everfresh

a slightly "simpler" workflow can also work... here i just keyframed the weight sliders. as soon as you keyframe the weight parameters in the constraint, you need 2 targets. so if an object is on a table and you want your character to pick it up or put it down , you need to have the table as a second target additional to the hand. i've seen people try it without a second target, that's why i'm mentioning it. what seems to be broken in the parent constraint as well as in the psr constraint is the maintain original offset option. i'd avoid using that altogether. parent_constraint.c4d

@GazzaMatazand that doesn't work for you? i don't see any new tool, just some added functionality to the parent constraint.

@GazzaMatazno they did some changes to the parent constraint, and it does work much better since then. but there's still some rules to be followed to prevent it from breaking. never heard of a parent constraint tool.

looks awesome... with all those additions lately xp is starting to look pretty attractive again.... might re-activate my maintenance again.

@filipstamate i think people from maxon were trying to say is that in the future, scene nodes WILL have all the functionality xpresso has, and therefor chose to not put any more effort into xpresso. to me it makes sense, and i can totally see how scene nodes can make xpresso obsolete, but the question just is "how long will it take to get there?". and i'm saying that as someone who uses xpresso heavily on a daily basis.

@Cairyn only four copies? that’s sad, i’m sure you put quite some time into that... did you find anybody to compile the mac version of your plugin yet? i would happily buy it. maybe i can even help out with the compiling, i just have to learn how to do it, but a friend at maxon offered to help with that.

make a vertical linear cloner made out of spheres, choose amount and size of spheres so they almost touch each other.. apply softbody tag to the cloner, choose "made out of clones" in the softbody tags options. dial in settings for structural, flexion and shear, also go to project settings and up the steps per frame to something like 15. then apply a tracer to the cloner, set to connect all objects... then sweep a circle along that tracer spline, give the circle the same diameter as the spheres. hide the cloner from editor and rendering. that gives you one noodle... but you can copy the cloner and sweep with tracer as many times as you need noodles..... done this in the past, works quite well, but it might get too slow with lot of noodles. you could also try just cloning a bunch of straight splines, make that editable and merge all splines and apply a softbody tag to that... might run a bit faster. then the splines themselves get calculated as softbody. you'd have to play with the collision margin then, so the noodles won't intersect.... edit: just did a test out of curiosity, the clones solution is way faster... files attached. spaghetti_clones.c4d spaghetti_splines.c4d

also make sure you subscribe to rodrigo's youtube channel, he has some good content there on rigging and will continue to make more if enough people show interest. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCev3FBg3BppCtlyCUtgtdSw

while i agree that there's not enough c4d specific rigging tutorials out there, keep in mind that the principles are the very same across all apps. so if you got the basics down and know how our constraints work, if you know the caveats of our ik and ik spline solvers, if you somewhat understood priorities, if you know the basics of xpresso, you can really watch any maya or blender or even houdini rigging tutorial and translate the technique over to c4d. i might do a tutorial about spline ik soon, since i have the feeling this is something a lot of people struggle with, i know i did for quite some time... would that be something you're interested in?

while a lot of cool features and workflow improvements for character animation have been added over the last releases, it's not that c4d wasn't capable of professional character animation before. like all software it has its strengths and weaknesses in that area. i've been using c4d for character animation professionally since r15, and while there is a difference to what we have now, it's not that there's a huge gap of what was possible back then and what's possible now. it just has been made easier to get there. c4d is used quite a lot for character animation in advertising, for film there's still a long way to go because of mostly pipeline issues for projects of that scale. almost everything that can be done in maya can be done in c4d as well, but for large scale projects like animated features or tv shows the lack of pipeline tools and performance issues with more than two character rigs in the scene are the main show stoppers.

damn, i totally missed this... seems i work too much 😕 congrats to the winners, fantastic work!

thanks guys... here’s another one i just finished, merry christmas!

a project i finished last weekend. may not look like c4d, but everything except for a few frame by frame animated particles and smears it's entirely c4d. liquidity from everfresh on Vimeo.

ok.. i see... i still think it looks better less reflective...

yes... waaaay better 🙂 tires now actually look like rubber with the glossiness way down...

at 7.5 seconds i think it looks best... still, i feel like the car paint has too much roughness and the tires too little... tires look a bit like leather and the car paint a bit like plastic.

very nice.. i feel like the car paint could be more shiny and the tires less shiny... or are you just not at this stage yet?

in all fairness, it wasn't overly advertised... there was a talk with that lady at ibc, but that's more because it is an interesting topic in general. but sure, i agree with you, there's tons of sources for mocap out there, free and paid, so not really adding huge value. but again, not a big deal to me. i just found it rather odd that you even count those mocap files as animation feature. there's much more useful stuff in there, like the pose library, delta mush, the new rig presets, all the little but super useful tweaks to timeline and keyframing behaviour... might not be very useful for mocap workflow, but for manual animation it is.

well, i wasn't talking about mocap workflows, i talked about animation. views might differ here, but to me it's about the same difference as playing an instrument vs DJing. never had use for any mocap in my whole life, so i can't comment much on that, although i tested the retargeting once and it worked. i was wondering why they included those mocap files as well, could be it was mainly because the mocap actress who made those works for redgiant, so it was considered low hanging fruit? certainly didn't eat up any dev time, so where's the problem? might be of use for some people.

probably more than you think. but yeah, not exactly a lot 😉 ...the obvious goal is to grow in that area. idk why you see very little practical use of the new features regarding animation. all animators i‘ve talked to so far seem to think the opposite. me included... wouldn‘t want to animate in any prior version anymore.

yes.

double click?

no, i mean the tutorial for the new face rig. 😉

the differences are quite huge. if i'd have to make a car analogy i'd say the one from back then was a skoda and the new one is a mercedes. much more comfortable to animate, better controller design, a lot more features, more flexibility. the only thing the old one was better was performance, so it was a very fast skoda 😉. with a lot more features of course the rig got more complex, but i spent a lot of time optimizing it for speed, so it's not that much slower. definitely worth the trade off IMO... used the new one in several productions now, it's much more fun to animate. the most significant change is the face rig, the one that was available on vimeo just had a very simply face rig included. i've been using the way more complex face rig for a longer while now, but i never made it available for download because it was too hard to understand how to apply it to your character for the average user. so for the r23 release i spent a lot of time optimizing that process and making it way more user friendly.. you still should watch the tutorial i recorded, no way you can make a face rig like that entirely self-explanatory. it will be available soon on cineversity.

you can build a face rig from a template and then simply constrain that to your own body rig or to another template rig, even when it's still live and not made editable. although i always recommend that, because you gain a little bit of performance when you make them editable. you have the choice between two face rigs now, one that comes with the toon rig and another standalone one made by bret bays.. they are quite similar in what they can do, if i should describe the difference it would be that the toon rigs face rig is (well you probably guessed it) aimed at cartoony more exaggerated faces and brets rig is more aimed towards realism. but that doesn't mean you can't use brets one for cartoon stuff or the toon one for realistic characters. they are both pretty flexible. in the end it's just about which one fits your needs and habits better. there are going to be tutorials out soon on how to apply them to your characters and how to use them.