Leaderboard

This gives me the opportunity to post this meme A few clients of mine would benefit from this diagram. But yea this topic reminds me of something i read the other day from a former vfx artist that had worked on a slew of marvel projects and the amount of pressure marvel / Disney was putting these guys under to deliver work of the best quality under almost unrealistic deadlines and obscene amounts of stress . The VFX are mostly pretty good on marvel movies although there are some cases where it’s a bit choppy and the VFX guys cop the stick for it, when really having to work in such conditions I’m surprised they pull these films together in the first place, everything needs to be A+ quality and it needs to be now, something’s gotta give surely ? V

Well. I obviously like to take the hard route. Already had started when I read your post. Your solution works. Thanks for bearing with me.

Don't know. That's one for Maxon support I guess. CBR

Solved it with the help of this tutorial. I am attaching the scene if anyone is gonna run in to the same problem. connect multiple cloners with splines.c4d

Good to have a post about it as it's an easy one to miss ! Whilst we are talking about arrow functionality, another one people sometimes miss is that we can use them with the move tool to move models by the quantize amount in the viewport - up-down-left-right kinda thing, with shift adding the Z axis. CBR

I might retitle this, as you are actually talking about 'cage geometry' which doesn't have anything to do with transparency. I don't have Ricochet, but feel sure that any plugin by CS and team will have options for thinning out and controlling the density and distribution of the connecting splines - are you sure you have exhausted all the options and possibilities within its settings ? But if you are sure Ricochet isn't the answer then there are other things to try. 1. Atom Array Dropping any model under this generator will give you generated sweeps on all the polygon edges and spheres on all the junctions, making reasonably nicely displaying 'cage' geometry. If the spheres are minimized in size you can make them almost invisible if that suits your plans more. This can get you the sort of look you want, and its greatest strength is that is entirely geo-dependent, which means you can design every aspect of it, but can't do any internal connections unless there is geometry there also. So whilst I think this might be useful to you just be aware you would have to create additional models inside that mesh to get an inner structure, and the connections between inner and outer structures might have to be made manually, which is no great stress if you use spline and point snapping... 2. Cloned nulls + Tracer If you clone some nulls to the surface of your model, then you could setup multiple tracers to connect pairs of them, which would give you a lot of control over how many connections there were, and where they appeared... 3. Voronoi Fracture For a completely different kind of cage, and to have some internal geometry created for you, you could try VF and various hull / invert settings... That gives you a rather unattractive webby-type look (left, below) but you can also not invert it, and then just Atom Array the original Fracture to get the sort of result in the middle... There's a lot of ways to control the source objects that affect that internal geo so I would spend quite a lot of time playing with this. If you want less organic and more straight-form structures, use matrixes, splines, planes or primitives as point sources. On the right below that's a matrix driving the VF, giving you more scaffolding-like results. By simply adjusting the density of a Matrix for example, and adding another Atom Array to the main geo as well we can get some very High quality truss-like forms... I'm sure there will be other ways too, but this should give you some ideas to be going along with... CBR

You might need to find / alter this option under Viewport Display in preferences... CBR

Ever seen a Hamster in a track suit with 2 Samurai swords ? you have now. i'll probably do some variations of this one with some glocks and stuff XD