Cerbera

Please complete your profile so we know which version you are working with... 4 main stages to this: 1. Make sure the object you want to explode has loads of segments, then use Explosion deformer set to 0.001 strength to separate the polygons, and Current State to Object that and save the original in case you want to do a 1 frame visibility swap-out using it. 2. Put that new object into Fracture, set its mode to Explode Segments, and give it a Bullet (rigid body) dynamics tag with a collision mode of moving mesh. Pop to Project settings / dynamics and turn gravity down to zero. 3. Add Bullet Collider tag to the surrounding object and set its collision mode to static mesh. 4. Now, when you press play the segments in that object will react to whatever forces you throw at them. Use a positive attractor to suck them offstage and a negative one at object centre to explode them. Optionally add Turbulence or Wind forces. Animate the strength of those forces with keyframes throughout the animation to control things as you need... CBR

Thanks HP, but that's not what I meant. I wondered how we would go about creating an original image in photoshop that would produce cool wrinkles when converted to Normal map. Or would it have to be photographically based ? CBR

Never having done much of that sort of thing before, I am curious to know how one would go about creating the Normal map we might need for this ? I mean, I know we could just go download one, but how would we make our own ? CBR

OK, if you get a smoothing deformer on (for example) a relatively hi res plane (say 80 x 60) pop it in Relax mode, initialize it, set the iterations up nice and high to something like 50-100 and the stiffness fairly low (0 - 30%) then subsequent use of the magnet tool at various sizes will produce attractive, quite natural looking contra-flow wrinkles, depending on how much and how far you drag things about. There will need to be some SDS going on as well, to see that to its maximum effect. Now, used too forcefully that technique produces deep, undulating ripples like we might find in a stage curtain, or some heavy drapes, duvets or other blanketry. But used with smaller brush sizes (not too small tho!) and less strength we can produce subtler, less drastic creases of the type you may want here. It takes a little practice to get the the hang of what sort of movements you need to make to get the right results, so I advise playing about on a plane before you plough into your final object. Oh, and when you want to bake the results down, CStO is the way to go. CBR

If it's a hero object up close and you will see other angles than front-on then it might be worth modelling. And then I think the old smoothing deformer / magnet tool trick could work to add some very art-directable wrinkles, if you get the topology density and technique right. You could further use the restriction tag to confine that to the areas inside the ultra-flat edge crimp sections or just apply its all the way to the edge and re-conform or extrude the crimped bits later... CBR

Welcome to the Core ! 🙂 So this is a Rigid Body Bullet animation ? What you need to do is cache the dynamics (bake project from cache tab of dynamics tag), then go to the frame you want to export, do current state to object on the cloner, and delete the dynamics tag from the resulting null. Check it has worked by rewinding the timeline, at which point the clones should stay where they are. CBR

Yep, my methods above seem to work in the main, although of course I don't have your bottle to work with, but I am able to get a nicely wrapping label with thickness and a pleasing overlap, and have done that with all the quads and SDS. I didn't actually have to split the circular bit off in the end, but once I had applied my deformers that were making it match the curvature of my (virtual) bottle it was not trouble at all to select the polys I wanted to offset, and move them out a bit on Z to get the overlap. I also went with different deformer set to you - I used bend and FFD to match the curvature but I don't think it makes a great deal of difference to the distortion you necessarily get along the way. The last step would be rejigging your UVs (if needed) so the label looks right in place, and to account for the backside now we have added thickness. CBR

Yes, I think this may be the sort of topology we need to nicely deform around that bottle... CBR

Ah excellent, now we can see what we're working with 🙂 Slightly unhelpful that they have double-labelled your reference bottle, but what can ya do hey ?! That is actually not so much of a serious overlap; certainly nothing we can't deal with if we allow ourselves the level of control we get by manually modelling. My plan is this. Model the label flat, out of polys, then UV it, so it matches the label, but when done split off the disc on the left hand side into its own mesh. Then I would whatever deformers you are using, like you did before, but don't try and make it match the bottle too closely - you only want the general curves at this point, not exactness, which will come next. At this point I would CStO the label (to bake in the deformers), then delete half the mesh so I only have to work on one side, but would instantiate symmetry here so the other side all gets done for me as I work. I could try and skip even that stage using the shrink-wrap deformer at this point though that will squash any overlap flat, so we have to bear that in mind, and fix it manually afterwards... Now I would get poly pen in reprojection mode, and I would move the points of the label down to the bottle surface, all the way around until they almost meet at the back... at which point we can abandon the symmetry and position and stitch on our disc section to get the overlap we need (that can have been independently have been projected on to the bottle so it also matches the curves). Once these are re-combined we can add control loops or edge weighting to give us the necessary sharp corners and infinite resolution on the label if we want to do it that way, add tiny amount of parametric thickness with Cloth Surface, and further adjust the offsets of the points around the overlap area until we get a nice result. If I get time later today I may show you the optimal base topology for that label so we don't have to dick about with splines and ropey old regular grid caps topology (nasty triangles round the sides etc). CBR

I too wondered if they were nulls. If so, you can fix them en masse using the OM filter, and double clicking the null object type, where you can set them all to 'none' in one go. CBR

Optimize IS the function we have that deals with that, so it something of mystery why that didn't work, presuming you had 'isolated points ticked', which is, by default. CBR

It's a bit difficult to advise on this when we haven't seen the full shape (flat) and we don't know how much overlap it has to have ! Not only that but you haven't completed your profile so we don't even know which version you are working in, or which tools are available to you ! For example if it is a very small overlap then it is no problem to extend and / or offset the geometry manually, but if it is a significant overlap then yes that might not be the best way... CBR

Yes, Extrude (modelling command) has necessarily never worked unless you are in a component mode. CBR

Still very much in my golfing modeller's cave, this time I'm back with some golf ball action - always an interesting challenge to get precisely the right dimpling layout, look and UV, and in this case to design an informative story around the various layers used in its design. Models by me, rendering / music: Kane Cochran for Rooted Solutions / Octane The secret to golf ball modelling is to lay it out as 20 equilateral triangle patches that combine to form an Icosa Platonic, which is then spherized to produce the overall topology. This gives us 12 x 5-point poles and 300 slightly complex 6-pointers, something that I would not normally allow in SDS modelling, but for tiling reasons our topology requires, and the deformation in the dimples is so slight, it is unproblematic in render. UV-wise, those tri patches are then laid out so that the 3 logos that appear on the ball are lined up over the centre of the UV with nothing over the seam lines. As you can imagine, S26s new Fit circle tool was essential to this build, and saved me having to to do points to circle 362 times, instead handling them in a single move (great job Luca / Maxon)...so that was nice. And more so to be able to do it with ALL the quads 😉 This layout also met a further criteria which was that it should be able to be bisected (for cutaways) without boolean operations, and indeed there is just 1 contiguous loop that does exactly that in this pattern. With a 4 x 4 patch like this we get 362 dimples, and with a 5 x 5 we get 490. I had to make both variations for this client, as well as a set and models for a brief advertising spot showing the development history of the golf ball... all good fun, unusually mathematical challenge, and nice to get a break from golf clubs ! CBR

Try this one... Pebbles CBR 02.c4d Here, just 2 basic pebble shapes (one based on a cube (but smoothed), another a deformed hexasphere) in a cloner, in object mode over a landscape, with random scaling and rotation applied via Random Effector, then the whole lot deformed by a World-space noise-driven displacer. We are using multi-instances in cloner, so no scene slow-down, even with 400, 000 pebbles. CBR

We are lacking information again here. Are you trying to make large, detailed 'hero' rocks, or are you trying to make many small pebbles that will just be tiny background objects and not the focus of the scene ? 1. Rocks are very complex surfaces if the camera is right next to them, and we need 10s of 1000s (if not millions) of polys to describe those sort of surfaces if we are doing it actually on the mesh using a displacer, as opposed to later with materials and bump / normal maps etc. If you reduce poly count too much (with remesh for example), you will lose detail, and possibly complain it does not look like a rock anymore. Those sort of rocks are NOT SUITABLE for cloning into a massive pile of them - your system will just fall over with the calculation. So if you want a whole beach full of pebbles then the geometry has to be much simpler (lower density) so that you can clone thousand of them without wrecking your system speeds. And that's fine, because if they are small then the camera isn't close to them, and so you don't need the extra detail ! 2. Rocks will look like spheres to some extent if you don't do anything to the spheres before you displace them ! To make my low poly pebbles I used an FFD to change the shape of a sphere into a more pebbly kind of thing, or started with a cube, and manually modelled it into a vaguely rock like shape ! You don't always have to start with a sphere... but whatever you do start with, make sure it has very even segmentation so it all gets affected by displacers equally. CBR

It's a fair point and sometimes you are right, but on other occasions it can be helpful to see what steps you followed to get to a certain condition. Its the info in your profile we need most though, otherwise we have to spend the first 2 or 3 posts of every single thread you start asking what software versions and renderer you are running ! Look at my profile ! You can see instantly what I am working with, so I never have to explain that to anyone, and no1 ever ever has to ask me ! Anyway, did my answer above help at all or are you still struggling ? CBR

Please take care to post in correct section - this does not go in 'News' ! Moved to 'Cinema 4D'. CBR

That would be an excellent idea, and indeed has already been suggested... CBR

For your general information that Axis mode is activated by the shortcut L, which sometimes people hit by mistake when they are trying to get the loop select or loop cut tools (U,L / K,L) for instance, and they move their mouse in between the shortcut key commands. Once you are aware of that it is easier to avoid. CBR

He has either got materials applied to the meshes and materials ticked in the display menu, or he is using custom display colours available in the basic tab for any object. Were these materials specifically for Octane ? Otherwise they won't work, and you will need to create new Octane materials. Additionally, your asset error warns you that you don't seem to have a required shader asset for the tongue... To be honest, you haven't made it easy to help ! If you mention a tutorial, you should always link it, your profile should tell us which version of Cinema and Octane you are using so we don't have to ask, and in most cases (though arguably not this one) you should include a scene file so we can more thoroughly see what we are dealing with ! CBR

Whenever you need lots of smaller pebble type rocks, I would then get the Cloner out, and clone a field of 'starter rock shapes', which will be identical initially. But if we displace the entire cloner with World Space noise, we can get a unique rock for every clone we have, like so... And if we then collapse that cloner down, we can start another one to clone all those rocks thousands of times onto a terrain object (surface mode) to make a rocky seabed. Then we can randomly affect scale and rotation and distribution to give us enough rocks that you can't notice any copies... Let me know if you need more detail on that.. CBR

You're welcome ! There is no image required for that file - I didn't do any texture work and all the displacement uses for its shader is standard Cinema noise. You do also have all the controls I do if you have S26, but I suspect the course you are following in Cineversity is for an older version, and there may be some differences. Click the black square to the right of the layer shader, which will open it and show you what is inside it... guess what you'll find there ?! CBR

Because of translation issues, there is some question about what you might mean by 'pebble'. Please find a photo reference so we can see more precisely what sort of rock you are trying to make... If you mean a round smooth pebble for example then you could start from an FFD-deformed hexa-sphere to get the basic shape. If you mean something rockier then perhaps this will help... Rock 01 CBR.c4d To get a new rock, change the random seed value in the V Large layer. To change the overall shape, move points in the FFD (Deformer). To change mid level ridges, play with the scale and seed and relative level of V Med To change the characteristic of the small scale noise change the noise type / scale of the Pits layer. Hope that helps... CBR

1 layer of noise is almost never enough to create displacement rocks. Your tutorial probably suggested Voronoi noise because it is very good at producing those hard angular formations that other noises lack. However that will look fairly shit on its own. You are also using the worst type of Voronoi noise - the one that gives you that dent in the centre of faces - I would go with one of the other types, which doesn't do that. So what you need is to distort that First noise layer with a second, using the distortion in the filters menu, perhaps driving it with Electric noise, and then layering up a couple of other, more detailed noise types above that on top of it (like Luka / Buya, or FBM for example), but with lessening mix amounts, and in interesting layer modes (overlay or multiply works well) to give you the mid and small-range detail. So, all that goes on within a layer shader, which you can get by choosing it instead of the noise you have now (which will automatically become the first child of it). There is no single 'right answer' or 'perfect setting' I can give you - you have to use your artistic sensibility, and play with all the parameters, and try loads of different combos of noise types and scales until you get what you want. Also, remember that displacement modelling only gets you so far. The last, smallest level of detail should come from the bump map in your material. That can also be (high octave) noise-driven, where you can adjust delta to achieve stunningly sharp final detail. CBR