/R2 isolates the thin rounding/bevel of the text, C1/C2 the flat face of the text. is there a way of isolating the thickness part if the text (sorry i don’t know the technical term… the section the extrude nurb creates?)

and then is there a way of animating this alpha mat so it runs round the extrusion?

many many thanks for your help and patience, i’m moving from after effects to C4d so all this is very new to me.

[Randy Johnson]

The “extruded part” just needs a material on it…. so put a material there and place it to the left of the other materials so it does not block them out. SInce they are on a “selection” they will not cover that area of the object. You may need to preview render to see it.

As for animating around the object…. there are a few ways to do this and they all involve different ways of projecting your texture. You can try changing the projection and see what you get of you may need to UV map the object (ONLY works on polygons NOT nurbs) there are some good tutorials on different texture projections. I know c4dcafe has a tutorial on it.

/Randy

[Scyld]

ok, so bear with me:

i have an extruded object that at the moment have a gradient color material applied to it. i make the object editable, i select the side/extruded panel… then i’m stumped. how do i apply a strip of light on top of the color gradient?

thanks for your patience, i’ll look for the c4d cafe tut you mentioned. i obviously need to understand the whole texture projection thing better…