natevplas

@3D-Pangel First of all, just want to say, Merk Vilson is a genius and releases stuff very frequently on Patreon (not just Topoformer). He has a ton of really useful plugins, tips, and tutorials he releases all the time. I've been using Cinema for about 8 years and he's teaching me a lot. So, if TopoFormer doesn't work out for ya, you should still definitely get your money's worth. Also, I think they only charge you on the first of each month, so if you were really unhappy, I think you could back out if you remove your pledge before April 1. As far as Topoformer, I'm not sure what you're able to see on Patreon without being a Patron. Here are some links showing various functionality: He also has a random polygon selector plugin which you can get without being a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/posts/random-poly-16743615

You may also be interested in TopoFormer from Merk Vilson. Not sure if it will do exactly what you want (and it's still in Alpha) but it's definitely interesting. It's available for his $20/month Patreon supporters. Another option would be to create a material with a displacement channel.

Great work!

Cool! Sounds like a really interesting solution- not sure I totally get it, but glad you figured that out! In the second pic, are you planning to show those edges to the RF mesh? They look a bit blobby.

Yeah, I can imagine having a lot of trouble getting RF to do this. You'd probably be better off painting a matte for an alpha channel on a plane- or using a turbulent gradient to get those wavy edges to it. Would love to see what you came up with!

Wow, that's a tough one! I've always thought that oil on water has a cool look to it with that iridescent shine, but never thought too deeply about why it looks like that. Good ol' Google to the rescue: http://www.hk-phy.org/iq/oil_rainbow/oil_rainbow_e.html Apparently the difference in reflected color is due to the varying thickness of the oil layer and how the top and underside of the oil reflects/bends light. I wonder if you take your RealFlow sim and add a Displacer Effector which only pushes polys in the Y direction. Then create a shader with various noises to displace the sim. I haven't tried it myself (and I don't use RF), but see if this produces interesting results with your thin film shader (or maybe a simple fresnel with the rainbow colors would work in the Reflection channel?). Not knowing how long the shot is or more about what the client needs, it seems like you could get away with not having much animation in C4D. Then take it into AE and apply some instances of the Liquify effect to animate a subtle swirling flow. That's just my two cents. I'd be happy to hear how other people might tackle this!

Hi Gene's mom! It takes a really dedicated, amazing mother to find a website like this to help her son. Cinema 4D is a great program and a ton of fun! Like Cerbera said, there are many, many free Cinema 4D tutorials out there from beginner to advanced. Vimeo and YouTube are great starting places, as well as https://greyscalegorilla.com which has a ton of really great quality stuff. http://www.eyedesyn.com/ is another great one that has a lot of character animation stuff. If he is very self-motivated, he can learn almost everything he needs to know on his own, but 1-on-1 training is great too, of course.

Great work! I think the white part of the cake/pie could use some SSS and be a little off-white to make it feel creamy and less plastic. The raspberry is getting better, but I think the model itself is not quite right. That Blender tutorial looks pretty great. I also agree with @Wouter that the raspberry should be on top. The composition and focal plane are a bit muddled right now. I love that crust, but it feels like the pie is facing away from me too much. Composition stuff is pretty subjective, though, so take it with a grain of salt (or sugar, haha).

No prob @bentraje! Yes, an attractor would be useful too. Thanks!

@bentraje i'm not sure what you mean. If you put a cloth under a null, the cloth will still fall to the ground (or into infinity if there's no ground). I did a test where I animated the null with a cloth underneath and the results were pretty bad. What do you mean "have the child in Follow position?" Is there a setting you're referring to? Because I'm quite sure there is no "Follow Position" option under Cloth- only in Soft Bodies.

Nice work! I'm working on a project now that requires semi-controlled animation of pieces of paper blowing. I'm using soft bodies because you can use the Force tab to get them to Follow Position. It's still tricky to get them to look natural AND go where you want!

Yeah, modeling it seems like overkill. You'd definitely be fine using displacement for this, and it will be way faster and easier!

These are pretty funny, but some of the reviews for Amazon products are downright hilarious! For example: http://amzn.to/2B7jWHG This computer is probably total overkill for 99.999% of people, but i have to disagree on the 12TB of storage being overkill. If you ever work with footage, especially something like 8K Red Camera footage, you'll know that a single video file can be over 100 GB. 10TB hard drives are not all that expensive these days and certainly not what put this computer over the 20K mark!

This is pretty great too! One of the first Wacom tablets, lol!

Do you have an image reference for what you're trying to achieve? My guess is adding hair to a sphere, grooming it, and adjusting the frizz, etc could get you something like wool. Or do you mean like a rolled up ball of wool yarn?

Did you guys see this? It's called Lattice Plane and it's a planar version of the FFD deformer. Haven't tried it but it looks interesting! https://labs.MAXON.net/?p=3192#comment-128

Wow, gorgeous work! Definitely the best stuff I've seen using ProRender!

Yeah, it was a huge moment! I had a big hint from the creator of the Shapeways model, so I can't really take credit. It was also hurting my brain. Next I want to figure out if there's a way to do this with a photo like a lithophane. I know you could do it with small extruded holes, like a vectorized or halftone photo, but it would be cool to get smooth gradients via a displaced mesh and not to have ridiculously complex geometry.

Ok, I figured it out in case someone else wants to try this. First create your flat geometry. For instance, you could start with a plane, then cut some holes into it. Once you're happy with that, select all your polygons and extrude them up a ways. Create a sphere about the same diameter as your plane or smaller. Then select all the newly extruded polys (the top faces) and scale them down to 0% (if you hold shift it will snap to factors of 10). Move this single point up on Y only to the top center of your sphere, and make sure your original polys at the bottom are just below the bottom of your sphere. Now give the sphere thickness by adding it to a Cloth object. Make the Cloth editable. Then put your sphere in a Boole with the extruded model under it, setting it to A intesect B. It will take a couple minutes to generate, depending on the complexity of your geometry, but it should give you a stereographic projection! To test it, put a light at the top of where the original sphere was, and create a plane under the sphere. Set the light to cast hard shadows and voila!

Has anyone modeled a stereographic projection in C4D (or elsewhere)? I'm trying to create something like this for a 3D print: https://www.shapeways.com/product/4LG52RNML/honeycomb-stereographic-projection?li=mentionBox&replyUser=henryseg&anchor-comment=185281#comment-185281 Basically you stretch a plane into a sphere in such a way that when you put a small light right at the top of the sphere, the shadow projects an un-stretched pattern. I would just buy this one, but I want to customize mine a bit more and have freedom to do different designs. I've tried the Wrap, Spherify, and Shrink Wrap deformers. Shrink Wrap came the closest if i started with an extruded plane and the added a Sphere to the Shrink Wrap target object. But at best it can only wrap it onto the bottom half of the sphere- no higher.

Thanks for the reply, Cerbera! I've sent MAXON a feature request for R20 ;)

Is there any way to edit the bezier handles of multiple points simultaneously? I have a sine wave I generated with the Formula Spline and made editable. I'd like to select all of the "top" points and extend the handles to make a fatter curve, but it looks like you have to do this one at a time. Does anyone know a way to do this for all of them? Maybe some XPresso or something?

Thanks Abyss! Yes, I should try that. I'm a little concerned that this will cause my computer to have to compute a lot of unnecessary clones, though. Maybe it's not a big deal, but seemed like there must be a better way. Also, I plan to render with Octane, so I'm not sure if the shader effector works properly with it or not. I might try X-Particles too.

Thanks Cerbera! I'm open to completely different ideas on how to accomplish this. For now, I found a work-around that isn't too bad. I made the sphere pretty high-poly and then made my cloner and sphere editable. I selected all the polygons for each and made a selection tag for them before doing "connect objects and delete" command. Then I used the selection tool with "only select visible elements" checked. I proceeded to manually select all the visible sphere polys (not worrying about avoiding the cylinder polys), then I chose the selection tag for the cylinders geometry and clicked "Deselect Polygons" so that I only had sphere polys selected. I created a new selection tag for that, then I selected all the cylinder geometry and deleted it.

Is there a way to create a selection based on a black and white texture? I have a sphere, which I'm using as the object for a cloner of a bunch of cylinders on it. I've added a Proximal shader to the sphere's luminance channel to make the sphere white with black filled circles where the cylinders are. I'd like to create a selection from that white area to clone more things in the spaces between the cylinders. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way?