It was almost a year ago that we had a look at the Ocean Wave Effector for Cinema 4D, created by Creative Tools’ Vidar Nelson.
Wave Deformer is an implementation of a tessendorf wave as a deformer for C4D
The Ocean Wave Effector allowed you to create and animate ocean waves easily in C4D with simple rig controls and some parametric options.
Since then, Johannes Kollender has created his own adaptation – a Wave Deformer which is based of is by Vidar Nelson’s work.
Like the original, the Wave Deformer is an implementation of the “Tessendorf” wave as it is known. The Wave Deformer operates as a standard C4D deformer, creating waves and wave motion from any polygonal object, however it works best with flat objects such as a plane.
The Wave Deformer for Cinema 4D
The obvious question might be “if we already have a wave deformer, then why is there another?”. The new Wave Deformer operates significantly faster than the previous, especially with high resolution meshes.
In addition, the Wave Deformer offers an additional advanced tab with more controls, and a handy preview tab. The Advanced tab houses controls for using gradients and maps for falloff effect on the wave.
Selecting the ‘Use Length Falloff’ will use the gradient to define the intensity of the deformer along the wave. This can be easily used to lessen the wave effect at the edges. You can even further control this by adding additional masks, with the “use Mask” check box. With this set, the assigned shader will be projected from the top, onto the wave, and can controls the intensity of the deformer’s effect.
The preview tab allows you to toggle the visibility of the schematic editor preview of the deformer.
Availability
The Wave Deformer is PC only (32 and 64 bit) at the moment, and was tested in Cinema 4D R14 and R15. Johannes does note that “It’s far from thoroughly tested” so if you do something crazy with it, make sure to safe your work first. Check out the free Wave Deformer for Cinema 4D here.
