spedler

I've been wanting to do some 'space' scenes for a while but tools to create star fields, planets, nebulae, etc. either don't exist or (if they do) are commercial plugins. So I decided to write my own. I've got several in the works but the first is now available - a shader for creating background star fields called 'StarScape'. Rather than post multiple sample renders here, you can see a few on my site at https://microbion.co.uk/html/starscape.htm I'm no artist, so I'm certain many people will be able to do a lot better than that 😀. It's completely free, has a full manual and is available for C4D 2024 (Windows and macOS) and 2025 (Windows only). I'll upload the 2024 version to the Downloads section here or you can get it from my site at the above link. Steve

ArrowMaker is still available from my site right up to Cinema R2023. See https://microbion.co.uk/html/arrowmaker.htm Steve

Hey Nick, Thanks for the suggestions. I'll send you a DM so we can discuss these. Steve

Hehe. Very funny Dave! I'd have admitted to the second but I've just got a new keyboard so it can't be that...😉

Thanks for the comments. I just did it because I'd thought about it a couple of years ago and finally found some time to see if I could get it to work! So I guess I did it out of interest more than anything else. There are quite a lot of molecular visualisation apps around but very little to create objects directly in C4D. I also wanted it to be procedural so an ObjectData plugin rather than a script looked the best bet. It only does the classic ball-and-stick appearance ATM but I might extend it if I revisit it at some point. Here's another render, this time using different materials per element and some lighting:

ChemLoader is a free plugin intended to parse a chemical molecule definition file then create all necessary objects to display and render the molecule. Out of the box it creates objects like the bacitracin molecule shown below. The model is fully procedural and can be modified with numerous settings at any time. A full and detailed manual is included. For more details and to download a copy please see the plugin's page on my site. Steve

I had to do this myself recently. The SDK docs are pretty good but miss out one or two crucial steps. I wrote the procedure down as I knew I'd need to do it again (and would never remember it) and you can find it on my website at https://microbion.co.uk/html/createplugins_r23_3_notarize.htm. For sure, this can be automated but it helps to understand the process and the only way to do that is to do it (at least once) from scratch.

No offence taken at all, I was just surprised is all. In fact I see you’ve been on the community forum recently and that Mario has been helping. He’s a great guy, if anyone can help, it’s him. You may get some help from users on discord, too.

Sorry, small community? Have you joined our Discord channel and our new community forum? There are plenty of other XP users there, especially on Discord. They are the best places to ask questions like this. You can find details of both of them on our main website.

Probably best if you visit our forum and we'll help you there. We usually ask for a scene file (simple as possible) to see what the problem is. Steve

Contact MAXON support. They can sometimes recover corrupted files if that's what the problem is (which it sounds like). Steve

Hm, I don't know what's gone wrong there, the process is automatic so shouldn't have been missed. Sorry about that. Please contact our sales team via the contact form on our site and they'll sort it out for you. If after that you still don't hear anything get back to me and I'll look into it. Steve

Please let me clarify this, as it seems to be a common misunderstanding. We are not charging for the render engine itself, we cannot do that even if we wanted to. What we are charging for is the time and effort required to build the bridge from Cinema to the render engine. Believe me, that has taken a massive investment in time and resources, which we have to recoup. It really isn't a matter of a couple of afternoons running up a quick plugin to pass the scene file to Cycles. Steve