Clothilde (Part of Mocca 2)
The very popular Clothilde Cloth introduced in rel 9 has had a bit of fine tuning. The interface has been rearranged a bit and there's no longer an "Effects" tab. Those settings are now on the "Tag" tab. We get a new "Cache" tab and this has the Cache commands and a new Cache tool. This new tool lets you edit cached solutions. You can now save and load cached solutions as previously these were stored in the clipboard and since the undo command couldn't cope with complex or lengthy animations. The belt function has been enhanced and there is now a new belt tag. Your object can now have multiple belt tags thus more than one object can be associated with the cloth. Clothilde now works in conjunction with particles and the dynamics module. Sweet!!
Chanlum Shader
New in the 9.52 minor update was the Chanlum shader by well known C4D artist "Naam". This shader gives a delightful surface to objects similar to what the pdf update compares to as peach skin in that it is has fur and is blurry. There's some similarity to Sub surface scattering. Here's an image comparing Sub Surface Scattering on the left with the Chanlum shader on the right green moose.
COFFEE Scripting
A new way of leveraging COFFEE code has been introduced in the form of
scripts. Prior to 9.5, specific code was needed in order to register a COFFEE
plugin with the menu system. A script bypasses this formality and allows
you to add new menu items easily. For example, I could create a new menu
item with an icon that will take the currently selected object and move
it to the origin. Maybe that's not terribly useful but insert any COFFEE
code you like in order to build your new tool and the script manager will
get it on the menu for you without all of the fuss of plugin programming.
Missing from the scripts manager is an easy way to add a simple dialog
for controlling the menu item. You still have the full power of COFFEE at
hand so adding a dialog is still possible. However, that is one of the tasks
in creating menu plugins that is difficult. Being able to create input fields
of various types would be a great addition to the scripts manager.
The COFFEE language is fairly straight-forward. Once you get past the syntax and the SDK elements, you can do some pretty robust and useful things. You can build complex plugins, XPresso COFFEE nodes, and you can now create menu enabled scripts with little effort. These are all very useful aspects of COFFEE. I must say, however, that I have always been under-whelmed with the COFFEE interface. Where COFFEE is integrated in CINEMA 4D, the interface is just barely there. It has always looked and acted to me like a programming editor that a software engineer wrote, got working, and then just backed off from. There is very little at all in the way of hand-holding, debugging, syntax helpers, pre-defined function libraries, or anything that would make COFFEE intuitive for the non-programmer and the new COFFEE programmer. The underlying COFFEE engine is strong but the interfaces that we are asked to use, even in the new scripts manager, are just barely enough to get by. I would like to see MAXON work on polishing this "diamond in the rough" into a true development environment by R10. For now, the addition of scripts is a welcome step in the direction of making COFFEE easier to integrate into the workflow by cutting out the need to know how to code menu plugins.
Baking Textures and Normal Maps
It is quite evident that MAXON put some work into the new texture baking features. So what is "Texture Baking" and what the heck is a "Normal Map"? Let's look at texture baking first. Normal maps are a sub-set of this feature.
To "bake a texture" means to convert into channel maps (color, bump, illumination, etc.) the material's texture as it appears in the lit scene. In the following example, I have taken a plane, a cube, and a spotlight (Figure A) and then used the baker to produce a color channel map with the illumination from the spotlight and the cube's shadow baked into it. The "Bake Object" tool will hide your original object and show you the baked version. You can see in the the Bake Object tool in the lower right-hand side of the screen along with the color map that was produced.
The image on the left is "Raw" and shows the original objects. The second image is "cooked" and you can see the light and shadow are baked into the floor's color map. You can rotate the object and the baked light and shadow are visible in the editor. You can now remove the light and render. The final render looks to have a light in it but it does not. Pre-baking the lights and shadows could be very useful in speeding up some animations.
So what is all this baking good for? Speed. The concept of texture baking is used heavily in the low-poly world of 3D game engines. Having to truly render each frame (lights, shadows, and all) would simply take too long with the current technology. Although we've made huge strides in the last 10 years, 3D games still need to remain lean and fast. Having the lights and shadows pre-baked into the textures for the walls in a game like Doom makes good sense when you're working with limitations on processing speed.
For this same reason, the concept of "normal maps" has sprung up. Normal maps are basically the second generation of bump maps. A bump map is a black and white representation of height with black representing the low spots (dents) and the white spots representing the high spots (bumps). Given this height information, the renderer figures out what direction the surface normal is pointed and, consequently, how it should be lit. If it's a dent, maybe it's a little darker. If it's a bump, make it appear to pop out and catch the light with a little specular highlighting. Normal maps take this concept a step further. Instead of feeding the material height information and making it figure out what the surface normals "might" look like in the presence of a dent or a bump, a normal map records the actual direction of the surface normal with a 3D vector. The result is a funny colored red, blue, and green texture that encodes each pixel's surface normal exactly. Given a 1x1 plane and a normal map, the renderer will see the 1 quad polygon as though it was complex geometry. Take a look at this normal map and a short video showing how normal maps work.
A normal map produce in R9.5 using the new texture baking tag
Check out the video to see a normal map in action. 7mb mov
When the light hits the surface of the plane, it is the normal map that tells the renderer "which way does the light bounce for this one pixel?" The result is a very low poly surface that can display a large amount of detail. Not just color detail as in the past, and not just bump map detail, but a true-to-the-original 3D "looking" surface as though there were geometry there making the light bounce. 3D game engines have started using normal maps to take their visuals to the next level while still remaining low poly. CINEMA 4D R9.5 enables game developers to make and apply these normal maps with ease.
"So? I'm not writing games. What are baked textures and normal maps good for?" I suppose there are sound reasons to use these techniques to speed up renders for animated films. Let's think through this. What if you had a 350,000 poly train engine that needs to be in 4,000 frames. The sides of the train abound with rivets, seams, dents, hoses, and other minor geometry to get the train to look real. If you could convert that surface geometry taking some 120,000 polys and create a normal map from it, you could drop the poly from 120,000 to a few hundred for a cylinder. Place on that the color map, diffusion map, and finally the normal map. It's the normal map that will fool the lights into thinking, and rendering, like the complex geometry is still there. For object with complex surface details in animated films, I can see normal maps playing a huge part in reducing the overall render time. The same argument can be made for baked textures that incorporate lights and shadows into the maps themselves. Not having to re-render every light in a scene, but getting the same result, could also save a lot of render time.
