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Also a few more with the PINGO vfx lighting kit from last week.

Moody samples on a test scene I made for workflow from Vectorworks to Twinmotion. Still testing that, but here's some quickies' from Cinema. Based on the work of Edward Gordon Craig.

Hey guys! I’m dealing with an interesting challenge. Basically, I’d like to light my scene in a pixel art fashion (except in 3D, so I guess that would be in a "voxel" fashion). I initially wrote a wall of text, but I've decided instead to make a few renders to better illustrate what I'd like to achieve. First, this is my setup (viewport screenshot): https://i.imgur.com/nzJK5iP.png Now, a traditional way to light this scene would be to use a Spotlight, as such: VIDEO 001 : https://i.imgur.com/XYmDKFk.mp4 But this is not the result I want. I would like to find a way to light my scene/meshes in a way that resembles this: VIDEO 002 : https://i.imgur.com/Xza6tnQ.mp4 Problem: The method I used to create the render above is utterly inefficient and CPU-intensive. In short, I'm duplicating each voxel of the bicycle, extruding those duplicates on the Z-axis and detecting any intersection between those extrusions and the "wall". See here (in red): VIDEO 003 : https://i.imgur.com/gH8ZwSG.mp4 Objective: I would like to find an efficient way of having the boundaries of the lights/shadows projected onto my meshes (like the voxel walls) be restricted to the voxels/cubes they (those same meshes) are made of, i.e. in a pixel art fashion. I've attached the demo scene to this post. Please note that Octane was used in this project file, but I'm also opened to using default materials if needed. At this point in time, I’m wondering if this is even possible to do with Octane, or Cinema 4D for that matter (unless I decide to dive into Python or something). That said, given my novice status, there could be a ridiculously obvious solution that I haven't thought of. I feel like this could be more likely... Any advice/tip/insight would be hugely appreciated. Seriously. Even just keywords to Google and what not, because I'm running out of keywords to Google over here... Thanks a ton! BIKE_DEMO_001.c4d

I have a simple solution. The key concept is "discrete". If your model moves in discrete distances your shadows will also move in discrete distances. If you have a moving light source then that light source should move in discrete distances. We essentially convert the animation to a stop-motion format without dealing with frame rate. This leads to other problems though... I know there is a way to make a voxelated object that moves discretely in space using the Cloner. (If you don't know how to do this let me know) What I don't know, is how to make the light source move discretely in space. If you do want that and don't know how to do it we can summon someone expert on this. One more problem you should solve is positioning your light source in a certain way to have the shadow fall exactly parallel to your wall without spreading (I think the parallel spot is what you are looking for) - you may want to switch to Hard Shadows. Maybe make the shadows more transparent. You can duplicate the light and position it bit next to the first one (it is up to you to find the exact distance so it coincides with the voxel size) with a different shadow opacity to make a penumbra shadow effect.

Ah... so, if I understand correctly, a voxel in the background should have only 2 states: 1. Completely in the light OR 2. Complety in the dark (shadowed) ...Like a pixel with two luminance states. Then how about this: - Build the wall from voxels - Assign individual color materials - The base color (for example, diffuse) should be the shadow color - quite dark - Now give the material a strong Subsurface Scattering color. Now, when a voxel is in the shadow (not hit by light source), it should stay dark (the shadow color defined in diffuse) When a voxel is hit by light source, it should light up complety, due to SSS. With a medium SSS setting, you could even produce some kind of "pixel flickering" like dithering in pixel art. ... it's just a theory, though 🙂

If I understand correctly, your problem is not the pixelated shadow itself but the discrete way it is supposed to be projected on the wall. Am I right ?

Just an idea: - Start with approach 1 - Lower the output resolution to something like 160x100 - Carefully position the Camera, so that a voxel roughly equals an output-pixel (you could make an overlay for the camera with a grid of output-pixels) - Everything including shadows should now be pixelated - Upres in post as needed (without filtering for "clean" pixel look)

Wow...that is really ingenious how you did it. Sometimes, creating a low tech look can only be accomplished with a high tech approach. So you want just the shadows to be heavily pixelated? The first thing that came to mind was to use shadow maps with an extremely low resolution but the lowest custom setting in C4D was 40 x 40. That created this result (settings to the side) So while the pixelation is there, it is not as pronounced as you desire. Another approach would be if you had Redshift and set the initial ray cast levels extremely low as well but that could have other unintended consequences. Interesting challenge to make something look 8 bit with 64 bit tools. Dave

Lovely work! I tested a similar package of separate HDR studio lights a few weeks ago and got some really nice results. It’s funny how the digital world circles back to the analog. It reminds me of the tape emulation plugins used on lots of music these days. There’s something about those barely audible changes (or visible, in the above renders) that are very pleasing to the human senses.

One more with the new lighting kit.

I found these sweet HDR studio lights and bought the set after playing with the free demo. Really nice stuff. Here's some tests with them. Just the tip of the iceberg on playing with these.