[eric nixon]

I just wanted to share my findings of a quick experiment. In this case I am mapping a hdr timelapse sky sequence to a 'sky' sphere, but this technique is the same if you wanted to animate something like a TV screen.



I have an animated sequence of hdr's placed into the luminance channel of a c4d material (all other channels deactivated)
I have found that you should set the c4d plug (under the cinema/procedurals tab) so that that sampling size is the same as the source hdr's (the plugin is resampling the hdr's because the brightness can be animated) and leave interpolation on.
Also in the c4d material animation tab, you need to click calculate for the frame range, AND under the shader tab, select color profile to sRGB, exposure 0 (default).
Now finally set the mix-mode to multiply with a brightness of 100%

Here is a link to download 6 frames of animation, this is attached merely as proof that its working;
http://www.mediafire.com/?ctyhcu5vfd7om86

JD, I've checked the hdr data is converted correctly with these settings, do you think there a better way?

[JDHill]

I couldn't really say -- it is up to the shader (whether Cinema or otherwise) to render itself, so different ones will likely respond differently to different setups. The request for the shader to render is made using the same parameters regardless -- the only difference is that the rendered buffer is requested to be written as 32-bit HDR rather than 24-bit TGA, when you are rendering a luminance shader.

[eric nixon]

Ok I'll ask the shader...

[eric nixon]

JD, I just noticed that when the luminance channel is used in a c4d shader, the plugin ignores all other channels, this is not good because I want to use an alpha channel with the emitter...

Btw. like you said 'its up to the shader'... It seems we can do many cool animation effects, like using an animated mask (I used a spinning cyclone) via the fusion thingy to clip the hdr data, you can colourize etc. It requires some fiddling to keep the data in a 32bit state but the possibilities are endless.

[JDHill]

JD, I just noticed that when the luminance channel is used in a c4d shader, the plugin ignores all other channels, this is not good because I want to use an alpha channel with the emitter...

I will see about adding support for this.

[eric nixon]

Great, big thanks.

I just noticed while using an animated emitter, that if that emitters brightness drops to zero, maxwell renders the whole frame blank, so I need to find a way to make the minimum be like 0.01

It seems a bit harsh that this should happen in the first place...