Cerbera

I did NOT know that worked ! You learn something every day ! 🙂 CBR

I have a couple of ideas. 1. Instead of using single lights - use 3 closely coincident lights, R,G, and B and vary the relative strengths of them, imitating the way LED lights behave these days... 2. Go old school and make a slowly rotating gobo-wheel offset in front of a white light. You could put a radial gradient of either gently transitioning, or hard defined colours you define in the transparent portion of this, and then Xpresso the rotation angles to lock into each colour, or set it to rotate to slowly shift round the colour wheel. CBR

If you want a properly realistic result with zero distortion in the thickness of the strands of the metal meshwork then you really have to model that panel in that shape. But I don't think we do want that. In the real world a flat mesh is press deformed into the shapes required, so we should try and mimic the physical consequences of that, which will include some distortion of the perfect pattern, but no variation of wire thickness. However, because the curvature is only slight , or at least the bits where it's not slight are only at the very edges, and mainly hidden by the frame, I suspect the distortion you'll get with something like an FFD or Mesh Deformer might be OK to get you a decent result despite a tiny amount of thickness variation that will get introduced along the way. So, assuming this end section is likely to be made from a circular section of mesh, your first job should be to boole intersect a square section of mesh with a cylinder, and make that a single editable object. At that point you may be able to try soft selection to pull a nice curve out of the end section, or you can try it with less scope for human inconsistency with deformers, of which I think mesh deformer will be most successful, the cage object being a cylinder with about 6 cap segments. A mesh deformer, yesterday. On another note, you may want to fix the rogue triangles and near coincident polys that is making your main metalwork look scrappy round the edges, and I suspect we need some phong breaks there as well for truly clean, sharp cornering, especially if you are not using SDS. CBR

In Cinema this sort of functionality is usually handled with the Takes system. CBR

Yes. CBR

No, I think we can only have one of those. CBR

Yep, that's we need to know, cos it changes in every version ! And now we need to know what type of RS materials the presets are for - are they RS shader graph (nodal) presets or RS (legacy) material presets, or presets for the new RS Standard Material introduced with S26 ? CBR

Scripts are not run from there. I think you need Extensions menu / User scripts etc CBR

Edit Profile, top right of banner. There should be field for DCC, in which you put Cinema and version, and Renderer, where you put RS and version. CBR

I'm not going to answer any more of your questions until your version (of both Cinema and RS) are in your profile. This question specifically demands that we know both those things in order to be able to answer. CBR

It's a bit confusing, because we can use the move tool to select all connected polys on models, yet the live selection tool doesn't do that. Whilst in the UV editor, double clicking with move won't select connected, but will do with live selection. Other complications around S24-R25 include a small bug where if the model was under active SDS then the d-click live selection in UV edit wouldn't work until it was disabled ! CBR

I think that does work in all versions post 21.... CBR

Well that's all very clever and reassuringly smooth.... for those of us without Houdini, can we have a wireframe screenie ? CBR

No, it's not. I saw the word standard and jumped to the wrong conclusion. The new RS Standard material (which doesn't contain presets) looks like this... So whatever you have isn't that... How did you get that material ? CBR

No it shouldn't. The new Standard Material isn't in R25. That's 26 only. If the video is showing R25 then it can't be the new Standard Material, which explains why the presets are there - it's the older RS material. CBR

What you have there is the new RS Standard Material, which, in current versions does not have the presets like the old RS material does. I imagine they will add some at some point, and I have seen people make their own and store them using the presets system. CBR

That was always going to be risk of using displacement for this, and is unavoidable using this method because the shapes you are displacing have nothing in common with the polyflow they are extruding from, which leads to that jagginess wherever they are counter-flow. We may have to go back to the drawing board on this one... CBR

The control of that extrude will have to be image based if you want anything other than smoothing (which could be deformer based), so it all comes down to what blur type you use on that line.. CBR

Yes indeed - I meant to suggest that in my first reply but forgot while I went way to log the idea ! - sorry 'bout that !! 🙂 CBR

There is not, without moving those children first. I agree that is not the most intuitive of behaviours, but that is the way it works and always has done. Perhaps Maxon would be willing to change that - there is a modifier key free that could do it - we can use shift and alt modifiers to change where the new axis appears, which theoretically leaves ctrl free to do it without children... I will suggest it. CBR

Hey Erin, welcome to the Core 🙂 May your learnings be excellent and your 3D's rewarding ! CBR

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