Hi gang.
Great information in this forum and I have already seen some familiar faces lurking around.

So to my question:
I have a very simple Digital asset, a sphere with a procedural noise.
For some reason, loading in C4D (yes I am one of selected few testing that :-)
I see the UV map, and the material, BUT it's empty and no noise is visible.
There should be some bitmap image saved somewhere so I guess I need to write out a file or something in the asset.

Where do I do that and how?
Anything else I need to know?

Thanks
Thanassis

Hi Thanasis,

If this is a procedural texture that is generated in VOPs/VEX at render time, then you will have to bake that texture out to disk in an initial Mantra render using micropolygon rendering to disk, then switch up your surface shader to use the texture map instead of the 3D procedural method inside your shader.

A second method is to use the built-in compositor to instead generate the procedural texture and then this will be applied to your geometry with UV's. If you used VOPs, it should be possible to apply the same/similar VOPs logic to compose the material in COPs.

Once in COPs, you could render the image to disk as a texture then reference in the material to render with other render engines. If using Mantra, you could just reference the COP directly in the texture material parameter in your material:

opimg/img1/texture_image_cop

Hope that helps.

Hi Jeff.
Very interesting.

This is a procedural texture I made using a SHOP Network.
Does the COP solution allow for baking the texture in “real time”?

I want to be able to change the procedural texture inside C4D using its exposed parameters. Baking out all frames won't work for this case.

Is there any tutorial that covers something like this?
I haven't touched COPs yet and I think I'm afraid of them :-)

Thank you for your reply, and happy family day (actually it's over 25 minutes ago)
WOW, time flies :-)

If what I'm hearing is correct, does this mean we'll be able to render with mantra while we're in C4D?

I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you can trigger mantra renders from a digital asset, and get the rendered image saved, but using mantra to render C4D scenes is NOT supported.

p.s.
Luke, do you know anything about COPs?
:-)

noseman
Luke, do you know anything about COPs?
:-)

I know very little about COPS, but from what I understand it works a lot like Nuke or Fusion - just a series of nodes. The advantage is that instead of being forced to bake out your compositing node graph to disk before using the resulting images as texture maps, you can directly pipe the ‘OUT’ node of your compositing graph directly into the texture slot of a mantra node.

Have I done it myself? Not exactly. But is it possible? Yes.

noseman
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you can trigger mantra renders from a digital asset, and get the rendered image saved, but using mantra to render C4D scenes is NOT supported.

It would be very interesting to see if you could block out the placement of a gas cache using an asset, and then trigger a render of it using the PSR data from a camera node.

Lots of possibilities, but also a lot of setup time to get everything working correctly in asset form.

Luke Letellier
but also a lot of setup time to get everything working correctly in asset form.

tell me about it… interesting learning curve though!!!
Can't say I'm not enjoying it amidst some frustration :-)

noseman
Can't say I'm not enjoying it amidst some frustration :-)

Looking forward to the public release so I can play with it as well. I thought about trying to get into the beta, but I just don't have time for bugs…