Maxon’s Cinema 4D has a vibrant and well supported plugin ecosystem that offers all kinds of extensions to the app – from filling holes in the toolset to optimizing the workflow in the creating process of a 3D configurator. And because Cinema 4D is built that way, these plug-ins are not only well integrated into the app, they also work well together.
So you can easily find Cinema 4D tutorials that combine third-party modifiers and effectors with native tools, convective with Turbulence FD X articles and then visualize with Hair Shader, break with Nitroblast and animate with Signal – the combinations are endlessly creative.
In this article we introduce our most popular plugins for Cinema 4D. There will certainly be something for you.
X-Particles 3.5
The latest version of this useful particle system can now be combined with the Cinema 4D effectors, allowing you to color, scale, randomize, and distort particles with the familiar Motion Graphics tool sets.
TurbulenceFD.
TurbulenceFD is a voxel-based flow simulation system for fire and smoke formation. TFD is used in movies, TV shows and video game advertising. Once you see the final results, you will be convinced by this plugin.
Nitroblast.
Lazaros alias “NitroMan” has created many useful plugins and Nitroblast is certainly one of the best. This great little tool automatically breaks objects and lets you smash them to pieces with the dynamics of C4D.
Scroll Roll Deformer.
Scroll Roll was designed to create roll paper and carpet-like effects, says Daniel Fitzgerald, developer at Curious Animal, but he also found it a fun way to create sprouting animations. The scroll also proved to be perfect for breeding seedlings and feathers.
By enlarging these objects as they rolled out from nowhere, he managed to develop them gently, but much more interestingly than a simple scale.
Lumen 2.
Lumen 2 was developed by Chris Montasano and although he no longer actively develops it, it still works well under C4D R17 and has many useful features. Chris particularly likes the “Visibility” setting in Lumen 2, which is useful for quickly filling an area with random objects.
Motion Stretch Deformer.
The second plugin from Curious Animal, alias developer Daniel Fitzgerald, is Motion Stretch Deformer. When Motion Stretch Deformer is applied to a mesh, it expands the geometry according to its motion, creating things like motion paths.
Signal.
Signal is a GSG plug-in designed to automate the animation process. It is applied as a tag to an object or deformer and you simply drag in any animable value. It’s then about setting some values and getting Signal to do its best to create random, noise based animations and seamless loops.
Effex 2.7.
Effex 2.5 is a physical animation framework capable of generating fire, smoke and liquids of different viscosities and combining these effects with the Bullet rigid body dynamics. For example, you can now have objects that fall, hit each other, create splashes, and float or sink depending on mass and density.
SplinePatch 3.0.
As the name suggests, SplinePatch 3.0 brings spline patching to C4D, allowing you to create smooth, curved surfaces from overlapping splines. This is ideal for creating more complex shapes such as cars, clothing, figures, packaging, or other curved shapes that remain editable and animable.
EdgeShade.
Chris Montasano says that there are some tricks for EdgeShape’s Soft Edge Shaders that surprise people over and over again, even though they have published information about them. The main features are a Ray Traced Render mode that lets you soften edges, even between objects. The Ray Traced mode also allows you to adjust the angles.
Forester.
Forester was reviewed by 3D World and receives a five-star recommendation. Forester is a procedural vegetation plugin that creates an endless variety of grasses, trees, and plants, as well as a rock generator and a scattering function called Multicloner.
Transform.
GSG`s Transform is a clear plugin for creating animations without keyframes. It offers a set of 65 presets for different animation sequences, which can be adjusted accordingly. It works well with text, clon arrays or fractured objects created with nitroblast.
Unfolder.
This tool by Cesar Vonk unwinds an object as a strip of connected polygons, like peeling a banana. It’s a very cool effect with many options to change the way it unfolds and disappears. However, Cesar explains that you can’t just cache the effect because Unfolder changes the number of points and polygons by default and the PLA cache needs them to be the same.
Difference Map.
The Difference Map is a handy plugin that lets you create layer effects on the following layers beyond their deformation by creating a node map that describes the effect of the deformer on each point in your model. So if you use Impact Deformer to create waves, you can use the Difference Map tab to create a vertex map that you reference in a material to give those waves a different color than the rest of the object.
We hope you will also find some useful plugins. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us via our forum.
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