Cerbera

We are lacking information here - we don't even know which version of the software this is (please complete your profile to show this) ! We also can't see how your model is UV mapped, which is sometimes crucial to the baking process, although you appear to be generating new UVs as part of the bake, which is often not advisable with spherical form objects... Lastly I am not sure if baking a null will work correctly. But it is very difficult to determine what is wrong without the file to try things with. CBR

I don't have that pv folder in the equivalent path in any of my C4D installs. Could stand for Picture Viewer maybe, or perhaps Previous Version ? Can't think why it is so big. I think perhaps only Maxon can answer this, either here or in a support ticket... CBR

I would do this with Pose Morph / Morph Deformer personally, then you can get the second state of the mesh exactly as you want it and transition between the 2 states, and use the same field to control it... CBR

I think MoSpline's Turtle mode will be of great use here if you can work out how to address it, which isn't exactly intuitive. But that is one of the few spline-based systems in Cinema that supports junctions within a parametric / animating system. CBR

''We put it through QuadRemesher or similar" ! I'm certainly having a hard time 'liking' what I see, whether I believe it or not ! At the moment I dislike it because it is not good enough to be usably practical and is cynically / greedily overpriced, and when it IS good enough to replace modellers like me I will hate it for that reason and the way it devalues human effort like nearly all this art-based AI does ! CBR

I can see why that is not very Google-able ! 🙂 Booling it might be simple and stone-age sounding, but I bet it would work in this instance ! As would Volume builder of course, with all the advantages and disadvantages over booles that come with them... The interesting part of this isn't so much the boolean components, but how to model this sort of network of non intersecting, yet thoroughly entwined solid tubes, complete with junctions and splits and whatnot ! I'll have a think about that... CBR

A quad patch, in this context, means any UV island that contains 4 sided UV polys in a simple grid formation - a plane object would be the most obvious example of an island that can be rectangularized, whereas a round disc comprised of triangles is not a quad patch, and cannot be forced into rectangular form for obvious reasons, which is why that command is conditional. Yes of course; you can put seams wherever you like, but you do so by defining the new ones as edge selections and re-projecting the UVs according to them. In a way, asking 'how do I move a seam?' requires an entire explanation of the concepts and workflows of UV mapping, and that info already exists, so my best advice would be to watch any of the many hundred UV tutorials about it over on Youtube. This one particularly taught me everything I needed to know about UVs back in the day, and although some stuff has changed since in Cinema, the general principles still apply. Hope that helps CBR

No, that is not a seams thing - that function does indeed only work on quad patches, so if your island isn't that it won't work. Relaxing is one a single part of a larger workflow. Once all islands are relaxed (at whatever size) you should be selecting all of them, and finishing off by going to UV packing, ticking equalize island size, and doing a Bounding Box pack, which will sort their sizes out relative to each other AND pack them nicely into the canvas with the spacing you specify. The only downer about this workflow is that you must remember to equalise the islands before you do any custom arrangement of islands, as the packing will do its own thing and undo your arrangement work if you do it afterwards. CBR

Yes ! I had to model 'a superhero car' again 'from scratch' after the new movie came out, for a streaming video promo commissioned (way upstream) by the film company themselves, yet the only reference that was made available to us was a handheld video of someone looking round the physical car prop, where it now resided under massively unhelpful lighting on display at some museum or other !! It was 'only for the home streaming market' so the campaign was not considered important enough to provide any files apparently - both me and the agency I did it for were astonished at how unhelpful the commissioning organisation were ! It is specifically for competitions, and is totally legit in the Olympics ! So are compound bows, in a different class of course. AND all the stuff hanging off them is allowed as well ! Here is one of them with just such a machine from Olympics 2020... But I deliberately didn't want to do a hunting bow, even though they do look slightly cooler and more techie ! CBR

Well, it's a Bank Holiday, and I have been rained off all the exciting electric unicycling plans I had, so I remain in my modelling cave, with some rare personal project time on my hands ! So, I thought, let's find something exciting to model, like THIS lovely recurve riser from Hoyt, the Formula XD. Should be a good exercise in hybrid HS / SDS techniques, and working with slightly sketchy reference, as there are almost no orthographic views of this available. Not to worry, we shall prevail regardless... As well as the main riser section, there is a lot of acoutrements / auxillary items to model here, most of which are very topologically, not to mention topographically interesting, for example this proprietary bit, where the risers meet the limbs... ...and the balance bars / aligment aids / sights, clickers, arrows, limbs, slings, harnesses and fixings, and I'll try and get most of them... I'll do a number of posts and videos during the modelling of this on the off-chance it is useful to anyone else... As a little teaser I have started with the clicker block, thusly.... What do we all think is the best way to start something like this, where we need very smooth curves and very sharp machined edges, and a lot of it is flat, but we also need varying bevels and an ultra smooth 'bullet cutout' going through the roundy triangle holes ? It must be suitable for displacement because there are sight marks and a logo which are etched into it. CBR

Yes you should !! I would like to add 'Edge to Spline' and the new Relax mode of the Brush tool, which can relax and improve loop evenness / integrity without shrinking the mesh. And at last, the new Thicken tool, which means we don't need to use the previous range of un-optimised compromises like Cloth SDS and Extrudifier. CBR

Thank you dude - much appreciated, and thanks again for making my tip jar tinkle ! 🙂 CBR

Some signs are just...wrong... CBR

It does, but the red line still stays mostly on top in a way that it didn't before, no ? CBR

I'm glad you find them helpful ! I always worry that my thoughts on these things tend to emerge quite chaotically, and I usually forget at least 3 things I meant to say in every one, so nice to hear people find the main points are getting through ! 🙂 CBR

Sounds quite 'buggy' to me. Impossible to be sure without file of course, but you can send it in to Maxon confidentially. CBR

That's a very nice lookin' little critter you built there ! And of course I am appreciating the quadly goodness 🙂 Glad to see you back ! CBR

Yep, I don't like the instability of dynamic splines with spline wrap. But I can get fairly decent results by losing the banking and setting the up vector to -1 (Y) in the rotation drop-down of the latter... Still twists out in one place though. Very hard to avoid that. Not sure you need to though. Snake bodies DO rotate about a bit as they pass over themselves in footage I have seen. snake_dynamics CBR Fix.c4d CBR

...like so... CBR

No, Projection mode is for something else entirely ! That takes the initial position of a coincident mesh and deforms it with the target, which isn't what you need here... UV is definitely right, and use the scaling and positioning in the deformer to get it exactly as you want it... So if you now fuck up that cylinder mesh by displacing it for example (before the surface deformer in the OM !) then the UV should go with it and deform the label properly with only minimal adjustment... CBR

In that mode of the deformer, yes. CBR

Yes, it'll be the UV causing that, upon which the surface deformer depends utterly. yours is broken into islands, which is no good for this... This what the UV should look like for the cylinder, and the settings you need to wrap using it... To get that UV looking like that I was in UV Edit mode, selected all polys, lined the viewport up so I was vaguely front on to most of it, did Frontal Projection, then relaxed all polys, which should get you the shape above, which you can then scale to fit the canvas better. You may need to pop to UV commands to mirror U or V so my specific deformer settings work... CBR

Good point 🙂 And that's that one solved... CBR

And here's part 3, in which we conclude today's lecture (lols) with a little discussion about the complexity of poles, and what we a) can and b) should do about them, or not ! CBR

I am afraid that is most likely a bug, which I will report if it is not already known. Selecting the point and setting either 'Soft' or 'Ease-ease' there should give you handles both sides I reckon. This is not related to the qualities of the source spline. CBR