All Activity

There's a file with it pretty much done, if that's any help... shading_error CBR Fix.c4d

Oh DF, you are so very good at finding the Achilles heels in fundamental tools 🙂 Alas, merely flattening that row of polys will not give you the droids you are looking for... The reason is that with that topology, as theoretically ideal as it may seem, we are asking way too much of SDS here - it needs considerably more help than that to solve the shading issue. Let's simplify in order to better explain. Here is the side of one section of your tubing before it is curved, but even more perfectly even than your original, and for now without any control edges... Now, if we add an experimental bend to that, (occupying the top half of it, and in unlimited mode so it does both ends at once) then already the SDS shading is disturbed, but because of the polygon evenness and lack of control edges we can't really notice it. However it is there, as we can see by the breakup that arc into a dot and a line... Let's add some control edges to our base mesh that so our groove isn't floppy, which will make the problem much much worse ! So now if we try and bend this... Then we will get this... in which the horrible shading is fully restored and visible... So, what can we do about this ? Well, we can move the bend deformer for a start ! Let's bend the SDS result rather than the base mesh... ...and there we go, shading problems disappearo ! Now let's have a look at the sort of topology density we have had to bend to get that... So the answer here, which I know you will hate is to generate these curved surfaces first, CStO the SDS result, and Extrude your flat bits across the top bottom from there, at that polygon density... So what is happening there is that the shading problem (which is still there) is rendered virtually invisible by being averaged across so many tiny polys. And so if we do put this under Level 1 SDS (that's all it might need now given the already applied subdivision), our shading problem remains (visibly) absent. So, TLDR version would be. Weakness of SDS - needs a shitload more polygon density to circumvent ! Hope that helps... CBR

Ahh now I get what you did there. Yeah that is a bit rough!

What the heck, I thought I checked for that. Apparently I didn't. Thanks for that, I'll see if I can fix that 🙂

one problem is that your base mesh isnt actually flat. If you crank the phong shading angle down to 0 and stick a light to the side, you can see the middle is flat, but the curves surfaces have depth to them: If I just run a plane through the base mesh, you can see these parts all stick out

But this HAS to be possible with SDS based modeling somehow, right? I can't imagine this is just not possible. Shader based approach is unfortunately not possible since I will be very, very close to that mesh at points. I'd use the Volume Builder approach but I thought I could finally use this opportunity to get a bit better at modeling 😕

Just because the control mesh is straight, doesnt mean the resulting SDS mesh will be smooth. The different heights are going to cause different rates of curvature top to bottom. In this case I would go with either a volume builder based approach, or just leave the edges sharp and use material rounding to smoothen the edges volume.zip

This is probably going to be very embarrassing, but I'm just really bad at modeling unfortunately 🫠 How do these shading problems even manifest? The model is all quads, everything is completely flat on the horizontal axis. I don't understand where these errors come from 😕 C4D file attached. shading_error.c4d

Yup, that's my finding so far as well. I just resorted to grouping the entire material node tree and having that group in a material as the only node. It's a bit more tedious to edit but at least I don't have to open the Node Editor and then click the node to get to the attributes. Now it's visible in the "Surface" category of the material.

Hi there, for an upcoming show i need to animate an already rigged fire-dragon in c4d. I'm not a character specialist, I know some are really proficient with this whole field and would do in a couple hours, if not minutes, what would take me days... Best would be to create a couple motion-clips with the different moves required, that I could later adjust/edit. I have a budget for that, but it must me done next week. Please provide reference work, i need someone experienced. Looking forward ! Julien

Thank you bezo ! completely missed the step effector for that... And good to know about mospline, I never used it ! Cheers

Very difficult to say without trying stuff first. It helps tremendously to have your scene file in trying to help with things like this... Can you upload it ? CBR

I'm interested in making the new particle system follow a dynamic moving mesh. Currently I'm using a cached cloth simulation within a mesh emitter to source the particles they're using a follow spline with a spline I made by using a surface deformer. It's an alright approach however they don't fully follow the surface exactly some particles will clip through which I don't want, is there a better way of doing this?

You can try pushing the ports into groups which will then give them separate tabs. I think it's been somewhat broken/confusing for a while. Things just don't quite work right. For instance you can create groups and rename them but the names don't stick outside of the resource editor. Edit: I never found a way to have the Inputs automatically appear in the Attributes Editor for the Material. It would be so much nicer to expose those at the material attribute level than having to go into the material and then click on the node group to expose the tweakable inputs. Maybe it does work that way and I am just clicking wrong or exposing it improperly. You have to do some strange work arounds like edit the port (right click on it, Edit Port) then give it a new Group Identifier) Then go back into the Resource Editor and make a groups with the same group identifier names. the drag the ports into those named groups. You can also expose the parameters outside of the shader with a User Data tag but it's a bit more work to set up and can't be saved to the asset library as the material and the user data tag are separate.

I mean it's doesn't really matter 😛 just wasn't sure where exactly to put it but I think it's fine.

I asked for a RedShift category but the forums' backend isn't that stable for such changes...

Wanted to post this in the "Nodes" section but there is no "Material" Tag there, so I thought I'd fit better here 😉 I'm trying to create a universal material that I can use for multiple metals with controllable parameters like the strength of the anisotropy effect, etc. This works really well so far, except I can't get the parameters to expose well in the Attribute Manager. This is how I can edit the material in the Node Editor: Everything there is working as expected. I can change the settings and the material changes accordingly. I would like to avoid going INTO tha material an clicking on the inputs though. This is what I get when I group ALL the nodes in the material, set it as "Start Node" and select the material: So, so close, and yet so far... it seems like the material lists ALL input attributes... for every single input attribute, again and again. Is this intended behaviour or what am I doing wrong?

Thanks, that makes sense though I naivly thought that without any displacement to the voronoi-ed object parts there would also not be any cracks visible. Or that i could somehow limit the area where the cracks appear.

Here is a version where goal is kept and both sides can be transformed, rotation happens in direction where one would expect (use the goal null). Not sure if that is what you are after, and if so, you will need to elaborate a bit 🙂 overextended mechanical joint_0003.c4d

Hard to make animation if we can not imagine start/end state. Can you please show how it looks when opened/closed? Its some door/cover whatever animation? Needs to be used IK? Simple FK not enough? I can not imagine if first cylinder needs to be rotated only up or down too...

Can not be animated enable/disable voronoi itself?

With spline it should be even simpler. Spline itself should contain (with mospline helper) the same point count as your images. Step effector distribute multishader along spline points. For targeting clones should be used multiple ways (target effector, rails (as in my exmaple)) Small animation from outside attached. clone sorting_along_spline.c4d

Hmm, not really. This is essentially the same as the second set of joints in my original scene file. The end of the joint chain is able to drift away from the goal. And the elbow doesn't move.

Yep, came here to say exactly what HP did. Single frame swap-out with unsplit version is traditionally how this is handled. CBR

You can't have both the object fractured and light behave as it wasn't fractured. That's how materials behave in reality. If there's a crack on your plate or glass of water no matter how opaque the glass it's still visible. The only solution is to disable the Voronoi Fracture object. As long as you don't need to shatter your object keep it disable and enable it the moment it needs to crack open.