Chester Featherbottom

You enabled "Vertical Tags" in the Object Manager.

PoseMorph will be easier than Xpresso. It's not the most intuitive interface/workflow Maxon has come up with, but you'll need to 1) enable "Points", 2) select the pose beneath the Base Pose and 3) drag your Master spline into the Target field. Then you need to switch Edit to Animate. File at the bottom. Pose_Morph.c4d

Regarding the "Value of Art" Art History would say... "Don't worry. Art has a way of destroying and rebuilding itself. It will be just fine." Just imagine how freaked out painters were with the discovery of photography. Can you imagine how many people were saying "Well if you can just click a button what's going to happen to the value of Art?" And while photography is successful in its own right, it evolved even further into film which has become one of the most prolific and influential art forms developed by humanity. Regarding the Industry. This has been happening since the beginning. Physical model makers, cell animators, and countless other professions have had their jobs swallowed by technology. The few who are absolutely remarkable still exist... but you need ballerina skills to earn that place. Honestly most people who've had a couple decades to watch things change don't want the tools to go backwards. If they do it's always a very "convenient" amount (i.e. before subscription services but after Global Illumination). Don't know a single matte painter that wants to go back to painting on glass (certainly not on a deadline). When done well, technology should leave more room for creativity. The largest threat to working artists is quite honestly the next generation of young artists, and that's the way it should be. I don't know where this AI road is headed, but I do know there's always a path to embrace change in a positive way. Cheers

I think @srek already answered how to branch conditions, but it does seem like it would require a lot of nodes to explicitly reproduce what you have above. However, as an alternative, you might consider using matrix math as it's perfect for this kind of task. If you want +/- switching on the B rotation as in your python script above you can achieve a purely xpresso solution like so. Result is in radians.

@muhchris The snap does work fine as long as you move your axis to the correct location, but there are some alternative approaches that may be helpful depending on your goal. When you want to clone something between 2 given positions an alternative is make a starting object and an end object with axes that can be placed in specific locations and then clone between them in blend mode. If you know you need stairs "with exactly a 8" rise and a 10 run" it's better to create them how you have them, but if you're doing R&D and and just trying to get a sense of how many stairs "look right" a blend might be helpful.

I was under the impression that Unity created the "free under $100k" payment model first and it was actually Unreal that copied it. No?

Ah... well I guess it's gonna be a lot of cats then. 😉

Agree with the above comments, but even more specifically on your shadows... the area under the machine needs to be considerably darker than the cast shadow because it is not getting either direct or indirect sunlight.

I was referring to Re:Map by Re:VisionFX. It's really overkill if you're just doing planar alignment (native AE/C4D integration will do just fine), but it's a lifesaver if you're trying to map textures on curved 3D surfaces in AE. However, it does have other uses. I used it on a very oversized render for an architectural installation where the client wanted multiple 8k footage over 50' of wall. They wanted it to appear to be refracted under glass that echoed the basic geometry of the building and also wanted the refraction in constant motion. I told them I needed them to lock the edit because we wouldn't have the time/money for multiple renders. They said they couldn't lock the edit without knowing what the effect looked like and wanted to be able to experiment with the placement of the footage within the effect. So I just rendered several different animations of UV's behind refraction, set up some RE:Map layers in AE on some low res proxies and they were able to fiddle to their heart's content. Rendered once out of 3D... the rest was all AE. There's also another plugin over on AE scripts that was popular back in the day, but it doesn't look like it's compatible with the latest Adobe versions.

The issue is not real world tolerance or that "nobody can tell". The issue is that the solution is not 1) consistent 2) scalable or 3) capable of being automated. Those are all very good things to have when developing a workflow... so that puts any solution that requires eyeballing at the bottom of my list. But honestly, @dezbat doesn't have a lot of options here since he's not just looking for a workflow... he's looking for a "portable workflow" exclusively within a specific piece of software and no 3rd party plugins - so he may have to just crack his knuckles and get to work. Well it does exist... just for AE. 😉

Ooof. You will never get me to eyeball 3D alignment. Since After Effects "speaks" both Cinema 4D and Photoshop. I'd use it as a proxy. Import your C4D scene into After Effects and place your Photoshop in 3D space with precision.

As a new C4D user, that's probably one of the best things that could have happened to you. The 3D world has become considerably less imaginative over the years and now almost exclusively relies on modern renderers to achieve the exact same looks. You should have a lot of fun with 3D and S&T, especially as a Graphic Designer. Welcome!

In the meantime, the quickest way out of this is to switch from the 1up view to the 4up view and then back again. This can typically be done by middle clicking in the viewport. Cheers. Edit: And I will also add you shouldn't worry about your file being corrupted.

Oh I know. That's why I built it this way. You can move the Planes anywhere you want because they're still live. You can trim the edges in seconds with a MoGraph Selection. This is the last one. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lvduxm0iid69vv3/Cloned_Terrain_Edges.c4d.zip?dl=0

Did you open the file? I cloned objects on to the points of a Plane in Objet Mode. I deformed that Plane to your Terrain mesh with a Shrink Wrap Deformer. I don't think I can be any clearer or concise than that.

At the risk of sounding snooty, I'm not wild about this method either. 😉 The largest issue is the separation of the the thread from the shaft. 1) It will never look as good as a single closed poly surface. 2) It cannot be used with 3D printers. It's absolutely fine for a free rig if you need to get a bunch of screws out the door in a rush, but I consider a single closed helical mesh to be the ultimate procedural goal. The very best tutorial I ever saw regarding helical threads actually came from C4D Cafe (maybe 10 years ago?) I may still have it around somewhere on an archived drive. I'll post it if I find it.

Oh dear lord this has gone off the rails. Forget constraints. They are not suited to dealing with large sets. Get your cloner out of Grid Mode and clone in Object Mode to the Plane Object you're Shrink Wrapping. https://www.dropbox.com/s/09yi9k0fruh4dpd/Cloned_Terrain.c4d.zip?dl=0

We've told you several times that you don't need dynamics. The "reason" you don't need dynamics is because you do not require a rigid body collision to determine anything. All you need is an array of axes to stick to the surface of a plane. As a matter of fact, you don't even need to change their x or Z direction. You ONLY need to change their Y position. This should make a word pop into your head and that word is "projection". A projection has a very low calculation overhead compared to a rigid body simulation. So it just requires a little bit of un-thinking your process. 1) In the scene you provided, you put several vines in a row (maybe 10). That means the cloner is going to clone groups of 10 which will not conform to the surface. Start by pulling your individual elements out so that each can get cloned to a surface from their own axis. 2) Fix your axes, they all over the place. (The Axis Center tool with the Y slider bottomed out is your friend). 3) Clone on a uniform plane. 4) Project your simple uniform plane on your complex plane with a Shrink Wrap deformer. 5) Profit! Here's an oversimplified example. I just threw one vine and a post in a cloner. You could use fields or a formula effector to change the step patterns on the plane, but it's probably just as easy to use multiple planes (one for random posts, one for random vines, etc) for the easiest, most intuitive alignment.

I know it's sometimes difficult to read tone on forums, but when I said "It's easy enough" the part that was missing was not "It's easy enough for me". The implication was that "It's easy enough for C4D." By contrast, this is not easy... for anybody... in SketchUp (no matter how many decades you have under your belt). 😉 This is one of the most awesome and powerful features of the Cloner Object. It's been implemented from the beginning and it's frequently overlooked. Learn it and use it often. And the pleasure was all mine, sir!

You didn't mention you were using Forester. It would appear Forester was doing quite a bit of optimization for you in the background. If you remove forester from your plugins briefly and try to load the scene you posted you'll find out pretty quickly what you provided the forum with for review. There must be some kind of mograph conversion for compatibility, but it's crippling. I mean... not even using render instances or multi-instances. Hopefully there's someone on the forum who has Forester who can help you further. 👍 <irrelevant rant> Everything in the known universe is bound to a scale where it operates comfortably (everything). And this is why it doesn't matter how many gigs of RAM you have, or if you have the latest RTX card... the best upgrade you could get is the curiosity of how C4D (or any system) operates under the hood. Way more valuable than just throwing CPU/CUDA cores (money) at it. When someone says "it should just work" - I hear "I shouldn't have to learn how it works". Well you don't... you don't have to learn how anything works, but it puts you in a pretty lousy position in life. Soon enough, everything just becomes magic and you have to hire magicians to fix it. 😉

Oh I have 128 GB of RAM and it doesn't help. 😉 Let me rephrase the question for anyone who doesn't want to download the 278 MB scene file: "Why don't my 680 Cloned Instances of 158 nested elements containing a total of 38,000 polygons (25 million polys total) respond to dynamics when I try to make it collide with a terrain mesh consisting of over 4 million polygons?" 1) Why are you even using dynamics? Why don't you clone your instances directly on to the surface of the terrain? 2) What incredible machine do you have access to that would even let you travel down this path with confidence?

I consider that a path to success. 🙂 A couple things to keep an eye out for when you're building procedural rigs like this. 1) Keep your axis aligned in a way that makes intuitive sense. 2) Be careful about using object scale to adjust the size of things... all nested objects in the object manager will inherit that scale. Cheers. screw_loft.c4d.zip

I had not heard of the AV1 codec. Anybody have any experience with it? I'm suspicious that they spent so much time comparing it to H264 instead of H265.

Right. Well, for the record I'm very much against this approach to screw construction. Your mesh count is off the charts and the flow is even worse. But you didn't ask about that. 😉 You will indeed need to use a loft. It's easy enough to iterate and rotate an egg that transforms into a circle with cloner in blend mode. I just noticed you're on R21 which is not on my current machine otherwise I'd post the file, but here's a head start if you rebuild it before I get back to my laptop. Procedural_Woodscrew-H264.mov

The profile of a Sweep object should be considered a "constant". There's no way to change the shape from beginning to end (that would require a loft). If you needed to control the shape of the object generated by that profile over the length of the sweep path... that would traditionally be done with a Rail Spline or within the Scale sweep parameters. While you could likely get what you want that way (and a variety of other ways).... why not just scale the threads down the same way you scaled down the whole screw... with another Taper Deformer?