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Here are my top 5 favorite free Cinema 4D plugins. (I looked at the free plugins I used most as my metric fyi). Here we go!
Best Cinema 4D Plugin #5: ArrowMaker
ArrowMaker is a free plugin for Cinema 4D that generates an arrow shape as a spline primitive. The shape itself can be customized to create a ton of of different arrow types, then used in an Extrude or Sweep NURBS to generate a mesh. Here’s a tutorial I made years ago showing how to use it:
Download Free Cinema 4D ArrowMaker Plugin
Best Cinema 4D Plugin #4: Screw Generator
The C4D Screw Generator plugin is created by Fuchs & Vogel. It’s a great way to add a lot of detail to any of your models. Included are 7 main screw presets and then you can further customize them in various ways. I find myself using this all the time!
Download the Free Cinema 4D Screw Generator Plugin
Best Cinema 4D Plugin #3: Gelatine
Cinema 4D Studio is the very best that MAXON has to offer for professional 3D artists. If you want to create advanced 3D graphics but need a helping hand to ensure you create jaw-dropping graphics quickly and easily, then this is the choice for you. Your Cinema 4D/library/layout folder. Open Cinema 4D, Open the Preferences, Press the 'Open Preferences Folder' then place the layouts in the library/layout folder. Restart Cinema 4D. There will now be a Plugins 4D menu at the top of Cinema 4D.
This awesome free Gélatine Plugin is created by Code Vonc. It’s sort of like the jiggle deformer, but has a lot more options and is really fast to work with. Unlike the jiggle deformer you can have more flabby effects, work with multiple objects, set handle points and use a simple fall-off curve to effect the animation. It’s really easy to specify which parts of the model should wobble and which should be stiffer. Overall a super fun and useful plugin, especially for infographic type work.
Download the Free Gelatin Plugin for C4D
Best Cinema 4D Plugin #2: ReeperX Rope Generator
A plugin I find myself using all the time is ReeperX. Reeper means Rope Maker in German, so there you go. You can create 4 different styles of rope with the new 2.0 update. You can also use it to create cables or telephone wires etc. Lots of great uses for it!
Here’s an old tutorial I made on it:
Download the free ReeperX Plugin
Best Cinema 4D Plugin #1: Hot4D Ocean Generator
The free HOT4D plugin is absolutely incredible! It’s a wave and ocean generator which is a great start for any ocean/water scenes. Here are a few samples plus a tutorial I made on it awhile ago:
Get the Free HOT4D C4D Plugin here
To get the free scene file from Helge Kiehl (shown above) go here: https://vimeo.com/57924940
To get the free scene file from Mostyle (shown above) go here: https://vimeo.com/57351572
Those are some of my favorite plugins. If you want to add any of your most used free Cinema 4D plugins just e-mail me at [email protected] and I can add them to the list!
Maxon’s Cinema 4D has a vibrant and well-supported plugin ecosystem, providing all manner of extensions for the app – from filling holes in its toolset to streamlining the workflow. And because of the way that Cinema 4D is structured, not only are these plugins nicely integrated into the app (often seamlessly at times), they all play well together.
So you can find Cinema 4D tutorials that mix third-party Modifiers and Effectors with native tools, use Turbulence FD to convect X-particles and then visualise them with the Hair shader, shatter meshes with Nitroblast and then animate them with Signal... the combinations are endlessly creative.
In this feature we’ve rounded up a few of our favourite plugins (although not all of them by any measure!). There’s something for everyone here.
01. X-Particles
- Price: £540
This amazing particle and VFX system has a host of useful features. You can create stimulations for cloth, smoke, fire and fluids, for example, and it integrates seamlessly into Cinema 4D. If you can use C4D, you can use X-Particles.
02. TurbulenceFD
- Price: £369/ $469
TurbulenceFD is a voxel-based fluid dynamics simulation system for making fire and smoke. TFD is used in movies, TV shows and video game promos, and you only need to use the plugin and see the end results to agree it’s pretty special.
03. Light Kit Pro 3.0
- Price: $249/£190
The latest update to Light Kit Pro provides a complete and fully customisable lighting solution – providing a variety of realistic lights, panels and softboxes with which to really hone your lighting. It's easy to use, includes 120 studio presents and has built-in support for renderers Octane, Arnold and Redshift.
04. Nitroblast
- Price: €65
Lazaros, aka ‘NitroMan’, has created many useful plugins, but Nitroblast is probably his best. This great little tool automatically shatters objects and enables you to blow them to pieces using C4D’s dynamics.
05. Scroll Roll Deformer
- Price: $18.75/ £12.90
Scroll Roll Deformer was designed to help create rolling paper and carpet-like effects, says Daniel Fitzgerald, developer at Curious Animal, but he found it was also a fun way to create sprouting animations. Scroll Roll also turned out to be perfect for growing sprouting objects and growing feathers.
By scaling these objects up from nothing as they unroll he was able to transition them on smoothly, but in a much more interesting way than a simple scale.
06. Motion Stretch Deformer
- Price: $36/£25
The second entry from Curious Animal, aka developer Daniel Fitzgerald, is Motion Stretch Deformer. When applied to a mesh, Motion Stretch Deformer – as you might guess – stretches the geometry according to its movement, creating things like motion trails.
07. Signal
- Price: $129
Signal is a GSG plugin that’s aimed at automating the animation process. It’s applied as a tag to an object or deformer and you simply drag any animatable value into it (including colours). It’s then a matter of setting some values and letting Signal do its thing, generating random, noise- based animations and seamless loops.
08. SplinePatch 3.0
- Price: $71.48
As its name suggests, SplinePatch 3.0 brings spline patching to C4D, which enables you to create smooth, curved surfaces from intersecting splines. This is ideal for creating complex forms that remain editable and animatable, such as cars, clothing, characters, packaging or other convoluted shapes.
09. Forester
- Price: £287
Forester is a procedural vegetation creation plugin that makes an endless variety of grass, trees and plants, and that also comes with a rock generator and a scattering function, called the Multicloner. Its latest update also integrates with C4D's Variation shader, so you can colour your leaves randomly.
10. Transform
- Price: $199
GSG’s Transform is a neat plugin for generating animation without the need for keyframes. It provides a set of over 65 presets for various animation sequences, which can then be tweaked to suit. It works well on text, clone arrays or fractured objects made using Nitroblast.
11. Unfolder
- Price: €24.99
This tool by César Vonc unwraps an object as strips of connected polygons, like peeling a banana. It’s a very cool effect with plenty of options to alter the way it unfolds and disappears. However, Vonc explains that you can’t easily cache the effect as Unfolder changes the point and polygon count by default, and the PLA cache needs them to be the same.
12. Difference Map
The Difference Map is a handy plugin that enables you to layer effects on
top of your deformation by creating a vertex map describing the effect of the deformer on each point in your model. So, if using Impact deformer to create ripples, you could use the Difference Map tab to create a vertex map that you reference in a material to give those ripples a different colour to the rest of the object.
top of your deformation by creating a vertex map describing the effect of the deformer on each point in your model. So, if using Impact deformer to create ripples, you could use the Difference Map tab to create a vertex map that you reference in a material to give those ripples a different colour to the rest of the object.
This article was originally published in 3D World magazine, and has since been updated. Subscribe to 3D World here.
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