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Hello. My first personal anim that I've actually had time to finish. 🙂 Very short, very simple. Started as a fun particles study. More info under the video on YT or my Behance. ( Behance) All the work done in C4D+RS. Xparticles for the web stuff. Comp in Fusion, edit, grade and sound in DaVinci. Oh and the model of the doors/frame modelled in c4d, textured in Quixel Mixer... That was a first. Good tool but for simple work. Aspect ratio 4:3 to frame it that exact way. Any other ratio just didn't work for me. Also i would have to create a lot more stuff of screen I'll drop few more anims in a while. just need to tidy them up. 'End credits' if you can call it like that was my first ever attempt on more creative title/text creation. Designing that kind of stuff is not my thing. Same goes for sounds fx. But i did enjoy creating both I would love to hear some thoughts about it. I know there isn't much too it but feedback is always useful. Thank for watching. Quick breakdowns: The splitting/ghosting effect was a 'creative' fix for a mismatching renders... It was easier than to rerender. And it adds a bit to the story.

Btw, if the drone blades are moving all the time, you can perhaps fake it completely and save a ton of rendertime. Render 1 still from top with good motionblur settings, use that image as a texture on a disc and rotate the textured disc slowly. Depending on distance and camera, you can get away with it 🙂

This helper plugin will display mesh dimensional data. It works in point, edge and polygon mode and displays individual lengths in point and edge mode, with total length. In polygon mode it displays area and total area of all selected polygons. Point mode Two or more points are selected and the length between them is displayed Alternatively, selecting points which are not connected will provide you with distance between them without using mesh itself, just a shortest line between the tow. In edge mode it calculates edge lengths In polygon mode is calculates area There are additional controls to choose custom colors and transform the resulting dimensions To install simply import it into content browser https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/47-dimensions/ Requirements: Cinema version 2024+ is required

About the frame 3 thing: Go to the hair object > under 'dynamics' there's an option 'animation'. Set the frames to '3' (in your case) and click on 'relax'. This will play the animation for 3 frames. After that, go to Hair > Hair edit > set initial state. This will freeze the current state of the hairs. You can then go back to the Hair object and disable the 'dynamics', to make sure the hair stays the same.

Try these custom shutter settings, those smooth everything out quite well:

Hi Cebera I did cache the particles but now I am looking at the project (Surface Flow) with more time on my hands I realised I was being a complete doughnut! When I was rendering the first few frames I saw no particles in the scene so thought something was wrong (why do I always suspect bugs?). Now I realised that's because the particles didn't enter the scene until about frame 20 and I was preview rendering frame 76 where the particles are half way down the blob object! I gotta learn to slow down a bit… I feel a complete particle now… BTW what do you mean by PV - Preview?

Regarding Consistency in animation: Here's a test animation using Redshift's new Volume Displacement to add fine detail to a procedural cloud made with C4D's Volume Builder. I'm quite pleased with the outcome! I uploaded the project file here, so you can play around with different noises, etc: 1309818867_ProzeduraleVolume-Builder-WolkemitRS-Volume-Displacement_LY01.mp4

Haha, yeah, it really is a maze and a puzzle all at once sometimes.

Personally, I think you've been sold the dream. Is X-particles useful? - Yes it can be, but don't be blinded by all the bells and whistles its fancy marketing team provide. Not to long ago I was taken in by all that too, only to find that al that glisters is not gold. Awful technical support, a community that was basically non existent and a very expensive and somewhat buggy product. It's almost as if all Bob's videos were to give an outward projection of a company that wasn't as prolific and well put together as they would like you to believe. Yeah, the 'Particles' side to X-Particles is somewhat functional, but woe betide you if you're naive enough to use their dynamics, fire and water sims in a commercial production pipeline....they just don't work as well as they say it does. I stopped using their plugin for a good few years, finding suitable alternatives in After Effects to fill the particles hole. Honestly if it wasn't for the fact that my current role demanded it, I still would not be using it. Granted, X-particles has become a lot better and less buggy since then, I'm still not stupid enough to use anything but their particle functionality though. In contrast Cinema 4D actually does what they say it can. It's a very reliable tool, and the product speaks for itself, they don't need all the fancy marketing as a selling technique, the application just works.

should be fine, check now please

Looks like Insydium was shaken from the last C4D update and rushed to add some similar features

Yes - this is the idea. Thank you so much for taking the time to play with this! I really appreciate it. I had come up with this solution before and, you're right, it is annoying 🙂 I was hoping for a more elegant solution where I could clone the single assembly and get the same affect, thereby keeping my cloner work single and easy to manage and update. Now I wonder if I can make a system like this and use set driver/Driven to keep the cloner values the same for each one with a single input interface. More experimenting to be done! Thanks again!

I would put additional aim constraint tags on the instances, which should override the one on the original provided they appear below it in the OM. OR if that didn't work I would hide the original off-camera somewhere, and remove the aim constraint from it but not its instances. For nested hierarchies like this it might mean making instances of the things inside the main null rather than the parent null itself. CBR

No problem, dynamic guides snapping is described in manual : Snapping (maxon.net) Polygon Pen (maxon.net) Also Axis Constraint Snapping is interesting too : Axis Constraint Snapping - Cinema 4D - YouTube

Thank you so much for the crash course on polypen snapping Smolak! From watching your video I'm thinking that maybe I need to get a bit more familiar with the snap tool. Maybe I'm not fully utilising it in the way Maxon intended!

Ah yes thanks Keppn, have copied your motion blur steps and it's super smooth now! only issue is the drone itself moves in frame so the overall motion blur is a bit much. But I will try rendering them separately or disabling motion blur on the drone chassis instead!

I think it’s a good tool and I appreciate that the modifier keys are taken up. But could we not have some kind of constrain to x / y / z in the tool settings? Would certainly be helpful. Anyway I’ll try the dynamic guides! Maybe that’s the solution. I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to use them before.

That is very nice and moody sequence you have there. Like the atmosphere 🙂

In the cloner, swith from "Render Instance" to "Instances", then it works.

At this moment no, particles are OM based

Yeah, PV = Picture Viewer. You shouldn't actually even NEED an RS tag on the particle group - they should appear in render right out of the box (preusming they have appeared in the scene, lols). Tag only needed if you want additional options there, without it, it defaults to mode 'optimised spheres' I am told... CBR

@Bezo It rendered beautifully. I just didn't wait long enough for frame 20 when the particles actually enter view. It was me rushing and not using my noddle 🤣

This new Surface Attract is good for Ivy things too SurfaceAttract.avi

You gotta cache those puppies to get them out to PV full render... Do this in the Particle Group Cache tab. Or here's Chris, showing the other methods. CBR

I recommend keeping the 2070 and using it just as your display adapter (to drive your monitors). Then only use the 4090 for rendering. You'll enjoy a lot less crashes this way, and will be able to jump around to other programs with more confidence while rendering.

It is true that you can't drive the creation of particles with map, shader or noise yet. But there are two workarounds. You can either drive a polygon selection with map/shaders/noise and use that to restrict the emission, or you can emit evenly and instantly kill particles based on a map/shader/noise. Here is an example. The shader field drives a vertex color tag which is then used to set the particle colors on emission. Particles are emitted into a first group where there color is checked. If the it is below a certain value the particle is killed right away, if not it is moved to a permanent group where it will happily continue it's particle life. In case you wondering where the animation is coming from, that's set in the Shader Field with the remapping graph to cycle through different grey values of the texture. This is not the most efficient way as the buffers need to be cleaned up more frequently than needed, but you can achieve the intended effect. kill_by_map.c4d

Ok, for anyone else using Octane, I discovered it works only if you select Render Instances in the Cloner settings as follows:

I thought maybe you could get around this by using a vertex color map that used a solid field to feed it a texture....but alas, it did not work.

I made this list for the following reasons: So users with old software can have access to modern tools with alternative 3rd party plugins. So underexposed developers can have their chance here. So new developers or even MAXON itself can revive dead plugins.

Hello all : ) We have a new free plugin for you called Random Divider This plugin divides a grid randomly into smaller rectangles. It can generates spline or mesh as an output and works as any other mesh or spline in CINEMA 4D, thus 100% compatibility is ensured. To install simply import it into content browser https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/46-random-divider/ Enjoy!

@hyyde There is an issue related to the use of custom layouts. Are you using any of those? If it's an option in your case, maybe you can use the standard layouts until a fix is released.

Per-Anders Edwards is Oscar awarded developer, designer and artist. Widely known as one of the duo of brains behind MoGraph and highly innovative individual . Born in Sweden, currently resides in California. He worked in many design agencies, Maxon and currently works at Mercedes Benz Research & Development North America. Apart form designing and programming, he enjoys playing the guitar, painting and has interest in tech policy. He also loves annoying Sam Altman. We are very happy to present Per and are very thankful he opted to give us this exclusive interview! Describe yourself in a single word : ) Serendipitous How did you get into C4D development and 3D in general? I got into 3D early on in childhood, not that I was some precocious kid; it’s just that I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Elite on my Acorn Electron and Outrun at the arcades. CG was fresh, a big deal flashy thing wherever it appeared not just for me - it was a part of pop culture, in the Cinemas, magazines, even on the news on TV. This was an era of relative to today at least tremendous tech optimism. Tron & The Last Starfighter were milestones of course I remember well and of course Red and Tin Toy, the amazing work Pixar brought out setting the bar again and again and of course then Terminator 2, Jurassic Park in the 90s. 3D CG was even showcased in science museums heavily, I remember seeing an early VR headset at a museum of nuclear science in the north of England in the early 90s. It was hard not to be into 3D CG when you’re surrounded by a million voices telling you how cool it is, when you’re immersed at a formative time. Fortunately for me my dad was every bit into technology as I was and he brought one of the first 8bit home computers er… well… home. He and my brother wrote an accounting program with it but once I got a hold of a computer I wrote a painting application and versions of space invaders, then little 3D toys based on my own logic. It wasn’t till the early 90’s when I got a Commodore Amiga I got my first taste of a DCC thanks to the magazine Amiga Format having Real 3D (later to be Realsoft 3D) on a cover disk. I managed to create a few animations, but raytracing was sloooow. Things picked up a little when I moved to my dad’s Mac and first got to play with Bryce, Ken Musgrave and Kai Krause’s idiosyncratic take on 3D and UI. Also not fast, but faster and fascinating. Over time the interest petered out though with the life and needs of a growing lad. It wasn’t till I was working at a post production house in North London and we were using 3D Studio Max for little CG stings so I had to make a few videos for clients that needed 3D elements that my interest was rekindled. When enough of the clients begged that I become a freelancer because they wanted to work directly with me (and save a penny I’m sure) I decided to pick up Lightwave as the tool for when 3D was needed. A choice made based on the readily available community, there were plenty of other freelancers who I’d bump into constantly who used it in London. When I moved to America in the early 2000’s I decided to shift to just 3D work, and to see what else was on offer as a fish in new water. After testing just how quickly I could work in all of them I found I was fastest in Cinema 4D, it even aligned with my needs using the After Effects when I looked at how they were updating their timeline, to me it was the most artist friendly 3D tool at that time. That’s not to say it was perfect. The software development then came as a necessity, there were missing tools I was used to having and when you’re a freelancer time is money. You have to be able to work fast, so I started to fill the gaps. Which area interests you most? Stepping away from C4D for a moment. For me in my own personal projects right now I’m enjoying the world of VR and AR. While it’s not exactly early days they’re still in that charmingly awkward phase of UX development where nothing is really set in stone and everyone’s as incompetent as each other at it, and this makes for many opportunities. What other apps are you using and what for? I use a bit of everything. You have to be adaptable to be a freelancer and you should always be enthusiastic about the field you freelance in. These days I find myself encountering and using Blender more and more. When it comes to development work then of course my main weapons of choice are IDE’s and text editors, VSCode, the Jetbrains tools and the occasional forced under duress use of Nano etc. Unfortunately more and more I find myself being sucked into the world of Jira, Excel and PowerPoint. Which learning resources you used and would recommend? Oof, opening a big ol’ can of response here. I have many thoughts on learning. Different tactics work depending on your initial passion for the subject. Sometimes you have to learn something you don’t really want to, sometimes it’s just an internal need that can’t be satiated enough. Use every one! This is your passion or at least interest. It’s like you’re climbing a cliff, you need every handhold available to you as you scrabble your way up. As a technique I found that answering other peoples questions without assumption was very successful and would recommend the same to anyone. It’s great because you’re forced out of your comfort zone and ways of thinking, to research and do things you haven’t done before, and your answers are documenting your progress for you in an analytical way. If you try this then take on the QA mindset and never assume when you’re learning - always make sure you test and do the thing yourself before you respond, you don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. When it comes to growth mindset and learning I’m a believer in the value of routines rather than goals. It’s not really about introducing structure, instead its because they really help overcome fear of failure. Failure is a huge positive potential that’s mostly squandered. Especially in the arts failing means you have improved your discernment to the point that you can recognize that failure for what it is! That’s a good thing. You keep working at it till you figure out how you can fix or avoid the mistake. The more success you have the harder it is to fail. But you place that expectation you think others have of you on yourself and I really found this a lot the more I worked at Maxon, the mindset there and the lack of free time and building my own voice and and and… well and it exacerbated my own introversion and risk aversion which in turn reduced my ability to learn and progress and I would say while I was successful I capped my own potential. That reduced my value to the company. Once I left I found it incredibly liberating to bring in routines where there was no pressure for success. To focus on the exact opposite of what they always tell you to - quantity rather than quality! The quality comes anyway of it’s own accord anyway, you can’t help but learn and improve faster if you’re failing faster too. You build that critical discernment. Just remember the mantra of “No pressure!” (beyond the commitment of starting, of it being routine of course). You don’t need to produce a lot, it doesn’t have to be good or successful in any way, it can even deviate completely from the plan, you need only do and take the first step each day. Success, learning, a loss of perfectionism and entering a growth mindset are byproducts. We all subconsciously build ego around success, then try to repeat it and avoid failure. This fear of failure is perfectionism and that stops growth, you no longer want to take risk, or try anything outside of your comfort zone and eventually it’ll stop you completely, it’s a prison that shrinks your horizons and world. It’s incredibly important for your own spirit to recognize and avoid that outcome, break perfectionism for your own happiness. An example of routine that fits the bill is the morning pages from Julia Cameron’s “The Artists Way”. A great book well worth reading if you haven’t already. It’s a fantastic starting point, from there you can find your own routines, your own daily “me” time, whether it’s exercise, or even if it’s a process you introduce to your work itself. Do you think talent is overrated and can be offset with a lot of hard work? I’m on the side of nurture on this. I don’t believe in the idea of innate talent, I do believe in certain innate aptitudes that can help, for instance having larger but skinny hands makes playing the guitar easier, but also that you have to put in the work. Those who seem “talented” simply put in all the work that you don’t see, even if it’s their first time trying something, they put in the foundational work required to quickly pick up this new thing. That could be physical fitness, mental flexibility, mechanical understanding. It can even be the work others put in, like giving them a solid support structure, financial security so they can take risk. It’s all like putting together a recipe, you can make a pizza base if you have cauliflower, chick peas etc, but it’s much easier if you have wheat flour, salt, water. Bear that in mind the next time you see someone for whom it seems easy. How did you imagine and conceptualize MoGraph? When I was hired by Maxon at Siggraph I agreed on the provision that they would also hire my at the time coding partner Paul Everett. Paul had mentored me on the C4D API and C++ then joined forces with me writing plugins. I wanted to develop plugins that could do certain things that you could not with the only scripting language available in Cinema at that time C.O.F.F.E.E. Together we’d released two top tier plugins “Mesh Surgery” a modeling toolset that innovated workflow simply by being completely interactive and realtime (a novel idea at the time and for the processing), and “Storm Tracer” a fast volumetric particle rendering system. Paul had a storied history developing his own plugins before he met me, and shortly before I joined Maxon I’d written an extensible node based compositor in Cinema called Spider (which was never released). It was this background that lead Maxon to approach me. The first project we did was MoGraph. I wont go into the full background of the project, however suffice to say the original desire from the company wasn’t exactly what they ended up with. In fact they weren’t even after a motion graphics toolset, more of a procedural modeling tool do fill a recently opened gap with some ideas talked about doing text transitions. Thing is, I’m a 3D graphics freelancer. I know what I wanted. Knew what was great and what sucked about using Cinema 4D, and critically I knew what took time and what I needed to be much easier to achieve. So I had my own set of goals and fortunately for me Paul was right on board. in the end Maxon was happy to trust us to do what was right and that we knew would be better than the original brief. Paul is tremendously intuitive at coming up with novel ideas himself, I’m very focussed on workflows. To me you as a user shouldn’t be forced to make decisions that a good design should do for you, there’s no excuse as a developer other than budget, after all we can do anything. Also I just want an easy life as a user - laziness is a great driver of innovation! So I came up with the Effectors system (I still regret the naming, but often what you do in development ends up sticking) and Cloner as a solution to some of the workflow issues I faced when dealing with particles. I wanted to have ”particles without particles” a directable solution, so this was embedded throughout. Paul meanwhile took this idea to the Matrix object where you could feed in an actual particle emitter and apply deformers to the particle axis and the MoGraph text object where you could explode and direct elements of text at all hierarchy levels. I’d make a spline deformer, Paul would make a displace deformer and so on. We built a whole load of procedural modeling and animating objects, deformers, tags and shaders around Cinema’s brilliant but slow Object System. We were very symbiotic and spend time together on each piece of code, I added the Thinking Particles integration to the Matrix etc. At the end of the day these ideas solved problems I faced as a 3D artist, with workflows that were at the time as intuitive solutions as I was able to create with the knowledge I had then. Once people saw what it was coalescing into we agreed that Motion Graphics was the ticket, and the name MoGraph I just threw in there because I was tired of constantly typing MotionGraphicsModule. It was obviously a highly successful collaboration between ourselves and Maxon. MoGraph was only the start of course, that first developer meeting we had in person I set out a map for the future they’re still following, organization, design department, new core, nodes etc. having worked extensively with Cinema’s object system I had… opinions. I had a headline feature in every release from 9.6 onwards. In fact my tools and guidance helped the company grow 2000% over the time I was with them, and even though I left some time ago I still occasionally recognize one of my or Paul’s old shelved tricks being unearthed as new feature content. Your best advice for newcomers, tip or trick to pick up? People skills, be genuine - will open doors that a 5 star portfolio alone will not. The trick there isn’t in being friendly and likable when everything is going well, anyone can do that. It’s in being able to deliver bad news but make your client still love you for it. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Drinking fresh mango juice. Thoughts on AI? Tremendous tool but also highly dangerous. From a UX perspective it’s implicit design which always makes Undo the whole workflow, something I’m not keen on. Experience has taught me that a professional knows what they want, to achieve that the tool should enhance their control, not take it away. In general it’s a magnifier of human behavior. In particular when it can be used for profit of one kind or another - it’s a magnifier of greed. As such there are very real risks and ethical concerns around how we use AI. Our policy makers are far behind the ball on this one, and unfortunately people like Sam Altman put on a circus and leverage the general ignorance on the topic to gain advantages that would see the rest of us deeply disadvantaged. The bogeyman of sentient and agentic AI (or AGI) is nothing more than that. It’s a tool to legislate away competition and build a moat for these people. Deep learning, machine learning is currently architecturally incapable of reasoning. It’s akin to a lossy encryption algorithm with a fuzzy logic key. It is tremendous at recall though and this is enough to fool many when they underestimate the size of its training corpus or do not understand the tokenization and importance weighting process. The real risks are human and economic, the potential for dystopia at our own hands. Even the E/ACC crowd identified this. I’ve always fought for artists. It’s for this reason that I put myself firmly on what I am sadly fairly certain will end up being the wrong side of history and back them in their fight against generative AI abuses, corporations scraping their work. You might say being right but on the wrong side isn’t much of a strategy for success, but it’s about compunction and I’ve only ever gained by supporting people. Top 3 wishes for C4D If it isn’t clear by now I make my own solutions 😄 In a more diffuse way I would hope that it continues to do well and enables new generations of artists to achieve. The best good you can do in the world to make it better is to enable others opportunity. If you could send a message for Maxon, what would you say? Hey! I charge consultancy fees for that you know? 😉 They know where to find me if they need the introspection and understanding of what’s really going on within their structure and what they can do to resolve the problems they face. Message for Core4D? Keep being awesome! This forum is tremendous help and eco system driver for C4D. Tell us something we could not possibly know about you but you find important Client first! It’s pathological with me. When Warner Brothers approached me to head and build their virtual sets department and when AWS wanted me to join their top sales team in a very high level role I dissuaded both from hiring me because I simply felt my complete lack of experience in those fields would be a huge detriment to their goals. Oh I’m sure the seven figure salaries would have assuaged my conscience a little but that little voice in the back of my head is always gonna be screaming “you’ll never get repeat business that way”. Since then no surprises I actually have more experience and contacts in both worlds, you never know what the future might bring! Life always has a way of working out. If people want to contact you? They can and they should! https://www.linkedin.com/in/per-anders-edwards/

Found some fun BG at pexels.com to do some tests with trying to add my little UFO character and work on some character animation. Really trying to make this thing into a film with a few friends after we film a full trailer. We shall see!