Cerbera

SDS polycount is irrelevant. You only need to worry about the base mesh. 5000 polys seems high, and would be too high if your model was a body alone, but if that includes the hair, helmet breastplate and skirt then that is more reasonable. In your model you actually have not enough loop density around key joints like knees and elbows (these areas should have 3 defining edge loops). Otherwise, I would say, across the main body at least, polygon density is about right. CBR

Yeah, I hardly dare say it, but my hopes are pretty high for this one...

No, I'm hoping I'll be happy at regular speed. It's always a bit dodgy overclocking current AMD's unless your cooling is spectacular, but don't know if that applies to these new ones...

Yep - I'm in the queue for one of those, and will do a new build with it when it gets here... CBR

No - you'd have to animate its properties to make it behave like a magnet at all...

I think you're never going to find that, and if you do it won't be a script ! Can you not make this with 2 attractors per mesh, one set to negative attraction, and blend their fall-offs ? Perhaps not, if you are in a version older than 12... CBR

Great idea for a project. Looks like you got Extrudifier just in time ! CBR

This is already my favourite thing you've ever done :) Gold Star.

Great use of camera mapping there :)

Ah, yeah, if that's what you're aiming for, as opposed to water actually lapping up and down against the camera, then that is soo much easier and less hassle :)

That's a shame - I just had another go at this with Hot4D, and am getting much better results now on a cube ! Or rather I was, until you said that you'd have to fly over a ton of ocean first :) But, in case it helps this is what you get if you apply Hot4D to a cube, and give it tons of resolution on X and Z, and none on Y.... it animates perfectly, as long as you can't see the bottom face of the cube, which is also moving. You could probably lose that by making the cube very tall and putting the ocean floor above the lower movement, or at the risk of slowing things down unbearably, you could chop it off with a boole. The problem still remains as to how you would transition from a wide open ocean shot to this, but at least it is a viable solution for seeing above and below water, and should allow you to have light beams in the water below that are actually related to the movement of the ocean surface.

The only way I have ever got this to work with animated ocean cannot use either infinite ocean or HOT4D ocean. The reason for this is that none of those things offer a way to apply the effect to anything other than a plane, which is not very helpful for what you are trying to achieve. Instead you need to displace just the top side of a very high res square box with axial noise displacement on Y. That is the only way I have found to do this without booles, which cause endless problems in animations like this. CBR

Is this for a still shot or an animation ?

The extrudifier is much more important now that Greebler is no longer available. Personally, I would be delighted if the features in that tool got refined, expanded and made it into the software proper...

Well that's in the top 3 best things I've seen done in C4D this year :) Sound design also spot-on. Great job all round really ! :)

Lots of good points in this one. It's a really good idea for a tut. It's very well explained, and your tone of voice really lends itself to this. Your renders are very rewarding too. It's at an especially good speed for beginners I would have thought... If I had to pick one thing I would prefer was done differently, it would be to not encourage the use of booleans, or at least if you do, to explain why they are not proper modelling, and why they will break any bevelling or subdivision that your students may later try to apply to them ! CBR

No, no, maximum 3D violence ! Peace in the real world ! :)

REALLY good stuff - textures are great, and he looks properly cross :) Love it.

Cool little scene :) But what, in that scene, requires, or is helped by GI ? No, I'd get some standard lights in there, turn GI off, and your render times will improve considerably... CBR

Thanks @Ukushonga Yeah the bins were fun :) Your Gameboy model is heading in the right direction topology-wise - the back especially has some good clean polyflow going on.

I got the highest res reference I could find for mine, and found a group of pics from someone's repair workshop that showed the Horn from loads of angles. Then I just gave it weeks and weeks of time - think it took about 5 to get the whole lot modelled doing a little bit every day...You did very well to get yours out in 2 ! What I do, instead of rendering Isoparms with S&T is slightly annoying, but it does work. In the Object Manager, search for SDS, and then set all your SDS objects in the scene to 1 and 1 (viewport and render subdivisions). Then choose Standard Render, and in the settings, add Cel Render, and tell it to only do lines, not outlines, and set colours to black and white or the reverse. Render out your cel render wireframe, then combine with beauty pass in Pshop or similar using overlay or screen modes... not quite isoparms, but looks enough like it to pass, and no annoying dots... This was done like that, except I also did a cel render with SDS set to 2 x 2, and set that layer even lower in transparency than the 1x1 file, which gives a nice 2-tone effect... CBR

Oh lose the array - doesn't need to be there :) Works faster on single objects...

Yeah, I also dumped it in scripts initially ;)

Extrudifier is .c4d file !!! Just open it directly ! Some Extrudifier tips, btw... 1. Put your geometry as a child of the Extrudifier, but then turn it off with the cross to see all the greebles, not just the externally protruding ones 2. It has some refresh problems. Changing settings on the object under it won't update the effect until you turn the object on and off again, or change the random seed in the extrudifier. 3. Expect it to take some time to calculate on higher polycount surfaces. Spheres with high segments and 5 levels take around a minute to calculate, but just wait, and it does get there....

Yeah, that goes in c:\users\yourUsername\appData\roaming\Maxon\RXXXXXXX\plugins CBR