Hi there.
In this short tutorial I am going to show you how to install and set up Pangolin and
LC 4D, so that you're able to perfectly rendered
3D animations into laser graphics for Pangolin BEYOND.
As a first step, we have to installed the LC 4D plug in into Cinema 4D.
As you can see, I already have some plugins installed but not yet the Pangolin plugin.
To install the new plugin, Cinema 4D has to be closed.
If you have not yet downloaded the LC 4D plugin, please simply request your installation file
at pangolin.com.
During the installation you trust me to follow the standard process as it's done for every
software under windows 10 for example.
At this step, please ensure to select the right Cinema 4D version
you have running on your system.
So in my case it's version R18.
Please make sure that the file is installed in the Maxon root folder like you see here.
So that's basically all in LC installation is really quite simple.
As the first introduction I recommend to spend some time to read the basic starting guide
for this plugin.
So you will easily learn the fundamentals of this excellent tool.
Now since everything is installed, let's start.
I would recommend to start BEYOND first and then start Cinema 4D.
And as you should see the connection between Cinema 4D and BEYOND is directly established.
So after Cinema 4D has started, we will shortly check if the plugin has really been installed correctly.
To do this, just click on plugins.
And as you see, the LC 4D plugin is available.
So here are now able to select between connection to BEYOND or in case you are working with
LD 2000, this feature is available as well.
Okay so let's see if everything is working correctly and we just start with the rendering
of a very famous logo.
As next step, please go to render setup and let's suggest some basic settings.
To enable LC 4D simply select this feature from the render effect list.
And as you see, here are the first basic settings available.
To reach the more advanced features, you're able to select the LC 4D tag and use dedicated
settings for each single 3D object.
As you can see, there are several filter settings, line type settings point and color settings.
So basically everything you need to perfectly tune the laser output of each single object.
So please remember those object settings are comparable to the standard functions inside
the main render menu.
Never the less they are having much more advanced features to really optimize the output performance.
Anyhow this should be okay for now and those deeper details would be explained during my
next tutorial.
So let's close this for now, and we start with a new empty file, to see how the render
settings should be adjusted step by step to get the first basic results.
I showed before the first step should be to check if the connection to Pangolin BEYOND
or LD2000 is established.
In this case here, I just need to activate it.
So this should work now.
The next step will be to load the lc4d plugin from the effect list.
One important step is, to reduce the resolution of Cinema 4D into 320 x 320 pixels.
Since the laser rendering calculations are optimized to exactly this resolution.
Please keep in mind that it will work with other resolutions as well, but you will get
the best render results with this resolution of 320 pixels.
If you want to see the laser output results in real time during the rendering, make sure
to have those two checkboxes activated.
In any case, please don't hesitate to open and use the help file.
There you will find many really helpful explanations and hints for almost all functions that are
included in this plugin.
Since the basic settings are done for now, let's open again the previously shown 3D file.
Okay as you see, the Pangolin logo consists of several rectangular boxes which in total
means, that this is in fact not one of the easiest logos you may convert into laser graphics.
Anyhow let's see the first results without any additional optimization.
Since we already set the basic stuff before, we can now directly start to render this frame.
Okay, so this works quite fast and as you can see we received our first rendered laser image.
To check the final amount of render output points which is important for flicker free
laser output, simply go back to render settings and activate the preview window.
So here in our case, we got around 1070 points now.
Which I would consider is the upper limit of point number to achieve a stable flicker
free graphic.
But as I told you already, there are many features to further optimize this result.
So this should be all for this basic introduction of LC 4D plugin.
In my follow up tutorial, I'll show you all the options of how to really optimize such
kind of laser graphics, to achieve a rock solid laser output and a really nice looking
laser graphics with soft fadings and sharp edges as it should be.
Thank you very much for watching and enjoy your work with your Pangolin software.