HappyPolygon

Alright, There is a better and easier way to do it BUT it requires C4D > R23. The following project file is completely useless because it was made in R20 but you can use it in more recent C4D versions to make it work by adding the following: go.c4d Enable Fields on the Matrix Weight Tag. Insert the Box Field in that tag's Field List. Expect to work properly when hit play The concept: The Box Field changes the Weight of a matrix element from 0 to 100, affecting its visibility (via the Plain Effector). This still works in R20 but their is a crucial difference. After the field has moved away from the matrix element its weight automatically drops to 0 again making it invisible. In more recent versions the inclusion of Fields in the Matrix Weight Tag enables the use of Field Layers. Using the (by default existent) Freeze Effect the weight of the matrix element won't loose its weight value after the passing of the Box Field.

I would try to recreate this using particles with 0 speed, no death rate, no forces no nothing else. Since each pawn spawns from a previous one then having a particle emitter traveling on a predetermined path giving birth to a particle in constant time intervals makes more sense. To give the impression of a pawn giving birth to other pawns just make a pawn a child of the emitter and have it follow the emitter. The hardest part will be to control the speed of the emitter to coincide with each passing through the center of each birth point, since spawning is strictly determined from time and no other C4D mechanic can influence it (Fields, Effectors etc.). While writing this I had a better idea. Give me some time to test it,

If the Displacer Deformer does not work for you try the SubPolygon Displacement Channel from a Material. The only dissadvantage is that you won't have a viewport preview, but that's also an advantage. You can use a non-rendered proxy of the object using the Displacement Deformer if you need to take close-ups and always have a general awareness of the volume.

I have been asking Maxon for the last couple of years for a Shortest Path algorithm. Someone can have a look to a recent post about a new plugin

So how did you do it ? Is it particles ? Is it splines ? At least share the file or make an export to obj for the OP to use.

Your approach has two flaws: It cannot scale down to 0 polygons effectively when they are connected to each other. In order to do that you need to know exactly how much far away each point is from the center of mass so you can enter half of that as a value to the Plain Effector. In your scene if you hit render you can still see the scaled-down polygons. Estimating this value is very hard 2. Your second tube was neither round or straight as the first one. This is a serious difference from the first object. A polygon or point can be manipulated relative -to many things. Usually they scale relative to their normals. You set polygons to move towards the Z-axis by a certain value. So the affected polygons (that also are connected to each other) move towards the center because their normals point to the center due to their arrangement (circular). In order to both move and stay connected to each other they squiz themselves before reaching their destination. So scaling was a by-product in your case. You should be scaling their points. Now moving to the hexagonal tube, each polygon's normal did not point towards the center. Flat surfaces of many polygons point collectively to the same direction. That's why you witness that weird brake on the corners when trying to move them along their local Z-axis (normal axis). As mentioned before polygons can be scaled relative to many things. If your object does not have a common center to scale down towards along all of its mass the trick by providing a single value won't work. So you can try to make the polygons scale relative to something else. This time the Effector itself (pivot point). do that just change the Deformation to Point, Transform Mode to Absolute and Transform Space to Effector. Move the Effector itself in the middle along any point of the object and also move the Timeline. You will notice that the object vanishes by scaling down but it does so ineffectively. The reason is this: a. The effector is stationary. As the Field passes through so must do the Effector. So every point wants to scale (points do not actually scale) towards the effectors position. b. the object gets deformed in many unwanted ways. This is because the polygons are connected and want to remain like so. So an Effector is not a good way to "vanish" an object in the way you'd like to (by warping it like if it was sucked by a wormhole). The only way I've seen Effectors to make objects disappear is with the use of the PolyFX. PolyFX will disconnect all polygons so other Effectors can manipulate them discretely. In your case scale them to 0. The problem with that is obvious: Your mesh will break up, even with Fields disjoining polygons at the latest of stages will most of the times not be a plesant visual effect. None of the above is a problem with a deformer. A deformer will move each point of a mesh according to a differential space formula. So essentially we still have a scaling of polygons as a by-product but it's not that obvious because we don't explicitly deal with movement, scaling or rotation.

OK I've finally got my way around the numerous disappointments and came up with this: lattice.c4d to open it you need the best plugin in the world Network.7z from Noseman There is one more step you can do to make it a bit more parametric : use the Segment Capsule from SceneNodes to be able to control the number of intermediate control points of the vertical splines. Now that I look the photo again I feel like an idiot because the structure has nothing to do with what I just upload... Anyway see also this branched structure.c4d Only play with the Seeds inside the cloners, do not increase the number of clones more than two... it gets crowded. And a spin-off which I think is even better branched structure with network.c4d this also needs the plugin

If you need to scale then you scale. Using the Plain Effector you did not scale, you where moving all points towards the Z-axis. linear field.c4d

Well, my first idea didn't work because the results were not good and because the C4D dynamics system do not allow for perpetual motion. Unfortunately due to a bug I can't provide a better solution I thought of. And of course I can't even test the rope idea because I don't have R2023

I think what you could be googling is "organic lattice", "mycelium" and "porous structure".

I can think of two solutions. One with branching and one without. They easy one is without branching just make a null bounce inside a cube and trace it. The other involves the same idea but using TPs for branching out once a while. I'll demonstrate the first one in a few hours If I had 2023 I would also try out some tangled rope dynamics with high collision radius.

It does mention multiple views but all demonstration videos show amazing results with just a front view. I think all those videos are just publicity stunts and total lies. Providing more than one picture makes this "hidden AI" no different than a photogrammetry app. The fact that the results are so close replicas to the original image makes the app even more fishy. So far all AIs produce quite deviant results from what they are fed as input. You can provide a 2D image to DreamStudio or similar and set it to have little impact on the image but the paradigm is give an image take an image, and generally best results happen when both input and output are of the same type (with the exception of text to voice and vice versa) this is totally different. NVidia's best AI 3D generations even produce textures. Could it really be that what Kaedim's AI just isn't trained to produce textures ? Even Blender projects the generated image on the geometry. It's not even that much of a cost for their "Quality Control team member" to project the provided image... if their results tend to be so close to the depicted image this should be no problem at all. I just wonder how much one has to wait after pressing the "generate" button. How long would a skilled modeler need to clean that House from AI garbage ? If the time needed is not less from what a skilled user would need to actually model the concept art then it's totally a scam and a waste of money.

I controversial because I'm having a hard time to accept what I see. If this was true then 2-minute papers would certainly make a video about it. Rumors claim that it's not really an AI but a real person modeling on-demand behind the API. Does anyone care to try and give us a review ? This is the most expensive AI app I've encountered so far billing 6$ for a trial instead for a free trial. https://kaedim3d.com/ The only competitor is https://make3d.app/?ref=theresanaiforthat

What ? You want to screen record C4D using C4D ? No C4D does not provide any screen capturing capabilities other than color picking. I think here is a way to record user actions but for animation purposes not screen recording. There's probably some good screen recording app that will record only when pressing mouse buttons or keys but I'm not aware of any.

This is a serious question regardless how stupid it may sound due to my complete lack of professional experience in CG. At least in my Country from what I've been hearing amongst graphics designers in the 2D realm (Corel, Adobe Designer, Photoshop), they get very frustrated when the client comes to their office asking for a poster, flyer or busyness card giving them a time-worn out card as a template for the designer to recreate or do something similar and consider it for granted that the designer will be able in no time and without extra cost redesign they logo from the card itself or even from a low-res image from their FB page. (is this also common in your place ?) Does this also happen in 3D? Could a similar company approach an office for a render of their product (already in market and not still in design) without giving them the CAD or CAM product file? I've never seen a bow like this before... I thought all bows should comply with standard regulations to be eligible for participation in the Olympics. Unless of course it's not meant for competitive sports.... 🦌🦌🦌

I have R20 and people sharing their projects with 2023.2 work just fine if they don't contain any later generators like Pyro, Mesher, SceneNodes or Rope/Cloth simulations. You should move on soon though because there's a pattern where every 5 years the compatibility with older versions is cut off due to significant changes on many features.

I get what you mean. In my mind all these "alternative" roads are being perceived as "levels of quality" in the photorealism context. Standard Render/Standard Material < Physical Renderer/Reflectance Channel < RedShift Material Nodes are completely different. I consider them as a low-level procedural shader construction toolkit. I would advice beginners to learn those systems in this order to understand bit-by-bit how CG lighting works and build their intuition rather than jumping all at once on RedShift or Physical.

This is unrelated but it is so funny I had to share it

(Probably my first original 3D article) This is a list of 10+1 useful yet overlooked or unappreciated features in C4D. 10) Scene Nodes Scene Nodes made their debut with R23 as an experimental feature drawing developer resources resulting R23 and the next couple of releases deprived from any major features. Due to its unusual for C4D UI, workflow and intuitiveness standards most users tried to stay away from it in a “let others figure it out first” response. None-the-less Scene Nodes are here to stay despite many people’s beliefs it would soon flop. Now many users do not hesitate to use Capsules but still quite few will spend time making their own, propagating the belief that SceneNodes maybe are not that powerful to produce what they expect or compete with other systems like Blender’s GeoNodes or Houdini. The Truth is that behind the scenes more and more people are working with SceneNodes and soon tutorials and new Capsules will be popping more frequently as witnessed with the last couple of releases. 9) Polygon Reduction This little generator is rarely used. Due to its name and function most users will rarely even considering using it because “Who wants to compress their geometry in a pile of ugly mess anyway, especially when Remesh is around to do it better”. Actually the Polygon Reduction can come in handy in abstract modeling, weird animations and my favorite: as an indirect uniform instance distribution. Polygon Reduction has a useful Preserve 3D Boundaries option. So when the Object Surface distribution mode of a Cloner fails to satisfy and you end up hitting the Seed value for half an hour to land a distribution where you don’t have intersecting instances, try to populate your surface uniformly use the Polygon Reduction as an instance in Vertex distribution. If the scale of your instances is not an issue throw a Push Apart Effector. 8 ) Sculpting Although not as powerful as ZBrush is, if you don’t want Forger because you don’t work on a tablet or don’t want a subscription to ZBrush, then this is your best alternative. It includes all the essentials for sculpting plus many advanced tools. It’s a quite complete tool case. Probably the most invaluable feature is to turn your sculpts to a Displacement Texture using the Bake Sculpt. Blender boasts its recent 3.5 release about its VDMs (Vector Displacement Maps) after ZBrush later this year made it possible to copy sculpted details as brushes and reuse them while C4D had it all along since R15. Plus the very useful and overlooked Projection tool. Which can also project tubed meshes ! 7) Camera Calibrator Tag This is another tool most users haven’t ever used myself included. It is used for Camera Mapping and provides many useful parameters and options for a quick camera placement from a reference image. It’s basically the equivalent of Motion Tracker but for still images. 6) Tension Tag The Tension Tag is placed in the Character Tag menu so most users that aren’t concerned with Character Rigging overlook it and don’t know it can also be used for modeling. Although you can achieve the same effects using the Displacer Deformer, the Tension Tag is more preferable for animations when the amount of deformation of a polygon from its initial state alters the Weight Map of the object allowing for local effects on regions of structural stress. Try doing this Reaction Diffusion without Fields! I think it’s faster too. And we have the Tension Tag to thank for this since R17 (I think). 5) Feather Object Right in the middle of this Top 10 list lies the Feather Object. I don’t just rarely see projects that use feathers. I’ve just never seen any feathered projects ever. And I’ve never used that object myself either! I might have seen a scene or two during MAXON’s demo showreels but you never know what percentage of those scenes are C4D. It’s a quite interesting generator with many parameters carefully designed to model any type of plume. It’s also a generator that doesn’t work on geometry like the Hair object but on guides. It essentially generates guides for guides. So if you want to turn any hairy model into a feathered model just put the Hair object under the Feather oblject! (also works for splines) 4) Instance Object Who uses Instance objects, right? Cloners create instances themselves by default why should I need an Instance object ? Maybe it’s used only when you turn a Cloner to an Editable Object. The truth is that the Instance Object can make your scenes a lot lighter when you don’t use a Cloner yet you do use a lot of copies of the same objects. Most users overlook it because the first thing that comes to mind when you need a lot of something is to clone it with the Cloner. Probably the Instance Object is what makes the Cloner work in stealth mode. I'll let the Master Shapiro show you one practical use of this object. 3) Smoothing Deformer Oh the Smoothing Deformer! With a bent tube as an icon (a flat iron R25+), it doesn’t really excite. Also the name doesn’t excite either. Usually users when they want to smooth things out they’ll use the Subdivision Surface generator (SDS). But what if you don’t want to increase the number of your polygons? Yes you guessed right. But wait, what are the Relax and Stretch modes? Stretch will try to maintain the overall shape and volume of your object. So any hard edges will be preserved while polygons try to be of homogenous area. The Relax is the most interesting one. People ask all the time how to make stills with realistic cloth wrinkles and will resort to cloth simulations or even sculpting… Look no further, this is your salvation! With just a few mindless brushstrokes with the Brush tool this deformer will blow your mind. 1) Plane under SDS. 2) Plane without SDS, just play with the Brush (Mesh->Transform Tools [M~C]), 3) SDS again 4) Just apply the deformer in Relax Mode. 2) MoSpline Turtle My favorite. MoSpline is not a rare tool on users arsenal. Who doesn’t like those sexy curves, and the icon is the most elegant in the whole app (talking about the old one). But the Turtle mode is just absent from any C4D project I’ve ever seen. It’s like it doesn’t exist… I guess people see those unintelligible symbols and delete the poor tree before a virus turns C4D into Houdini. The Turtle mode is highly unappreciated. Although it does have room for improvement in its capabilities, what someone can achieve with it is quite impressive and there is no other way to do it (except maybe coding it in Python). Anyone with affection for fractals appreciates this tool. Unfortunately most people love only the colored Mandelbrot type fractals. Line fractals deserve some love too! 1) XPresso Well, what did you expect? Although a lot of users do use XPresso, still very few are well knowledgeable with it. Most users relate XPresso only with Thinking Particles and this is the main reason most users resent XPresso, because it doesn’t deliver easy, fast and intuitive particle setups. There are also many shady corners in XPresso that are rarely used in scenes so most people don’t know how they could even be used. What for should someone use Dynamics nodes or Hair nodes ? Who knows ? Anyhow, XPresso is very powerful tool if you know how to use it, and it has an overlooked cousin feature the Driver Tag that developers made just for those who don’t like XPresso. Bonus Feature Pyroclusters The most underappreciated feature ever. Today it’s totally outdated because we have Pyro. But if you don’t have RedShift or any VDB compatible renderer what will you do? Just look at those clouds! 0 voxels, 0 GPU RAM needed. There are some preset shapes you can use like box and cylinder which I have no idea what practical purpose they serve but the Hemisphere can be used to see clouds from below. The downside is that you don’t have the flexibility Pyro offers because you need a particle setup, and sometimes particles are not enough so you have to use Thinking Particles which leads us back to XPresso. Other limitations follow like that they are not compatible with VDBs because they use apperceptive 3D shading algorithms instead of voxels, so you can’t export them to an other application and that PyroCluster does not work in conjunction with the depth-of-field functionality. Other than that, if you work natively, Pyroclusters can provide some comfort when you need some fluffy clouds or smoke. This is a special case of under appreciation because people do not appreciate the ingenuity used for this one-of-a-kind feature. I should be making a YT video 🤔

Never heard of it. Is it this ?

For me Blender is a joke when I get to see 2023 news containing a lot of exclamation marks with titles like "Blender now ha Caustics" and "Blender now supports light linking". And I'm like -how could you live like this ?-. No disrespect to Blender or its community but getting YT feed like this makes my jaw drop. How can you invent Geometry Nodes before light linking or Cycles before caustics ?

Do you have an example? Because I don't know what you mean.

I'm waiting for Princess Peach Minion How do you direct artistic shadows in big mouths when there is plenty of light in the scene ?

Using a dynamic spline with the Spline Wrap is a bad idea. You could clone the same spline and offset it a bit to use it as a rail but the fact that it's dynamic and coils in all directions makes it impossible. Maybe if you explain your target result we can figure out a different way to pull it through.

Can you bake/cache the simulation ? does that help ?