southpaw

There's a few ways to do it, but the attached scene file should help you get started. If you want to change the thickness of the line, change the parameters of the Rectangle spline in the Object Manager. If you want more control over the thickness, slect the sweep object in the Object Manager and play with the scale and rotation parameters in the Attributes Manager. To find out what something does, you can right click on most objects (including the interface elements) and select Show Help. Colour Lines.c4d

It's an interesting question, as Fastbeen mentions, alot of depends on your client base or the studio your working at. I often to listen to similar debates on a youtube channel called 'artcafe', hosted by Maciej Kuciara, a concept artist whom has worked on numerous hollywood productions. His argument often talks about kit bashing (painting over photo reference) in concept art, and wether or not that is cheating. (Not the main focus of his channel but often comes up in conversation with the guest artist). He states that, as long as you have an understanding of the fundamentals, then it's not a problem. If the client wants to see the chareacter from another viewpoint, you know enough about drawing to re-construct the character as requested. He often talks of the 'old days' when kit bashing was frowned upon and seen as cheating, where-as today, with deadlines becomoing ever shorter, kitbashing is the norm. For me, working as a freelancer, I think that when comes down getting paid for the work you take on, then use whatever you can to keep the client happy. I use personal projects to challenge myself and learn from, then I intergrate/adapt those skills when on a commercial job down the lne. In my experience, the client's main concern is that it's done on time and on budget, and looks or excees what they envisioned.

That partly explains the mess I got into, aside from my crappy Xpresso setup. Thanks again for the explanations.

Ah thank you @jed, I knew there was a way to interate througth the spline points, but I've always found iteration in Xpresso a little confusing. I didn't understand that I needed to re-use the spline object & point nodes in order get the count and then use the index, so your file is a great help in understamding this. Thanks again for you help 🙂

I have a rough working solution using a condition node, new scene file is attached. But this means I still need to enter the spline index values manually into the condition node. Which is fine for 2 or 3 but i'm looking for a more automated solution. There should be a way to do it using the iteration node to loop though the spline index points, and check which are even or odd, then set the position of say the even point indices to that of a null. If anyine has any ideas, please let me know. Xpresso controlled Spline Points 001.c4d

I have a six point spline, and i'm reying to set every Nth point to match a null object. So for instance, set points 0,2, and 4 to the position of a Null. I've tried using iteratiing through the spline points, and using the Modulo node to select every other spline point, but am unable to set the Xpresso up correcly. I've added a scene file, and and image for reference. Any help would be much appreciated. EDIT: After some research, I think it I should be using something along the lines of a Compare Node to evaluate the MODULO of Spline Point Count/2 ==0 to find the even number indexes, but still can't it to work properly. Xpresso controlled Spline Points.c4d

The alpha that's built into your original png render may be the problem. You might need to render a separate alpha, as a black and white image sequence, then add that to the Alpha section of the C4D material.

From what i can gather in the documentation, you can only use the polygn node to find the index and postion of a polygon, but you can't set the position of it. The Point Node gives you a point position as an input. So you could set the position of 3-4 points to match another object such as a null, and this would move the polygon when you move the null. Found this tutorial, it uses a point node to set the postion of a polygon by using the Cluster tag from the Character menu. of the

You could try saving a polygon selection, you could access that through xpresso, and from there, you might be able to set the position or matrix of the of the poligons. Alternatively, wouldn't the pose morph the pose morph be easier? You could store the polygon postions in a number of pose morphs, and animate them.

The only thing I can think of is that things like Bloom and glows are usually a post effect in the 3D renderers I've used, and this may be what's causing the loss of data. The best solution I can think of would be to add blooms/glows etc in AE, and render an Alpha from there. Then re-imort the rendered alpha for use as a luma matte.

Apologies, I didn't catch the sentence about colour correction. Have you tried rendering both a Straight Alpha and Pre-Multiplied Alpha and testing those as Luma Mattes? I don't see a mention of the file type you're rendering to. Are you rendering Linear 32Bit TIFF, EXR or similar? If not, that might be the issue. Have you double checked that AE is set to sRGB and Linearize Colour Space is checked in the project settings? Other than that, I've no idea why this is happening.

Are you comping in 32bit within AE? Additionally, you could try applying a colour correction/curves, chooosing Alpha in the Curves dialogue and increasing the mid-tones.

Some styleframes for a News Feature I worked on recently. Also included are some early mockups, and a few viewport shots. The topology of the tree model is pretty bad, but as it wasn't going to deform in shape, it was left as it was. The UV process was a little difficault at first due to the poor toplology. The bark areas of the mesh where cleaned up and UV's seemed to work much better. Rendering was done in Cycles4D.

Here's a scene file and screen shot. This one uses a random effector and a Fracture object. The Random Effector contols the visibility of the clones inside the Fracture object. Play with the seed values and the Min/Max sliders (see screen shot). Hope this helps. Random Tile Visibility.c4d

Rather than using the Random effector to offset the position, you could use it to hide the visibilty of the some clones, you would need a mograph selection tag to control whick clones are influneced by the Random effector, or you could just play with the Seed setting until you're happy. Or you could try adding a Dynamics Tag to the cloner (set to Top Level in the tag's Attribute settings), that way they would not not be able to intersect and you could add a collision margin to control the gaps between each tile.

Just seen this official version of this video on motionographer.com.

See the attached scene file. I've enabled "Use Rail Direction" in the sweep. And created a duplicate of the helix to use as a Rail spline (controls the direction of the sweep). drill 01.c4d

To get a smaller null/solid in AE, select the External Compositing tag in C4D's Object Manager, then in the Attrubues Manager, enable the tickbox that says "Solid", you'll then see the size fileds enabled, you can enter a custom size there, try a smal number like 10 for example, that way, when you open in AE you'll get a smaller Null/Solid to work with.

There are 2 things you could check. If you're rendering an image sequnce from C4D, check that AE is importing image sequnces at the same frame rate, for instance, if your render is set to 25fps, Make sure AE imports the image sequence at 25fps. I think the setting is in the AE preferences, or right click the footage in the AE Project window and select Intererate Footage. The other thing to try is to centre the axis to the plane in C4D. The axis point in AE is always different, but as long as the frame rates are the same, the movement should match, but most of the time you'll need to re-adjust the position/scale of the replacement image in AE to fit the screen size correctly. Hope this helps.

Fantastic work Jed, If you havn't already, check out a book called "The power of Limits" It's quite old, but talks about geometry of nature. I've found it very interesting, although the math stuff is way over my head, but I think you should be able to translate alot of the content into your tests judging by the work posted here. There's also a Houdini artist named Serjan Burlak that does a lot of this kind of work, I found out about the book from a podcast he was a guest on.

Thanks for sharing, great work! The other breakdowns on his Vimeo are interesting too. When i first read the title, I thought is was Erik Wernquist, whom produced this video https://vimeo.com/108650530

Quite a long poem, must have taken a whle to animate, Ccongratualtions on the film being selected for the festival.

There's a free node based addon (plugin) called animation nodes that has similar functionality to C4D mograph. I heard on a padcast that the developer of Animation Nodes now has full-time position at the Blender Institute, and is working on updateing the particle system within Blender amoungst other things.

Thank you Hrvoje, you're old rigging training really helped me out.

Here is a link to a short film I completed recently. It took a few months as it was a passion project produced between normal freelance jobs. There's a project description on vimeo. Below are some WIP stills that show the early development.