Hi everybody.
This tutorial demonstrates the interaction between Pangolin BEYOND and Cinema 4D from
Maxon.
Cinema 4D is a 3D application for modeling animation lighting and rendering.
In this demo scene we have included geometry, some lights, a camera
and animation.
Which describes the movement of the objects.
Let's just render the scene.
And play.
Here you can see we have a simple 3D animation.
With BEYOND version 3.0 Pangolin developed a new plugin for Cinema 4D called LC4D for
BEYOND.
Which establish a direct connection to BEYOND.
The installer of the plugin can be found in BEYOND > InstallSupport > LC4D_install.
Double-click and it will start the installer.
Here you choose your Cinema 4D version.
There are all Cinema 4D version from 12 onwards supported.
I use R18.
The plug-in will automatically installed into the correct Cinema 4D plug-in directory.
Normally you don't need to change the path.
We start Cinema 4D again.
And open a scene.
Let's render.
You can see here that the plugin is not rendering correctly.
Because we haven't established the connection to BEYOND.
Now let's stop BEYOND.
Back in Cinema 4D we go to plugins > LC4D BEYOND > LC4D start connection to BEYOND.
You can see the connection was established successfully.
When BEYOND is started before Cinema 4D, a connection will be automatically established.
Render again.
The plugin has now rendered the laser graphics and it is also immediately visible in BEYOND.
Now let's go back to our first scene.
The settings for the plugin can be found in the render settings as a rendering effects
and the so-called tag.
For those new to Cinema 4D, Tags add additional properties to objects.
Let's create a LC4D render effect.
Effects LC4D.
Here you find all global settings.
Like line, color, filter and laser settings.
Where you can also enable and disable the laser output.
So let's change the color to light.
Now we add a LC4D tag to the cube.
LC4D BEYOND tags, LC4D.
This defines object specific laser settings.
Again here you have line, color, filter and laser settings.
In Cinema 4D, most tag properties can be animated.
So we add a grid and animate the amount of grid lines on the cube.
We render again.
And you can see the animation it's directly visible in BEYOND as well.
You can continue working inside Cinema 4D while the animation is rendering.
When the rendering has finished, you can play the animation and again it's also visible
in BEYOND.
Now let's go back to the render settings.
We disabled the output to BEYOND.
And if you don't want to have BEYOND in front all the time, it's also possible to see the
laser preview and point count directly inside Cinema 4D.
Just open the preview window.
There it is.
Once you are done with your animation in Cinema 4D, you can send a result to BEYOND.
Choose the correct Cue.
And press the send button.
And the animation will be send into the active cue in BEYOND.
Here you can now apply further BEYOND specific animation.
Thats it.
Enjoy.