Cinema 4D R13 + SSS + Physical Renderer

Just got Cinema 4D R13 and thought I’d see if i could figure out some of the new rendering features, mainly the new sub-surface scattering system as well as the the physical renderer and camera. Struggling a bit, but challenges make this stuff more fun.

I was inspired by Maxon’s marketing image for R13 of the grapes by Marijn Raeven, which I’m sure many of you have already seen. Didn’t want to waste time modeling anything, so I did the next best (i.e. easiest) thing, and cloned a bunch of dynamic spheres and applied SSS. 13 minutes later I had this image.

Over the next few months I’ll see if I can reign in the times and quality to see if its feasible to use physical rendering in animation production, but in the meantime I think I will be sticking with R12.

Here is the first image I created. Its a model of a trichinomas (yucchy parasite). I chose it as I thought it would be a good object to test the SSS due to its general blobbyness. Its a starting point. Still a ways to go…

“Here’s Looking at You?” No? Then how about “The Eyes Have It”?

I always wanted to try to see if I could pull off a decent looking human eye render, and recently had the chance for an animation project which gives an overview of a particular disease of the cornea—the clear outer layer of the eye. I started with a Daz3d model and a high res map that I purchased for it. The eye needed to blink, so I exported 2 states of the eye from Poser; one opened, one closed, then imported both models using the plugin Riptide, which is useful for importing and exporting .obj files to and from Cinema 4D. I used the morph tag to keyframe the blinks, by linking the 2 states of the model into the tag.

I found I needed to re-build the eye from scratch in order to get the level of detail I needed for the closeups in the animation. I was able to take the high res maps of the eye that came with the maps I purchased, and edit them in photoshop to get more detail and a displacement map as well as an AO map out of them. I also needed to animate the disease state of the eye (not shown here) gradually developing on the cornea. Once the eye ball was modeled, I was able to rig the pupil and iris to dilate, again using the morph tag.

The model I was working with had a really low res solution to the eye lashes, just a few overlapping planes with an alpha-channel lash map on it that broke up when you got too close. I fixed this by modeling a lash and cloning it along an extracted path from the edge of the eyelids via the mograph cloners. I used the random and step effectors to make the lashes look less regular and scale down across the eye.

I also used the chanlum shader and vreel skin in the luminance shader of the eye to get some sub-surface translucency.

Although there are some issues, like the skin map being a bit too low res at super close distances, and not being able to control the reflections on the cornea as much as I’d like, I was quite happy with the results.