Cerbera

Only my guesses, but I think that could be because that feature is primarily meant to be used with spline sketch to project guide splies directly onto the model where they are probably most helpful, which isn't possible with parametric splines (or at least not without deformer help etc). But may also be something to do with RM needing actual points to work with rather than a real-time mathematically generated procedural object ? What are we like hey ? 2 am on Xmas day, and both of us are here ! All my lot have gone to bed, but night owls don't sleep much I guess, or at least not now ! 🙂 Season's best to you HP... CBR

Hey Matt Not by my C4d machine over Xmas, so better not advise about the Xpresso answer (though I'm sure there is one that might involve a boolean switch or similar ? Bu what you could do is use the 3rd of the 4 little icons on the right of the Object Manager to get the scene filter, double click the cameras icon to select them all, and then turn off in one click in attributes maanger ? Or you could create a Selection Object which contained all the cameras, thereby would select them all with a double click on the Selection object icon (not title!), and agin use Attributes to turn them all off ? Anyway, Happy christmas to you ! CBR

Absolutely, and to you my friend and from me to you all 🙂 🤪✨ I know I post this every year, but never stops being funny. CBR

And a bit further on, more of the same sort of techniques, collapse-ment of loops away from corners where we don't need them any more... ...leading to more evenly spaced, larger density polys overall... Next step would be to notice that we don't need that polygon density we have at the top of the recess there to describe the curvature towards the back, so it could be further collapsed by turning a lot of those edges into the centre so that only a minimal number ever reach the back side, though ideally we should bear in mind the number of edges it needs to meet itself at the lower side of the recess when the loop around the mesh is completed. ..and because that whole thing is flat both top and bottom, there are endless places to solve anything we need to, which is partly why I haven't so far felt the need to resolve those complex poles I allowed to creep in there ! I would resolve it later though, as it is easy enough to do so with judicious use of Spin Edge, or just by again, turning them centre-wards instead, like this... I'm away over xmas so can't show you more than that until I am back... Anyway, Happy Holidays CBR

Main advice here is that even though it isn't symmetrical you could still establish the main shape and features using that before collapsing, and then doing the unique details on each side, which would save some time. Other than that, best general advice would be to start with some mid level detail to establish correct polygon scale, so perhaps here, in the front recess... But working at the sort of poly density required for the overall shape and recess features, we won't have enough polygon density to do the much smaller groove details both at the front and on one side in the base mesh - instead it would be better to use some applied subdivision here to get those details AFTER the main forms have been had their low poly curvature baked in. And you will probably need 2 levels of SDS to get the requisite resolution. That said, you could get away with the groove details in the base mesh as well because of the proximity of all those adjacent planar surfaces in which to solve topology down and avoid running those micro polys all round the mesh. Thereafter, once you have the main strategy planned there isn't anything too complicated about this object so I would anticipate relatively plain sailing ! I'd be confident about knocking that out in 2 hours. Where the corners are razor sharp use small box-form corners to preserve that hardness around those areas, but quickly diverge from them to wider, more evenly spaced topology on the curvier, larger areas. There could also be useful deployment of edge weighting if you would rather avoid some of the control loops, although I can't see any areas that would demand this - fortunately your hard cornering needn't affect your base mesh curvature. I started it quickly to demo these points... So blue circled box corners where we need to keep them very sharp, gold circled show open form cornering when they need to be rounded, red arrows show where I have used 100% edge weighting to avoid extra control loops there, and green circled bit is showing that we don't need those smaller form polygons once we get away from the corners; we can collapse them, and not have to run them all the way around the mesh, thereby aiming for more large-form and even poly flow, this collapse helped massively by that area being entirely flat. Hope that gets you off in the right direction... CBR

Welcome to the Core and Happy Christmas ! I fully sympathize - I can never fully 'get' the behaviour of those clamp constraints, and they never seem to do exactly what I want, so I am the wrong person to advise on use of those. But I can recommend a different way, depending on what you need. One very simple way to get a straight spline between 2 things that move is to position 2 'target' Nulls at the connection points of / as children of your main objects, then use the Tracer to 'connect all nodes' which will constantly draw a straight spline between them. If you want to try simulation then Rope Belt is probably the way to go, but I would tend to avoid that approach, as it is quite difficult to art direct 'tension' using that and things have a tendency to be very 'floppy'. CBR

I'd just get a circle spline or other suitable shape (loads of subdivisions), whazz it in a linear cloner, and then group that with a displacer using animated noise. Wavy clones CBR 01.c4d That sorts the movement out (tweak speed and noise scale / type to taste). But how to get them to fade out as they fall off ? I wonder if Blend mode in the cloner would blend between luminance colours of a material applied to 2 operands within it ? That, or some sort of fog / environment in C4D / RS. Or using depth pass in AE or similar (providing your clones fire off into Z space) ? CBR

Lovely to see the enigmatic and long-absent Daniel Danielsson back with another reminder about why we all need him... CBR

Thank you - that is useful to know, and should be reported. Did your example scene make it to support ? CBR

You could set global gravity to zero, and control it on individual objects that need it with Gravity Force, OR you could have 2 completely discrete simulation scene objects with different gravity settings and assign your sim components accordingly... CBR

They do keep him very busy these days ! I bet he's doing one, and it'll be along soon... as I recall he was little late with the last one too ! 🙂 Always worth it when it gets here though ! CBR

I would guess you are changing it in the wrong place, and not here, which is the place you need to fix it... ...and indeed, you had that set to default of -981 cm. CBR

New Booleans are definitely better. Far superior hierarchical / tag-based workflow, no longer requires solid operands, operands can now intersect each other with less likelihood of problems, glitching is much reduced in animation setups, surfacing is generally better, and it is faster to calculate than the old system was. It also succeeds in many situations where the old one would fail. So, as someone who has been rigorously testing this for a while, I have to say I am very impressed with it and it is a significant upgrade to Cinema's modelling toolset. CBR

That has not been my experience, and I regularly use it all the time without running the problems mentioned !! CBR

Oh, that's a little unfair. That may have been your impression but is not the case. There have been minor QoL fixes and improvements in pretty much every release of the last 5 years, just not the one OP is looking for ! Whilst it wouldn't be true to say that particular request hasn't ever come up / been discussed before, but on the wish list of things people want, it's not very near the top, leading me, and presumably those with the power to change such things to conclude most people are either happy with, or used to the way it works now. Having said that I am not opposed to the idea (provided the extra UI stuff doesn't further get in the way of what I am trying to see or select), though it would have to be a preferences thing were it ever to become reality. Lastly I should check @mlon is aware of the press-and-hold functionality we have to temporarily switch to a different transform without leaving the current one ? Press and hold E, R or T to temporarily enter whichever mode you like from whatever one you are in now, and release to instantly return to it. Also works with Axis Mode (hold L), where it also temporarily activates all-component snapping (nice QoL thing !), and Move without Children (hold 7). It's a compromise, sure, but it is one click less every time, so it's half way to what you're after ! 🙂 CBR

I'm not so sure that is weird (or at least MORE weird than Collision deformer usually is !) but at the same time there is something odd going on with some of those modes, and it'll take me a little while to figure out what it is meant to be able to do vs what it actually is doing... We should note that your sphere is currently wholly inside a closed volume. And I notice there IS no mode in that collision deformer to match that state ! We can deform outside a volume but possibly not from inside one it would seem ! But we should be able to test that theory by simply deleting one face of the cube after which I would expect the Collision mode 'inside' to work.. however it doesn't, so something seems wrong. Inverting Normals on the cube doesn't help either as far as I can tell. nor does disabling Render Perfect in the Sphere (previously known to cause certain issues with things like this) or making the sphere editable. And already we are running out of things to check... Also I am finding no difference between modes inside and inside stretch - the sphere is stretched regardless of the 'Inside' setting. Anyway, investigations continue, and I will report back when I have additional answers / info. CBR

Yep, always include the scene file you've currently got so the people trying to help don't have to recreate everything from scratch, and can usefully see what you are working with. What you are asking for should be quite simple however, and you should organize your scene that so that particles change to a new group (with different material applied) when contacted by another element, such as a field, a particle-enabled collider or after a certain period of time. More specific help I will leave to the experts in the field... CBR

The only option we have inside Extrude / caps is the Bevel Outside option but I don't think that does quite what you are looking for either. So in this case, I would say, yes; use the bevel deformer instead. CBR

Yes that is true, in that you can either restrict differently projected materials to polygon selections (if your poly flow supports the transition points) or pile them on top of each other and mask via alpha / vertex map, or even fields OR build a single material within RS nodes that uses different projections of the same map. For still shots there is also the option of 'saving it in post' of course, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, and perhaps it should be the option of last recourse, despite it being likely to take rather less time than getting it to work in 3D, whereby you would make a texture / pattern brush in PS or equivalent, mask off the front-facing bits of the label that needed the even pattern and literally paint in and blend the correct details into the front-facing areas ! With some editing skill you could make this look as good as a 'correct' 3D render would have been. CBR

Late to the party on this one ! It's easy to underestimate how difficult this sort of foil top bottle is to get looking truly realistic. Not only are some creases there to accommodate the taper, but rather bigger ones are needed to portray the wire cage that the foil normally sits over and that is very hard to get right if the pattern used with it mustn't visibly distort. And for true realism there should be some effort to remove / fade / smooth out the pattern wherever it has been touched or pulled taut near the top - so there are lots and lots of disparate problems to solve for here. I've made a few of these in my time and all of them have taken far longer than initially thought ! As I recall I made simple base geometry just outside the surface of the bottle, modelled the wire cage underneath it, then subdivided the base geo for the foil to a huge degree and shrink-wrapped it over the top, followed by sculpting in the remaining wrinkles. In my cases I didn't have to maintain an even bump texture, but had I done, then tri-planar mapping is what I would have tried first, which RS can do fortunately. CBR

Oh, thank goodness you'll find it now - that is a very helpful thing ! Middle toolbar, cog wheel next to magnet (snap). Those double arrows let you auto-select any type of the flagged components, so you can easily find, select and remove isolated points for example. The only downside of this, and the reason you probably wouldn't leave it on all the time whilst modelling, is that it can make your edge selections less clear if they are overlaid with (say) the green border markers for example... CBR

I believe the way that is meant to work is that if you CO&D meshes that have identically named tags those will be merged. Non-identical ones should get preserved instead. And indeed that is what is happening for me. We can also fix wrong ones later using modifier keys and the commands in the tag to update the selections to what they should be. But we do need scripts to automate this process currently. CBR

Righty - here's how I'd go about modelling that base... We have 12 way rotational symmetry, and within that 2 way planar symmetry, meaning we only have to design topology for a nice small manageable section. And we don't need to go to the centre with that, because that is on a dual axis curve so we don't want any poles there. We'll make a patch for that later. 1. I started by outlining the main nubbin with as few polys as I thought I could get away with (whilst still keeping them mainly even)... I am using HB retopo for this, but if you find yourself without that, then polygon snap will do just fine in a pinch, and you could even shrink wrap onto the CAD model to more rigidly stick to that surface as you work)... I am working with symmetry here, so have only modelled the right side... you can optionally use the symmetry Hub / mode, but for technical reasons, I didn't on this occasion ! 2. Next, let's patch that any old how, expecting to need to revise it later, and expand the upper border... mostly using poly pen here, and frequently utilising things like smooth edges and equal spacing to keep things neat... 3. We need to continue out to half way across the square block bits, so did that, trying to keep edges as even as possible. 4. But now my modelling spidey senses kick in to suggest we'll be needing some harder edges and corners on the inner edge of the square bits, and that we should continue the lower loop around the indent on, to keep its outer control loop flowing around it (rather than down towards the centre), which led to the following topology changes... So I've run an extra loop across the square bit, and slid some edges about to get tight control loops for those corners, but, crucially, have got 4 evenly spaced edges at both inner and outer borders, which is vital for perfect SDS circularity (top) and partial sphericity (inner). I actually went on a bit beyond this to tighten those corners further before the next stage, and added some consistency as to how I did the cornering and additional loops round bevels for better base mesh definition. 5. So, having got one segment of the 12 mostly right, we can radial clone that x 12 to get the complete outer ring for the base. That'll need to be in a connect (weld on) to join those together. Having done that, we can make that connect editable, and count our border edges, which in my case was 48, which we can divide by 4 to conclude that we need a 12 x 12 plane for that centre section, and we will need to make that editable, Fit Circle it, relax / iron the inner points, project it to the CAD model (shrink wrap deformer) so we match the curve exactly and then CO&D that to the connect we made earlier, which should match perfectly if plans have gone well thus far... This means we don't have any complex poles in the base on that subtle curved area at the centre, which is important, because even though the slope is quite gentle there, it curves in 2 directions at once, so triangles or pole counts more than 4 will produce SDS artefacts that will be variously noticeable and not fixed by adding more SDS levels. SDS L3 is perfectly sufficient for this unless we choose to use SDS edge weighting (not necessary here), which would necessitate an extra level of it. ...and that leaves us a very manageable 48 radial polys with which to work our way up the rest of the bottle... We conclude that section with an Optimize, and checking it with Mesh Checker to hopefully reveal all quads and no borders, isolated points, or other errors ! 🙂 Hope that helps CBR

Aha ! If we have the CAD, then things become a lot clearer / more accurate, and indeed I can now see that the bottom of this bottle is not very much like the coke-style one I guessed it might be originally ! 🙂 The principals I highlighted above though still hold true, in that we should still start at the bottom and work our way up. So this is the ref for our base... So, if we want to throw this at ZRM (usually a good idea, just to see, and sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised by how good the result is !) we should rotate the model first from its default position so that the Symmetry options in ZRM can usefully apply, thus increasing our chances of getting mesh consistency across the model... And as we can see, we can get a really pretty reasonable easy quick result, that would be sufficient for getting fairly close to the object with the camera if we do that... But perfection it is not, and if you are one of the few remaining artists for whom modelling nicely is a pleasure in and of itself AS WELL as getting us to a much more perfect result, then I would say it is worth the effort of doing it properly with SDS modelling. The downside of re-mesher is that its polygon efficiency is arbitrary / based on user-input number / percentage, it can't detect flow very well automatically (see those indents at the off-axis angles) and we that need quite high numbers of polys in the base mesh to accurately gain those shapes, which is quite inefficient and nearly always leads to it using way more polys than it should have to. However, even if we do intend to model this 'properly', we can gain a good understanding of the sort of polygon density that should be possible, and get ideas for the flow of certain (on-axis) features that might not have occurred to us initially, so it's all good XP... I have some spare time later today, so will pop back then with a new plan for that base, hopefully demonstrating the optimum topology there. CBR

Can't tell exactly how many nubbins there are on the base there, but if I guess 8, then we can set the segments on our initial geo to a multiple of that number, so here 16. I started with a disc, added a single loop cut where I wanted the nubs to stop, and then selected pairs of segments to extrude (no caps) or ctrl-drag an arbitrary amount to get the bumps... We can't do all them in one go if they are next to each other, so I did them 4 at a time. And then it's over to SDS to do the rest of the work for you... I quadded the centre to avoid a nasty SDS pinch there (close poly hole / patch mode). Without seeing the bottom view of the bottle, and without any similar ones lying about at home for refs, I don't really know how the bumps fade out towards the centre, but we can easily adjust that by moving the inner circle of extruded points, or we can add one more loop cut half way between edge and centre to better define that transition. You don't want to add more than 1 loop though, as then shapes will start to become too defined under SDS. The little grip bits in the cap are such relatively tiny details, nobody is going to notice if you do it in texturing, but TBH it is quicker still to just model them separately and slightly intersect them with the main model, and we certainly don't want the rest of the mesh at the sort of resolutions that the grip section would require if it were part of it ! So if you want to do that just start with a tall cube in a radial cloner, add enough Y segments to it so they SDS with the correct amount of roundness, and then set the radius in the cloner and adjust the amount and size until it looks right. It's hard to see from the pic, but it looks to me like the plastic wrap stops before the ridged bit, so we shouldn't need to worry about that ? But no matter if we do. To get the plastic wrap layer we can directly split the wrap polys from the base mesh, and then just manually adjust a few loops so it gets round the bumps OK and add parametric thickness with Thicken generator or manually via a tiny 'caps on' extrude. CBR