This year, I decided to discover new tools released  in Cinema 4D and Redshift 2025. I wanted to focus on newly released Particle System and Liquid simulations, explore Scene Nodes and try all the different modifiers and their combinations. My aim was to play and discover new things organically. Try different setup on every letter and see what I can get with different approaches, revisit previous letters to improve them and so on.

I was inspired by loud, bright colours, cyber aesthetic with heavy neon kitsh glass influence.

Overall, my materials were fairly simple, on their own. Simple Standard Material with different Transmission Colour with small tweaks to Weight and Roughness. Reflection added on top, to make it shiny and generate more details in the image. At the end, I made 5 different materials with different values and properties. On average I used 2-3 of them per scene, with an exception where I used all 5. For example, letters and numbers with lots of objects had 5 materials, such as 0, 1, 2.

I tested different Transmission and Reflection Weight / Extra Roughness values on a simple block sliced up with Voronoi Fracture, until I was happy. I was extra happy, when I started blending them with each other using Vertex Maps generated with MoGraph properties and Fields. I was not so happy, when it came to render each scene as a final 4K EXR sequence. Glass-like materials take a lot of processing power to render at higher resolution.

Working on personal projects like this one, is enjoyable and challenging at the same time. I get to try and explore new things I haven’t had a chance to try before. However, it involves creating 36 different setups. And then doing 36 different renders.

This time I really wanted to bring all the noise and particle deformers to life. I had to animate 36 different scenes. Animation was not a problem as most of it was done with deformers, noise shaders or particles driving different properties. Rendering time was the problem. I settled on 3 second animations per each piece, so in total I had to export 2700 frames.

I tried to optimise all the scenes as much as possible – caching simulations, baking to Alembic files, reducing geometry as much as I could. However, glass and glass-like reflective and refractive materials are very computational heavy. During my exploration and creation stage, I was able to produce quick 1k renders in around 15-40 sec on my laptop. Rendering everything at 2k resolution with minimal noise proved to be too long. We are talking at around 30min per frame or more.

I tried using a render farm as a test for a single letter and it would cost too much to render everything. I burned through €30 worth of free credits in about 50 frames at 2k resolution 🙂 At the end, I ended up exporting everything at 1k resolution EXR sequences, compositing and post processing everything in After Effects and finally upscaling and denoising everything to 2k resolution in Topaz AI.

Here are some of my early tests, when I was trying to figure out setup to process early on.