Cerbera

Hmmm. My understanding of this whole space time thing is quite limited ! Are you sure humans are meant to be thinking about this sort of thing ?! 🙂 More seriously though, I have trouble trying to translate these sort of questions to the sort of perspective / ortho / parallel views we have in Cinema. So, still exploring the theme that simplest may be best, what about 3 shear deformers on a cube, aligned to X, Y, Z accordingly ?! 3 way shear CBR 01.c4d CBR

Does a shear deformer on a cube not give you what you are looking for ? Keyframing the Strength attribute for animation... If not there's always pose morph, which is where I'd be heading next... CBR

Yeah right ! Including my one where I said pretty much what you did ! Perhaps there has had to be some restoring from backups or something ? CBR

Very pleased to hear that Rocket Lasso is back in action after a very long time away, starting with Season 7 Ep 1 tonight at 8 pm (BST). CBR

I haven't done this myself so far, but I suspect the best way to go here might involve cycloid splines, blend mode cloners and Field Forces. Searching around those terms I found this tutorial from Insydium. Obviously, they are using their own particle system, but there is no reason to think the native one couldn't also do it... though I am probably not the best person to advise on the specifics of that; I don't have much experience in Cinema particles yet ! CBR

I haven't watched the series yet myself, but that title sequence is wonderful. And the music is as harmonically interesting as the visuals and techniques are to us CG guys. Perfect alternating consonance and dissonance. For those of you who have an interest in such things, here's Charles Cornell to explain why that's also great ! CBR

There are, if we look carefully, a number of things subtly wrong with the settings in this scene. As HP predicts above, Render Perfect on the sphere is one of them, and fixes the effect of collision deformer not showing in render if we turn that off. Next we had some suspect settings in the sweep object (parallel movement should be off, Banking should be ON, and End Rotation should be 0 degrees), which fixes the twist in your path spline over the indent, and restores it to correct, contiguous circular form all the way along its length... The mode of the Collision Deformer should be Outside (volume) and the capsule should ideally not be a child of it, though it doesn't particularly matter in this scene. Likewise object order in the OM could be better bearing in mind that Cinema scans downwards through it from the top. Below is more ideal I would say, and general good practice. Next, the curvature in your path spline within the sweep isn't quite matching the curve of the indent in the sphere, resulting in some unevenness in that area. This can be fixed by getting a new path spline for the sweep, which we get by doing Current State to Object on the main sphere (once collided) and then Edge to spline on the centre edge loop of that, but first we have to fix the collision object, which should also ideally be a sphere so that we can choose Hexa type and thereby avoid the complex pole on the end of the capsule it replaces, which was previously confusing the collision deformer, and producing some wanky / uneven collision vertices in the main sphere at the apex of the collision point, which would obviously effect any spline you subsequently derived from it. In my version I wanted a better, higher resolution sphere, but not one that caused the collision deformer any extra work, so changed the type of that sphere to Hexa as well, which then necessitated addition of a Spherify deformer before the Collision Deformer (because hexaspheres are not mathematically spherical out of the gate). And then lastly that went under SDS to give us improved resolution, and my Current State to Object was performed on the SDS instead of the sphere itself, for maximum spline matching. Anyway, I have fixed all that in the scene attached below... groove-on-sphere CBR Fix.c4d CBR

Oh wait, I can answer that one quickly before I go... you should be able to hide the capsule with the traffic lights in the Object Manager... See those 2 dots I have clicked on there to make them go red ? Top one hides capsule from viewport, bottom one hides it from render. CBR

Ah OK, yes I misunderstood you there... indeed the term 'groove' there led me properly up the wrong path - lols 🙂 Think I'm with you now tho, but alas have run out of time - I have to pop out for an hour or 3 now, so will assist further on my return if HP doesn't beat me to it, as I'm fairly confident he will ! CBR

Refresh the page - I added some more detail.... CBR

This looks to me like it should be as simple a thing as just modelling a groove into the sphere directly, unless there is some special (or spatial !) reason you need that element to be procedural ? If that is the case, then a simple boolean subtraction should do it - sphere and a thin torus under the new boolean object in that order will get you this sort of result... That'll be a very quick and easy way to go, but won't give you flawless topology if that is important at all... The manual way needs a small amount of prep for ideal topology in that I would make the base sphere out of a merely 8 segment (hexa) sphere under SDS, and then in a group with a spherize deformer to restore perfect roundness and provide a very solid topological base to work from, which will work more nicely with a collision deformer from any angle, because there are no complex poles at the actual poles of the sphere like there would be with a Standard sphere primitive... ... and once we have that manually modelling in a groove manually is fairly trivial operation mainly involving bevelling the highlighted edge above and extruding the resulting poly ring in a bit / shaping it as desired by scaling its component edge loops, like so... Let me know if you don't understand stuff, or if I am missing something important... CBR CBR

Indeed not. Sorry - forgot you were on older version despite it being right there in your profile ! CBR

We could also cheat, if time-saving would be helpful... For example we could just get our original spline, pop it under an Extrude Object, and then put that under a (Z-)ReMesher where we could then adjust the poly count until it matched our corners nicely... Not as good as the manual method (still a bit on the dense side), but more than passable if you're in a hurry... CBR

That can be a feasible (and very sensible) way to start when you need a very specific (and especially numerically based) corner radii, but what you are actually doing there is defeating the point of SDS in 2 ways; firstly you are forcing yourself right from the outset to be at much much higher density than you need (which is rather contrary to the whole concept of live subdivision !), and secondly by manually / unnecessarily doing work that should be left to SDS itself. So we actually want very minimal topology at the corners, and should be using the type of corner loop termination (box corners vs inset style ones) and distance of the neighbouring control loops to the main corner vertices to directly control the rounding on each corner, rather than defining it in topology. There ARE times when you NEED to define corners in topology, but this is not one of them, primarily because the rounding you seek is at a comparatively smaller scale than the overall topo density you need to describe the form and to allow it to bend evenly. CBR

I can confirm that until very recently there was a bug where having isoline editing on but the SDS cage hidden in filters menu was not working, and indeed that seems to be what is going on with yours - we can simply see both the isolines and the base cage. As you have spotted, it will be resolvable simply by disabling isoline editing. And I can also reassure you there is nothing wrong with your actual mesh, other than a few easily solvable tris that probably don't matter if left ! However, if I was doing that Sub-D I would go for much lower resolution in the base mesh, and all the quads, like so... We have enough topo here to handle a fairly decent level of bending at the base mesh level, but if not, we can run the bend deformer at the same level as the SDS and bend that instead. CBR

I have checked this again, this time with the exact shape shown in the original post, and I can reproduce the error now. It is so far unclear whether the cause is linked to ngons, viewing angle or the Tweak Mode of the Poly Pen (changing that to points seemed to significantly lessen the chances of it entering new poly mode for example), or all of the above ! But I do have enough evidence to report it as a potential bug now, so will do... Thank you for raising the issue. CBR

No, I don't think there is anything we can do about that with a single setting, presumably because clone color is an attribute of the cloner object, so (correctly IMO) considered important to reflect in the viewport. It has always been this way as far as I recall, at least back to R11. That is not to say it doesn't annoy me sometimes, and I do wonder sometimes if we shouldn't ask for options in the basic / display tab that allow this not to happen, or at least not to preview in vp. But of course then we get into the massively complex question of what should happen instead, which is a nightmare if you think about all the possible options it could offer, and I have renewed sympathy for why it is left as it is ! The workaround(s) are simple enough though - we could just use a cylindrical field and a plain effector in color mode to turn one clone the highlight colour thusly... or any of the other ways the cloner offers to do that... CBR

I think you are deriving linear splines that exactly match the topology of the base objects, which means those lines will be straight like the edges themselves are between each vertex. For them not to be straight you will have to rethink the setup, perhaps at a rather fundamental level, and there will either have to be some spline interpolation involved or you will need to derive the splines at a much higher resolution, such as you would get from a Subdivision Surface setup, which is how we would normally model clean curves from a low res base mesh. If I get some time tomorrow I can elucidate further, but alas I am out for the rest of the night now... CBR

Welcome to the Core... Poly Pen can only make one line cut at a time from one edge (or point) to another. It can cross a previous cut, but if you try and make it do that there is apparently some chance that it will think it's creating a new poly in that version, as you demo. I suspect that may be a bug, which isn't present in the version I am currently testing in. The workaround for that would be that to make multi cuts, or ones that cross existing edges with better consistency, it is better / more flexible to switch out to the full line Cut Tool (K,K). CBR

Ok, then either increase the dimensions (and optionally segmentation) of the (parametric) plane, or decrease the size of the spherical field (scale tool or in its attributes) ! CBR

That would depend which of the above methods you used... which way did you go ?! CBR

Several options here, but you were on the right track... 1. Displacer should be fine for this, but you probably want to use a circular gradient as the driving texture... ...in which you control the characteristics of the curve by affecting the knots in the gradient, and that white dot between them... Also check the various modes of that gradient - Linear, for example might be more suitable for this than an exponential mode. 2. Bezier Primitive. Control the peak on a high res patch with a much lower res grid. You can think of this as a plane with an FFD pre-applied ! 3. FFD On plane - the 'manual' version of the above. 4. Soft Selection. If you would prefer to edit a high res plane directly, then soft selection would be the goto here, allowing you to specify various profiles of diffusing components selections so that they affect adjacent (unselected) ones too. Dome Mode shown below... 5. Saving possibly the best until last, I would personally use Fields for this, implemented via a Plain effector which is a child of a plane, and has its deformation mode set to Points. This, I suspect is going to be most useful because if you use the contour controls in the remapping tab of a spherical field, it lets you control the character of the curve directly via a spline... like this. ...which would give us this sort of result... So that's most of the non-mathematical approaches with the actual character / interpolation of the ramp defined in a number of different ways... The maths-based stuff I will leave to someone more into that than I am ! As for the Atom Array aspect of your question - That will work as a parent of any of the setups above, but if you'd rather not wrangle the unnecessary vertex spheres in that, so will cloning cylinders to edges (scale edge 100%) or stealing the topology using Edge to spline (still available parametrically via a correction deformer) and sweeping the result. CBR

No, I don't think we have control of that - it should just do it and if it doesn't that seems like a bug to me. What happens if you delete that user data for height and add it again ? I can submit it for you if you can provide the file. CBR

It seems to me we are doing mostly fine until the moment it impacts the wall, and then the rebound goes all weird, and the wrecking ball floats and bobs up and to the right in a way that definitely doesn't look like natural rebound, and agreed, seems to defy gravity thereafter. It may be of some comfort to note that I don't find anything overtly 'wrong' with your settings so far, and remain as mystified as you must be to why it is behaving like that, and requiring such high sub-step and iteration levels to even achieve some level of stability without falling apart. I will investigate this further as time permits, which I appreciate doesn't help you in the meantime, but I am interested to know the thoughts and findings of anyone that is a lot more familiar than I am with the foibles and quirks of the new integrated dynamics and may be able to get to the answer a lot quicker than me. CBR

We'll be needing your scene file pls... CBR