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Using video texture as shader effector – issues with diagonal straight edges
I’m currently working on a mograph scene made up from tessellating triangle clones (which I converted to fracture elements). The animation is based around geometric shapes kind of popping in and out across the grid and the colours changing to reveal the patterns. Still pretty much a rookie with C4D so go easy!
I tried various things and eventually decided to animate the cloners using video textures built in after effects, then applied to shader effectors. I’ve managed to get it working and aligned to the grid but am having some issues getting straight diagonal lines. I’ve tried scaling the squares in the animation up/down and applying a blur, but always get these “stepped” edges:
This particular shader’s texture tag is frontally mapped to a plane like so:
My guess is that things maybe get a bit confused when one triangle has a mixture of both black and white colour applied to it, however slight – can anyone think of a way around this? It’s a real head-acher
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4 Replies
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how much do you understand about pixels vs vector – screen vs print? If you zoom close in on an image the pixels are large, everything is blocks and no straight diagonal line is ever straight, it’s a series of steps made of the pixels. Your clone grid is like the pixels on an image the size of your clones is like to the pixels of an image and those are large ‘pixels’. If your diagonal line goes across one of your blocks the block can only raise or lower depending on if the black/white is over the clone origin. Half the clone can’t raise, it all has to go together because it’s one piece.
I would think your clones blocks need to be a lot smaller which could give the impression of a straight line but it would still be made of small blocks if you zoomed in enough. -
Thanks, I see where you’re coming from with the pixels point.
It’s kind of essential that the triangles are clearly visible as individual elements, so can’t shrink them down too much. Especially given that the final LED screens this will be played on are relatively low-res.
I tried moving the axis origins of all of the clones to their “centre of mass” rather than their geometric centres; ie, so that they don’t sit on the diagonal edge, then so that the shader can safely overlap, but am still getting the stepped edge
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since you are using triangles (thanks for the zoom) and they appear to line up (and should work) all I can think do check is to put the sequence you are using to elevate the clones into the color channel to make sure it lines up like you think it does. If you’ve done that I might have to see the file.
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Good news, I managed to work it out – quite tenuously in the end.
So even though I’d converted the clones to geometry and moved their axis centres, for some reason the effectors were still transforming the polygons from their geometric centres. I tried putting them into nulls but this still didn’t help.
Eventually I went back to the original polygon and just tried adding a few effectively null/unconnected points to move the centre point that way – somehow this worked…. Diagonal lines galore! Thanks for your help anyway
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