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This is my version of the very nice animation done by @MJV in this thread. Some notes: - I deliberately exaggerated the cloth bending effects in this one to differentiate it from an RBD sim. I realise that this makes a departure from the objective of the original, but I quite like how this turned out. - The cloth is fairly high density, I have not subdivided it after the sim. It took 5 mins to sim 480 frames, which is pretty good imho. A pure RBD sim of this would be significantly faster. - I animated the velocity damping from very high at the start, to allow the big ball to settle into place quickly (and also why the start of the animation looks unrealistic), to a very low amount once the smaller balls start getting emitted, so that they wouldn't be bogged down by the damping. - There is a variable stiffness on the cloth - it's very stiff at the borders, to simulate the tautness of it being pegged to the ring, and falls off to not very stiff in the middle, to simulate the lack of support there. - Vellum usually does not allow object emissions at intervals (the built-in options are Start Frame, Each Frame, and Each Substep). This being Houdini, a quick expression allowed me to override that to emit the balls once every second instead. - I am including the scene file here, but fair warning - I have not annotated anything, so good luck. It also includes the Solaris setup. Marbles.hiplc

What Hrvoje said. You can think of the Loop Carried Value node as the body of the looping function. If you want to run it multiple times just set the controlling iterator accordingly.

For recursion use loop carried value and memory nodes. They both have access to previous value

I understand your reasoning but as a professor I think that would not fly. It needs to be the full and current version. Here in the US we are training them for the industry where they will use the full featured and current software. And again, Cinema 4D does not exist in an island without competition. The competition is Maya and Blender (also 3ds Max in certain markets outside of the US), full featured. Both Maya and 3ds Max student and indie versions are full featured. Autodesk even retired Maya LT, which was a feature-less version of Maya because Maya Indie made it redundant. Note how smart Autodesk was. As soon as Blender became actually usable in 2.8, they released the cheap indie versions of Maya and Max. They KNOW one of the reasons they are the industry standard is that most top Animation schools in the US and Canada teach Maya, so it is easier for companies to hire Maya trained people. Blender was a direct threat to that so they lowered their price for indies. I honestly think Maxon could get part of the pie of this market if it had any interest in actually being accessible to students. C4D it is indeed easier to grasp and- in my experience - even helps to understand other 3D software. I taught intro classes with both Maya and Cinema 4D (in different semesters). Every time I used Cinema4D the students were able to grasp the concepts and create beautiful shots and animation much, much faster. Unfortunately, it is a non-starter to advocate for C4D use in most schools due to the issues I talked above.

This is true, I should have noted that: in my former school I was able to convince them to keep the Maxon One subscription due to Zbrush, which became cheeper, even though the students and the IT guys were pretty unhappy about the whole thing of charging students for an educational license (and taking weeks to approve it). That was a very good move, thanks. Now, as you are indeed involved in the student license program, I have some suggestions to make my life (and any educator who wants the convince their department to use Cinema 4D) easier. This is strictly from the point of view of a professor in the American higher educational system: 1 - Free educational licenses. It doesn't matter if the fee is low, no other main 3D software charges for it. Maxon is simply sending the students to Blender and Maya. 2 - 1-years student license instead of the the current miserly 6-month student license. 3 - Hassle-free process to get an educational license. Every other software company will automatically give you an educational license if you have a .edu email 99% of the times. They usually only ask more info if there is some suspicious activity going on. Meanwhile, Maxon takes weeks to approve the student license according to my students (to be fair, for faculty it tends to be faster). 4 - A cheap indie version for people making less than 100k a year, so recent graduates can keep using it either as freelancer or until they get hired by a company. The lack of an indie version makes C4D a non-starter for students that just graduated, when they can get Maya and 3ds Max for $300 a year and Blender for free. They can't afford C4D, but they can afford Maya/3dsMax. Zbrush is the industry Standard and it doesn't really have any competition, so it's a easy sell for any department no matter what. But Cinema 4D, on the other hand, has to compete with Blender (free) and Maya (industry standard, free, hassle-free and with a indie version post-graduation). I would hate to see C4D becoming a new Lightwave or Softimage, because no student and school cares about it anymore.

One more example, this time the creation of an own modeling asset using high level modeling operations https://nodebase.info/example/modeling-with-scene-nodes-part-2/

Some circle packing 🙂 183_Circle_Packing.c4d

Greetings all, I am interested in building a rig that would let me switch a character from keyframed or clip animation to a ragdoll/physics driven animation. Here’s a great example of someone doing exactly that in a project to great effect: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cwk_DqNNi74/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng== Though I've hunted high and low, unfortunately I haven’t found a single tutorial that shows how to set something like this up, so I would wonder whether one exist at all, despite the heaps of tutorials out there showing the various ways to rig up a mannequin using the Connector object and Ragdoll function. I’ve made my own attempts but have only gotten as far as matching the bone-transform-coordinates of a ragdoll skeleton to a clip-animated one, at a specific keyframe, and then turning on/off visibility from one mesh-object to the other at render-time. Seems like cave-man method, and kinda half useless if I need to render in-scene motion blur. So I’m thinking there must be slicker way to do this. It’s come to my attention that there’s a plug-in for this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmiKN2F8SWk Has anyone subscribed to this? It looks GREAT! Though I would still feel more satisfied if I was able to build the rig I need myself, rather than paying $$ for it. In any event, I’m hoping someone can either point me to the right tutorials, or suggest the proper method, if you’ve done something like this yourself (created a rig that lets you switch between keyframe or clip animation, and ragdoll physics). Preemptive THANKS for any reply! NpF

(Probably my first original 3D article) This is a list of 10+1 useful yet overlooked or unappreciated features in C4D. 10) Scene Nodes Scene Nodes made their debut with R23 as an experimental feature drawing developer resources resulting R23 and the next couple of releases deprived from any major features. Due to its unusual for C4D UI, workflow and intuitiveness standards most users tried to stay away from it in a “let others figure it out first” response. None-the-less Scene Nodes are here to stay despite many people’s beliefs it would soon flop. Now many users do not hesitate to use Capsules but still quite few will spend time making their own, propagating the belief that SceneNodes maybe are not that powerful to produce what they expect or compete with other systems like Blender’s GeoNodes or Houdini. The Truth is that behind the scenes more and more people are working with SceneNodes and soon tutorials and new Capsules will be popping more frequently as witnessed with the last couple of releases. 9) Polygon Reduction This little generator is rarely used. Due to its name and function most users will rarely even considering using it because “Who wants to compress their geometry in a pile of ugly mess anyway, especially when Remesh is around to do it better”. Actually the Polygon Reduction can come in handy in abstract modeling, weird animations and my favorite: as an indirect uniform instance distribution. Polygon Reduction has a useful Preserve 3D Boundaries option. So when the Object Surface distribution mode of a Cloner fails to satisfy and you end up hitting the Seed value for half an hour to land a distribution where you don’t have intersecting instances, try to populate your surface uniformly use the Polygon Reduction as an instance in Vertex distribution. If the scale of your instances is not an issue throw a Push Apart Effector. 8 ) Sculpting Although not as powerful as ZBrush is, if you don’t want Forger because you don’t work on a tablet or don’t want a subscription to ZBrush, then this is your best alternative. It includes all the essentials for sculpting plus many advanced tools. It’s a quite complete tool case. Probably the most invaluable feature is to turn your sculpts to a Displacement Texture using the Bake Sculpt. Blender boasts its recent 3.5 release about its VDMs (Vector Displacement Maps) after ZBrush later this year made it possible to copy sculpted details as brushes and reuse them while C4D had it all along since R15. Plus the very useful and overlooked Projection tool. Which can also project tubed meshes ! 7) Camera Calibrator Tag This is another tool most users haven’t ever used myself included. It is used for Camera Mapping and provides many useful parameters and options for a quick camera placement from a reference image. It’s basically the equivalent of Motion Tracker but for still images. 6) Tension Tag The Tension Tag is placed in the Character Tag menu so most users that aren’t concerned with Character Rigging overlook it and don’t know it can also be used for modeling. Although you can achieve the same effects using the Displacer Deformer, the Tension Tag is more preferable for animations when the amount of deformation of a polygon from its initial state alters the Weight Map of the object allowing for local effects on regions of structural stress. Try doing this Reaction Diffusion without Fields! I think it’s faster too. And we have the Tension Tag to thank for this since R17 (I think). 5) Feather Object Right in the middle of this Top 10 list lies the Feather Object. I don’t just rarely see projects that use feathers. I’ve just never seen any feathered projects ever. And I’ve never used that object myself either! I might have seen a scene or two during MAXON’s demo showreels but you never know what percentage of those scenes are C4D. It’s a quite interesting generator with many parameters carefully designed to model any type of plume. It’s also a generator that doesn’t work on geometry like the Hair object but on guides. It essentially generates guides for guides. So if you want to turn any hairy model into a feathered model just put the Hair object under the Feather oblject! (also works for splines) 4) Instance Object Who uses Instance objects, right? Cloners create instances themselves by default why should I need an Instance object ? Maybe it’s used only when you turn a Cloner to an Editable Object. The truth is that the Instance Object can make your scenes a lot lighter when you don’t use a Cloner yet you do use a lot of copies of the same objects. Most users overlook it because the first thing that comes to mind when you need a lot of something is to clone it with the Cloner. Probably the Instance Object is what makes the Cloner work in stealth mode. I'll let the Master Shapiro show you one practical use of this object. 3) Smoothing Deformer Oh the Smoothing Deformer! With a bent tube as an icon (a flat iron R25+), it doesn’t really excite. Also the name doesn’t excite either. Usually users when they want to smooth things out they’ll use the Subdivision Surface generator (SDS). But what if you don’t want to increase the number of your polygons? Yes you guessed right. But wait, what are the Relax and Stretch modes? Stretch will try to maintain the overall shape and volume of your object. So any hard edges will be preserved while polygons try to be of homogenous area. The Relax is the most interesting one. People ask all the time how to make stills with realistic cloth wrinkles and will resort to cloth simulations or even sculpting… Look no further, this is your salvation! With just a few mindless brushstrokes with the Brush tool this deformer will blow your mind. 1) Plane under SDS. 2) Plane without SDS, just play with the Brush (Mesh->Transform Tools [M~C]), 3) SDS again 4) Just apply the deformer in Relax Mode. 2) MoSpline Turtle My favorite. MoSpline is not a rare tool on users arsenal. Who doesn’t like those sexy curves, and the icon is the most elegant in the whole app (talking about the old one). But the Turtle mode is just absent from any C4D project I’ve ever seen. It’s like it doesn’t exist… I guess people see those unintelligible symbols and delete the poor tree before a virus turns C4D into Houdini. The Turtle mode is highly unappreciated. Although it does have room for improvement in its capabilities, what someone can achieve with it is quite impressive and there is no other way to do it (except maybe coding it in Python). Anyone with affection for fractals appreciates this tool. Unfortunately most people love only the colored Mandelbrot type fractals. Line fractals deserve some love too! 1) XPresso Well, what did you expect? Although a lot of users do use XPresso, still very few are well knowledgeable with it. Most users relate XPresso only with Thinking Particles and this is the main reason most users resent XPresso, because it doesn’t deliver easy, fast and intuitive particle setups. There are also many shady corners in XPresso that are rarely used in scenes so most people don’t know how they could even be used. What for should someone use Dynamics nodes or Hair nodes ? Who knows ? Anyhow, XPresso is very powerful tool if you know how to use it, and it has an overlooked cousin feature the Driver Tag that developers made just for those who don’t like XPresso. Bonus Feature Pyroclusters The most underappreciated feature ever. Today it’s totally outdated because we have Pyro. But if you don’t have RedShift or any VDB compatible renderer what will you do? Just look at those clouds! 0 voxels, 0 GPU RAM needed. There are some preset shapes you can use like box and cylinder which I have no idea what practical purpose they serve but the Hemisphere can be used to see clouds from below. The downside is that you don’t have the flexibility Pyro offers because you need a particle setup, and sometimes particles are not enough so you have to use Thinking Particles which leads us back to XPresso. Other limitations follow like that they are not compatible with VDBs because they use apperceptive 3D shading algorithms instead of voxels, so you can’t export them to an other application and that PyroCluster does not work in conjunction with the depth-of-field functionality. Other than that, if you work natively, Pyroclusters can provide some comfort when you need some fluffy clouds or smoke. This is a special case of under appreciation because people do not appreciate the ingenuity used for this one-of-a-kind feature. I should be making a YT video 🤔