Not by AI

August 8th 2026: With AI being used more and more frequently for all kinds of content creation, leading to comments about 'AI slop', I think it is necessary to clarify any use of AI on this site. To this end, I can confirm that all web pages to date were written entirely without any input from any AI source, and this will be the case for the foreseeable future for all further pages. All plugins and code samples were written by me without help from AI, and all images and C4D models were created without AI. The only exception site was for the site logo (next to the word 'Microbion' at the top of the page) which was AI-generated.

From now on, all pages on the site will be updated to carry this logo, which links to the not by AI website.

If, as I do, you believe that it is important that humans retain the ability to create text, images, code, music and so on without recourse to the use of robots, then hopefully you will find this information reassuring.

New plugin: Earth-like Planet

May 7th 2026: this is a new shader (and for the time being the final one) in the 'Space' series of plugins. It is designed to reproduce a habitable planet similar to Earth. See the main plugin page for more details and to download a copy.

New plugin: Red Planet

April 4th 2026: this is a new shader in the 'Space' series of plugins. It is designed to reproduce a red planet resembling Mars, although any colour can be used. See the main plugin page for more details and to download a copy.

New plugin: Libnoise

February 4th 2026: a new shader implementing the noise algorithms from the open-source library 'libnoise' is now available. See my blog article and the main plugin page for more details.

New plugin: Missing Plugin Remover

December 20th 2025: a new plugin is now available. It is intended to find and remove all instances of a plugin from a scene file. It can be used when a file is loaded which produces the 'Several plugins are missing' message. Removing such plugins manually is tedious and time consuming; this plugin automates the task and makes if much faster and easier. See the main plugin page for more details.

Plugins updated for R2026

November 24th 2025: all the plugins on this site are now updated for C4D R2026 and ready for download.

You can download the plugins from their respective pages. See the main plugins page for links to each plugin.

OSL shaders for download

July 26th 2025: as part of the Open Shading Language section on this site, I have started to convert a number of shaders for use with Redshift. More will be added over time. Please see the download page for the first shaders in this resource.

New website section: writing OSL shaders

July 11th 2025: a new section has been added to the site which is intended to expand into a resource for writing OSL shaders for Redshift. The first two parts are now available, and links can be found in the contents page here.

New plugin: QuickDisplay

June 18th 2025: a small new plugin called QuickDisplay has just been released. It's a convenience plugin, which lets you do in one click something which would take several mouse clicks to do. For more details, and to download a copy for R2024 or R2025, please see the plugin page.

Plugins now available for C4D R2025 on macOS

June 12th 2025: all my plugins which were formerly unavailable for Cinema 4D R2025 on Macs have now been rebuilt with the latest SDK and will run on macOS. Please note, however, that when using them on a Mac version 2025.2 of C4D is an absolute requirement - they will not run in earlier versions of R2025.

The new builds can be downloaded from the various plugin pages and you can find links to all those pages here. The functionality is unchanged and if you only use these plugins in Windows, you do not need to re-download them - the Windows builds are still the original ones.

The shader is now available for download. Please see the plugin page for more details and download links.

New plugin cookbook recipe

June 1st 2025: I haven't written any of these recipes for a long time, so it's time to start again. The first new recipe is now available and covers how to determine if a shader is in a particular channel of a material. See the Cookbook page for details.

Models updated

More recent versions of Cinema 4D have reduced the backwards compatibility when it comes to loading older scenes. Unfortunately some of the models on this site were created in older versions of C4D which can't be opened in the latest versions.

For this reason these models have all been resaved in C4D R19, and can now be loaded in newer versions up to and including R2025. I have also taken advantage of this process to rationalise some of the models, removing unnecessary objects and correcting problems such as absolute texture paths.

The models themselves are unchanged and can all be downloaded from the pages shown in the 'models' menu at the top of each page.

Models

(April 12th 2025) I have a number of models which I produced over several years. Over the next few weeks I'll be releasing many of these as free models for C4D users. They tend to be simple models (though by no means all of them are) but may still be useful to anyone needing a model for a scene. See the models pages for details and download links.

Latest models added:

Little Nellie

Oil lamp

Penny-farthing bicycle

Fairbairn dagger

Apatosaurus