HappyPolygon

Just a quick thought... Weight maps are responsible for the seams not the splines themselves. Could there be a way to paint the weight map on the letters (using a shader/texture maybe or by hand) and have them move freely without being concerned on how the spiles will follow along ? Correction: The Connector tag does not use any Weightmaps.

How do I access it ? AAAAAAHHHH ... Now I found it .... It has been moved to a Bullet Tags menu ... By habit I automatically was looking for it at the bottom of the list ... That was a relief

Check this technique for the stitch effect

Has anyone seen Sandman ? I haven't seen any VFX breakdowns of their 1st episode intro but it immediately reminded me of those AI animations. I have the feeling it could still be made with traditional AE but it was so well made and hadn't seen anything like this before. I'm talking about the first few transitions before the craw enters the dream world. It could be some kind of datamosh effect or good-old morphing...

You are right. I hadn't noticed because I used a default low-res sphere. It seems the new model although it solves a number of issues for soft bodies it completely forgets how to handle solids! Your solution for low-res proxies seems to me an overstretch. We used to put a simple dynamics tag on a sphere, put the sphere under a cloner and see the magic happen with tons of balls hitting the ground. Now it's all squishy ... Was it really necessary to scrap the simple rigid body solver ? Everybody is talking about softbodies and ropes but we completely lost the most basic and common collision type. And the icons are definitely not helping new users... The SoftBody icon looks exactly like a jellyfish... and why a collider should be represented with a hanger ? Increasing the simulation sub-steps though did the trick. I will certainly make a note of that. But I'm not sure what effect will that have on the refresh rate on more complex scenes. Right now this configuration seems to run smoothly on my pc

AI is a whole new beast and hard to add to 3D DCC companies for the following reasons: Companies like to implement well-founded technologies, or they will have to invest in R&D which is a risk and costs time and money. Deep Dreaming has been around for a long time and gave the foundations (data bases) for text-to-image. The evolution to 3D needs more data and tricks and this is just the beginning. AI is based on training data. This means that the algorithm needs access to a huge dedicated data base on a specific problem in order to solve it. In the case of UV mapping that would require a big database of well-made 3D models and their respective UV maps. The data also require some normalization and classification this is a big headache for data analysts due to the quantity of the data. This is done during the build of the data base. Classification means that the data need to be described in terms of tags and normalization means they have to be conformed to certain restrictions like the resolution size of the UV maps, number of polygons or even color space. It's a whole new and different field of expertise for companies to look out for hiring. Not just programmers but also technicians. Training an AI requires some big guns in the hardware arsenal and the gun provider is only NVidia. The technician's job would be to setup a GPU cluster or farm with all appropriate necessities that requires (cooling regulations, security monitoring etc). The AI needs to be trained. This is also quite a task because the AI still needs some human guidance to make sure it spits out correct results.

Is this a generic setup ? Can we substitute the tube with any other polygonal object ?

No extra settings at all. If the ball is deforming in any way it means the soft body tab is enabled

You use the Dresser mode of the Cloth tag on your sheet. The catch though is to have your sheet as an editable object and not parametric. After that you go to point mode, select all peripheral points (all those points on the boundaries of the sheet) and while on the attributes tab of the cloth tag press the Set option of the Fixed Points attribute, this will hold your cloth on position. Then make sure you have also a cloth tag on your falling object (no Balloon, no Soft Body or anything enabled) and just let the simulation run. My solution using a parametric object is the following: Use the Correction Deformer on your sheet Select the points using the deformer Make a selection of the points Enable the Mix Animation with Pins under the Mix Animation of the Cloth Tag Use the selection tag on the Map attribute and lower a bit the influence.

I've noticed that McGavran is breaking the NDA dogma and it seems that MAXON has finally recognized the benefits of creating hype by showing features under development. I think they were strict about those information leaks in fear that some competitor might catch up with them and release earlier.

I hope they've put some Field integration with the particles... That will be a more competitive mechanic in the market. I see a new Pyro object with a material tag and a new Pyro tag. I guess the Pyro object is the equivalent of the old Pyrocluster Volume Tracer. The good thing is that I have no idea what exactly is going on in that scene. This is exactly how a good teaser should work. We know the attractor repels particles from the torus surface but what drives the turbulence ? Why does that ring of air pocket at the perimeter of the torus form ? Is the variation in color driven by vertex maps or is it hard-coded ?

It seems I've missed some episodes ... V-Ray and Corona are developed by the same company ? Chaos is mimicking Autodesk in the renderer realm ?

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/