Vertexcoloring in c4d

[Helper]

THE POST BELOW IS MORE THAN 5 YEARS OLD. RELATED SUPPORT INFORMATION MIGHT BE OUTDATED OR DEPRECATED

On 28/10/2004 at 15:52, xxxxxxxx wrote:

I am currently building a level for a game and using vertexcolors proved to be a very powerfull tool:

This scene is a screenshot of an OpenGL implementation that runs on an average PC with 60 FPS - there are no lightsources and the only "unique" Texture is the one for the tree - everthing else is textured with tileable textures, means, the textures contain no specific lightning information. Everything is precalculated with Vertexcolors - mainly with the Dirt plugin of c4d, but with lot's of tweaking by hand. It was pretty complicate to export all that stuff but I think the result is worth the effort.

Besides all that, the whole scene is rendering in C4D within 4 seconds and it looks like the screenshot - so it is also interesting to people who like to render scenes quickly for animations etc. In that case the polycount could be higher and the result could look like a true radiosity rendering - with the difference of a uncomparable reduced renderingtime (of course, integrating this into an animation could be tricky, but a smart lightning setup by the artist that would include only animated objects could speed the renderings up without a mentionable artistic difference, but a highly mentionable rendertimeimprovement for the animation)

Unluckyly, C4D is not very comfortable when it comes to vertexcolored materials ....
First, it would be nice to have *real* vertexcolors and not only vertexmaps, since I cannot preview any vertexcoloring without rendering (lightning is okay, but RGB coloring is tricky).
Also, it is impossible to preview vertexcolor shaders in the materialpreview. Using a special vertexmapped materialpreview object doesn't help either.
Then, the vertexcolor shader seems to be attached to the vertexcolortag somehow - it uses its name, but it resets the name, if I delete the vertexmaptag of the original mesh (even if the material is assigned to other meshes that have vertexmaps with the "right" name). I liked it more when I simply used a name for identifying the right vertex map.
The Dirtplugin is the only help I can get currently - it would be nice to be able to render the complete lightsetup to the vertexcolors or at least to vertexmaps (radiosity/lightning with shadows)! - 3D Studio max is capable of doing that (at least for radiosity solutions).

So my request for c4d would be (plugin or builtin) :
* True RGB Vertexcolors based on vertexmaps, together with a vertexcolor painting tool
* lightsetuprendering to vertexcolors or vertexmaps
* A better integration in the shaders and the materialpreview

Thanks for reading and have a nice day