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Hi, just want to remind, that our Summer Solstice Sale will end up tonight at midnight (CEST). We grant a discount of 25 % to all products. https://c4dplugin.com

Not sure it's entirely fair to say that there are less modelling questions / discussions here recently - I have certainly had things to answer on a daily basis, and the forum has been generally a bit quieter recently, presumably because of 'holiday season' and our recent domain name change. Meanwhile I have more modelling students than I have ever had, and a decent flow of constant modelling work for use in Cinema pipelines, so I can't quite share the opinion that this is a sinking ship - I genuinely don't think it is, and as much as I admire Blender, and understand people's reasons for learning it additionally, or outright defecting to it, I am not as pessimistic about the future of modelling in Cinema as others seems to be. The modelling toolset has continued to improve with almost every version after R18, and speaking as someone who uses it all day every day for client work, it remains 'up to the task' in my book - sure, there are still gaps in the toolset remaining, but those gaps do get smaller, and so far they are nothing like large enough to make me consider the full jump to something else. The focus might be more on procedural workflows at the moment, but I remain hopeful and relatively confident that regular modelling / development has not stopped and the importance of traditional modelling workflows is not forgotten as it moves forward. Having said that of course I do see the wisdom of keeping abreast of what the others are doing, Blender and Houdini most of all, and I will watch this and all the other Blender threads with ongoing interest. CBR

It's worth noting that this approach creates a single long spline. You can simulate multiple segments by adding a material with a multi-colour step-type gradient in the V direction.

I've adapted Mododo's brilliant solution and modified it to properly fill a volume and to get some more randomness. Mododo's key insight is setting the matrix to reference the seed spline on the first frame, and then switching it to reference the tracer on the second frame. Since the tracer references the matrix, this sets up a feedback loop that extends the length of the tracer-generated spline each frame. You would think that this wouldn't work (since it is has two objects referring to each other for their basic structure: a paradox!), but it takes advantage of C4D's execution order and effectively ratchet's up the line complexity over time. Crucial settings are: the push part effector's distance setting, the falloff in the push apart effector (which being set to volume allows you to fill a volume based on a proxy object), the random effectors intensity and scale settings, and the Matrix object's step setting. You can play with these settings to vary the look, but beware that some settings (e.g. lowering the step setting too much) will quickly bog C4D with the masses of generated geometry. Volume filling spline tube (chromatin).c4d

Sorry, I can't speak English. Just look at the file. 8.c4d s.c4d sphere.c4d