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Splines with plain effector not working un cloner with blend mode.


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Hi! I'm trying to get this set up working: 
I have two different splines deformed by a plain effector (Uniform 64 points splines) and I want to put them in a cloner with blend mode. 
It works when I 'connect' the splines and press 'C' but it doesn't work if I leave them like that. And I want to leave them like that so I can animate the contour on the effectors. 
Uploaded the c4d file as reference.

Any ideas?

ps: first time posting here so I'm not sure if I'm missing something

SplineCloner_Blend.c4d

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Wow - that setup really doesn't want to work does it, no matter what we try.  There's no getting away from the fact that the blend mode of the cloner requires some very specific properties in its source objects to be able to work, and we can't give it that, so it doesn't.

 

I've tried all manner of connects, spline masks, tracers, mosplines, matrices, and blending the poly results of the sweeos, or the splines themselves, or traces, or mosplines of them, but despite getting vaguely close at one point with the inheritance effector on matrix objects, that blend mode just WILL NOT work unless you actually make stuff editable, which may be ruling it out its use here altogether. 

 

I am the first to admit Mograph is hardly my strong point, and I have tried everything I know in it, so looks like you need a proper MoWizard to come along and find what we are missing - I can't believe there isn't a way somewhere, but I get the feeling it's not going to be direct or immediately evident except to people who truly know all those systems backwards. 

 

CBR

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10 hours ago, Lucas Barbuzzi said:

It works when I 'connect' the splines and press 'C' but it doesn't work if I leave them like that.

 

That's because you are trying to blend their Fields, not the Splines themselves. I don't think Cloners were supposed to blend Effectors or Fileds.
This is probably a limitation developers did not foresee.
Maybe @srek can tell us.

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2 minutes ago, HappyPolygon said:

 

That's because you are trying to blend their Fields, not the Splines themselves. I don't think Cloners were supposed to blend Effectors or Fileds.
This is a probably a limitation developers did not foresee.
Maybe @srek can tell us.

Sorry, not my area of expertise

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I've tried to make a procedural Field blend using a Loft and the Edge to Spline NoseMan's plugin.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/waa1zw4r3fevoro/edgeToSpline.zip?dl=0
 

Use a Correction Deformer to use the Loft as a tool to make any parametric geometry temporarily editable.
Select only the intermediate edges that makeup the profile of the blending splines and store them in an Edge Selection.

Feed the selection to the Edge to Spline.

image.png.c87ae09b9f89f9a544a2be810b7777d0.png

Warning: Do not change any attributes of the Splines or Loft before deleting the Selection Tag first as it will mess up any stored structure instructions. First delete the Selection, make any changes and then reselect all edges and save them in a new Selection and feed it to the Edge to Spline again.

There is no way to adjust procedurally the Loft's Mesh Subdivisions V (the corresponding number of clones if that could work). If you want to make things a bit more MoGraph you can still apply Effectors and Deformers to the Loft geometry as long as they do not change the number of points. To break each spline and manipulate them separately as if they where clones use a PolyFX Effector as a child of the Edge to Spline.

Press play in the demonstration file to see that it works procedurally with the Fields. I animated the Time Offset of the first Plain Effector.

blending splines.c4d

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2 hours ago, HappyPolygon said:

I've tried to make a procedural Field blend using a Loft and the Edge to Spline NoseMan's plugin.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/waa1zw4r3fevoro/edgeToSpline.zip?dl=0
 

Use a Correction Deformer to use the Loft as a tool to make any parametric geometry temporarily editable.
Select only the intermediate edges that makeup the profile of the blending splines and store them in an Edge Selection.

Feed the selection to the Edge to Spline.

image.png.c87ae09b9f89f9a544a2be810b7777d0.png

Warning: Do not change any attributes of the Splines or Loft before deleting the Selection Tag first as it will mess up any stored structure instructions. First delete the Selection, make any changes and then reselect all edges and save them in a new Selection and feed it to the Edge to Spline again.

There is no way to adjust procedurally the Loft's Mesh Subdivisions V (the corresponding number of clones if that could work). If you want to make things a bit more MoGraph you can still apply Effectors and Deformers to the Loft geometry as long as they do not change the number of points. To break each spline and manipulate them separately as if they where clones use a PolyFX Effector as a child of the Edge to Spline.

Press play in the demonstration file to see that it works procedurally with the Fields. I animated the Time Offset of the first Plain Effector.

blending splines.c4d 215.94 kB · 1 download

WOW! It works! That's great. Thanks!
I think I don't completely understand the correction deformer (something I had no idea it existed) and the store selection tag part. 
 

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11 minutes ago, Lucas Barbuzzi said:

I think I don't completely understand the correction deformer (something I had no idea it existed) and the store selection tag part. 

 

You don't have to worry about the Correction Deformer just let it be there. A happy side effect it provides is access to points, polygons and edges of parametric objects. 
I selected all the appropriate edges using the deformer and stored them as a selection.
To isolate only the appropriate edges using the Edge to Spline plugin I fed it the selection tag and hid the loft geometry.

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16 minutes ago, Lucas Barbuzzi said:

I don't get why the cloner is trying to blend the fields instead of the 'connected' splines if that's what the connect tool is supposed to do. 


It probably has to do with some internal priority of operations. The Connect object does not always act like the "Current State to Object" command.

So now Maxon has to implement two new synergies : Make the Connect object embed Field deformations on Splines and make Cloners able to blend Field attributes.
As for the second one I don't think they will look into it as it seems to fit better to the SceneNodes context.

I suggest you let them know of these limitations from their support page.

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I would agree it's probably an internal priority issue. You have the step field set to spline in a plain effecter inside a cloner modifying a spline, and then you're asking the same cloner to take the splines in their post modified state and blend them, and on top of all that you have the results bouncing back and forth up and down the OM hierarchy using instances and what not,  it's not terribly surprising to me that this setup doesn't work. Also I fail to see the need to do it in this way in the first place, as the splines inside the step fields seem in no way more procedural to me than just using standard splines would be. 

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7 hours ago, MJV said:

I would agree it's probably an internal priority issue. You have the step field set to spline in a plain effecter inside a cloner modifying a spline, and then you're asking the same cloner to take the splines in their post modified state and blend them, and on top of all that you have the results bouncing back and forth up and down the OM hierarchy using instances and what not,  it's not terribly surprising to me that this setup doesn't work. Also I fail to see the need to do it in this way in the first place, as the splines inside the step fields seem in no way more procedural to me than just using standard splines would be. 

And how would you procedurally modify the splines without effectors? 

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20 hours ago, Lucas Barbuzzi said:

And how would you procedurally modify the splines without effectors? 

 

The first workaround I would suggest, without knowing more about your exact specific intent, would be to use point posemorphs to modify the splines, which can then be controlled via xpresso or whatnot, and if you want to control the posemorph using a falloff, then that can be achieved with a pose deformer. I'd be happy to explore it further if you can perhaps explain what you want to achieve, specifically, rather than just how you had hoped to achieve it, as I'm not following exactly how it is that a custom spline drawn in the effector graph window is more "procedural" than a custom spline drawn in the VP.

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