Daily Cinema4D – Scene Nodes
I wanted to continue working with Scene Nodes. Today’s goal was to bring some concepts that I was comfortable with from code (like for loops and iteration) into the node environment, which was a simple but surprisingly challenging exercise! I’m really started to appreciate the lack of documentation on a lot of these operators.
I wanted to make procedural geometry that looped a simple operation: inset and extrude. I wanted the following parameterized values:
- Amount of inset
- Amount of extrusion
- Number of “tiers”
- Method of collapse – this would be either all tiers grow uniformly together (parallel) or the next tier only starts once the previous one was fully grown (cascade).
Video of the two different methods – cascade (left) or parallel (right).
Node set up (outside of the loop)
Node set up (within the loop)
Besides all the nodes I learned, I also learned how to put comments and debugging node inspectors, which was ery useful. I was surprised I didn’t have a “spy” node like XPresso, but this is much handier!
With the comments in place, I feel this is fairly straightforward/self-explanatory. Let me know if you have any questions!
I am not sure if this node set-up will have any purpose but it was a fun learning experiment. The growth can be constrained to just a polygon selection if the object was cooked down. I should see if it can be constrained to a field – that would be really interesting. Maybe a part two! I haven’t played with field integration yet.
Parameters changing in the viewport.