IntroductionGreebler is a powerful and integrated set of three plugins for adding greeble and nurnie detail geometry onto polygonal mesh objects. Nurnies can be represented as polygon geometry, instance objects, or render instances (R11.5+ only). Greebler consists of a generator object plugin with an associated tag and library management system. The generator accepts all children objects that result in polygonal meshes as inputs. It is multi-processor aware and will utilize all available processors in the generation process. The Greebler tag allows you to restrict greebling only to polygons specified in a referenced Polygon Selection tag and contains its own configuration options similar to the generator object. It is used in conjunction with the generator object and any number of them can be added to an input object. Although the results are randomized, there is a great deal of user control. Materials can be assigned to the Greebler results generally as well as to specific area selections. Along with a good selection of stock greeble shapes, you can add custom greeble shapes and objects (nurnies) as surface detailing. Since you might want to reuse these in the future, Greebler has a library management system which lets you store and organize libraries of greeble shapes and objects. Custom Greeble shapes and objects are stored on disk as regular Cinema 4D documents (.c4d) and are referenced automatically by the Greebler Library Management window. The library manager lets you add, remove, rename libraries and items as well as load them into the current scene for use with Greebler objects and tags. Before being able to use Custom Greeble shapes they must be added to the library as some preprocessing is required to prepare them for use. If you are not careful, Greebler can quickly eat Cinema 4D's available memory. Remember that, when rendering, a copy of the scene is passed to the renderer which effectively doubles the memory consumption. Use beveling sparingly and only when it impacts the render. Stock Greeble Cylinder/Ring Rotation Segments should be set to the minimum tolerable using Phong tags to smooth the surface. If you are using Cinema 4D R11.5 then you have the option to represent nurnies as render instances for greater reduction of memory use. What is a 'greeble' and 'nurnie'?A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to an object surface so as to break up the surface and add visual interest. The purpose is to add complexity to the object and yield the impression of greater size. It is essentially the small detailed technical part of a larger object. You will typically see greebling in movie special effects, particularly of the science fiction genre. In Greebler, the terms 'greeble' and 'nurnie' have been differentiated to mean 'surface feature' and 'surface object', respectively. |