[wimver]

Hi,

is it possible to animate MW emitters, e.g. fade in/out?
if so, how?

I want spots to be turned on, but now (switching the visibility of the emitter) it happens too fast, I want a few frames so they can 'start glowing'. turning them off should even go slower.

tnx
wim

[JDHill]

To do this, you would need to use a Cinema material, and animate its Luminance channel parameters.

[wimver]

Thanks JDHill!

wim

[wimver]

I bumped in to a crash bug in C4D + MW plugin:

if you use a C4D area light, and you choose a triangle as area shape, apply a MW emitter, this makes C4D crash. it is repeatable.
Why would I do so? because a triangle renders 5% faster than a rectangle, and with 350 frames to go, this makes a difference.

thanks for looking into this

rgds
wim

[JDHill]

Are you sure it's limited to using a triangle shape? Looking at the code, it seems this can never have worked.

That aside, I don't quite understand what you're doing. You want to animate light values, so you should not be using a Maxwell emitter material (I assume this is what you mean by MW emitter). You could use a Cinema light directly like this, animating its Intensity, though not with a custom shape, since that appears to be broken. I would probably not prefer that way regardless, though-- if you want to use, for example, a triangle, just make a single polygon, apply to it a Cinema material, and animate the Brightness of its Luminance channel. This way, you directly control the geometry, rather than relying on some internal plugin conversion from a spline.

Please let me know if you think that makes sense.

[wimver]

if I take an area light from C4D, the emitting object defaults as a rectangle. this is translated by MW to a similar rectangular plane with an emitter applied to it. but I can change that to disc, sphere, cube, cilinder, and this works too. when setting it to line, there is a message that there are errors in the scene, which sounds logical. but when I set it to object/spline, and insert a triangle (or another EDITABLE object for that matter) the application crashes. I get an error when using parametric objects, but no crash.

now, I did some tests, using a rectangle or a triangle with a MW emitter applied, and this gives me a 5 to 6% time advantage (or higher benchmark) when using a triangle. so I figured that, when using a triangle as a C4D area light, instead of the default rectangle, I should get the same advantage. so there must be something in the plugin that refuses simple geometry as a triangle to emit light as an area light.

I was not aware that the luminance channel of a material in C4D could actually illuminate. thanks for telling me!
this is definitely better, since working with the default rectangular area light, the values are much too strong when creating a very small light (like 4x4cm), then I have to set the luminance (V) channel to 1% in the color settings and animate the intensity from 0 to 4% to have dark to full illumination.

rgds
wim