Is it possible to use metaball in a cloner simulation?

[atomician]

in C4D 2025, I can drop a sphere onto a cloner onto a metaball:
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(sorry if the images are blurry, this site only seems to allow low res images? I tried an 800px image, 20kb in size and it was "too big")

Anyway with metaball activated, I can generate nice blobs.
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However, what if I want to animate the blobs? I have tried adding both soft both and hard body tags to the metaball generator, the sphere and the cloner, nothing seems to work - I want them to move freely and independently, forming blobs as they meet each other.

Any ideas?

[Dr. Sassi]

Hi atomician,

Softbodies rely on a constant mesh; Metaballs don't have that; they get generated for each frame.

The max height of images is 500. However, images do not tell me much. Those are more useful for communication about aesthetic targets, if at all. Project files are the way. Please reduce the file to the question and apply it here as c4D (size below 1MB)
If the size is larger, for security reasons, no zip, no rar, etc. just the file via DropBox, WeTransfer, Google, Apple, or Adobe. The URL is pasted here, not shortened or via HTML. Thank you.

The Softbody Option needs a geometry that is not recalculated for each image. MetaBall recreates this on every frame. Any Dynamic/Simulation will fail fully or to a certain degree. As a side note, that is also true if both values for the MetaBall mesh are equal.

You need to make this editable and use the mesh.

Alternatively, the Cloner receives the Dynamic Tag, while the (Parent ) MetaBall is deactivated, the Dynamic is cached, and the MetaBall is activated. This moves the MetaBalls but does not represent the Dynamic based on their shape; they are only based on the clones.
CV4_2025_drs_25_PAlg_21.c4d

The Volume system has way more power than the MetaBall option, but the limitations are similar in Dynamic/Simulations.

Have a nice weekend