harrymihalis

Hi, I'm working with the motion system and have some animations converted to motionclips. I'd like to know how to add some position offset to some of the joints. Like if I have a looping walk cycle, but want to lower the shoulders or head for a portion of it, whilst keeping the original baked keyframes running underneath, just offset by the amount i have adjusted the joint. Does anybody know how to go about that? Many thanks,

Hi there, I was wondering if there is a way to control the playback speed of a motionclip? I've not used them before but need to currently, and am wondering if I can set keyframes to control the rate at which they playback? Many thanks, H

Thanks @Vertex Helix, I did manage to figure out out following this tutorial, by just exporting my animation as fbx with 60 extra frames at the end, then making a motion clip and adding the same clip twice with one 60 frames before the end to blend between them

Yeah thats what I am already doing. I mean loop seamlessly as in natural flowing motion rather than just no pops. I can easily have the start and end keyframes be the same but this doesnt look right as the creature returns to a specific pose everytime it loops. Do you know a way to fade out the influence of baked keyframes over time? Something like a pose morph than can fade the strength of keyframes. I suppose maybe if I had a duplicate of the skeleton shifted back I could keyframe the strength of PSR constraints but this seems like a lot of work, do you know if motion clips can do this?

Hi there, I'm wondering if anyone knows a good technique for creating seamlessly looping character animations. I have a creature set up with expressions controlling random movements to create some different idle animations, and ideally i'l like to bake the length of the animation plus 60 frames, then copy the 60 frames from the end to the beginning and fade their influence from 100% to 0% over those 60 frames so that I can create seamless motion. Right now my technique is copying the last keyframes to the first frame and trying to blend between those and the start of the animation which never looks natural, so hoping there is something maybe involving motion clips I can do? Many thanks, H

Thanks very much @Cerbera, Pose morph could be a solution i suppose but hoping I can figure something out using dynamics to have a kind of exagerated undulating motion. Kind of shooting for something pretty over the top like the tongue in the Venom movie...

Hi everyone, I'm working on a lizard rig and need to add a suitably reptilian forked tongue to the set up. something like this video but with slower, more dynamic motion: I have already added some IK dynamics to the tail so could use something similar to that, or sweep a dynamic spline which is set to collide with the rest of the lizard mesh, but my questions are: 1. How to make the tongue retractable so that it can shot back into the lizards body 2. How to set up collisions in a way that doesn't cause horrible glitches 3. How to model the forked end of the tongue. 4. How to make the tongue follow the movement of the head. Any advice is very much appreciated, H rigged-finished-w.mp4

Thanks for your response Dan. I'm using a mixture of ragdoll and hinges as reccomended in the 2 tutorials on rigging the built-n mannequin, but the angle limit is hard to understand and the limbs on the skinned mesh keep twisting too much and joints are often bending both ways even when I have specified a limit. I'm going to have a look at autodesk motionbuilder and see if I can make something in that which I can bake out and render in c4d... shame to have to leave c4d as usually it has everything one needs but I guess no program can be perfect . Thanks for your help.

Hi there, I've been trying to find a solution for making a ragdoll rig from a character model rigged by mixamo. All I have been able to find are tutorials showing how to rig the built in mannequin, and these do not adequetly take account of orientation and the angular limit becomes extremely confusing and is often seemingly inverted or doesn't accurately display how it is actually effecting the movement of the collision objects. In my current set up I have made collision geomettry for all the bones and have connected them together with dynamic connectors as explained in the 2-3 tutorials on the subject available. Then I have created PSR tags on the bones of the mixamo rig and parented them to the collision geomettry. The result is semi-passable but the tools c4d has for this are clearly not designed to cope with a full body rig, or i'm going about it really wrong, because arms, legs and necks are twisting all over the place in horribly unrealistic ways. Unity has a beautifully simple tool for this where you simply drag the bones from the rig into corresponding slots and in generates a perfectly set up ragdoll asset, I was wondering if there are any alternative techniques or programs I could use to achieve a more realistic result. Ideally any solutions would result in an asset that I can bring back into cinema to throw around and render, as I have the lighting and environmental dynamics the way they need to be and would like to avoid having to try and replicate that in another program. Any help much appreciated, Harry

something like this? cords.mp4

no worries got it, something very obvious slipped my mind there

Ok silly question, but what is the exact process for converting a baked softbody simulation to geomettry at a specific frame? everything i'm trying looses the deformation.

awesome great idea, that was the main thing i was scratching my head over - I could also make the splines have dynamics so they move slightly around the blinds..,

Fantastic thanks so much! I'll let you know how I get on..

Hi there, I'm modelling a scene of an office which has been trashed or abandoned and am wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to create tangled office blinds as seen in these two images. Any ideas much appreciated. Many thanks, H

hey just an update after much tearing out of hair over UV mapping in realflow i'm a little closer to a finished shot, here's a low res render from cinema. Slickspillslow-1-1.m4v

Yeah I don't really understand it either to be honest. I got some tips from a RealFlow veteran who told me I was doing several things wrong, so starting again armed with a better understanding of the parameters. The final render will be a close up of the central portion of the mesh, so those blobby edges won't be on show.

Hi natevplas, I'm making good progress with realflow now. I found an old tutorial for realflow and Maya on making lava flows which details a technique for pinning a texture to the mesh which is then deformed along with the particle movement and adapted it to work in c4d. This then bakes out to UVs that can be used to drive the transparency of the thinfilm effect in c4d. In terms of the natural motion I ended up using a grey scale version of the large scale oil spill and mapping the roughness and stickyness parameters of my collision surface to that so the fluid kind of traces the formation of densities and flows in the image, but then moves on and gradually evolves its own shape. That speed information also comes out as a vertex map which I can use to drive the variation of the thin film, along with a little animation of my sky hdr and a bump map from the realflow UVs to add some detail. I'm still figuring out how to handle exporting the number of frames the client needs (2,250), but feel im definitely on the right track at last. Many thanks for your input! H

Hi natevplas thanks so much for your many good suggestions I will certainly be trying them out. Cinema's Thin Film shader already has a built in function to map noise or other shaders to the thickness of the oil film, and i'm getting some good results in terms of the material now using a GGX reflection layer with additive transparency and some high IOR numbers. I will certainly be using After Effects to add in extra detail and was testing with turbulent displacement but your suggestion of animating the liquify effect is much better. I'm not having much luck with RealFlow and am finding the simulation times and filesizes pretty unmanageable as unfortunately I don't have access to a super computer, although I was considering looking into houdini as I managed to unearth this code for up-resing fluid simulations. http://www.tkim.graphics/CPT/ Unfortunately I'm on Windows and it seems like this code is only compatible with Mac/Linux, and I have no idea how to use Houdini. Anyway thanks for your input!

Hi there, I've been asked to create a simulation of a large scale oil spill as seen from a high altitude. I'm currently trying to use RealFlow and then bringing in those meshes with a thin film shader, and then applying displacement in After Effects. Is there some way I could apply a highly detailed turbulent displacement that would respect the direction and speed of the realflow meshes? Attached are some examples of the sort of image the client is looking for. Any ideas on how to approach recreating this with convincing dynamic motion, shifting iridescent colors, and a good amount of fine detail, whether in cinema, after effects or any platform would be very much appreciated.