... Activate and Render Channels?

Owned by thomas (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 05 Sept, 2014
2 min read

When you take a look at a RealFlow fluid simulation you will notice that the particles are coloured. These colours represent values of a certain property, for example velocity. Such a property is also called a channel. A dark blue colour indicates low velocities, white stands for fast particles. In Cinema 4D, on the other hand, all particles are displayed as small white crosses and the channel data is no longer visible.

To change this, go to Display > Display Mode in Cinema 4D, and change the option to “Particles” or “Circles”. Then select a channel under “Color By”. Now, the colours from the gradient under “Color” are used to dye the particles. Change the gradient's colour to your needs.




Please bear in mind that some channels contain constant values only, for example temperature. In cases like that, all particles will be dyed with exactly the same colour. Other channels show hardly any difference, and you will see just a few coloured spots. To get more contrast, please follow these steps:

  1. Deactivate “Automatic Range”

  2. Now, the “Min/Max Value” parameters are accessible

  3. Take a look at the “Current Min/Max” values, because they can be used as a reference to enhance the colours.

  4. Play with the values and change them to adjust contrast.

 

 

Currently, the new settings only affect the viewport, but when you render the scene everything will be displayed either in grey or the material you have applied to the plugin. The channel's and gradient's colours are not visible:

  1. Remove any existing materials from the plugin.

  2. Render > Add shader creates a material and applies it to the plugin automatically.

  3. Start the render process

  4. Optional: Adjust the colour gradient and channel values as described earlier to get different results, and render again.