Cerbera

Good news ! I might be exactly the right person for this project ! I actually have some experience building various shipyard components for another client, in addition to 25 years+ general modelling XP. I also very much appreciate the value of a highly organised scene structure, so we have that in common too. Lastly, although I do consider myself a C4D generalist, my main focus and expertise has always been in modelling / UV, so I tend to gravitate towards projects that let me focus on that alone, like this one ! 🙂 Only thing is I have 2 jobs ahead of this in my queue at the moment, which will tie me up until the end of next week I imagine. But if you think that could work for you, pls do PM me any additional information you may have, and hopefully we can sort something out to start around 24th Feb ? Many thanks CBR

I believe Maxon are aware of this one, and hopefully it should be addressed fairly soon. CBR

You shouldn't have to grab that specifically - clicking anywhere in free space with the move tool should move it freely, right ? CBR

For me it does what I presume you want if I just lose the pin material tag ! What does that do for you ? CBR

Is it possible in your situation to lose the actual thickness, do the displacement as a child of the mesh, but then put the whole lot under a thicken generator ? That should get you somewhere ? CBR

Yes I think that that is why beta guys offer some value to Maxon above most customers in that regard - unlike your report, which was atypically thorough, and any @HappyPolygon makes (which seem to be on a whole new level in terms of detail and frequency), regular customer reports are usually limited to 1-liner 'this doesn't work - sort it out!' kind of thing, which is about 5% as helpful as they need reports to be, and there is a much greater incidence of user error in their findings. This is why I have my doubts about Maxon potentially doing fully public betas, because it is impossible to discipline any large (unpaid) crowd into writing the sort of reports they can usefully act upon, and if you allow reports to flood in from those sorts of numbers there will be a lot of white noise and wasted time in there, from people, who through no fault of their own, and despite their best intentions, won't always know what they are doing, or how to do it well ! It will no doubt be appreciated that you have taken the time to provide the info you did, even though it was in rather aggravating (for you) circumstances. And although I have absolutely no influence over these things, it would be nice if support were in a position to offer people additional subs time when they are forced into a corner like you have been... CBR

They sort of have that already with the beta program, but even if you're in that you have to be pretty active, and in the top tier of contributors to be earning free subs. No disrespect intended, and not to minimise the effort involved in you documenting yours, but finding and reporting one bug, even if you were very thorough about it, is a fart in a hurricane with software as evolving, and complex as Cinema is; with such wide-ranging scope and functionality, where the amount of creative possibilities and combinations of systems is practically endless, even with the diligent and attentive QA / beta testers and systems they have, some bugs are bound to get through... I think I found 7 over the xmas break alone, by way of comparison, reported 3 of them there and then, and investigations continue on the others before I do those too ! Some bugs are mercifully identifiable, reproduceable, and understandable / explicable fairly quickly when you find them, but others can take hours, days, weeks or even months of continued monitoring / circumstance recreation before you can produce a report that demonstrates a distinct and consistent issue and is detailed enough to be helpful. It is quite a lot of extra work to be a good bug hunter, but it is the sort of work I like, find interesting and have time for, and I am grateful that Maxon values and rewards this for people prepared to put in a sustained effort. Perhaps you could apply if that sort of commitment interests you ? However I am unsure who you would ask about that ! Presumably Captain McGavran can advise ? 🙂 CBR

Before I start, I should say that I advise here not because I think I am the right person for this job (animation / rigging not really my thing) but because you don't seem to be getting much in the way of replies, and I can help with the modelling advice, which I attempt to do thusly now I have seen the topology you have going on in your other post on the subject... Mainly I am confirming that what you have there is OK, topologically speaking, for the base mesh, IF the movement is limited to what you describe. For full walk / run cycles etc you'd probably need more loops around the leg joints, but if it's just standing there looking about then what you have is fine, in that it is all-quads, will subdivide and hopefully bake well (UVs also look decent, though could maybe do with a relax or 2) and there is no polygon flow that will get in the way of your plans that I can see. So that's all good ! As for breathing animations, these are best handled via pose morphs on the base mesh rather than in the rig. Hope that helps to some degree... CBR

In your version you need to be in the Sculpt layout, and then the bake function is here... Cool model btw - sort of like a cross between a Thestral and what you might see a White Walker riding ! CBR

And don't forget the often unacknowledged command 'Polygon Islands to Objects', which can do it without additional generators... CBR

Only my guesses, but I think that could be because that feature is primarily meant to be used with spline sketch to project guide splies directly onto the model where they are probably most helpful, which isn't possible with parametric splines (or at least not without deformer help etc). But may also be something to do with RM needing actual points to work with rather than a real-time mathematically generated procedural object ? What are we like hey ? 2 am on Xmas day, and both of us are here ! All my lot have gone to bed, but night owls don't sleep much I guess, or at least not now ! 🙂 Season's best to you HP... CBR

Hey Matt Not by my C4d machine over Xmas, so better not advise about the Xpresso answer (though I'm sure there is one that might involve a boolean switch or similar ? Bu what you could do is use the 3rd of the 4 little icons on the right of the Object Manager to get the scene filter, double click the cameras icon to select them all, and then turn off in one click in attributes maanger ? Or you could create a Selection Object which contained all the cameras, thereby would select them all with a double click on the Selection object icon (not title!), and agin use Attributes to turn them all off ? Anyway, Happy christmas to you ! CBR

Absolutely, and to you my friend and from me to you all 🙂 🤪✨ I know I post this every year, but never stops being funny. CBR

And a bit further on, more of the same sort of techniques, collapse-ment of loops away from corners where we don't need them any more... ...leading to more evenly spaced, larger density polys overall... Next step would be to notice that we don't need that polygon density we have at the top of the recess there to describe the curvature towards the back, so it could be further collapsed by turning a lot of those edges into the centre so that only a minimal number ever reach the back side, though ideally we should bear in mind the number of edges it needs to meet itself at the lower side of the recess when the loop around the mesh is completed. ..and because that whole thing is flat both top and bottom, there are endless places to solve anything we need to, which is partly why I haven't so far felt the need to resolve those complex poles I allowed to creep in there ! I would resolve it later though, as it is easy enough to do so with judicious use of Spin Edge, or just by again, turning them centre-wards instead, like this... I'm away over xmas so can't show you more than that until I am back... Anyway, Happy Holidays CBR

Main advice here is that even though it isn't symmetrical you could still establish the main shape and features using that before collapsing, and then doing the unique details on each side, which would save some time. Other than that, best general advice would be to start with some mid level detail to establish correct polygon scale, so perhaps here, in the front recess... But working at the sort of poly density required for the overall shape and recess features, we won't have enough polygon density to do the much smaller groove details both at the front and on one side in the base mesh - instead it would be better to use some applied subdivision here to get those details AFTER the main forms have been had their low poly curvature baked in. And you will probably need 2 levels of SDS to get the requisite resolution. That said, you could get away with the groove details in the base mesh as well because of the proximity of all those adjacent planar surfaces in which to solve topology down and avoid running those micro polys all round the mesh. Thereafter, once you have the main strategy planned there isn't anything too complicated about this object so I would anticipate relatively plain sailing ! I'd be confident about knocking that out in 2 hours. Where the corners are razor sharp use small box-form corners to preserve that hardness around those areas, but quickly diverge from them to wider, more evenly spaced topology on the curvier, larger areas. There could also be useful deployment of edge weighting if you would rather avoid some of the control loops, although I can't see any areas that would demand this - fortunately your hard cornering needn't affect your base mesh curvature. I started it quickly to demo these points... So blue circled box corners where we need to keep them very sharp, gold circled show open form cornering when they need to be rounded, red arrows show where I have used 100% edge weighting to avoid extra control loops there, and green circled bit is showing that we don't need those smaller form polygons once we get away from the corners; we can collapse them, and not have to run them all the way around the mesh, thereby aiming for more large-form and even poly flow, this collapse helped massively by that area being entirely flat. Hope that gets you off in the right direction... CBR

Welcome to the Core and Happy Christmas ! I fully sympathize - I can never fully 'get' the behaviour of those clamp constraints, and they never seem to do exactly what I want, so I am the wrong person to advise on use of those. But I can recommend a different way, depending on what you need. One very simple way to get a straight spline between 2 things that move is to position 2 'target' Nulls at the connection points of / as children of your main objects, then use the Tracer to 'connect all nodes' which will constantly draw a straight spline between them. If you want to try simulation then Rope Belt is probably the way to go, but I would tend to avoid that approach, as it is quite difficult to art direct 'tension' using that and things have a tendency to be very 'floppy'. CBR

I'd just get a circle spline or other suitable shape (loads of subdivisions), whazz it in a linear cloner, and then group that with a displacer using animated noise. Wavy clones CBR 01.c4d That sorts the movement out (tweak speed and noise scale / type to taste). But how to get them to fade out as they fall off ? I wonder if Blend mode in the cloner would blend between luminance colours of a material applied to 2 operands within it ? That, or some sort of fog / environment in C4D / RS. Or using depth pass in AE or similar (providing your clones fire off into Z space) ? CBR

Lovely to see the enigmatic and long-absent Daniel Danielsson back with another reminder about why we all need him... CBR

Thank you - that is useful to know, and should be reported. Did your example scene make it to support ? CBR

You could set global gravity to zero, and control it on individual objects that need it with Gravity Force, OR you could have 2 completely discrete simulation scene objects with different gravity settings and assign your sim components accordingly... CBR

They do keep him very busy these days ! I bet he's doing one, and it'll be along soon... as I recall he was little late with the last one too ! 🙂 Always worth it when it gets here though ! CBR

I would guess you are changing it in the wrong place, and not here, which is the place you need to fix it... ...and indeed, you had that set to default of -981 cm. CBR

New Booleans are definitely better. Far superior hierarchical / tag-based workflow, no longer requires solid operands, operands can now intersect each other with less likelihood of problems, glitching is much reduced in animation setups, surfacing is generally better, and it is faster to calculate than the old system was. It also succeeds in many situations where the old one would fail. So, as someone who has been rigorously testing this for a while, I have to say I am very impressed with it and it is a significant upgrade to Cinema's modelling toolset. CBR

That has not been my experience, and I regularly use it all the time without running the problems mentioned !! CBR

Oh, that's a little unfair. That may have been your impression but is not the case. There have been minor QoL fixes and improvements in pretty much every release of the last 5 years, just not the one OP is looking for ! Whilst it wouldn't be true to say that particular request hasn't ever come up / been discussed before, but on the wish list of things people want, it's not very near the top, leading me, and presumably those with the power to change such things to conclude most people are either happy with, or used to the way it works now. Having said that I am not opposed to the idea (provided the extra UI stuff doesn't further get in the way of what I am trying to see or select), though it would have to be a preferences thing were it ever to become reality. Lastly I should check @mlon is aware of the press-and-hold functionality we have to temporarily switch to a different transform without leaving the current one ? Press and hold E, R or T to temporarily enter whichever mode you like from whatever one you are in now, and release to instantly return to it. Also works with Axis Mode (hold L), where it also temporarily activates all-component snapping (nice QoL thing !), and Move without Children (hold 7). It's a compromise, sure, but it is one click less every time, so it's half way to what you're after ! 🙂 CBR