Looking for tips on a C4D animated low poly background

[Brian Jones]

the looping undulations can be done with a Displacer deformer (or Displacement in a material) with a noise as the shader for displacement with a non-zero Animation speed and a Loop Period set to the number of seconds you want it to loop in.

Yeah, no control with Cel Renderer on the line width, Sketch and Toon will give you line width control but it’s harder to get the lines to be stable with those low angles (but that just may be my lack of experience with S&T in the last while).
As an aside you get control of lines and solid line with Redshift’s Wireframe node but I don’t expect you have that.

[Sam Treadway]

1. What would be the best way to create that looping undulating effect?
On the noise shader of the Displacer, set the animation speed to something like .3 and set the loop period to the total time in seconds.
If the fps of the project is set to 30, then a loop period of 1 will loop over 30 frames. You will render frames 0 through 29 (frames 0 and 30 are identical).

2. How to get the lines extruded on top? I’ve tried using the cel renderer effect, but I can’t seem to control the width of the lines.
One way is to use the bevel deformer. This coupled with fields will allow for some really interesting controls.

First, to get the same look I’d start with a sphere set to “Icosahedron” as the type. Set the radius to something large like 1000 and the number of segments to 200. Then make it edible and select a square patch from the top view, invert the selection and delete.

Assign two materials to the object. For the material that will represent the edges, make sure the selection field of the texture tag is left empty. For the other material representing the polygons, select all the polygons and create a selection tag and drag that tag into the texture tag’s selection field.

Now, create a bevel deformer. (the values below are a good starting point)
Set the bevel mode to: chamfer
offset: .25
subdivision: 0
corner n-gons: off
phong break rounding: off

Make the displacer a child of the object mesh object.
Make the bevel deformer a sibling of the mesh object by placing both under a null.

[Sam Treadway]

Here’s a really quick test setup in under 10 minutes from the above post:

https://i.imgur.com/IPk4QIv.gifv

View post on imgur.com