In this break down you will learn how to color your material textures procedurally with mograph using fields in Cinema 4D.
Controlling vertex color with mograph can open up many possibilities for your material setups in Cinema 4D. The set up requires a few steps but once achieved you can control your material color in a quick and predictable way using the regular mograph effectors.
Create a grid of clones and plane effector set to color with a linear falloff set to green.
apply the effector to the cloner to add a color gradient to the clones as expected with mograph.
in order to use the field to affect an objects color
apply a vertex color tag to the plane and put the linear field into the field list
then create a material and in the color channel select a vertex map to go into the texture slot
drag and drop the vertex color tag into the vertex map link
then drag the material onto your object
add in a solid field set to white below the linear field in the color vertex tag field list
and you will see a gradient being applied to your plane
note that the gradients resolution is dependent on the density of the mesh geometry
then switch the linear field into a spherical field
put the spherical field into a cloner and clone it on a three by three grid
we can alternate the colors of the cloned field by duplicating it and switching the color on the duplicate
now go into the vertex color tag and delete the spherical field from the list
copy the cloner and hit "C" on the duplicate to make it editable and it will break into a group of individual fields
now we will hide the original cloner but do not disable it
link the cloner to the editable clones using expresso
now we can drop a random effector with scale and position enabled
and add some noise animation to display what can be achieved when using mograph to control a shader
if the material has trouble updating you can bake the plane to alembic and hide the original in order to render it
In a similar way here is a more complex example that demonstrates the power of mograph control on material channels
In this example I used cloned dynamic spheres to determine the position of the fields to determine the material color. The hero sphere knocks the other spheres around and is also used as a field displacer to create a bulge on the mesh. So this is how you can get gradient textures using Cinema 4D Mograph controls including dynamics.
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