by frankmci » Tue Jul 02, 2019 11:19 pm
frankmci
Tue Jul 02, 2019 11:19 pm
You'll get a better response if you post what you've got so far.
The example tutorial you linked should give you the basic concept of using edge falloff to make a reasonable Scanning Electron Microscope type shader. It's generally the same idea, regardless of what renderer you're using. I highly recommend you get used to working in Octane's Node Editor instead of the default C4D Material Editor.
In Octane, you'll use the Falloff node instead of C4D's Fresnel property, but it's functionally the same thing. You'll probably pipe that into a Gradient node to tweak the colors and from there into a Texture Emission node, then into the Emission input of the Material.
Add a little noise to the bump and displacement channels, either procedurally or with bitmaps, and Bob's Your Uncle.
You can animate the colors lots of different ways, from manually keyframing colors, to using Mix Material or Blend Material or Mix Texture nodes, to managing it all in post with careful layers and masks.
As for the glows traveling down each axon, again, there are many ways to do it. In this tutorial, he's using a spherical gradient in either object or wold space. Unless your neurons are similarly spherical and symmetrical, though, I'm guessing you're going to want to do it in UV space, so be sure to build your neurons nice and clean, lining up the geometry consistently along U or V to save you some headaches. Or you could do it by animating invisible toroidal light sources down each axon, if your UVs are just too chaotic to deal with.
Anyway, there are endless approaches. As I said at the beginning, share what you've got, no matter how basic. In fact that's always what I recommend; start as simple as possible so that you understand what's really going on, then once you have a good handle on that, apply what you've learned to the more complex, real project. I hope that helps you get started.
- Attachments
-
- Simple SEM Glow
Technical Director - C4D, Maya, AE, - Washington DC