[John Mcmullin]

That image is perfect for what I was trying to do so I’ll download Corona as soon as I’m back on it and see if I can do something nice. I had a look at the Corona website and quite excited to try it out. The interactive way you can change the exposure looks really nice.

Thanks a lot for all the feedback.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Brian and Steve,

Thanks so much for your advice on this. The idea was for a semi-transparent, candy character (mostly a head) that I was texturing. I was putting some patterns on the material and felt that they looked like a skin, rather than like they were running through him.

It’s a personal project I was playing with and I didn’t want to have to jump through hoops or spend a very long time achieving it. But the Corona renderer idea looks promising as it’s free for c4d whilst it’s in beta. I’ll get back to it in a few days.

Thanks again.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Brian. I tried turning off total internal reflection and exit reflections and it hasn’t made a difference.

Here is a link to an example. It’s just two glass balls, one inside the other. Not what I’m actually doing but just testing the concept. I’m aiming to have the inner ball appear as transparent (with a red colour) without additional bending of the light.

12462_glassball.c4d.zip

Thanks a lot. Sure it’s something simple I’m doing wrong.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Steve,

Point 1 is something I’d tried but I was having the RI showing both the objects bending the light even though they have the same RI. Maybe it’s something I’m missing but it doesn’t seem to work like the real world in this regard.

Point 2, visible light idea is good, but you can’t make area lights linked to objects visible so you just get spheres or planes. I was hoping to have tendrils of colour in my gel material.

Ideas 3 to 4 I’ll give these a try.

The other thing that occurred to me is that it might be a two-pass thing. Render out two different objects and then comp. them in After Effects. But I was really asking this question to find a quick and easy method. Seems to me the problem is due to trying to look through two different transparent objects without the light exiting to air first. And C4D isn’t set up to do that.

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Steve. I saw that tutorial before but it didn’t really work for me ’cause my letters were glancing off each other.

I fiddled around with follow position and rotation and other settings to get something that worked OK for me in the end. Was kind of a learning exercise. It seems that I have to go with the random element – just a slight change in start position for example can make things fall into place nicely. Or slightly retiming things to get the collisions to happen at the correct time when they’re not so disruptive. It’s the constant caching that takes the time. I was using soft body so each recalculation was quite slow.

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks Steve. That’s great.

Just before I try it, the only thing I’m not sure about is how to avoid a kind of kind of “magnet look”. Like some invisible force is pulling the letters back to place at the last moment. Also, if the final letters haven’t actually got their own dynamics tag, they might pass through each other as they’re drawn back to their final position.

Perhaps there’s a bit of hand keyframing/cheating involved to make it look more natural. Your method has the benefit that I can effectively unlink x and z axis from the simulation and have the object hop back to place rather than be drawn sideways.

Thanks. I’ll it a go this evening.

John

[John Mcmullin]

I forgot to say that I was trying to add the alpha to an already transparent object (transparency ticked with refraction etc). The problem seems to have been something to do with my absorption colour being set to a non-white colour. The soft vertex map is working now but doesn’t look how I was hoping as the refraction doesn’t fall like the colour channel does. You can still clearly see the edges of the objects.

Has anyone got any ideas how to represent rich, coloured jams or liquids, where you have light playing around within a viscous liquid that is itself within a glass jar? Although the liquid is going to be static, I’ve got to animate a camera move on this and it’s got to look really good but I want to avoid a massive render hit.

Thanks for any ideas.

John

[John Mcmullin]

Hi Adam.

That certainly is very similar. Much simpler and and more effective than what I was doing. I think I misunderstood the physics of what was causing the colouring on the bed of the bead.

Thanks so much for a great solution.

Best wishes,

John

[John Mcmullin]

Thanks so much Adam,

That pointed me in the right direction. This tutorial and the one following explain it all really well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVtK3z4mYp8

Best wishes,

John

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[John Mcmullin]

Thanks so much Brian.

Someone on C4D Cafe forum had suggested keyframing Enabled/disabled in project settings and so I started that way and that it got horribly messy. Didn’t appreciate the difference between enabling/disabling and turning dynamics on and off.

Brilliant. Feel like I’m over the hump now. I’m learning C4D after many years of editing and using After Effects and I think it’s so amazing to be able to create things out of absolutely nothing. The dynamics are incredible, easier than writing AE expressions to do the same thing.

Thanks again.

John