Following from Part 2, I just created the displacement map within After Effects – I then opened up C4D on my computer and started to load in all the test objects for me to see whether my displacement map gave me the aesthetic I was looking for. I loaded up a ‘plane’ object in C4D, which is a horizontal flat square and applied the material to it, in which the displacement map had been loaded into the displacement tab inside it. I then experimented with the material settings to try and make it work as the tutorial used a plug-in which I didn’t have, making it useless, the video below shows my process:
As stated above, I encountered several problems within my process, the first one being the tutorial as it was using another plug-in called Octane – this is a similar products to Radeon’s ProRender which uses the graphics card or GPU to render the project instead of the CPU, this allows for the project to be constantly rendering in the display screen and also allows me to see what my project looks like in real time. These characteristics are very desirable to professionals within the industry as it reduces the amount of time it takes to create a project from start to finish, but it comes at a cost as physical components are worked very hard and at are more risk of failing. However, this didn’t stop me from testing the displacement map out in C4D, I got stuck when I first added the displacement map or material to the ‘plane’ object and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working, after a while I found out that it was because of the number of segments in the object. The number of segments an object has defines how many pieces make it up, originally it was set to 10 but when I bumped it up to the maximum setting the map became more visible. I then followed the exact same steps but on the cube object, which produced the renders below:
Overall I think this is a really good piece of development for the project, however, I feel that there still needs to be some development of the displacement map in terms of the settings, specifically of the displacement strength as that renders produced aren’t up to the quality level I would like. The renders produced had a strength of 75% and also a height setting of 1% – I feel that it could do with a bit more height to make the protrusions more pronounced or maybe even a more simplistic map with less fine details, this would be more suited to the total number of segments available that the cube object can have as it would allow each protrusion to be cleaner and sharper. To progress from this point, I am going to research how to add colour to this displacement map with a colour palette that will be more suited to the overall theme of the animation – and then after this, I will test it by producing more renders.
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