Controlling Light Intensity with Fields

[jonas_schneider]

Hello guys,
I have basicly a setup of arrows that are clones on a axis, basicly creating a line out of arrows. Now I want to have those arrows as lights and I want to control the intensity of the lights with a field. The goal would be to animate them fading in and out. I could do this by animating it manually, but this would be pretty timeconsuming and not every good for different light speeds etc.

Thats why I would like to use a field or at least some shaders to control it. Anyone has a tip on how to to this? In this picture I used Mesh Lights that contain sweeps, but maybe it could also work with Light Materials. But I am open for any tip.

Best regards.

[deyan.hadzhiev]

Hi jonas_schneider, as you correctly tried, the best solution would be to use the MoGraph shader as a texture in a MeshLight. Unfortunately as you also noticed the MoGraph shader does not work yet.

But yea no clue why the MoGraph Color Shader isnt working. Tried it multiple times but its just broken. Hopefully someday we get a working one.

Adding support for the MoGraph shader (as well as User Attributes or User Data, which are very related) is one of our priorities and it will be available soon in V-Ray for Cinema 4D.

We are constantly working for a better integration and support for even more Cinema 4D features, but we do have technical limits and we try to balance between stability improvements, V-Ray features and better integration.
Thanks for you patience and I hope this does not cause much inconvenience.

[akos_kiss]

Hi jonas_schneider,

I had similar issues recently. For some reason when i use the fields in color mode with no texture on and object, vray renders the color information fine. but when i put a mograph color shader in a vray texture it just doesn't work. In the supported features doc its marked as working with c4d bake shader but in reality it doesn't work.... This is really strange as vray can render the fields color if there are no textures applied just the viewport color info.
It would be great if this feature worked as advertised...

My workaround would be to add scale to the light sources and modify that with a scale and fields, but for the light intesiti i would just link a cube or any geo to the light source and use the vray distance shader to animate the light color from black to white.

A bit more elegant solution is a cloner with two or more meshlight intensity settings and the clones set to blend mode. add a plain effector with a linear field and you can remap the blending mode with a curve, and you can stack multiple fields. I attached a screengrab.

Alternatively if you want really fine control there are a few xpresso "hacks" that can work, but i didn't try them myself.

[jonas_schneider]

akos_kiss that is actually a very smart workaround which I totally overlooked. That works great.

But yea no clue why the MoGraph Color Shader isnt working. Tried it multiple times but its just broken. Hopefully someday we get a working one. That actually something that I admire about Redshift. The integration in C4D for MoGraph stuff is just way better (as expected of couse).

[deyan.hadzhiev]

Hi jonas_schneider, as you correctly tried, the best solution would be to use the MoGraph shader as a texture in a MeshLight. Unfortunately as you also noticed the MoGraph shader does not work yet.

But yea no clue why the MoGraph Color Shader isnt working. Tried it multiple times but its just broken. Hopefully someday we get a working one.

Adding support for the MoGraph shader (as well as User Attributes or User Data, which are very related) is one of our priorities and it will be available soon in V-Ray for Cinema 4D.

We are constantly working for a better integration and support for even more Cinema 4D features, but we do have technical limits and we try to balance between stability improvements, V-Ray features and better integration.
Thanks for you patience and I hope this does not cause much inconvenience.

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello jonas_schneider,

As you might have already seen in the Announcement post, we just released V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D Update 1. It comes with many new features and I am happy to let you know that we have now added support for user attribute textures and the MoGraph Color Shader. You can download and install the latest builds from here.

[jonas_schneider]

Hello jonas_schneider,

As you might have already seen in the Announcement post, we just released V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D Update 1. It comes with many new features and I am happy to let you know that we have now added support for user attribute textures and the MoGraph Color Shader. You can download and install the latest builds from here.

Already trying out stuff, very pleased so far. Thanks for your continous work. Much apprechiated

[akos_kiss]

Hi All!
I just had a few ideas that i wanted to build a demo scene for. I wanted to use fields to control the color of rectangle lights in a cloner.( V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D, update 2.1 (v6.20.01 from Feb 6 2024).
When i used a mesh light with a mograph color shader as a light texture it worked fine. Now that i was trying to use the rectangle light in a cloner with fields. No matter if i used the vray usercolor shader with mograph color or the colour shader non if it worked. I would like to use random field to controll color and some field with direct colors too.
Does anyone have a workaround on how to control the color of lights with fields directly in the new version?