Cerbera

Absolutely stunning solution ! Very imaginative thinking, like your other few recent replies ! Great job, and good to have you here ! CBR

That is a very cool plugin, and extra helpful here in that not only does it show how much time is saved using it, but also gives some insight into what you'd need to do to make dynamic versions of your models. But we should also mention that some basic dynamic mixing is available to pre-animated characters via use of the forces tab in Bullet Dynamic, and Mix Animation paramters in new cloth, softbody and rope dynamics. CBR

I need to pop back to this thread (originally hidden by author, once he had received the help he needed) to warn the community that Christoph Voorn apparently does not pay his bills to fellow artists that he hires to help him. I would like to record here that I was engaged to complete what would turn out to be over 6 hours of work, which was completed on the day he requested it. Although I had never worked with him before he did send a small initial payment of £175 at which point I provided the file. He then made it clear that he wanted a series of details refined and additional changes made, which I clarified with him over skype would also be chargable at my normal rate and that I work on an hourly basis, to which he agreed. So once I had completed the additional work I chose to trust him, and gave him the new file, so he could look round it more thoroughly, and issued a new invoice. At this point he ghosted me, did not pay his final invoice, despite 5 reminders in the following month and has 'done a runner' like a disreputable little thief. I warn you all - this man is not trustworthy, and has stolen £210 worth of work time from me. Whilst this amount is too small to consider pursuing via legal channels I do feel duty bound to warn you all that working for him comes with a considerable risk of not getting paid, and I advise you to not release ANY files to him until the balance is received in full. Needless to say, he is on my blacklist now, and I won't be working for or helping him again. CBR

I take it you have tried the relief object ? CBR

Got a decent start on this the other day... Wil post again when I have finished that bit ! CBR

I don't think there is... if I ever need to do that I just chamfer the points first... CBR

I suspect that is actually a very simple setup. A Cloner is cloning a null, which looks like it's being animated via a random effector in Noise or Gaussian Mode. A MoGraph Tracer (unclear which mode, though I suspect 'connect all nodes') then presumably takes the output null(s) from that, generates connecting splines between them and feeds that to the Volume Builder where dilate / erode and SDF Smooth are used to thicken and smooth the animating spline into the sort of shape you see above. The disadvantage to that sort of setup is that the movement is not very art directable, based, as it seems to be, on random movement where the only control we have is animation speed and position parameter being randomised. Of course that would be circumnavigable by just manually keying the animation of nulls yourself.... Here's a quick starter file in which you can change cloner numbers / modes and play with volume builder effects... VB Tracer.c4d CBR

Oh that's a shame you're done without telling us what you used in Houdini !! CBR

Interesting. I hate the orange boxes so have turned them off, and therefore have never run into this problem myself. That sounds like it might feasibly be the case, but I don't know, and of course I defer to any Maxonites who will have superior input ! In order to report it as a bug though we do need to be able to repeatably reproduce the situation, and have a rather precise idea of which modes / functions prevent it working. Have you come to any firm conclusions in that regard so far ? CBR

Seems like a reasonable way to go. In my version I am holding all the 'fruit' in a dynamic collider box (static mesh) and using a moderate strength wind with some turbulence to float them all up to start with. However, before they reach the top of the containing box a linear field attenuates the wind, making them fall languorously yet chaotically back down, depending on what you do with wind strength... By keyframing that strength you should be able to either fade off the wind, or turn it off abruptly, making them all fully susceptible to gravity again quite quickly. tossing fruit.c4d CBR

We are lacking information here - we don't even know which version of the software this is (please complete your profile to show this) ! We also can't see how your model is UV mapped, which is sometimes crucial to the baking process, although you appear to be generating new UVs as part of the bake, which is often not advisable with spherical form objects... Lastly I am not sure if baking a null will work correctly. But it is very difficult to determine what is wrong without the file to try things with. CBR

I don't have that pv folder in the equivalent path in any of my C4D installs. Could stand for Picture Viewer maybe, or perhaps Previous Version ? Can't think why it is so big. I think perhaps only Maxon can answer this, either here or in a support ticket... CBR

I would do this with Pose Morph / Morph Deformer personally, then you can get the second state of the mesh exactly as you want it and transition between the 2 states, and use the same field to control it... CBR

I think MoSpline's Turtle mode will be of great use here if you can work out how to address it, which isn't exactly intuitive. But that is one of the few spline-based systems in Cinema that supports junctions within a parametric / animating system. CBR

''We put it through QuadRemesher or similar" ! I'm certainly having a hard time 'liking' what I see, whether I believe it or not ! At the moment I dislike it because it is not good enough to be usably practical and is cynically / greedily overpriced, and when it IS good enough to replace modellers like me I will hate it for that reason and the way it devalues human effort like nearly all this art-based AI does ! CBR

I can see why that is not very Google-able ! 🙂 Booling it might be simple and stone-age sounding, but I bet it would work in this instance ! As would Volume builder of course, with all the advantages and disadvantages over booles that come with them... The interesting part of this isn't so much the boolean components, but how to model this sort of network of non intersecting, yet thoroughly entwined solid tubes, complete with junctions and splits and whatnot ! I'll have a think about that... CBR

A quad patch, in this context, means any UV island that contains 4 sided UV polys in a simple grid formation - a plane object would be the most obvious example of an island that can be rectangularized, whereas a round disc comprised of triangles is not a quad patch, and cannot be forced into rectangular form for obvious reasons, which is why that command is conditional. Yes of course; you can put seams wherever you like, but you do so by defining the new ones as edge selections and re-projecting the UVs according to them. In a way, asking 'how do I move a seam?' requires an entire explanation of the concepts and workflows of UV mapping, and that info already exists, so my best advice would be to watch any of the many hundred UV tutorials about it over on Youtube. This one particularly taught me everything I needed to know about UVs back in the day, and although some stuff has changed since in Cinema, the general principles still apply. Hope that helps CBR

No, that is not a seams thing - that function does indeed only work on quad patches, so if your island isn't that it won't work. Relaxing is one a single part of a larger workflow. Once all islands are relaxed (at whatever size) you should be selecting all of them, and finishing off by going to UV packing, ticking equalize island size, and doing a Bounding Box pack, which will sort their sizes out relative to each other AND pack them nicely into the canvas with the spacing you specify. The only downer about this workflow is that you must remember to equalise the islands before you do any custom arrangement of islands, as the packing will do its own thing and undo your arrangement work if you do it afterwards. CBR

Yes ! I had to model 'a superhero car' again 'from scratch' after the new movie came out, for a streaming video promo commissioned (way upstream) by the film company themselves, yet the only reference that was made available to us was a handheld video of someone looking round the physical car prop, where it now resided under massively unhelpful lighting on display at some museum or other !! It was 'only for the home streaming market' so the campaign was not considered important enough to provide any files apparently - both me and the agency I did it for were astonished at how unhelpful the commissioning organisation were ! It is specifically for competitions, and is totally legit in the Olympics ! So are compound bows, in a different class of course. AND all the stuff hanging off them is allowed as well ! Here is one of them with just such a machine from Olympics 2020... But I deliberately didn't want to do a hunting bow, even though they do look slightly cooler and more techie ! CBR

Well, it's a Bank Holiday, and I have been rained off all the exciting electric unicycling plans I had, so I remain in my modelling cave, with some rare personal project time on my hands ! So, I thought, let's find something exciting to model, like THIS lovely recurve riser from Hoyt, the Formula XD. Should be a good exercise in hybrid HS / SDS techniques, and working with slightly sketchy reference, as there are almost no orthographic views of this available. Not to worry, we shall prevail regardless... As well as the main riser section, there is a lot of acoutrements / auxillary items to model here, most of which are very topologically, not to mention topographically interesting, for example this proprietary bit, where the risers meet the limbs... ...and the balance bars / aligment aids / sights, clickers, arrows, limbs, slings, harnesses and fixings, and I'll try and get most of them... I'll do a number of posts and videos during the modelling of this on the off-chance it is useful to anyone else... As a little teaser I have started with the clicker block, thusly.... What do we all think is the best way to start something like this, where we need very smooth curves and very sharp machined edges, and a lot of it is flat, but we also need varying bevels and an ultra smooth 'bullet cutout' going through the roundy triangle holes ? It must be suitable for displacement because there are sight marks and a logo which are etched into it. CBR

Yes you should !! I would like to add 'Edge to Spline' and the new Relax mode of the Brush tool, which can relax and improve loop evenness / integrity without shrinking the mesh. And at last, the new Thicken tool, which means we don't need to use the previous range of un-optimised compromises like Cloth SDS and Extrudifier. CBR

Thank you dude - much appreciated, and thanks again for making my tip jar tinkle ! 🙂 CBR

Some signs are just...wrong... CBR

It does, but the red line still stays mostly on top in a way that it didn't before, no ? CBR

I'm glad you find them helpful ! I always worry that my thoughts on these things tend to emerge quite chaotically, and I usually forget at least 3 things I meant to say in every one, so nice to hear people find the main points are getting through ! 🙂 CBR