SDiraptor

nice, many thanks!! really appreciate that!

That's pretty good - many thanks for this tip! I kept the soft option selected and didn't need to invert. It looks great in renderer, but the alpha channel does have a hard edge on the horizon. I've played around with the Function, Blend mode and Distance on the proximal shader but can't seem to get rid of it in any way - see below. I might just put a vertical plane at the back with a background on instead of trying to render the alpha, but let me know if there's any ways to soften the horizon as it would be easier to mask it out! See below, was hoping for the hard edge on the horizon to be a soft fade out. Originally planned to put a different background behind it in post to reduce rendering a background. But the hard edge on the horizon doesn't make this very clean.

Is it possible to fade an object out over a distance? I know it's possible to do over time by using the display tag and animating the visibility. But in a single frame I want an object to go from opaque one end to transparent the other. Here's my material, a tiled effect over a plane. At the far end of the plane I want it to just fade out in the distance. I know I can achieve this in post by rendering multiple passes and adding an alpha channel in After Effects. But for this project I want to keep render times down and would prefer to render one pass if possible! I can do this with a gradient in the alpha channel, but the tiled material also needs to be tiled so the two don't work together. Stacking layers and mixing them doesn't work because the tiled layer layer is always fully opaque. Looking at fusion and layer textures but I can't use materials as a shader can I? If I can, I could stack the materials in a layer texture. Bit stuck on this, appreciate any help 🙂

@bezo thanks, yes, I use the help menu's a fair amount. In my haste I think I skipped most of the dresser section because it just didn't look like what I needed - so my bad! I'm using the trial version to try and tempt my manager into upgrading so I didn't want to run out of time 😉

spot on, many thanks! Especially for the cloth pinning - I couldn't find out how to do this for the life of me.

Here's an example scene. Hope that helps! cloth drape v1.zip

Been looking this up for a while but I'm new to cloth tag so I might be trying to do this in completely the wrong way. Here's a very simple scene example of what I'm trying to do. The orange plane has a cloth tag. The green cube object has a cloth collider. I want to attach the end of the orange cloth to the top of the green cube, so that when I play the animation, the cloth falls down around the green object and hangs off the top. When I play this, the cloth falls down on the green object. One problem here is that it actually stretches massively, and I want to prevent it from stretching at all. The original plane was 100cm wide, 230cm long with 1cm segments, I thought this would be high enough count to prevent stretching. I've got flexion and rubber at 0%. When the animation continues, the cloth stretches further and then starts to fall off the object. I've recreated this scene a few times in different ways to get it to work. Pinning the cloth by putting a cloth collider through seems to have some effect but also can seem to form the cloth very oddly. Is there a way to prevent the cloth from stretching and to get it to hang nicely from the top?

That would be very valuable and helpful if you don't mind. Thank you! Interesting, I presumed that because it had the particle simulation and the help topics covered dynamics it would be included. thanks for confirming!

Using Cinema 4D visualise R20. This includes the particles simulation system: But when I look at tutorials, pretty much any use of the particles involves using Collider tags, Dynamic tags, rigid body tags etc etc. But I can't find any of these? From what I've read, it sounds like there should be a separate Simulation Tags menu, but I got nothing. Am I missing something obvious? It feels like I should have them somewhere because I've got all the help menu's for the tags: Do I have them or not, if so where can I find these, and if not, can I get them at all as an addon etc? I've got everything I need for a project except these tags! Really appreciate any help! 🙂

just been going through the help items, looks like multi-instance is only for particles.

boom, thank you!! Everything I searched came up with Mograph this Mograph that... 😜 While messing about I found a "Multi-Instance" mode on the Instance object. Can this do the same thing and create a series of copies for me? Just searching for tutorial on it, can't find anything much rn.

I knew this but for the life of me can't remember how to do it. I have Visualize R20 so no Mograph cloner. I want to create 20 instances of an object, evenly spaced in a straight line. There's a way to do it, I know there is, but can't remember how! I struggle with this every time. I thought it was something to do with the move tool options, or a similar tool. You could select the object, select the tool and the tool options gave you a chance to clone the object into several instances. You could set the distance apart and qty of copies etc.

😂😂😂 fair enough! but my job isn't animation focused - there's no justification to get octane, redshift, corona etc as the animations i'm doing are side projects to my main role. I just want to do the best I can within the limitations or R20 and would appreciate a recommendation on the best default engine to use. Note, I'm not trying to get photo-realistic renders - I'm animating products to demonstrate their capabilities, so realism isn't a goal.

This feels like a really noob question, but here goes: I've had C4D R20 kicking about for a while, only used it a little here and there with Premiere Pro / After Effects. However I've got a new PC and started doing some animation work in C4D for my company. My new PC is a Dell Precision 3640 Tower with Core i9-10900K and Nvidia Quadro P2200. I've noticed that while rendering, CPU is maxed out but GPU is hardly touched. Can I use the GPU to increase render times using the vanilla C4D install (no octane, corona etc)? And how would I utilize the GPU anyway? Can't find loads of posts on this, and most are really old, so wanted to find out the latest info on this. I've looked at ProRender and Hardware OpenGL but can't test at the moment because in the middle of a render. EDIT: maybe I should have asked what the pro's and cons or using GPU render are? I've seen some notes that physical render is slow, and that being the case would like to speed up renders, the Quadro P2200 seems decent and hoping that it can speed things up!

YES! bring it on 😁😁😁 that's exactly it.

No not in render, I'm looking to turn off materials in view panel. Seems to slow things down even there.

Basically got a similar issue to the one discussed on this link: http://forums.cgsociety.org/t/how-can-i-disable-all-textures-and-materials-in-render/1344104 I want to disable all materials while I'm working on models and animation to speed things up. My PC is ok but not a supercomputer... I'm using Xrefs and merging other models so my usual workflow of texturing as the last thing isn't applicable. The fact there are plugins built for older versions of C4D indicate to me that this feature has been a requirement, but as I'm on R20 I wondered if there is a way to do this built in yet? Prefer not to use plugins unless I have to.

@jed works spot on. thanks for that!

Hello all, Had a look at below topic, where @Cerbera suggests using Arrowtools or Arrowmaker to make make and animate arrows. However: Arrowtools gives me the following warning when I try to install: I've closed the popup and carried on playing with it, but I don't think it's working correctly. Arrowmaker looks a better option, I've downloaded and installed plugin, but it's not appearing in C4D. According to Greyscalegorilla plugins in R20 have to be updated by developer before they're compatible. Any other suggestions how a noob can easily animate arrows in C4D? Thanks in advance!

Got it, thanks!

Great, that's what I was looking for! And just about as simple as I could have hoped. I changed to flat and got a load of lines, so I guess I need to rotate the texture as you mentioned - how do I do this? Guess I'll read up on the projection options too. Thanks for your help! Flat projection (needs rotating) Cubic projection

Hey all, I'm trying to work out how the material sizing works... I'm a bit confused about something. 1. So I start by opening a new file 2. Create a few planes, and make them a random set of sizes 3. I group them into a null object, and apply a material to the null. What I'm finding weird is that because the default tiling is 1 tile per plane, the result is the materials are scaled differently on different size objects. When I create a material, say it's carpet tiles for instance... Whatever size floor area I apply the carpet materials to, I still want the carpet tiles to be the same size don't I? You wouldn't put big carpet tiles in big rooms and small carpet tiles in small rooms... So I want some advice on workflows. Do people using C4D really sit down and work out how many times they want the material to tile over a given object? Or (this seems logical to me) is there a way to set a global scale in millimetres or something, whereby a material will always be the same size no matter the size of the object I want to apply it to? The core issue being that I have some models that with a few hundred parts in them. I want to apply a default paint texture to the all the parts within a null but I'm having issues with different size parts within the null having different scaling of materials, and I don't want to manually apply a material to hundreds of parts and work out the correct sizing of each one - it would take forever!! See screenshots below which demonstrates the different default scaling of textures.