Natural media rendering splines/PaintFX
-
THE POST BELOW IS MORE THAN 5 YEARS OLD. RELATED SUPPORT INFORMATION MIGHT BE OUTDATED OR DEPRECATED
On 17/11/2002 at 19:09, xxxxxxxx wrote:
I would love to see a plugin for C4D that allowed you to draw a spline in c4d and then gave that spline a natural media "stroke".
I realise this would require a heavy ammount of coding to get right, and i would expect teh price tag to match (i.e. around the $400-$500 mark.
Ideally it would work like Maya PaintFX or like "Expression" but in 3D. It would allow for complete control over the stroke, and rather than simply distorting geometry along a curve (although this would be one fature) it would have something similar to teh "tube" creating/branching algorythms of Maya PaintFX that allow it to be so powerful at rendering everything from lightening through trees, through watercolour effects.
It may need to use an object that the splines are placed beneath, or a tag to control completion of the line (useful for rendering a logo completing. The splines would remain editable afterwards.
Painting in 3d space would give you the option to paint on any axis, facing teh camera or on any "live" objects (if htis is the chosen method then the splines produced would have their points fixed or snapped to teh surface that they were painted on even if you move them around, this meaning that if you start a stroke on one object then it finished on another, should you move the objects the inbetween line would simply stretch between as the points would be stuck to the objects surface).
It would of course allow the loading and saving of brush libraries, and would have xpresso integrations in terms of being able to write xpresso expressions to control the strokes animation (lighting effects for example, or smoke).
The strokes should be able to be both volumetric (fog smoke) and planar/toon (pen strokes etc). The interface should be able to handle using a tablet to control teh stroke, and input weighting into the line va the tablet.
This may appear to be asking a lot, but i think it needs to be competitive with a like priced product (for instance Painter).
If anyone feels like taking this project on, then I have many ideas on how to make this roduct work, and how to give it a good easy to use interface that would blow away products such as Maya PaintFX etc.
I suspect that it may require a custom render engine to get all of teh features working.
A great way to extend this would be to allow faces and edges to also be used to generate strokes though facial stroke generation or postfx stroke generation would be taking it several stages further. However this would be incredibly useful.