Storm Tracer :: Features

Storm Tracer is an exceptionally feature rich plugin with many uses and possibilities.

Application/Flexibility

Storm tracer can be applied directly to virtually all objects in Cinema at the touch of a button, and that includes tags! Here are a few of the possibilities -

Storm Tracer can be applied to Cinema 4D's inbuilt standard particles, making a vast array of visual effects from explosions and rocket trails to rain, sleet and snow a breeze for anyone with Cinema 4D and a basic understanding of Cinema's own particle system.

With Thinking Particles, the possibilities expand a whole lot more. With surface sampling and direct per particle color control, the ability to render millions of thinking particles in minutes or seconds, the full control the Xpresso gives over the particles themselves truly you have CInema 4D FX nirvana.
Rendering Storms on spline objects reveals a great deal of possibilities. From simple strokes and lines, to more complex natural media style effects even to particle emission style effects.

If you apply Storm Tracer to polygon geometry, primitives and generators you can create many interesting and useful effects, ranging from fur and grass through to trees and fires.

The Storms can be generated a number of ways across a surface, applied to each vertex, edge and polygon or randomly placed accords an objects surface.

Applying Storm Tracer to a point, edge or polygon selection tag results in exactly what you would expect. Storms limited to the selection with the same controls you have with polygon geometry. Simple, clean and easy to use.
Storm Tracer with Vertexmap tags (or Weightmap tags) allows a more refined level of control over placement of your Storms. This is great for adding in details where you want smoothly without the harsh edges of Selection tags, for instance forests on a landscape, or stubble on a characters face. What's more effects like organic growth can be controlled using the weight values.
Texture Tags enable an even greater level of control over Storm placement and generation than Vertexmaps, on a single polygon you can have virtually infinite detail. Perfect for effects that require animation of placement too, or more complex forms, an easy way to make great voluminous cloud layers (with Storm simply turn off render visibility of the object and the Storm will still render).

Textures

Storm Tracer placards can be textured using standard Cinema 4D shaders and bitmap textures, and even has a few shaders of it's own including reflection/refraction shaders that can be used not just with Storm but elsewhere too. With splines and organic cloning textures can even be stretched over the sprites to make a continuous smooth "stroke" along the spline or branch!

Surface color inheritance

Storm Tracer can inherit surface color allowing you to dissolve objects away or morph using particles, or even allow the user to color TP particles on a per particle basis, with absolute control.

Displacement & Illumination

Another unique feature of Storm Tracer is that it has voxel displacement as well to help enhance the illusion of three dimensionality.

 
Storm tracer placards can react to light in scene, there are two illumination models which can be combined with bump mapping and even normal mapping, the Storms will look perfectly in place in your scene and unlike most other "Post" Sprite rendering system they'll even cast shadows if you want.

Variation & Cloning

Storm tracer has a whole plethora of variation controls, and cloning/placard generation controls, including organic cloning which gives the user access to full powerful inbuilt organic and inorganic growth "L-System". Storm can render a huge number of particles very fast, roughly 10 million (depending on size, options and scene) per gigabyte of memory over the amount Cinema uses, thus allowing a great deal of creative freedom to the user to really push what's possible.