rasputin

Hey guys, You know what I would like to see in a future release of C4D? Better selection tools. It should be easier, I think, to make sophisticated selections of all kinds. Above all, I'd like to be able to, on a mesh object, select only Front-Facing Normals Polys... Or only the rear-facing normals. Also, the Phong Selection mode should be perhaps more effective... making it easier to select polys that fall along a slope. As the years have gone on, I find that my objects are often very high-poly... especially with the advent of the Volume Building features. With high poly objects, it's tedious and frustrating to make precise selections, especially if there is a jumble of Front- and Rear-facing polys in evidence. So, I say, I'd love to see R21 have some more advanced, clever and sophisticated Poly Selection tools. Thoughts? ras

Bravo, Per-Anders!

I'll prolly go in and tweak some edges to make that cushion look separate... usually with a finished VB model, I'll run it through the Polygon Reduction process.... You're right, some of the smooth perfection is lost that way, but not too much of a problem if the model is not sharply focal in a complex scene...

Here's a 1950's Moderne-type sofa chassis I designed this afternoon. It was all done using the R20 Volume Builder. Basically a thick Torus primitive with various chunky shapes Subtracted from it. A shape like this would've been a nightmare to model using just the old tools, I think you'll agree. But it was not too hard to do with Volumes. I'm lovin' the buttery-smooth shapes you can make with the VB. I'll have the rest of this room scene built in the next couple of days and will show it to you when I do. ---ras

Hey guys, This may seem like something of a n00B question, though I've been doing C4D for over a decade. It's like this: When you select a Cubic Projection mode for an object's texture, sometimes you are going to get visible seams, like the one you see in my screencap here. Question: What determines where those seams will appear on any given object? Can I hide/remove/disguise those seams.. and still keep my Cubic projection? I like the look of a Cubic Projection, it looks better than any of the other default Projection modes. Frontal projection will indeed give me a seamless look, but as we know, it risks looking unnatural inasmuch as the texture is distributed uniformly over the object, and changes in appearance with camera angle and focus distance. Thoughts? Hints? Tips? Thanks, ras

What Cerbera said. This is a job for Marvelous Designer. Not only because of the restraining cords, but because the fabric in your picture buckles in a very attractive, natural way, that I'm not sure C4D Cloth can simulate.

It already looks incredibly like her. Good job.

You bet, Sage!

Hey, VST, I have encountered much the same thing when working with volumes: sometimes my computer would be made very slow indeed by a subtraction or union. And my machine is fairly powerful, too. I found that the problem was greatly alleviated if I: made sure that the primitives or mesh objects I dropped into the Volume Builder did not already have an extremely high polycount. For example, I have my sphere primitive bumped editable with a Segment Count of 60, rather than the usual 90--100 I usually prefer. With your Cubes, make them Editable with a polycount setting of 8---8---8. The trick is to make your Volume Smoothing do all the smoothing work, rather than putting high-poly objects initially into your Volume Builder. switched the viewport's current Display Shading away from Gouraud and down to Hidden Lines mode, at least while I am doing the object translation needed for a Subtraction or Union; you can even leave your scene in Gouraud, and instead apply a custom Display Tag to your Volume Mesher to temporarily reduce the demands it's making on your computer resources. and of course, as you know, the whole Volume operation is made more CPU/RAM intensive if your Voxel Count is dialed very low, or your Smoothing Iterations is too high. One trick is to perform your Union or Subtraction while the Voxel Count is set to something loose, like, say, 5cm. Then, after you've gotten everything the way you want it, dial the Voxel Count down to something finer, like 1 cm. And, as you know, the Meshes you get as a final result of Volume Building are invariably crazy-high in polygon count. I almost always then apply a Polygon Reduction to that mesh; you can reduce your polycount up to 75% or more, with no discernible loss in visual quality. All in the name of safeguarding your computer's resources and preventing a huge hang or crash. And, vis-a-vis your texturing your objects: Bear in mind that, once you drop a mesh (or other object) into the Volume Builder, it ceases to be a "mesh". It has become a voxel volume, (a whole 'nother thang) and, as such, will not take a Texture. Only the Volume Mesher (in your OM) can receive a texture. And that Texture will apply to the whole stack of objects in the Volume Builder. Somewhere online, there is a tutorial of how you can use the Correction Deformer on the Volume Mesher to enable you to assign different textures to the different objects placed under the Volume Builder. Though usually your goal is to create a whole new mesh with a single texture, as the goal of Volume Building is not so much to allow you to to do Boolean-type operations, but rather to yield brand-new objects which possess the unique "edge-smoothing" look that Volumes afford. Best, ras

Here's my current WIP: a human skull. This was done entirely using the SCULPT feature in R20. I started out by using Volume Building, where I united a Cube and 2 Sphere primitives, to create my basic "chunky block", roughly in a skull shape... Then the rest was all done with Sculpt, looking at photographs. As you can see, because we're not working with voxels, there eventually occurs some nasty "bunching and stretching" of the polys. Increasing the Sculpt fineness/density does not really alleviate the artifacts, sadly; nor does using the Smooth feature. Maybe future releases of C4D will feature true voxel sculpting... What it needs, of course, is a Retopo, and I don't really understand how to achieve that in C4D. I never did figure out how to use the Polygon Pen to effect a Retopo. The skull isn't done-- I still need to etch in those teeth! Organic forms like this are jolly hard to sculpt. ras