Any Cinema 4D users here?

Post your questions, suggestions and experiences regarding to Image manipulation, 3d modeling and level editing for the Irrlicht engine here.
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Geomaster
Posts: 71
Joined: Tue Oct 21, 2008 3:39 pm

Any Cinema 4D users here?

Post by Geomaster »

Hey guys, I think I just figured out how to create awesome lightmaps with Cinema 4D at wonderful quality, which I was unable to do with any lightmapping software. So I wanted to ask, are there Cinema 4D users so I could write a tutorial?

Greetings,
Geo.
freetimecoder
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Post by freetimecoder »

That hat would be a great idea :)
I myself used Cinema4D a long time ago, but since it was never really working for my gamedevelopment I finally swaped to Blender. As I recall it the lack of Gamemaking Tutorials was a main reason for doing so.

I am sure it would help others very well. Why don't you post some screenshot about your discovery?

greetings
Geomaster
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Post by Geomaster »

Hm, the biggest problem seems to be loading these lightmaps into Irrlicht, it's pretty tricky and I'll write an application for ripping UV sets from two meshes, and then fusing them into one. When I finish that, I will write a tutorial for doing this, because lightmaps do not include some artifacts I've seen both in gile[s] and Light Map Maker, and ambient occlusion is pretty correct without any settings.
hybrid
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Post by hybrid »

I think we have such a loader for .obj in irrExt. You might at least be able to reuse the major code portions from there.
Geomaster
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Post by Geomaster »

Nevermind, I'll write a program which will rip the triangles from first mesh along with their UVs and then for each triangle search for its counterpart in second mesh and save its UV as well. I think this method is more stable, because materials could have different setup in these two meshes, and then the meshbuffers won't be the same.
Geomaster
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Post by Geomaster »

Just succeeded in creating really great lightmaps, but without ignoring textures for GI. I hope I'll do something for connecting seperate UV coordinates to one mesh, or even better: to natively export two UV sets from C4D. I really like the results I got there. It requires more work since it's mostly rendering software, not meant to be a gamedeveloper's tool, but yet produces really amazing results, compared to other things I tried (e.g. last gile[s] rendering took 2hours to complete and was full of artifacts) and it's pretty fast + does the correct ambient occlusion.

I'm gonna drop a tutorial by the end of the week, so C4D users, stay tuned :)
kbar
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Lets get more game developers using Cinema4D!

Post by kbar »

Not sure if this will help you or not with what you are doing, but I wrote a tutorial on using Irrlicht to load Quake files into Cinema4D, including the lightmaps, and setting it up so that the user can render the scene in Cinema4D.

You can then export the entire scene back out to Irrlicht to view it how it would look in the engine. Maybe it will have some useful chunks of code that you can use in your tutorial. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Here is the link to my article.

Importing Quake files and previewing levels using Irrlicht

I would really like to push Cinema4D into the gaming market and I already have alot of ideas for tutorials that I will continue to put on my website. But if anyone else in the Irrlicht community has any ideas for plugins or connectivity between Irrlicht and Cinema4D then just let me know and I will see what I can wip up for you ( or maybe Geomaster will beat me to it ).

Cheers,
kbar
Geomaster
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Post by Geomaster »

I have created little program for creating lightmaps based on 2 textures: diffuse with lighting and diffuse without lighting, so you don't have to do it manually, but still has some bugs, working on it...
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