deck

Hi Bezo No, no email received in junk or otherwise. I wonder if my email has disappeared from the system. I will go through the process again and see what happens. Cheers Deck

I went to download the first training and managed to get it in my basket but from there I couldn't see the download option, I must be missing something. No doubt someone will enlighten me. Cheers Deck

No Worries Igor, unfortunately your movie was so small on my screen I couldn't even tell if it was cinema or Houdini, but im guessing Houdini. Deck

Blimey what a struggle ! Just like to thank you all again as I think I got there in the end. I stayed with the displacement route and have 3 different deformers blended together with different heights and falloffs etc. Moving them off centre from each other also creates endless possibilities so Im happy with that aspect. Jops wave file was really useful in the end ( thanks Jop ), I scaled down the noise and rendered out two frames from the animation to use as Disp maps, mixed in with more regular blurred versions. I did go down the rabbit hole somewhat chasing the artefacts you can see on the grab below, I kept turning up the poly count till my machine died but then realised my polys were tiny in comparison to the marks. After much investigation it turned out to be a blur that I had put on one of the maps in Cinema, in the blur / offset part of the shader, it was only 2% but did all that damage, as soon as I dropped that and did the blur in pshop it was fine. Think I can come right back on the poly count now. Its actually for a bottle shot and Ive camera mapped a still onto rough bottle model to create the reflection, cant show it at the mo tho, even tho its only a test job. I feel nap coming on. Cheers all Deck

Cheers Mike, I think the Houdini and code copying is a bit above the pay grade of this old school retoucher. Though it does look the part. was thinking about the disc option but I may have to have intersecting ripples at some point so Im leaving that on back burner for the moment whilst I build the rest of the set to spec. Deck

Hi Jops I didn't realise your file was animated, Ive just had another look. I have to be honest and say I couldn't quite get my head around the stretched noise and spherical mapping but I can see that it works and does have quite a natural look to it and I think I may incorporate into my displacement for some more natural randomness. Combined with my concentric rings I should be able to get something convincing. Thanks again, grab below from yours looks convincing in this greyscale form. Deck

Hi Guys Thanks for the tips, no fields in R18 unfortunately, my software is as much a dinosaur as me. I was hoping I could do a mograph spline falloff but the falloff will only take a single spline and doesn't work in the connect object. I think Im gonna go with rendering out flat maps of concentric circles created with mograph then take those into pshop and mush them together, then bring that back in to use in a displacer. I think is my best trade off between speed and controllability. Ive had to turn up the poly count hugely and hope I dont get any artefacts down the road, grab of a quick test below looks like it will work and I can experiment with different circle patterns to get a proper ripple feel. I can stack these flat renders in pshop and maybe stack displacers too so I can by with this set up. Deck

Hi All I have to create some realistic ripples for an upcoming project, a still hires image. Hoping to do a nice test tomorrow. They need to be realistic like the ones in the grab below, Im not concerned about the lighting and textures just the physical ripples. Im hoping for something really controllable but swerving the formulae effector as Im not really smart enough to work it. Ive had a quick look at the collision deformer and playing with the fall off curve but that doesn't seem a practical option, Ive googled a few methods using the ripple shader and similar curve bending in a plain effector. I would like to do it with displacement as that seems the most controllable but Im not sure how to generate the required concentric and partly random circle pattern required for that. I also have to worry about overloading my meagre set up so any exotic dynamic options probably won't work for me, Im already concerned I may not be able to make the mesh dense enough. So, any tips for creating easy ripples much appreciated, plug in suggestions also a possibility and any tricks for creating the displacement map circles all much appreciated. Tho I only need a still Im not averse to running an animation and picking a nice frame. Cheers Deck

Your file was a bit heavy for my machine so I have had to take out a few things and also turn the petals off and the shell down to 2 clones. I also dont have field fall off in R18 so Im using a linear falloff here. Ive copied in your original flower and put that in the cloner, I think maybe where you were going wrong is having the cloner set to "play" in the transform tab Im not great with mograph but I think when you set that to fixed you enable the plain effector to then start the animation, also in the plain effector you need to put a frame offset thats equal to or greater than the length of your original animation. Also I deleted the turbulence from the flower as I dont think its best practice to clone that. Stripped down file below, had to delete textures and other stuff to make it fit here. Deck Frame set_06 falloff.c4d

Im afraid you've got me there as Im way back on R18 and only have one option, no doubt someone will give you a definitive answer soon, but in the meantime I would just try all 3 of those options. Deck

Make sure your not using "instances" in the cloner is probably the first thing to check. Deck

Hi Smolak Here is my cheap n cheerful R18 method of sticking things to the floor. As previously stated you can clone directly onto a displaced surface and the objects will follow the displacement but in that case you cannot choose their individual positions. In the version below I have placed 5 individual polys / planes inside a connect and Im cloning onto the poly centres of the connect object, this means if you move each square your cloned object moves with it. If we put the connect in a null with an exact copy of the displacer used on the large plain, then the connected polys will follow the movement of the bigger plane. Hope that makes sense, file below should explain all. Deck Stick and move 01.c4d

projecting a mesh is different from projecting a spline, this may help with the spline. Deck

Boat wakes are certainly not my thing but maybe the proximal shader could be of some use for creating a mask of near waves which could then be manipulated into a more convincing shape with distort and levr etc. Possibly a part of a solution. Deck

Dunno about xp but you could sort of do it with the free net creator plugin but you can only do it to a distance that is less than that of your grid layout, otherwise they will all join with their neighbours. https://www.wise4d.com/netcreator-v1-3-plugin-is-now-compatible-with-cinema-4d-r23/ Deck Net creator distance.c4d

You should be able to use a mograph selection for that sort of thing Deck

I would go for a similar approach to the sweep above with the offset rectangle but use a loft instead and a cloner to place the splines, this gives an opportunity to animate with effectors or simply just animate the transform tab of the cloner. Offseting the rectangle manually leaves everything parametric. Deck Loft wall fold 01.c4d

I quite like the poly pen tho Im just an average modeller, even when not building from scratch with it, its great for tweaking an existing mesh as it auto switches between points polys and edges so you can grab any part of your mesh. You may not be able to project with it but you can make it snap to a surface, that enables one of my favourite tricks which is to set up a cloner set to clone on poly center, at which point you can now paint your clones wherever you want them with the poly pen. I think thats been superseded now with some sort of clone brush but great for us users of older versions. Ive never seen the quad strip edges mode that CBR outlined before so once again learning some new stuff at the Core. Deck

Much satisfaction for enlightening you on some tiny bit of cinema knowledge, tho I will never be able to balance that book. I usually forget how actually to do a lot of the mograph tricks but have a vague memory of things that can be done and then just have to work it out all over again. I think Jacobite may want a single light also, so in that case you can set cloner to one and drive the colour with the noise or even animate the seed in a random effector. A bit more controllable is to use the shader effector and use the old trick of colorising the animated noise, still takes a bit of tweaking to get the speed size and contrast of the noise but many more possibilities, swapping the Knots in the grad from linear to none can also play a part in defining which colours appear. I think Hrovje probably posted a version back in the day, I guess there is a node or something in later versions. Deck Random light colour single.c4d

If you just want totally random lights then you can simply use the light and random effector in color mode, using a white light to start then you get the full spectrum but you can also choose a light colour and then use the min / max on the effector to keep the lights in a certain range. When you dig out your Pink Floyd visuals I imagine you will find them done as Gel, ie your image in the transparency channel of a material and applied to the light. You could probably use the multi shader here too, but the visible light will still be white. Deck Just another option to throw in the mix. Random light colour 01.c4d Gel light 01.c4d

Hi Guys Just wanna throw in my quick and dirty method for getting this done. I too find the square format a bit annoying and confusing when placing a non square image but you do have to suck that up if only to save your sanity. You can create and export a UV layer and all that good stuff but what I do is to screen grab the whole square in the UV layout, take that grab into pshop and crop it square. Then size that grab up to your desired res ( possibly the width of your artwork ) then just place your artwork to match the UVs, you can do that with a smart object of the first version and then you can just add the rest into that or stack them up directly in the square image. In the case above I would just move the UVs up a bit and maybe scale to give a bit of padding on each side, once you have this square image set up in pshop you just open it as a normal texture and drop it on, job done. I usually leave the UV layer in and just check it all lines up but it always dose if you have done a decent grab. Its a little crude but takes out all the placing and sizing in the UV edit environment and lets you sort that out in pshop. Just get the UVs correct before you screen grab the whole square and it works a treat. Deck

Heres a version where the sphere has lines only, you can achieve that by turning off the shading in both the SnT render settings as well as the material tag settings. Ive also turned off everything else in the render section. Not quite advanced to fading in the white but presumably you can use a second object or maybe even a second material. Deck sketch-n-toon-test 01.c4d

Im not great on SnT but a quick look at your file and maybe its the case that you used two versions of each object, one with SnT but with lines only and one version with the transparent material, Im assuming that SnT can render outlines only without the fill. Deck

Took the words out of my mouth Jacobite, tho in truth if I had the work and clients I probably would have upgraded but I would need the software new machines and the knowledge. With just the occasional 3D job R18 will have to do for me. Glad it worked out for you, I think CBRs vibrate solution would have kept them constantly moving and so would never come to rest and therefore not deactivate. Was just the long interval of no movement that stopped them, and confusing as it worked when playing in from later frames, again cos they were still moving. Cheers Deck

Unsubdivide, who knew, I couldn't even find a reference on google, nice one CBR.