JThreeD

Nice, that's a great feature, thanks for the explanation. I just had an idea while watching the video. It would be interesting to host something like a game of HORSE between the different software. Pose a basic motion graphics challenge, then have folks post a video of how they would accomplish it in C4D, Blender, or Houdini. It could reveal some creative solutions and a fun way to compare the different software. EDIT: Of course, immediately after making the suggestion I find @Icecaveman & @Cerbera duking it out in this post:

Thanks for sharing, I do see you've created a foreach loop with a timeshift in there. I'm aware of what makes Houdini great, and I've encountered the limitations of C4D many times, but I'm just not ready to completely abandon it yet. The venerable Dr. Sassi at Cineversity actually offered an alternative to using the Time Offset in the Step Effector, which can not effect User Data keyframes. He suggested using a Blend Cloner and the Modify Clone parameter in a Plain Effector along with a Linear Field. I think @HappyPolygon had a good suggestion of showing equivalent C4D tools in Houdini, that could go a long way to creating a bridge between the two. Since the Cloner and offsetting clones with fields is such a big thing in C4D, demonstrating the easiest way to accomplish it in Houdini would be an interesting tutorial.

Actually I have a challenge for you, but please don't feel obligated, you are totally welcome to pass it up. In this C4D project, I have an object that I'm trying to offset the animation in a Cloner using the Step Effector (Time Offset), but it doesn't seem to work with User Data. How would you create a similar setup that works with Houdini? 220530-cone_sphere_boolean_test-02.c4d The animation is set to the User Data of the Boole object directly under the Cloner.

Perhaps you can share what ideas you have for Houdini tutorials. I actually taught Maya at a university for a couple years, the most fundamental things I covered were basic navigation, geometry, modeling, and animation. Personally I'm not afraid of Houdini, I just have a lot on my plate between C4D, Redshift, and X-Particles already. The biggest barrier I had with Houdini was distinguishing all the different systems, between SOPS, SCHOPS, MMOPS, BOPS, and BLOPS 🙂 I didn't have the time to make all the distinctions. One thing I really appreciated were the logarithmic unit interfaces for changing values, wish C4D could implement.

I don't have any requests, but I'll gladly watch whatever you have to put out 🙂

I would try logging into your Maxon account and submitting a support ticket with them. They're actually pretty good about trying to help, and if you're on a subscription it's part of what you're paying for. They might ask you to provide log files.

Essentially you want to assign your age parameter to the particle color, add a Redshift object tag, add a 'Color User Data' node to your Redshift material, and then reference the particle color. Here are instructions: 1) xpEmitter > Display > Color Mode: Gradient (Parameter) > Gradient Parameter: Age 2) Redshift Object Tag > Particles > Mode: Sphere Instances 3) Redshift Material > Color User Data Node > Iputs > Attribute name: Presets > Particles > Particle Color Result: If you want to control the color in Redshift, you can make it a B&W gradient in the emitter, and feed into a 'Ramp' node in the Redshift material. This video is helpful, although it's older so the specific steps and UI are different:

In reference to @Cerbera comment about topology, that 2nd level can be important when talking about animation/deformation. If you plan on animating the object with deformers, having even quads can make a difference.

This is a good video on how to assign different materials to cloned objects, which is what I'm assuming you're trying to do:

What you're looking at is an experimental feature or custom tool being built by Pixar for their internal pipeline. This kind of thing is more common in Maya, which offers more obscure animation pipeline plugins, often times at enterprise/studio prices. Maya does have a corrective blend shape workflow built in, which allows you to do something similar, essential create additional deformation on top of a skinned and animated character rig: The closest thing in C4d that I can think of, is the Correction deformer, which offers it's own set of post deformer editing abilities: There may be something similar in Blender, but I'm not familiar with it.

I've used Arnold with Maya. It's a great render engine, but haven't touched it in a long time. With all renderers, there's usually a hair material that can render splines. In Redshift, rendering splines also requires the use of an object tag that has curve settings, which translates curves to renderable objects. Without any research I would assume Arnold does the same. Try googling "rendering hair arnold c4d" or "rendering curves arnold c4d"

Wow, I just looked up trueSpace, what a trip! I actually didn't start learning C4D until 2015, but my first attempt to learn 3D animation was back in 1998 when there was an elective on LightWave in the Computer Science department at my university. Unfortunately it was little more than a review of the manual, and I had no access to the software outside of it. I can't remember exactly when I started coming to this forum, but I remember seeing your posts. I also remember Cactus Dan being a fixture with his plugins. I was actually alarmed this past year when Igor started removing old posts that were still appearing on Google searches, so answers to my questions were turning up 404, but I'm glad to see he's at least kept an archive going back to 2016. Although it can be hard to recognize when things get buried in the past, I appreciate what you, and many others, have contributed to this community.

Brushing up on some X-Particles stuff and came across this tutorial: It includes using data mapping and curl noise with flowfield dynamics. Here's a link to the free FBX/BVH animal motion files that they used: https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC

I agree, I really like coming to this forum. The layout is nice and the functions are smooth. My only request is to not change it for the time being 🙂 I actually started browsing around the other day, and noticed your 3D Wiki section and Pipeline Tools, I don't know if they're really necessary. In my opinion (and please only take it as an opinion) you could probably save yourself the trouble. I don't know exactly what you're trying to do with that section, but if you're trying to create an online reference for all things 3D, it might be more work than it's worth. On a side not, you seem to be missing Nuke in your compositing section. I ran into someone online the other day doing a live stream in VR of their Nuke workflow, and to be honest, I was pretty blown away what can be accomplished with UV passes. Though when they mentioned the project size, they were talking in the hundreds of gigabytes when it cam to 4k EXRs. Also, I would like to mention, if you're trying to create a home for all things 3D, you should think about hosting an X-Particles section. I started paying for the plugin a year ago and realized it's severely underserved when it comes to online resources. They stopped maintaining their own forum and shifted to Discord, which I think is a horrible option. There's no good way to browse through or search old topics. Personally I think Maxon should just bring them into the fold, I don't know how the corporate politics work, but Insydium seems like they deserve to be better supported by the Maxon community.

The simplest setup I can think of would be to create a bundle of tubes with a cloner, then use a Boolean to intersect the tube cloner with an object. Here's a quick example: https://file.io/IOYHyvA5nhMC The Boolean is very intensive, so it's not a very practical setup, but that's the basic idea. It's up to you to try and optimize it.