Tread

So I am emitting a bunch of particles in a specific shape. They aren't moving, but I need the entire mass of particles to be spinning. Then I need modifiers to come in and begin to effect the particles, making them break off from the mass, and start doing other stuff. I know I can rotate an entire particle system, but that rotates everything regardless of what the particles are doing, so the modified particles end up orbiting the original mass. The best solution I've come up with is to use a follow surface modifier to have the particles stay with the object they are emitting from. Unfortunatley this isn't ideal because the follow surface changes their position slightly(push apart modifier creates a clean circle packing, and then follow surface kinda messes it all up) and kinda ruins the look I'm going for. Apparently xpTransform should be able to do this? But I can't it to do anything. Does anyone know of another solution? Thank you!

Thanks for the reply. I'm not very knowledgable with expresso, so I don't totally understand what's going on in this. It seems that the delay effector itself is driving the position of the cube. I can change the movement of the cube by changing the parameters of the effector coordinates, and get those to spring, but I'm not sure how to get this to drive a bend deformer on an object.

Trying to figure out of it's possible to have a value return to 0 with a delay/spring effect, so basically a sin function with a decay. I've basically rigged up a bend deformer to bend an object based on it's velocity, but once it stops, I'd like for it to oscillate the bend strength back and forth, decaying over time back to zero. Possible?

Anyone know if there is a solution, or something I'm not doing correctly that's causing edges of the faces of an object to pull away from each other. I get why it's doing it, but I don't know of a way to prevent it. Anyone know? Thanks!

Your method is working well, but one thing I'm having trouble with is using the delay in the fields. It does give me some nice-springiness, but I can't figure out a way to dampen it. The strengthen only makes the spring motion faster or slower, but I need it to not move back and forth so much. I've tried using another delay set to smooth, and the decay function, but can not get either of those to work. Any ideas?

Yep, looks that would do it. I’ve never really taken the time to learn blend mode, oddly enough. Looks super useful. Thanks for the help!

I’ve tried all kinds of things, soft body, rigging, different deformers… but haven’t found a way to do this kinda dynamically. Only through brute force with bend deformers, which is really hard to get the finesse that this has. Only thing the original creator said about it was that it was mograph. Not sure you get this with just mograph. Any ideas? Thanks! FullSizeRender.MOV

Oh right on, thanks! I don’t know why I didn’t think to search YouTube!

You know Newtons Cradle. I set it up with hinges, and have tried about all the settings I can find, but can't get it to transfer momentum like it does in the real world. I've removed all dampening and friction, to no avail. Anyone have an idea why it can't do it? Reading about it a bit it says that steel is used because it does not compress much and is efficiently elastic. I'm wondering if the properties of the solid that c4d is programmed with are not sufficient? Newtons Cradle.c4d

Where is Mesh Checker? I can't find it.

Yeah the recursive feature was why I was trying to use it, but ultimately any time I had it on it caused a lot more breakage in the wall and I couldn’t get pieces along the sides, top and bottom to stay put so I could have a hole. With VF I could do mograph selections to get pieces to stay, but I could not figure out a way to do the same thing in XP. Do you know?

Use the weld tool. Select a group of points on an edge you want to remove including a point you want to keep, then click on the point you’re keeping and the other points will be removed.

Is it possible to do all the same things with XPshatter as Voronoi fracture? Recently tried to use it but could not figure out how to do a few things and had to abandon it for Voronoi fracture. Mainly it was the ability to make selections of the pieces like you can with mograph selections. Also a way to trigger the bullet dynamics in a way similar to doing ‘at velocity peak’ with regular dynamics. Or using fields and effectors. Just seems like XP shatter is a less capable copy of Voronoi fracture.

Super helpful, thanks!

Cool Thanks. Works pretty well. Although I'd like it if the last few joints were a little more stiff, or didn't rotate as much. Do you know a way to achieve that? The dynamics settings aren't getting me to the desired result.

Yeah I was kinda thinking that. I was just playing around with spline dynamics, because I thought in the past I had made something with it that acted kinda like that... like an antenna. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Do you know if you can make spline dynamics that stiff?

Hmm, I'm trying that out and it seems no matter what I do I can't get the plane to be stiff. Just flops down like cloth would.

imagine a thin rubber rectangle, holding it at one end and kinda wobbling it back and forth. I’ve tried figuring this out and have tried the jiggle deformer, which kinda works but the card doesn’t retain its length and stretches. I don’t have much experience with soft body dynamics and when trying to use it the mesh just goes haywire and polygons get pushed out all over. I feel like this should be simple. Any help appreciated!

I'm emmitting some particles from an object, and I can't seem to find a way to vary their direction. The only options I can find are to specify an axis, in which all the particles just emit in that one direction with no options for variation, or an option to emit them randomly, again with no options for directional variation. When emitting from one of the shapes you can choose from it lets you vary the amount of direction spread, but that option goes away when you choose an object as the emitter. Any help? Thanks!

Thanks for the reply. Could you be more specific on how to set this up? I tried a few things but wasn't able to figure it out

Hello, I'm trying to make a custom cloud shape but using existing vdb files in redshift voulme objects. In an ideal world, I'd like to use certain sections of a vdb cloud, but I can't find anyway of doing any type of modification to a vdb file. Is this possible at all? Thanks!

I'm new to using xparticles and I created a water+foam sim and need to place into another scene file. Problem is I didn't set the scale correctly, and need to modify the whole sim in order to fit into the scene correctly. I can reposition and rescale the openvdbmesher for the water, but I can't find a way to modify the xpfoam particles. Right now I'm rendering them with redshift using a redshift object tag. Is there a way to be able to do this? Another way to assign custom objects to the foam particles that can then be cached? Thanks!

Thanks for the response KBAR! If you could sort it out that would be awesome. I have a cery basic understanding of how projection painting works, and can't quite put together how I can achieve what I'm trying to do with it. I'll try and do more research.

My title probably makes no sense because I don't really know how to describe it. I'm sure you've all seen how the texture maps and the uv map for megascans come out as a bunch of puzzle pieces? I have a model where I'd like to do some work to the texture image, but it's basically impossible with it all split apart like that. Is there a way to re-unwrap the UV to make it all connected? I've attached the texture Thanks!

I've just recently started exploring the included assets in the content browser, and have made several attempts to convert some of these materials to redshift. What I've noticed is that these c4d standard materials have the diffuse in the reflectance channel, and redshift doesn't seem to recognize that. So when I convert them to a redshift material, the diffuse is not brought over. Is there something I'm missing? Thanks!