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“Shapy” lights projected through transparent/translucent materials
Hi there, I’m a new member of the Cow even though I already browsed through several topics in the last month or so.
I’m a swiss student in architecture and I’m trying to make a reconstitution of a pavillon space which features lightshows through transparent-ish materials. (See image 1 for transparent curtain and image 2 for translucent wall). This reconstitution needs to be animated. The lights shown in the picture move, switch on and off, etc.
For that work I have to use c4d, a software that I never used before, and that’s why I’m here…
I have a hard time approaching the desired effect for the translucent wall:
I manage to have translucency (although not super nice but that’s a start) but I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to have those “shapes” the lights that are projected through the wall have. (a bit cloudy, almost like a view from space (pic3)
That’s the most tricky part given my lack of knowledge.
In addition to that, I’m fully open to advice regarding the translucency (I set my wall to have a slight thickness, subsurface scattering, transparency and blurriness, all of which I discovered through tutorials and other related threads)
I’m really looking forward to see potential answers, sorry I can’t really “give back” to the community since I just know close to nothing in cinema. I also hope I didn’t violate any important rule of the forum, if so, just kindly point out what I did wrong, I’ll do my best to edit/delete my post.
link for all three examples (in one single image):
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2 Replies
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Another option, which renders much faster than subsurface scattering, is to use the Effects>Backlight shader. Backlight essentially projects lights and/or shadows onto the back side of a planar object. You can get the noise effect by using the Noise function of the lights or, as in my file, you can place a texture on the lights which acts like a gobo. I’ve used a spherical gradient with animated turbulence in the textures’ transparency channel, but you can use any kind of noise or combination of noises (layer shader).
Example: 9736_backlight.c4d.zip
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First of all thank you for taking from your time to give me what I would call a really complete and detailed answer!
Having a basic c4d file is great as it enables to dig a little bit deeper in how you set your parameters, really useful!
I will definitely try and do as you explain. I tried the noise effect a few days back but I think what I did wrong is I didn’t set it to illumination.
SSS was nice but it was indeed pretty slow, which is really uncool when you are starting with a software, not really knowing what you do…
Also thanks a lot for the layer shader, I’m familiar with the layers in my architectual softwares, but I think I wouldn’t have been able to do it properly without knowing it was under the form of a shader in c4d.
The cherry on the cake is that little interactive render window you set, I didn’t know about it until today, but I will defo use it from now on.
I’ll now continue with my explorations and tests, thanks!
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