Cerbera

200 posts and we still don't even know which version of the software you have - why isn't this information in your profile ?! CBR

Like this ? spline swing CBR.c4d CBR

Lols. Yep, a bit in 'night mode' - only a small overlap between me and daylight at the moment... If you are happy with the VF approach (personally I am struggling to find any input sources for that that give me the sort of detailed, curvy shapes we see in photo refs) then Variation shader (Standard / Physical Render) does do a reasonable job of quantizing and mapping a gradient and some variably random tones over the pieces... ...but I rather think that this is only helpful in a cartoon / map style kind of way. I can't help thinking that if you want this looking 'real' in any sort of meaningful way then it has to be somehow based on those top-down satellite images, whether you pay for a solution like DEM Earth, or find a free way of implementing it. CBR

It's an interesting problem, because none of the fracture or noise based tools we have tend to create those sorts of very specific patchwork divisions. You don't actually say exactly what you are trying to achieve via modelling versus what you intend to do with textures. However 3 things may help. 1. Google maps does let you hide the labels and roads in satellite view and does provide that perfect top-down reference like the following I randomly grabbed just now... You could use that or something like it as photographic base I suppose, applied via flat mapping to a shallow landscape object or similar, and then add certain 3D elements on top of it using area scattering or cloning ? 2. I think you have a version of Cinema that has the variation shader ? That might be ideal for colourising sets of fields (providing you find a decent way to get those sort of shapes), and getting an organically varying colour range if you are not relying on photo texturing to do that. 3. If you fed something like the image above into illustrator (or equivalent) that should be able to trace the photo with spline paths which you could then refine and output into Cinema to help you get the field shapes, though uncertain so far what the full workflow for that would be - just an idea... I'll pop back if I have any more ! CBR

Like nearly all questions on this site, we could do with the scene file so it is clear what your setup and circumstances are, so that nothing is left ambiguous, and we are not left guessing what you want... CBR

Have you ever seen a rope in real life do what you are wanting; hold its shape whilst only supported at one end ? That'll be why you can't do it with rope simulation - the thing you want is fundamentally opposed to the defining behaviour of the system you are trying to make do it ! So the short answer to your question is 'no'; ropes are floppy and that is what that system is trying to achieve ! It sounds like you want the 'rope' helix to be a rigid body, so why not use the bullet system instead ? helix RBD.c4d CBR

Are you remembering to set initial state after you have done the dressing ? In other words - has the cloth sim icon in the OM gone back from white to purple, which tells you it is out of dresser mode ? CBR

I'd have to disagree there - the solution can be actually rather simple... For example if you get a high res cube and get a (new sim) cloth tag on it, you can pin the points you want to keep fixed, and then inflate the mesh with the balloon tab. By making a vertex map set to 0% everywhere, and then moving that to the map slot of the balloon tab we can then use any field tied to the vertex map to control where inflation is allowed to happen. CBR

You can either or apply 1, some or all levels of the subdivision and UV the resulting mesh, OR do the more common, and often simpler thing, which is to UV the base mesh. The SDS object has UV subdivide modes (edge / border etc) that should result in practically no distortion* if your base meshes overall shape roughly matches the SDS result. However, in cases where you are working really VERY low poly, and relying mostly on SDS to generate the primary silhouette / form of your mesh then it is sensible to apply a couple of levels of that subdivision to the mesh before you UV it to minimize the SDS distortion that would probably result otherwise. CBR * This does not apply to OpenSubDiv, which has a long-standing bug I report every year, meaning that it is simply impossible to get SDS distortion-free mapping with that mode of SDS, so make sure you stick to Catmull Clark !

Also, hair greatly benefits from a few omni or area lights in the scene and tends to look fairly horrendous under default lighting until you sort that out. CBR

You haven't given us enough information to reasonably speculate, not even the version you are using, or any information about the scene in question. Poly Pen is notably very reliable in recent versions, and problems with auto-weld are pretty much limited to very small scale scenes these days. It is possible that any tool can experience a 'quantum weirdness' where it suddenly stops working predictably, and those are almost always solved with a restart of the program. If that doesn't work for you pls provide the scene file so we have something to investigate. CBR

@Smolak pls upload the scene file above so I can report the issue with exactly your settings... CBR

Yep, certainly is. It won't perhaps be as optimised for clothing as MD is, but the new system is a lot closer to those levels of performance and results than the old system. Would be nice if we could just pick stuff up from anywhere tho ! CBR

That should have been that easy in Cinema using cloth, and indeed I am getting some equally lovely results when I try. In my test case I belted my cloth strip (a long thin plane object) to a cube I could drag about, added some turbulence and a ground plane it could collide with to get some fairly decent twisting and folding as we lead it across it a scene... But hey - whatever works for you ! 🙂 CBR

Lots of good ideas there, thwarted at multiple stages by problems Cinema is giving us, not least of which is the delayed VP update making real time preview very sketchy (no pun intended). No, I don't know why the arrows scale either - you are cloning onto a thing that is scaling, but I wouldn't expect that to govern the scale of the clones. CBR

I've had to make a lot of furniture recently, with lots of areas of multiple planks. When using the Cloner as a modelling tool like this it doesn't usually have to remain parametric. My workflow is to UV unwrap 1 plank (however best suits your texture map), use that in your cloner, then make the cloner editable, Connect (object+delete) the clones into one mesh, and then repack the UV so each plank takes a different part of the UV canvas. CBR

The chances of being able to solve this without the scene file is about 0% ! Pls upload it, and complete your profile to show which version of the software you are using. CBR

Yep, I concur that is a) doing that and b) is not what I expect the seed value to do. I will report it if that is not the intended behaviour. On a related note, I was checking phong break rounding in the deformer also did not work as I expected to fix that horrible shading on the beveled polys... CBR

Please update your profile to show which software and which renderer you are using. For example I have downloaded 45 MB only to find out that you are using Vray, which I don't have, and therefore can't help you with... CBR

They can, but they don't because you haven't told them to; and indeed all the time the text is parametric then you can't tell them to, so must rely on one of the standard projections or something like triplanar mapping as suggested above. The Standard projections are all the ones that generally can work in the most circumstances, but applying textures to lettering, and especially curved and chamfered lettering is way more complex, and there so many possible different ways of doing it that no standard projection could possibly predict the intended result for or compete with an artist manually laying out the UVs to get specifically the result they want. But, having accepted that it'll be a little more work, and text needs to be editable, Cinema has lots of ways to help you do that and get the result you want relatively quickly. For example in the case of this rounded T letter I quickly knocked up, I can do a 1-click automatic / cubic UV and get the whole letter neatly separated into islands thusly... ...after which I can decide which islands to terrace together to get precisely the image flow I want. By looking at all the ways you could possibly stitch those islands together it quickly becomes apparent why no standard projection could ever guess which one you want, and hence why this sort of thing can't be a fully automatic process... CBR

I shall watch this thread with interest, as I use DVR a lot for regular video editing and post, and voice-over recording / editing but I haven't got too much into the compositing functionality yet... CBR

Oh good call @bezo, I didn't think of that ! 🙂 CBR

That is indeed the case, and I don't think there is anything you can do about that, alas... I don't think PolyFX has any way to distinguish ngons from the source tris they are truly made of. I hope I'm wrong, but I haven't find a way around it yet... CBR

I have one monitor connected via HDMI and another connected via display port - as far as I can tell there is no visible difference between them. Cinema can use either one, or both without issue. CBR

Well I certainly concur it's not even slightly working as we might expect, and having soft bodies turned on slows the scene down by such a painful amount that is very hard to investigate... the mesh we are colliding with is very high poly as well, which really doesn't help in that regard, as you are likely to have to set that to Moving Mesh to get it to calculate accurately enough, which will slow it down even more, to the point where I can see how this is workable... However, I have noticed some things about the geo that aren't ideal, and perhaps listing those will help to some degree... The dynamics are applied to the base mesh of the reigns, rather than the SDS above it, and because the reigns mesh is a) very low poly, and b) quite uneven in poly distribution, and c) very thin, those are all things to avoid when trying to get decent collisions ! I kinda wonder if cloth might not be more suitable, but of course that comes with its own set of problems, primarily keeping things rigid enough... The reigns seem placed at the start of the animation so they are already intersecting with various parts (turn SDS off to see this) - bullet really does like everything to be not touching or intersecting at the first frame. The dynamics mode of the reigns was Automatic in the version I opened, which probably isn't good enough to calculate it accurately, so Moving mesh is my suggestion here, though I am loathed to do so because it will slow the scene down even more ! Certain elements of your reigns mesh have reversed normals. I didn't think that mattered so much with dynamics, but maybe does with soft bodies ? So not a hugely successful first look at that I'm afraid, but I very much understand the frustration. I just wish one of the rigging experts we used to have here could drop in and help you better - this is really some way out of my wheelhouse, either in terms of knowing what to do to resolve it, or having a machine that can playback capably enough to even try stuff ! CBR