HappyPolygon

Yes it can be done this way too and it can be done if you change the nested orbit's alignment of my rig here. The difference is the execution. Using the Tracer it is imperative to have a simulation/animation run it's course to reveal the result (something which is not predetermined or always constant). While this mathematical model computes the spline without considering time.

I think this will be even more useful than the plugin itself as a tool. It will definitely be an eye-opener to all of us.

I've been told this is done using the Inheritance Effector... A quick search in YouTube revealed this :

First of all I'd like to add a "maybe" easier way to create Torus Knots (even programmatically as a macro): torus knot.c4d The idea just snapped to me the moment I saw that top view. It looked like a double wrapped (overstretched) spiral along a circle to me. The fact that it looks like a pentagram-like star double-crossing the same quadrant before completing the curve strengthens my perception. Complex Stars are also something I've proposed to MAXON as a secondary Star mode to the already existing spline primitive. I guess this is a 1/10 SceneNodes challenge... I didn't add it here earlier because I didn't find it a particularly widely useful plugin idea... Anyways Your screenshot looks more like a heptagram in the middle of the picture. Maybe that's the reason why Maxon didn't like the idea. "If there is already a way to easily make something with a few clicks there is no reason to do it with one". About those hyperbolic corners, I've tried modifying the same torus knot to match that from your front view by reducing the spline nodes to absolute minimum and rotating their tangents to 90 degrees in alternating axis. Is this how your Spiros curve also looks like from other angles ? What frustrates me in spline editing in C4D is the lack of an Enhanced Structure Management that I have long ago suggested. Tangents are completely free-hand edited. There isn't an attribute form to fill for the rotation or length of each specific point tangent. Things could get even more complicated when the tangent gets broken... Even if you double-click on a point you get this dialogue box that is so R7 without live-preview of the changes that only provides positional attributes. And I've still to figure out a way to snap the orientation of a tangent. I think these problems are deeply rooted in the core making it difficult to solve even programmatically. My implementation does not involve a double-wrapped spiral but you get the idea... I hope I helped somehow and not derailed you from your goal...

Does your mathematical model support the generation of the famous trefoil knot ? I don't think this is based on a torus surface ... Maybe a Knot Mode -> Torus / Hyperbolic could fill the gap in the future, I don't know It also has variants of odd-numbered loops This could be interesting to someone who would like to know how things work but for the average user who just wants a perfectly closed loop it's not that fitting. Isn't there some kind of formula that given a certain p value can determine the q or vise-versa ? I've noticed the Slice Parameters have a Start and End Angle. I'm not sure what that does... I guess it slices the Torus, but for a moment I thought it had something to do with the generation of the knot it self as it traversed the surface of the torus. It's clear now that you use the pure mathematics model to produce knots but in the beginning I thought it was a more empirical approach. I thought there was a point situated on a specific position on a torus and given a certain direction of movement (angle) it would start traveling the surface until it got back to the same position. The path of that point would be the knot. For example a wide angle could "trap" the orbiting point traveling more distance in the inner part of the torus making this kind of knot I had suggested MAXON for a knot primitive years ago but I guess they didn't bother because MAX Studio had one already and it was something like a trademark for them like the teapot. You could further develop the plug-in for a commercial version with more curve modes like this.

Never heard of Cinema4D NET. What was it ? An early implementation of the Team Render ?

You have the "Knot Parameters" attribute title twice. I think the second was meant to be "Torus Parameters". Other than that it's wonderful.

By the look of the zoomed-in examples looking down to the individual strands, it doesn't look like geometry. There is no way that could be geometry, render in reasonable time and use reasonable memory. I think it's just hair. But they found a way to weave it. Does anyone have any links to the science behind this feature if it actually is geometry ?

While Cerbera was on to it, I did this in R20. It got me by surprise that I couldn't fracture the object using PolyFx or Fracture. One thing you should have in mind is that these kind of effects can have unwanted results when toying with polygons as dynamic objects due to their 2-dimentionality. So I added a Cloth Surface object (you can use the Solidify Capsule in R23+) to all objects just to make sure the collision detection system works as expected. nuclear fission.c4d

I guess one could start painting a simple grayscale bump map in Bodypaint or any other app and convert that to an normal map in the same way. I've seen a video turning a grayscale wall texture into a normal map.

https://youtu.be/ymodojBLCSk

C4DtoLUX Difficulty Level (10/10) (I rank this so high because I don't really know how hard it is to port this free renderer, the case could be to port a ready-made bridge launcher or re-code the whole renderer from scratch, I have no idea) A porting project for LuxCoreRender So why yet another renderer, especially now that Maxon has Redshift for All? It's still an alternative renderer that some might find more attractive. Some (like me) might just want to try it out and experiment with it (in the application they are most comfortable with, that is C4D). RedShift is biased and fast. RedShift renders have that "RedShiftness". LuxCore is probably very slow but its unbiased results might be what you are looking for. RedShift is still not integrated and requires additional subscription. Many users are still using older versions of C4D without the RedShift subscription or support for it. The "other" free renderer isn't cheap at all and comes with much more than someone might really need. https://luxcorerender.org/luxcore-api/

I wonder if a standard Destructor at the end of the spline would work on TPs. I've never used those forces on TPs.

Hmmm... It depends how much time you want to invest. Is it a big commercial for TV or will it be one render shot for a magazine ad page ? What kind of angle do you intend to use the product in ? Will it be a close shot or a far one ? Depending your answer to those questions you might need to model something detailed or just throw that image on a simple plane with a normal map for the creases... Decide which method you want to follow and we'll guide you further.

Thank you very much for this simple explanation Fritz ! By ML do you mean Machine Learning ? Have you ever heard of hybrid renderers ? Is there any studies or development in such renderers where they both Raytrace and Raymarch the scene and then auto-combine it in a composition step ? (I guess there could be some technical difficulties handling shadows/reflections casted from a raytraced object on a reaymarched object and vise-versa...) OR I could ask a better question... "Is a Raymarching algorithm a superior to a Raytracing one ?" in the sense that one can render all the things the other can and cannot render ?

There wasn't a generic Technical question about this so I just threw it in the Python section ... I didn't want to post this under the Discussion forum either since it's not that much of an artistic topic ... This isn't a programming question. But it can attract people knowledgeable to the topic. So we have had metaballs since 199X in computer graphics but only in the last 3 or 4 years I've heard about Signed Distance Fields (AKA Volume Builder in C4D) being used. Are Metaballs a different thing from SDFs ? Do they belong to a different CG field/theory ? Also, I know SDFs are pure mathematical constructs that's why we need the Volume Mesher to polygonize them. Are Metaballs the same ? I'm asking this because in the old Bryce app (1998) metaballs didn't seem to have visible geometry flaws, and it's hard to believe they intended to generate such dense geometries or implement some camera dependent tessellation algorithm back then. Example rendered in Bryce.

None of what I wrote were meant to be interpreted as aggressive. I apologize if my writing is interpreted that way. I just asked if the scripts in Python are have those capabilities. I assumed C4D was automatically adding the animate circle infront of parameters and made the interface live-previewed (I thought this was the main reason Maxon abandoned COFFEE).

Does being rewritten in Python 3 make the parameter dialogues animatable or interactive (live preview) ? Yes, some of his scripts were rewritten, but not all. Knots some attractors and many more haven't been updated.

Mathematical Wonders Difficulty Level (8/10) (I put 8 just because of the extensiveness, actually it's about 3 or 4) Even if this is a recent suggestion to Maxon I don't think they will consider ever doing anything like this because there isn't much usability for it. So there's this lovable chemist called Jürgen Meier, who has compiled more than 100 scripts for C4D R5,7,8 full of mathematical surfaces from the topology field and chaos theory. The scripts (I think work up to R12 I'm not sure, I don't remember the latest version of C4D I tested them on, could be just R6 and R8). As those were written to work in R5,7 and 8 their dialogue interface isn't interactive (C.O.F.F.E.E. scripts). This means that the user usually has to fill manually more than 5 parameters and press OK to generate anything. And of course those parameters aren't animatable. So, if anyone is up to the task of modernizing, grouping and updating all his scripts under one single plugin (or Scene Nodes Asset - nice challenge), and help some users visualize math as art - that would be great. BUT as mentioned in his site So, take some time to contact this guy and ask for permission (I know math are not copyrightable, but it's his code) if you are considering updating his code. He answers fast, I've talked to him once. Take a look here.

Nope. Never heard of these sites. And both sites are Italian... To be honest it's hard to keep track of C4D plugins. It's clearly a marketing thing. If a developer doesn't promote his work to all major 3D/C4D related forums it will not be widely known. I used to search a lot in the internet for C4D plugins during the R12-R20 period and never came across those sites.

Measure & Construction Tool II Difficulty Level (9/10) (the level is so high just because of the complexity and because I think it's hard to compute volumes and conic angles) This plugin aims to provide a visual aid during editing as well as in rendering for CAD/CAM oriented projects. The old Selection menu is unproductive. Measures don’t get named from user, can’t be deleted or deactivated in bulk unless they are converted to objects. This redesign enables access to all measures easily from a list and introduces new measurement capabilities and visual tools for CAM/CAD renders. Also it’s not a tool anymore. It’s an object in UI paradigm of the Volume Builder. Creating a new Measure adds a new Measure Object in it’s list and under it’s hierarchy. The Measure & Construction Object acts like as manager for bulk editing. There are 4 types of Measures - Length, Area, Angle, Conic Angle and Volume. Length needs an Edge Selection of at least 1 Edge. Area needs a Polygon Selection with adjacent polygons. An angle needs a Vertex Selection of exactly 3 points. A Conic Angle needs a Vertex or Edge Selection where all Edges must have a common point (origin). The volume gets a closed polygonal Surface. In the case of the Length of more than one Edges, Angle and Conic Angle, the Rotate button will change the point of measurement. In the case of Length it defines the Edge where the Value will be positioned. Custom Input is available only for Length (one Edge) and Angle. Start-End for Length, Origin for Angle. The new Measure Object uses splines for visualization and can be a child of any Spline-altering Object. Sketch&Toon can be applied for non-physical rendering. Values change automatically unless user enters a custom one. An artistic render of how a tool like this could look like:

1) You either do it like Igor suggested and texture the geometry accordingly or 2) Your unwrapped label isn't correct in the first place. Try carefully to unglue the label and place it flat on a scanner. Trace the label in a vector program insert it in C4D as a spline, convert it to geometry using a Lathe, choose grid subdivision, make it enough dense, try again with your method.