5 minute read
Tech Reviews
Greyscalegorilla Plus
Full disclosure: Cinema4D is not my primary 3D package, so I’m using that as my excuse for not knowing much about Greyscalegorilla before: a deep and wide set of plugins and assets to expand the already expansive toolset available in C4D. In fact, the list of available tools is so long that I can’t possibly cover the plugins for lighting, animation and creation, or the HDRI Collections, or the vast Material and
Texture collections — all of which are accessible in the Greyscalegorilla Plus subscription. So, this month we’ll simply take a look at the most recent additions.
Signal is an animation plugin that received a boost to 3.0. The toolset definitely leans into procedurally creating complex animations. The most impressive aspect is triggering and controlling animation with Cinema 4D native fields and noises, layering them into infinite variations. But you also have a looper modifier to create seamless loops (which is unbelievably frustrating when trying by hand). Numerous presets come with Signal 3.0, including a bunch of easing curves, animation presets like flicker, bouncing, vibration, etc., and a slew of scripts for adjusting your animation. These features can be dragged and tagged through Drop Zone (see below).
In the material collection area, 40 hand-crafted paper materials have been added. These include crepe, lined, cardboard, watercolor, craft, fanzine, etc. The materials are designed to be naturally translucent. Features like wrinkles and colors can be customized here. In addition, 80 new terrazzo materials have also been added to the material collection to an already existing group of terrazzo materials. There are bold colors, neutral palettes, dense or loosely packed resin chips and dispersion. All the maps are 4K, so you can get pretty darn close.
Greyscalegorilla includes libraries of Surface Imperfections like grime and dirt. The latest upgrade adds Dry Ink to the mix with 50 different 4K maps. They are pulled from samples of print processes, so brayers, blocks and sponge techniques just feel right. These maps also complement the paper materials above. Plus, these are just maps, so they can be used outside of Cinema 4D in other applications.
Then there is Drop Zone to work with Greyscalegorilla Plus plugins. This is designed specifically to speed up the workflow within Cinema 4D by allowing you to grab presets, HDRIs and Gorillacams (one of the already popular plugs for camera animation), drag them into parameters slots and automatically create links and tags.
The materials and plugins work within Cinema 4D, but they’re also cross-compatible with the various render engines within. Your Greyscalegorilla materials will all render with Redshift, Arnold and Octane, so you don’t have to worry about getting bogged down in making custom materials per renderer.
I haven’t even talked about the training that comes with the Greyscalegorilla Plus subscription. You can get it at $33.25 per month. Yes, I’m aware that with subscriptions for After Effects and Cinema 4D, and Red Giant and Substance — and you name it — it may feel like you’re being asked to get all the streaming movie channels. But given the power of these tools and the time you can save by using them, I believe it’s a pretty good investment.
Website: www.greyscalegorilla.com Price: $49 per month (Monthly Subscription); $33.25 per month (Annual Subscription)
E-on’s PlantFactory
In CG, plants and trees are always a “thing” in environment creation. They come in an infinite number of variations of forms and colors, and shift subtly (or not so subtly) in the wind. Then, there are always a lot of them — trees, bushes, flowers of all kinds and sizes. Nature creates hundreds of square miles of them without a thought. And in our CG worlds, as comparably limited as they may be, we have to provide the same amount of variety.
The latest version of PlantFactory from E-on Software allows for this controlled random chaos through combining the ease of drawing with the power of node-based procedural control. The UX design is soft and easy to look at, providing a balance of simplicity while giving you the tools you need to get the job done. Upon installation, it gives you the option of adapting the look and interaction to your favorite 3D software (Maya, Max, etc.). You can get going right away by drawing out the trunk of a tree with the
by Todd Sheridan Perry
stylus. Moving on to the branches: As you get into the finer details, you can auto-generate the twigs and leaves — because who has the time to hand-craft every little detail?
As you draw out your handmade tree, a creation node tree is being created for you, which at this point is pretty linear: Root, Trunk, Branch, Twig, Leaf. But each of those nodes can be controlled and modified with other nodes à la Houdini or Bifrost or Nuke. You can feed data about age, maturity, the season and health through control filters and math nodes to dynamically give your foliage variation and character - and even animate those factors.
We don’t always have the time, or indeed the botanical knowledge, to build a forest of plants from scratch, so E-on provides a huge searchable and filterable catalog of plants that you can download and then tweak, using the PlantFactory tools. The PlantCatalog objects are downloadable and exported to other DCC software through a standalone exporter, but you gain the most benefit by using it in conjunction with PlantFactory, where you can generate variants. If you use E-on’s VUE for your environment-building, then you are set. Both the PlantCatalog and PlantFactory assets are designed to work with the internal EcoSystem instancing and wind. But if you happen to be building the worlds in another 3D package, PlantFactory can export to a plethora of file formats including Alembic and Pixar’s USD formats, and the pre-built shaders can be either the native E-on engine or Arnold and V-Ray.
Website: info.e-onsoftware.com/plantfactory Price: [Vue and PlantFactory] Annual $139 (Creator), $525 (Professional); Monthly
$19.95 (Creator), $75 (Professional) ◆
