[Steve Bentley]

Solved – sort of.
We’ve had to work with OpenGL off due to the scale of the “world” on this project. (We’re exceeding the limit of what is viewable with open GL so we get that clipping at extreme distances from camera). I turned OGL back on for a more interactive session in close up on some areas and realized I wasn’t having the brightening problem when doing region renders. Is this normal? or again are we looking at a faulty card? Its pretty rare we run without Open GL so I think its why we haven’t noticed this brightening problem till now.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Jim,
What you presented is what I’m used to seeing.
Will swap out the card and see if it persists.

[Steve Bentley]

Ya I tried that, all clones get all lights with that one.
I think it was a hold over from an old prefs file. ( this machine has a number of versions of c4d on it so perhaps not the cleanest prefs files) I wiped the prefs file (for reasons that will appear in the next post) and now if you child a light to a parent, that light only illuminates it’s parent even when shoved through a cloner. Just like it used to.

[Steve Bentley]

So it is – damn that salt stings on those years of wounds caused by shifting cameras. Um… why is it not up with the undo under edit? Y’know, where every other software in the world has their undo’s (even alternate undo’s like pshop.) To be fair I don’t get into that menu much (or ever) as there is so little in there and what there is has dedicated neurons for the hot keys.
Oh well, thanks for that to all. Learn something new every day.

[Steve Bentley]

I went back to an old cinema and sure enough if you child a light to an object it only lights that object up. But not in R 16 through 18

[Steve Bentley]

NO WAY!!!!!!!
All these years and I never knew that! Old dogs and new …..hmm I’ve forgotten the rest, being such an old dog. I can’t believe I never tried that given that’s the step-back command (undo again) in pshop. I figured I would have stumbled on it just with muscle memory.
Never apologize for coming to someones rescue. Thank you thank you. The swear jar will be a lonely empty thing now. (oh wait, I’m still using cinema, may be not then)

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Adam for both reply’s on this. I agree that should work but it might be a versioning issue – I just bashed my head against the proverbial brick wall on another issue when some clones that wouldn’t animate as per the source object and then realized that fix clone has to be turned off in the version we have, when in a previous version fix clone could stay on.
I assume the file you modified for me should work, yes? I got all excited when you posted it but alas no such luck. We’ve got an older version and a new one here so I will try running it through those tomorrow.
Cheers

[Steve Bentley]

We use the fresnel shader in all sorts of channels to get the x-ray look. You can really nail it down for a still but if its an animation, keep in mind that as the angle objects change so too will the density of the edge “fog” created by the fresnel shader. There are ways around this with expresso determining what things are pointing at and adjusting the grad used in the fresnel channel.
For the x-ray look, apply the fresnel (usually in the transparency channel) and reverse the nodes in the gradation. Then give the luminence channel the full colour of what you want the tint to be.

[Steve Bentley]

In case any one else has a bloody forehead and a damaged brick wall from this issue – Some versions of C4d need the “Fix Clone” turned off for the animation of the source object to feed through to the clones. And since, in describing the fix clone button, the manual refers back to something that is never described, its hard to say why it changes from version to version.

[Steve Bentley]

I think is this what you are asking:

When they changed the reflectance channel set up half us scratched our heads and half of us said “thank god!”. Not everything has a round hilight!
I think they mean the “layer” in the reflectance channel, not the color channel of the material.

Lets say you had a circuit board with the classic green background with gold circuit traces. You could put a map of those circuit traces in the color channel of the specular (and reflection) channels to both color the light bounced back and to increase/decrease the level of brightness a specular (or reflective) flare might give back based on the kind of material each should be. So much less modelling! A texture map is worth a thousand polygons I always say.
So in the specular color map the traces would be bright and perhaps a light amber while the area of the board would dark green. As the spec hilight passes from one area to the next the texture map will change it’s color and it’s brightness. Things that are metalic or have a metalic paint structure tend to reflect or have a specular hilight that is the same color (but lighter) as the metal they are made from. A christmas ball is a great example. The highlights are rarely white , usually they are the red or green of the ball color. In fact there is a metalic setting in the reflection tab now that helps take this into account.

Another way to think about this – reflecting objects (like chrome) don’t often have much color in their color channel, in fact it’s one way to broadcast that it’s a cg object – its like the chrome got fogged. But you can put some color in there to help tint the metal. This is perhaps what they meant.

Let me know if that’s what you meant. I love the new reflection area – so much more powerful – but as for the manual – it’s riddled with errors.