One of my favorite texture tools within Cinema 4D is Noise. I use for a number of reasons but sometimes I need it to move. The best way to edit your texture without rendering is to set your texture preview to Animate. Here’s how you do it…
Create a new Material within Cinema 4D.
Double click on the material to open it in the Material Editor.
You can change this setting on any texture preview, but we’ll start within Color.
Click on the drop down menu next to Texture and select Noise.
Now double click on the texture to edit it’s details.
Once you have the details pulled up, right click in the texture preview window, and select Animate. If you right click again, you will see it has a check mark to indicate it’s on.
Obviously you’re not going to see anything happen once it’s selected until you animate your texture. For the sake of the tutorial we will keep it simple, but once you keyframe any attribute in the texture details you will see it animate on the preview. For now we will change the Animation Speed of our Noise.
Change the Animation Speed to 1 to get started and watch your texture move!
Here is a little gif so you can see it working. Notice that I changed the Loop Period to 2 for the gif example.
A couple things to keep in mind. You can also activate Animate on the Material Preview (the sphere with the texture applied to it to the left of the animated noise) so you can see all attributes animating together. If you like to use Layers, like me, with your textures then expect a little slower rendering. However, it’s still the best way to preview the texture before you render.
If you want to have a lot of fun with it, activate Animate on the Material Preview and start playing with Displacement and Sub-Poly Displacement. You’ll be able to see how abstract objects will animate before you even worry about rendering. Enjoy!
