Cerbera

Well - I didn't know about THAT !! And I am very confused as to why that makes a difference, but glad it does ! CBR

Nooo. Spline wrap is not one of the deformers that can support deformed editing alas. If you want to edit topology in place you are going to have to apply it. CBR

The bit you are showing is where you go to see it once it is loaded. You load it the first time under the menu top of left of that window. I don't have 21 installed anymore, but look for Load texture. From your example above I thought that DID look square, but if it isn't the UV canvas will assume the proportions of the imported image, which is not helpful if you are trying to make text appear at correct uniform size... You should make the canvas of your artwork square to avoid these problems, which does not defeat the purpose of what you are trying to do if you don't alter the proportions of the artwork, just the canvas size. CBR

Yes that is much clearer. If you need those waves moving all over a surface (and there are Cinema noise types that could get you exactly what you want here in terms of those sorts of shapes etc - check out low octaves, high scale Sema for example) then noise in a displacer seems a good way to go, given its easy animation possibilities... Here's my idea. Get whatever surface you want this happening on, make it furiously high res (up in the high hundred thousands of polys) and give that a displacer deformer, driven by your noise. Now because that noise has nothing do with the edge flow of the geometry that is likely to look janky and grim where it pushes out the ridges so we need a smoothing deformer AFTER the displacer to sort that out. Now is the time to get your noise animation parameters right. Then, my plan is to get an exact copy of that setup, and simply increase the contrast of the driving noise, and slightly increase the displacement height of it so it although its other settings and seed remain identical, so it animates the same as the first one, but now it can poke through the top of the original and have a different material easily applied because it is an entirely separate mesh... This does all have to be very high res, and the smoothing deformers are doubly needed so that the intersections between the 2 meshes remain clean. I'm sure people will suggest other ways as well, but that's certainly a relatively easy one to try... CBR

I know you have been here ages, but I don't remember which version of Cinema you are using so pls could you pop that in your profile ? Load that image into the UV view background in UV Edit (textures menu, top right of UV canvas). This will allow you to see if your UV lines up with the image. Presuming it does then you just need to make a material with that image in whichever channels you want it, and apply that to the object in UV Mapping mode, and all should be fine... CBR

Hi Christoph. Please don't delete / remove posts as soon as you find the answer - they might be of help to someone else, which is the whole point of the forum ! So please do another post here sharing the answer you found ! Did you solve it using the blend mode of the cloner for example ? CBR

It depends very much on how the polygon ridges are being put there, if the height varies, what happens to the poly flow etc etc, so not really enough information to make an educated guess. And not sure what you mean by 'dynamically select' either. Also, in the reference the materials seem to blend together, rather than being one on one poly, and another one on the poly next door, if you see what I mean... If the transition from one material to another is at a fixed level across the surface you could use a flat mapped v-gradient / ramp to blend between 2 materials that way. But obviously that would be using gradient space as opposed to any specific polys. CBR

Well, I don't have Reeper so your scene doesn't load properly for me, but this is a problem that comes up every so often, and is a very difficult one to circumvent. The problem you can't really surmount is that the hair is getting updated every frame that its foundational geometry changes as you grow the spline, which means you can't get a consistent result from one frame to the next. Not having any great ideas about how to get round that so far... I wonder if anyone else will ? CBR

Not really. The usual way we select groups IS the object manager. Although if you put objects in a Connect (weld off), that is easily selectable in vp, as is a null if you give it a clearly visible icon... CBR

No ! With dynamics, and live-generated stuff like tracer the data simply does not exist unless the animation has played through from the beginning, which creates the data your single frame needs later in the animation ! CInema has never had look-ahead type functionality that would allow it to precompute a single frame like this without caching. CBR

No, you are doing that wrong. You would ordinarily never just put a weight tag on an object - instead you should create one by using the SDS Weighting TOOL (M,R) to set a weight for selected edges. Once you have done that the tag is automatically created with the weight information you set. You should also Store Selection for the edges so you can get to them again if you need to adjust the weighting later, as there is no way to select previously weighted components. CBR

It's sometimes a bit dicey importing preferences from previous versions, especially layouts. It really is best to start new ones for each major version, and much more so if moving from versions previous to R25 to anything above it. CBR

Well, if you double click that tag, then the material should get loaded into Attributes panel.... and scroll to object (S) should work in the Material manager as well AFAIK. You can change the colour of the yellow border in prefs / color schemes / interface but you can't make it thicker. It has been raised with Maxon before that some people find this hard to see. CBR

The last 3 items in this list can help with that somewhat (S26). You don't say what version you run (pls fix that in your profile btw), so these may or may not be in yours... CBR

2 main approaches to that I would say... 1. Hard Surface: People may advise you that Star Splines in Extrudes are a decent starting point here but I would argue they don't actually save you much time over just modelling it properly, so I'd do that instead. 2. SDS poly model: Whereas with the HS method we start at the outside and work our way in, with the SDS method I would say better to start at the centre and work outwards. And we can use symmetry across the depth of it (here Z) so we only have to model one half. You could actually use 3 way symmetry here, but there is no real advantage to doing so because most of the moves we need to make next are radially based, and Symmetry on X and Y as well would actually make those moves more convoluted / awkward. So get a disc primitive, same radial segments as amount of ridges you want on the winder (I went with 24), make that editable, Inset and quadrify that, and gently curve it outwards at the front to get the nice smooth dome on the end. Then we need to get the ridges out of the perimeter, which we can do by selecting every other edge and Extrude outwards (90 degrees rotation), popping back to repeat that move on the remaining edges. That will give you this if you've done it right... Now we need to select all the outer perimeter edges, set the Scale tool to Normal Mode, tick Along Normals and drag on the blue axis band until we get near points (but don't go all the way to points), like so... Then I am sure you can see how we can move those back on Z to get the angle there, then select the whole perimeter, and extrude backwards, and zero-scale to make it flat, then move Object Axis to that rear loop and apply Z-symmetry, before adding control loops and SDS to give you something like this... CBR

...or the transform controls in UV edit... CBR

OK, and why are we feeling the need for Xpresso here ? Why not just do another rope belt to the other null ? That works ! CBR

What is your Xpresso setup supposed to be doing ?! CBR

Yep. impossible to advise without a scene file. So many factors about the scene are important - from scene scale to the specific topology and poly density in the simulated models, and of course the many and co-dependent settings in the simulation tag itself and its globals. Sometimes I find that people recommending turning sub-steps up are doing so because they don't have enough provided information to suggest much other than such widely general advice, and with rope and cloth simulations, because people often want their ropes and cloth tighter and stiffer, and sub-steps can make a big difference there. But, if we look in the manual we see something interesting... Note that very high values (e.g. 200) may cause paradoxical behavior: instead of precision increasing, it decreases. The reason for this is the 32-bit precision of the GPU. ...and this is elaborated on further in the 'Tips and Tricks' section of the help for Simulation scenes, so that's probably worth a read if you want to explore this further. CBR

'HDRI on a dome light' is about the laziest and least art directable way of lighting anything, but there's no denying its usefulness as a starting point because it allows you to generate a whole world of reflections and lighting irrespective of what else is (or isn't) in the scene. But the artists producing really good work will rarely be relying on that alone - they will also have a lot of skill and experience in setting up photographic style lights and cameras, reflectors and shadow casters, daylight systems and the more art directable / physical ways of lighting things. That is not to say that sometimes the ideal lighting won't be very simple, but you should definitely learn all the light types in your renderer of choice, and how to set them up realistically so that you have maximum flexibility with your approach. CBR

The Quantize settings are under Attributes / Mode / Modelling / Quantize, or from the cogwheel in the centre toolbar. However, the Quantize for texture does have smallest value limit of 0.01. CBR

No, you're in the tag not the tool. I see this Does M,R not get it for you ? I forget which version you are in but you should get that in your profile pls... CBR

Yeah sure - select the edges I did in the screenshot above (and store selection so you can get them again later!), find this button, (M,R, Mesh / modify / add / weight SDS tool) click it, and in attributes move that up to 100% (or whatever weight you would like, higher value = tighter edges / equivalent of tighter control loops), hit Set and then punt the SDS level up to 4 in both editor and render values. Optionally change type to OpenSubDiv. View isoparms for clean viewport. CBR

Ah yes - very useful thing that function. Doesn't work ALL the time, but when it does it can be a life-saver. This mesh is also a lovely example of when we can use SDS weighting to sharpen things to almost Hard Surface levels without having to add any control loops. Thats SDS L4 OpenSubDiv, which gives slightly nicer result than Catmull-Clark at values between 10 and 99% (100% weighting shown above where it makes no difference) CBR

Bullet dynamics didn't change though.... There is a lot more to current versions than nodes, and you can continue to ignore those to your heart's content until their usefulness compels you to try them 🙂 RS CPU and Z-remesher and the new modelling and UV tools, and simulation stuff make it absolutely worth-while updating. CBR