Leaderboard

Made it! Also I just noticed...

You can't have both the object fractured and light behave as it wasn't fractured. That's how materials behave in reality. If there's a crack on your plate or glass of water no matter how opaque the glass it's still visible. The only solution is to disable the Voronoi Fracture object. As long as you don't need to shatter your object keep it disable and enable it the moment it needs to crack open.

You're absolutely right, I hate it 😄 Imagine just for once just doing something and not having to work destructively because of running into tool limitations... couldn't happen to me. But that definitely solves my problem still. Thanks a lot! The only bright side is that technically I wasn't even doing it wrong, I just happened to find another edge case. So I wasn't too dumb 🙂

There's a file with it pretty much done, if that's any help... shading_error CBR Fix.c4d

Oh DF, you are so very good at finding the Achilles heels in fundamental tools 🙂 Alas, merely flattening that row of polys will not give you the droids you are looking for... The reason is that with that topology, as theoretically ideal as it may seem, we are asking way too much of SDS here - it needs considerably more help than that to solve the shading issue. Let's simplify in order to better explain. Here is the side of one section of your tubing before it is curved, but even more perfectly even than your original, and for now without any control edges... Now, if we add an experimental bend to that, (occupying the top half of it, and in unlimited mode so it does both ends at once) then already the SDS shading is disturbed, but because of the polygon evenness and lack of control edges we can't really notice it. However it is there, as we can see by the breakup that arc into a dot and a line... Let's add some control edges to our base mesh that so our groove isn't floppy, which will make the problem much much worse ! So now if we try and bend this... Then we will get this... in which the horrible shading is fully restored and visible... So, what can we do about this ? Well, we can move the bend deformer for a start ! Let's bend the SDS result rather than the base mesh... ...and there we go, shading problems disappearo ! Now let's have a look at the sort of topology density we have had to bend to get that... So the answer here, which I know you will hate is to generate these curved surfaces first, CStO the SDS result, and Extrude your flat bits across the top / bottom from there, at that polygon density... So what is happening there is that the shading problem (which is still there) is rendered virtually invisible by being averaged across so many tiny polys. And so if we do put this under Level 1 SDS (that's all it might need now given the already applied subdivision), our shading problem remains (visibly) absent. So, TLDR version would be: Weakness of SDS - needs a shitload more polygon density to circumvent ! Hope that helps... CBR

Just because the control mesh is straight, doesnt mean the resulting SDS mesh will be smooth. The different heights are going to cause different rates of curvature top to bottom. In this case I would go with either a volume builder based approach, or just leave the edges sharp and use material rounding to smoothen the edges volume.zip

Yup, that's my finding so far as well. I just resorted to grouping the entire material node tree and having that group in a material as the only node. It's a bit more tedious to edit but at least I don't have to open the Node Editor and then click the node to get to the attributes. Now it's visible in the "Surface" category of the material.

Hi there, for an upcoming show i need to animate an already rigged fire-dragon in c4d. I'm not a character specialist, I know some are really proficient with this whole field and would do in a couple hours, if not minutes, what would take me days... Best would be to create a couple motion-clips with the different moves required, that I could later adjust/edit. I have a budget for that, but it must me done next week. Please provide reference work, i need someone experienced. Looking forward ! Julien

Thank you bezo ! completely missed the step effector for that... And good to know about mospline, I never used it ! Cheers

With spline it should be even simpler. Spline itself should contain (with mospline helper) the same point count as your images. Step effector distribute multishader along spline points. For targeting clones should be used multiple ways (target effector, rails (as in my exmaple)) Small animation from outside attached. clone sorting_along_spline.c4d

For clones in grid mode needs to be adjusted U transform coordinates of effector. See help for multishader. In your simple example I would use simple cloner in linear mode and offset (up and to the left) last ten clones with plain effector/linear field clone sorting_0001.c4d

request from the scene nodes discord server... a quick and dirty method of creating random poly islands: 11-sn-random-poly-islands-BASIC.c4d

The Classic - Carpet roll! 120_Carpet_Roll(MG+XP).c4d

Time to revive this thread, here is a fun one 🙂 12_Butterfly.c4d

This uses the Boolean Intersection technique ive described on youtube but combined with Volume builder twice to finally create 1 click edge damage concrete the proper way. This of course also works for other materials. It took me a long time to get on the right track to get the concrete technique right to not make it look wrong. The key is to try keep sharp edges and a flat surface mostly, but options for holes and grunge are there. How to use: Just drag any mesh there, thats it. Make sure the mesh is closed, otherwise you will need to go to the volume builder and enable the "optimize and close holes" which makes it much slower however. Tips: You can tweak the top volume builder Dilate and erode settings for surface details or sharper softer outcome. You can tweak the bottom volume builder to change the edge damage. Also try increase Iterations in dilates and erodes. Total calculation time is a couple seconds only on my 12900k but the boolean is the bottleneck and can get laggy, however I do a mesher reduction and polygon reduction to optimize. I think this could be further optimized by using the boolean from the Nodes system which I strongly assume is multi threaded (Edit: there is no geo boolean in nodes yet?), but I haven't gotten to that yet. If that were the case, you could feed this much more powerful things. You can also try high quality boolean. You can also drag multiple meshes at a time. Test settings on a small mesh for performance always. The polygon reduction on top does a good job in making game ready meshes as well, also applies vertex colors for AO and edges ready for shaders to be used within engines such as unity or unreal. Recommended process is: - Drag in, wait - Create instance - Collapse instance - Drag instance into poly reduction (tweak if wanted) - Create instance of poly reduction - Collapse poly reduction - Export mesh with the vertex colors / Use in production But do as you like, the mesh is there. Edit: I should also upload this to downloads Download below. Shrikes Damage Generator.c4d

one problem is that your base mesh isnt actually flat. If you crank the phong shading angle down to 0 and stick a light to the side, you can see the middle is flat, but the curves surfaces have depth to them: If I just run a plane through the base mesh, you can see these parts all stick out