Cerbera

There are, if we look carefully, a number of things subtly wrong with the settings in this scene. As HP predicts above, Render Perfect on the sphere is one of them, and fixes the effect of collision deformer not showing in render if we turn that off. Next we had some suspect settings in the sweep object (parallel movement should be off, Banking should be ON, and End Rotation should be 0 degrees), which fixes the twist in your path spline over the indent, and restores it to correct, contiguous circular form all the way along its length... The mode of the Collision Deformer should be Outside (volume) and the capsule should ideally not be a child of it, though it doesn't particularly matter in this scene. Likewise object order in the OM could be better bearing in mind that Cinema scans downwards through it from the top. Below is more ideal I would say, and general good practice. Next, the curvature in your path spline within the sweep isn't quite matching the curve of the indent in the sphere, resulting in some unevenness in that area. This can be fixed by getting a new path spline for the sweep, which we get by doing Current State to Object on the main sphere (once collided) and then Edge to spline on the centre edge loop of that, but first we have to fix the collision object, which should also ideally be a sphere so that we can choose Hexa type and thereby avoid the complex pole on the end of the capsule it replaces, which was previously confusing the collision deformer, and producing some wanky / uneven collision vertices in the main sphere at the apex of the collision point, which would obviously effect any spline you subsequently derived from it. In my version I wanted a better, higher resolution sphere, but not one that caused the collision deformer any extra work, so changed the type of that sphere to Hexa as well, which then necessitated addition of a Spherify deformer before the Collision Deformer (because hexaspheres are not mathematically spherical out of the gate). And then lastly that went under SDS to give us improved resolution, and my Current State to Object was performed on the SDS instead of the sphere itself, for maximum spline matching. Anyway, I have fixed all that in the scene attached below... groove-on-sphere CBR Fix.c4d CBR

Oh wait, I can answer that one quickly before I go... you should be able to hide the capsule with the traffic lights in the Object Manager... See those 2 dots I have clicked on there to make them go red ? Top one hides capsule from viewport, bottom one hides it from render. CBR

Ah OK, yes I misunderstood you there... indeed the term 'groove' there led me properly up the wrong path - lols 🙂 Think I'm with you now tho, but alas have run out of time - I have to pop out for an hour or 3 now, so will assist further on my return if HP doesn't beat me to it, as I'm fairly confident he will ! CBR

Refresh the page - I added some more detail.... CBR

This looks to me like it should be as simple a thing as just modelling a groove into the sphere directly, unless there is some special (or spatial !) reason you need that element to be procedural ? If that is the case, then a simple boolean subtraction should do it - sphere and a thin torus under the new boolean object in that order will get you this sort of result... That'll be a very quick and easy way to go, but won't give you flawless topology if that is important at all... The manual way needs a small amount of prep for ideal topology in that I would make the base sphere out of a merely 8 segment (hexa) sphere under SDS, and then in a group with a spherize deformer to restore perfect roundness and provide a very solid topological base to work from, which will work more nicely with a collision deformer from any angle, because there are no complex poles at the actual poles of the sphere like there would be with a Standard sphere primitive... ... and once we have that manually modelling in a groove manually is fairly trivial operation mainly involving bevelling the highlighted edge above and extruding the resulting poly ring in a bit / shaping it as desired by scaling its component edge loops, like so... Let me know if you don't understand stuff, or if I am missing something important... CBR CBR

Indeed not. Sorry - forgot you were on older version despite it being right there in your profile ! CBR

We could also cheat, if time-saving would be helpful... For example we could just get our original spline, pop it under an Extrude Object, and then put that under a (Z-)ReMesher where we could then adjust the poly count until it matched our corners nicely... Not as good as the manual method (still a bit on the dense side), but more than passable if you're in a hurry... CBR

That can be a feasible (and very sensible) way to start when you need a very specific (and especially numerically based) corner radii, but what you are actually doing there is defeating the point of SDS in 2 ways; firstly you are forcing yourself right from the outset to be at much much higher density than you need (which is rather contrary to the whole concept of live subdivision !), and secondly by manually / unnecessarily doing work that should be left to SDS itself. So we actually want very minimal topology at the corners, and should be using the type of corner loop termination (box corners vs inset style ones) and distance of the neighbouring control loops to the main corner vertices to directly control the rounding on each corner, rather than defining it in topology. There ARE times when you NEED to define corners in topology, but this is not one of them, primarily because the rounding you seek is at a comparatively smaller scale than the overall topo density you need to describe the form and to allow it to bend evenly. CBR

I can confirm that until very recently there was a bug where having isoline editing on but the SDS cage hidden in filters menu was not working, and indeed that seems to be what is going on with yours - we can simply see both the isolines and the base cage. As you have spotted, it will be resolvable simply by disabling isoline editing. And I can also reassure you there is nothing wrong with your actual mesh, other than a few easily solvable tris that probably don't matter if left ! However, if I was doing that Sub-D I would go for much lower resolution in the base mesh, and all the quads, like so... We have enough topo here to handle a fairly decent level of bending at the base mesh level, but if not, we can run the bend deformer at the same level as the SDS and bend that instead. CBR

I have checked this again, this time with the exact shape shown in the original post, and I can reproduce the error now. It is so far unclear whether the cause is linked to ngons, viewing angle or the Tweak Mode of the Poly Pen (changing that to points seemed to significantly lessen the chances of it entering new poly mode for example), or all of the above ! But I do have enough evidence to report it as a potential bug now, so will do... Thank you for raising the issue. CBR

No, I don't think there is anything we can do about that with a single setting, presumably because clone color is an attribute of the cloner object, so (correctly IMO) considered important to reflect in the viewport. It has always been this way as far as I recall, at least back to R11. That is not to say it doesn't annoy me sometimes, and I do wonder sometimes if we shouldn't ask for options in the basic / display tab that allow this not to happen, or at least not to preview in vp. But of course then we get into the massively complex question of what should happen instead, which is a nightmare if you think about all the possible options it could offer, and I have renewed sympathy for why it is left as it is ! The workaround(s) are simple enough though - we could just use a cylindrical field and a plain effector in color mode to turn one clone the highlight colour thusly... or any of the other ways the cloner offers to do that... CBR

I think you are deriving linear splines that exactly match the topology of the base objects, which means those lines will be straight like the edges themselves are between each vertex. For them not to be straight you will have to rethink the setup, perhaps at a rather fundamental level, and there will either have to be some spline interpolation involved or you will need to derive the splines at a much higher resolution, such as you would get from a Subdivision Surface setup, which is how we would normally model clean curves from a low res base mesh. If I get some time tomorrow I can elucidate further, but alas I am out for the rest of the night now... CBR

Welcome to the Core... Poly Pen can only make one line cut at a time from one edge (or point) to another. It can cross a previous cut, but if you try and make it do that there is apparently some chance that it will think it's creating a new poly in that version, as you demo. I suspect that may be a bug, which isn't present in the version I am currently testing in. The workaround for that would be that to make multi cuts, or ones that cross existing edges with better consistency, it is better / more flexible to switch out to the full line Cut Tool (K,K). CBR

Ok, then either increase the dimensions (and optionally segmentation) of the (parametric) plane, or decrease the size of the spherical field (scale tool or in its attributes) ! CBR

That would depend which of the above methods you used... which way did you go ?! CBR

Several options here, but you were on the right track... 1. Displacer should be fine for this, but you probably want to use a circular gradient as the driving texture... ...in which you control the characteristics of the curve by affecting the knots in the gradient, and that white dot between them... Also check the various modes of that gradient - Linear, for example might be more suitable for this than an exponential mode. 2. Bezier Primitive. Control the peak on a high res patch with a much lower res grid. You can think of this as a plane with an FFD pre-applied ! 3. FFD On plane - the 'manual' version of the above. 4. Soft Selection. If you would prefer to edit a high res plane directly, then soft selection would be the goto here, allowing you to specify various profiles of diffusing components selections so that they affect adjacent (unselected) ones too. Dome Mode shown below... 5. Saving possibly the best until last, I would personally use Fields for this, implemented via a Plain effector which is a child of a plane, and has its deformation mode set to Points. This, I suspect is going to be most useful because if you use the contour controls in the remapping tab of a spherical field, it lets you control the character of the curve directly via a spline... like this. ...which would give us this sort of result... So that's most of the non-mathematical approaches with the actual character / interpolation of the ramp defined in a number of different ways... The maths-based stuff I will leave to someone more into that than I am ! As for the Atom Array aspect of your question - That will work as a parent of any of the setups above, but if you'd rather not wrangle the unnecessary vertex spheres in that, so will cloning cylinders to edges (scale edge 100%) or stealing the topology using Edge to spline (still available parametrically via a correction deformer) and sweeping the result. CBR

No, I don't think we have control of that - it should just do it and if it doesn't that seems like a bug to me. What happens if you delete that user data for height and add it again ? I can submit it for you if you can provide the file. CBR

It seems to me we are doing mostly fine until the moment it impacts the wall, and then the rebound goes all weird, and the wrecking ball floats and bobs up and to the right in a way that definitely doesn't look like natural rebound, and agreed, seems to defy gravity thereafter. It may be of some comfort to note that I don't find anything overtly 'wrong' with your settings so far, and remain as mystified as you must be to why it is behaving like that, and requiring such high sub-step and iteration levels to even achieve some level of stability without falling apart. I will investigate this further as time permits, which I appreciate doesn't help you in the meantime, but I am interested to know the thoughts and findings of anyone that is a lot more familiar than I am with the foibles and quirks of the new integrated dynamics and may be able to get to the answer a lot quicker than me. CBR

We'll be needing your scene file pls... CBR

Here's another alternative, using most of the methods I mentioned above, which remains quite simple, probably isn't the final answer in an of itself, but it does go to show that we can project things at a flat plane, generate a spline from the result of that, then place that spline under the original plane, which we can then deform however we like (spherical mode wrap deformer shown below) and then sweep and animate end position to get the shape being drawn as any deformations happen to the plane, which will happen properly following the deforming curvature... We can also do the same thing and steal the segment lines from the plane as well to give us a deformable grid with even line thickness. Obviously has some limitations, in that we do have to nail down the projection shapes and get their splines, but could be useful anyway because it is relatively easy after that step to animate spline based things and can keyframe both deformers and end point in the triangle sweep to sync path drawing and shape morphing... As you can hopefully see, if you deactivate the wrap and enable the couple of bend deformers also in the group you can get your saddle business going on. Project triangle CBR 01.c4d I imagine Pose Morph opens up some additional possibilities here too, but didn't have time to try that. CBR

OK, not really my wheelhouse, but I do have a quick couple of ideas, neither of which are big or clever, but when have I ever let that stop me having a pop at these things ? 🙂 1. We could do it 'manually' where we dump the axis of the sunroof thing to its leftmost pivot wheel, and animate it along our rails via simple align to spline animation, but then go back and add rotation keyframes to the object, hopefully allowing us to align the rightmost wheel with the path at key points along it. If that path isn't that long it might not be too much of a ball-ache to sort that out... or might go the other way, and require so many damn keyframes there would have to be a better way... 2. We could try a simplified dynamic solution involving actual rails and wheels and connectors ! It's basically a car rig if you think of it that way, and they can be remarkably solid in Cinema if we take the time to set them up right. But thereafter I should pipe down let the rigging / XP experts weigh in with all the clever constraint and maths based solutions I feel sure must be an option for those that know how... CBR

Volume builder is just another set of tools in the toolbox, but particularly suited to a number of specific situations. Modelling is only a part of what it does. Pre R2025.1, it found a lot of use in making up for the deficits we had in the boolean department, but that aspect has become less important since the new Boolean Tool arrived, which in and of itself solves a lot of problems and annoyances the old one had. However VB remains useful, thusly... 1. Fast iteration and concepting; it can be preferable to use a VB setup to quickly put together basic forms which might need changing or updating at any time before a concept is finalised enough to become a polygonal model. 2. Transitional Forms and advantages over Booleans; For all those situations where boolean operations don't produce rounded or beveled transitions between operands VB can do that very easily and adjustably whilst not losing any parametricity. Uniquely they do this without needing to base the result on topology like bevel deformer on a boole would for example, and are therefore free from the artefacts that usually results in. 3. Combining with ReMesher to save modelling time; It is sometimes a lot easier to get a tricky base form started using the VB before remeshing it early on, and carrying on with poly modelling from there. 4. Infinite resolution; VB setups can be generated at any level of detail in a way that no other method can (OK, sculpting can too, I concede :) 5. Incorporation of splines, points, generators and matrices into modelling; No other systems within Cinema allow this as fully / directly as VB / VM. 6. Allows Noise-based and Field-based modelling; useful for producing the sort of meshes that are nigh on impossible to create any other way, such as a network of holes and tunnels in an Aero bar for example, or the internals of an igneous asteroid... 7. Unique Layer and folder-based hierarchy; with similarly unique elements like erode / dilate and multiple levels of smoothing. 8. Clouds / volume based elements; SDF is not the only mode here, we also have a fog mode which is how we can generate our own cloud and volumetric forms and the like... 9. Vector Mode; useful for spatially-based vector and field operations that can control and apply to forces. And there will be more I haven't mentioned - the Volume builder in Cinema is a lot wider in scope than first appears obvious, and with every improvement and iteration it gets it becomes more useful (see cache layers / transitions etc), and its less desirable behaviours get further minimised and improved upon. As primarily a trad modeller myself I don't use it as much as others do, but there are definitely times when it helps me and I call on it when other methods fall short, or would take an unreasonably long amount of time when time is an issue and deadlines are looming... CBR

I would think it nigh on impossible that an artist of KC's XP and level would forget the Visible Only checkbox ! 😉 The modelling tools still affecting hidden and culled components WAS a bug in previous versions, but I thought they addressed it already. What version you on KC ? CBR

Feel free to elaborate ! 🙂 CBR

Being equally into music and 3D I do enjoy all these types of animations, and I often wonder what software Patrik is using in his playthroughs - I learned his arrangement of the Mandalorian theme from one of his vids the other week and I really do like the 'fireworks fingers' look ! I suspect the software is only half the fun though - I think he has one of those controller keyboards with a light on every note... The Line Rider one is equally great but for a whole load of different reasons, and when we're doing timing cleverness on that level, I think the low-fi line art style works particularly well and suits the chaotic and slightly comedic feel of the music. But it's HP's first post that I really like - it's so sleek and glossy and warm and lovely. I wonder if got the score in there by modelling individual notes and lines, or if he found a cleverer way to extract the Geo from a black and white image... And I'd like to see what we could do with gaining and losing trails with the Treble Clef notes when the amount of them changes... Fascinating stuff... CBR