JamesM

Anyone?

Hello, I have a swarm of animated (wings flapping) flies that are following a spline, with a load of turbulence, and I'd like the flies to keep facing the direction they are travelling, regardless of the turbulence. I've read about the Thinking Particles PAlignment Expresso method, but can't figure out how to get it working. So far, this is what I've done: I've got the flies facing the right direction as they follow the spline around, all good. But when I introduce the turbulence they are not facing the direction of travel within the turbulence. In the xpEmitter I've enabled Generate Thinking Particles, and ticked the Ensure Matching Coordinates. I have set up the Extended Data / Use Rotation / Tangential / Persistent Orientation. I've got Expresso opened, and got the PAlignment node. The problem is, I don't know which part of the xpSystem to drag in to Expresso, and which port to connect to the pAlignment node. It's pure guess work for me at this stage, and none of my guesses are working. Can somebody please help me with this? Many thanks, Many thanks. J.

Sorry, yes. It's been a while. I'll do that now.

Hi CBR, How can I upload a scene file if it's larger than 2.98MB? Sorry. Thanks.

Hi everyone, I've been away form Cinema4D for a while, and just getting back into it for work. I've encountered this weird thing that I don't ever remember having problems with before, the Bump channel is rendering weirdly. I've got no fancy or complicated set-up in my material, it's just Noise as the texture. This is pre-render: And this is how it looks after render: I'm currently on a 14 day trial of R23. Please could somebody help me out here? Thank you.

Mmm. Maybe not. It seems the whole scene is limited to the scale of the main ball, ie, it's got to be pretty big. If i scale everything down to fit my scene, the metaball does it's big blob thing. Ho hum.

Thanks again. I have no idea what I did differently, but your version is working.

Oh great, thanks!

Hi everyone, I found this quick vimeo tutorial which would be ideal for a simple motion GFX job I'm doing, but for the life of me I can't get the same result as in the video. The metaball is just one giant blob, and no matter what I try to change in any of the settings, it comes nowhere near the result in the video. The link provided for the project file has long expired. Does anyone have this project they can send me? Or can anyone re-create the project and achieve the same result and help me out? I've gone through the tutorial loads of times, paused it at every stage to get the exact same settings, but it's just not working for me. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks. James.

Great stuff! Thanks again Simmy, and thanks ABMotion for posting the video.

Yes, I got that light dome from HelloLuxx. It kinda worked for me, but the scale of my scene made it tricky to set up right.

Hi Simmy.... BOOM! Thank you SO MUCH! That Environment method has worked perfectly! My render time has gone from an estimated 20 hours... down to 3 hours.

Thanks Simmy, i will try that out.

Thanks Bentraje, that's good information. I've heard of various external renderers, but which one would you recommend for this kind of task? Thanks. Cerbera... adding lots of scene lights isn't an option. The 'world' is too large. I've tried a couple of different skydome techniques but again, my scene is too large. That Atrium video you posted... my scene is easily 10 times the size of that atrium, and the lights don't fall on all the little plants etc.

Hello Cafe, Is there a less processor-intensive alternative to using Global Illumination? I've currently got GI running on fairly low settings, but it's still taking ages to render out my animation. It's quite a large scene, with an animated camera floating along following various objects, passing trees, buildings etc. The animation is 1500 frames long. I've looked in to alternative scene lighting options, and have used key-lights etc, but it takes way too long to light all the various elements to a satisfactory standard as there are many plants and small details. I'm using GI to eliminate the harsh black shadow areas on all the polygons that aren't in direct sunlight, I'm not after a super-realistic result as the film is a cartoony style, i just want rid of the blackness of these dark areas. GI seems to be a massive rendering over-kill for something that I'd consider mandatory and simple. Thanks in advance for any help. James.