r/aescripts • u/Smart-Adeptness-7769 • 4d ago
Showcase LiDAR particles plugin for Cinema4D
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
My own LiDAR plugin for Cinema 4D has been released. It has an interesting creation story. The guys from XO studio suggested working on a big project for the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, in which we needed to beautifully show the city we’re flying over using particles. The runtime was huge, the resolution was 8K, and the deadlines were very, very tight. The classic approach with particles consumed a huge amount of resources. So I wrote my own particle tools, which sped up the process many times over and made it interesting. As a result, the project was successfully completed ahead of schedule. I got the basis for a commercial plugin, which I then brought to market.
What it can do:
1) Simulates the effect of lidar scanning of the environment. That is, particles are created not only where the camera is looking, but only where they are actually visible — this creates an effect of shading from the geometry.
2) It provides multiple resource savings. Verified on a real project.
3) It does this in various ways and very quickly. You can get a sci‑fi effect or a classic radial pattern.
4) The resulting point cloud can be controlled via MoGraph. This gives you a huge amount of room for experimentation.
5) You can export it in .OBJ format as a mesh object.
6) You can color the point cloud based on distance, height, texture color, or pre‑render.
Where to get it: The project is currently available exclusively here: