spiralstair

Hi I have an animated mesh and would like to attach a null to one of the points on the mesh. How can I do this? Thanks

Hi all - two questions 1. If I have two nulls, both with animated position, is there a tool in cinema to create a simple spline between the two nulls, which will animate according to the position, changing length accordingly? 2. If I have a circular spline how can I randomly distribute points on the spline (i.e rather than uniform subdivision)? Thanks

Hi Cerbera - long time ! houdini node trees don't just go up and down - or in fact left to right - a model can exist in several parallel (universes) at the same time. If you are interested check out Peter Claes's series on building a bridge

Hi @Cerbera do you use spline patch in your modelling workflow? I’ve been lost learning Houdini where coons mesh is very common.

unfortunately not - forester is procedural and so cannot interact dynamically with other geometry assets. If you were working the other way around you may be able to get this to work by exporting the tree/flora as alembic and then potentially c4d objects could interact with it. But in this case the tree would drive any simulations. And the alembics that forester produces are so heavy that it would take a very powerful CPU to make it work.

Only that if you set / apply a material and define UV mapping before you simulate it should already be correct after the simulation. TBH I don't know if that also applies in MD but it does in C4D, say if you were using its own cloth system. CBR Marvellous Designer attributes UV's to all MD generated geometry before any simulation takes place. The UV attribute doesn't automatically transfer to your export geometry (.obj/fbx/abc) and so you need to manually select it in the export options dialogue in MD. Don't try and (re) project UV's in c4d onto MD geo - it may appear to work at first, but eventually you will see distortion especially for shell objects which contain more than one part.

Hi All can anyone help me figure out a mathematical problem regarding frames per second. I am preparing an animation sequence to go onto a render farm. I have animated a character and camera - which all looks good - except that when I did a hardware render I decided the clip should be half the speed. Now I can't quite work out the best workflow for this. Normally I just leave scene FPS at at 25 and change the render FPS to 50. But the render farm I am working with cannot accept variation between these two and so I need to bake in the slow motion. With camera it is easy - just to scale the time x 2 in the animation timeline. But the character was originally made using an FK rig converted as an alembic into the sequence in order to keep the scene preparation times down (for the sake of speeding up rendering on the farm). How can I slow down an alembic? or How can I export an alembic at half the speed? so that when I bring it into a 25 FPS sequence it will effectively be playing 50 FPS? Thanks

amazing thanks @bezo

Is it possible to link a null to the moving coordinates of a specific point on an animated mesh? in fact I would like to link several hundred to different points on a moving mesh, but guidance for one would be fantastic. thanks

Hi All I have an alembic animation that I have built in houdini - simple question - I would like to include several (render) instances of the same animation within a scene but each offset to start at different frames. I see that its not possible to manually modify instances - but I was wondering does instancing actually matter with alembic? since it is always referring to an external file? it's a heavy file (2GB per frame) and for the sake of rendering I am trying to keep my geometry loading times to a minimum. Is there a way around this?

Hi I am trying to work out a way to animate a computer mouse cable. The mouse will move on a surface around x and z axis and I had drawn out a sweep spline for the cable, but am looking for best way to make the cable move in a realistic manner i.e bend a lot close to the mouse and not so much further away. I guess one way of doing it is with an IK chain. Is there a way with splines to fix some points on the spline so that the curve moves dynamically? thanks

Thanks @zeden I will still be going beyond January, I just need to close this particular scene by then. So if you have any time please get in touch. @Freemorpheme many thanks, I will send you a message

Hello everyone, I would like to reach out to the c4d community to ask for help for an ambitious film project that I am working on. I am an artist and academic based in London and have spent 2 years working on a 60 minute experimental film called "Quasi-Monte Carlo". The project is 3/4 completed, but I have realised that I have run out of time to complete the remaining modelling/texturing to a level that meets the work already completed. And so I am asking if anyone is interested in supporting the project by undertaking one of many small modelling tasks, which would normally take me 2-3 hours each. But there are probably 50 small modelling tasks or more and I don't have that many hours left. Here is the trailer for the film - this is not yet public - so it is a preview link for the cafe The film is entirely not for profit but will carry a visible public profile, IMDB page etc. The film initially won a highly prestigious UK award in 2017 to receive production funding from the Arts Council directly from UK tax payers. It will be shown in Museums initially in Europe, hopefully worldwide and also in film festivals. I haven't taken a fee for the work, In fact I have paid to make it and spent 2 years working on it almost to the exclusion of all other things. During the last 2 years many, many people have contributed in various ways from camera to sound to catering. @Cerbera has been incredible in providing very generous support with modelling, although it has been a lot to put on his shoulders. I was hoping that a couple of people from the cafe community would be interested in contributing towards the project, by offering a few hours of modelling time, sharing out the workload and forming a team built scene for the film. I also think it could be an exciting project to see developing here in the cafe, a way to share wireframes, renders for feedback and trouble solving. THE TASK The first major deadline is to complete a very large office scene by 5th January 2019. I have the outline geometry (below) which currently looks like a boring office, I want to rip out the stand in computers and furnish it with a lot of details, tools and machinery to make it look like the dream CGI workplace. It has 40 desks and the camera will move around looking at all of the details on the desks. We will see what is happening on the screens, but there will be no people. I have a list of core objects that I need ranging from PC workstations, to bags, clothes, office toys and I am also looking for suggestions - I can only see my own workstation - I am sure your desk is set up very differently and this would be interesting to show. I have included some images also which are of completed scenes in the film to give you a sense of the level of detailing that I am looking for. None of the models that you see are particularly complex, most of the work is in the texturing and lighting, which I can do. Is this something you would be interested in contributing towards (in the next couple of weeks?). If so I will put together a core object list ASAP and post it on this thread. There are also other things that I could use help with, I have a couple of objects to UV unwrap and a bit of help texturing (if you are a substance user) would also be amazing. Let's see what happens Many thanks Paul

In the case last night the scene file was initially saved into a folder dedicated to the textured model. As in I placed the textures there initially and they did not exist anywhere else on my system. All of a sudden they are gone?

Thanks @srek i see your point but I can't think of any other way this can be happening. I do a test render , all is fine. I save a backup with assets, close this file and reopen the original local file and the files have moved from my tex folder

Hi i have come across a (bug?) several times recently and wondered if I am alone? intermittently when using save as with assets command, some of the texture files are moved to the new location rather than copied. for example last night I setup a render queue and found this morning that the render was incorrect as some tex files were missing. I save all files onto a backup drive, but had set the render to read the file on my desktop. eitherway, I have had this problem several times recently and it has been costly, any advice here?

Did you make the speedboat wake in Houdini?

Hi im pulling out the little hair I have left trying to figure out which of the camera callibration tools to use and how to get the best solve. i have a source video clip, which shows an interior space with lots of useful strong architectural lines to map onto. the clip starts with a camera pan and then finishes on a still frame. My aim aim is two fold: 1) to track the material so that objects can be added into the interior space during the pan. I have solved this pretty well with camera mapper, although the scale of the camera/objects seems completely arbitrary. 2) to accurately block out the main architectural surfaces for the final (still) shot, as the stage for some dynamics collisions. The architectural modelling doesn't need to be too complex but the scale used is important as the dynamics require real world scale. on top of that the original footage was shot on a half decent canon l series lens (24mm) and i suspect there is a little bit of lens distortion going on, but when I have tried to correct this and then add it to camera callibrator the solves seem to be a bit odd and eventually off centre. So my questions here are A) can the motion camera be used instead of camera calibrator? Since the interface is far less annoying? Or or should I try and combine both methods? b) if So, with calibrator are there any rules to know about how near or far from camera lines should be set. as it happens the scene is almost square on to an architectural facade meaning there is almost no reliable z depth lines to follow. So far, I have had to solve z-depth indirectly and it leads me to weird results. i have followed the digital meat tutorial on this and watched a couple of others, but still haven't managed to create a reliable camera solve. any tips would be extremely helpful for my sanity. many many thanks p Edit - I am using a video clip for the motion camera and a still made of the last frame of this for callibrator

@jed you are incredible. Thank you. That's perfect.

@jed you are a legend, thank you so much. May I also ask, is there any xpresso commands which can be used to add variable shake to these controllers? For example Main dolly Z moves constantly with linear keyframing but there is slight speed variation to add slight imperfections into the movement. I often use the motion cam controls for cameras and wonder if there is a way to add something similar to motion of objects?

Hi all I have built a model of a camera dolly, which I cannot unfortunately share or show an image of and so instead I have made a basic block model rig and attached it here. My question is how to best setup the scene to allow for easy animation of the different layers of the hierarchy? Would it help to use Xpresso? If this is the case can anyone please help me setup (at least one of the controls in xpresso) because Xpresso confuses me. The model is setup with a hierarchy, the same as in the attached file. The base is parent to the drum, and then to the arm and so on. I would like to be able to control the timings of each of these pivots - without having to dive into many strands of the timeline and keyframe them individually. A typical movement would involve the entire rig moving along the track, the drum moving up and then the arm and camera all pivoting. Thanks in advance P CAMERA_DOLLY_RIG.c4d

Hi All I am looking at the feasibility of making a crowd animation using 4 or 5 different animated characters as the basis for a group. Basic question - is there any way to offset animation times with cloners in c4d? I am going to look into working with houdini as an alternative, although my original animations are in c4d - of course I can export alembic, but i don;t think this would get the most out of a procedural workflow. So, back to c4d - any tips on how to approach this in ways that involve cloners and difference? Thank you

@HSrdelic - could you please help a little more? My reason for initially asking for the triangle formula was to make a scalable corridor space with zigzag walls I have produced this file using a sweep with your tracer - however I would like to animate the corridor extending/contracting - and I am using the *matrix count* float as a controller for this. However the y position of the tracer (and therefore the sweep) changes on odds and even numbers of this control. Do you know if there is a way to stabilise this? Thank you triangle corridor.c4d

yikes! This is fantastic thanks @HSrdelic

Thanks Dan