Thank you, very much, Dr. Sassi.
I'm studying your invention, and I'll see what I can gain from your generous investment of time.

Being that I still need to find a solution for a current job. Maybe I can pivot this a little. In my example scene, I need to change the shape of the splines & spline mask. One thing I need to do, is soften / chamfer the harder edges; but I need to maintain the parametric nature of the object.
As it stands, the only "chamfer" solution I know for splines, is destructive. I've tried throwing the "smooth" deformer at the splines, as well as the delta mush deformer; but neither seem to have any effect on splines - only polygon objects.

Any thoughts, Dr. Sassi?

Cheers!

Thanks, Dr. Sassi. I'll watch that video, in its entirety. Once I get through the job that required figuring something like this out...

Hey,

I'm dipping my toe (barely) into object node creation. I'm wondering what the steps might be, to recreate the parametric shape in my attached scene, as nodes. Right off the bat, I didn't see any obvious node for MoGraph; so not sure whether that is simply not available in that method of object creation? Is there another node / combination of nodes, which afford similar features as MoGraph?

Thanks, for any initial guidance.

reference shape.c4d

Dr. Sassi, thank you so much, as always, for your efforts.
I worked around the issue, to get through my deadline. But I haven't solved the actual problem; which I believe may be somewhat related to the actual geometry object, which is acting as the surface emitter.
I'm attempting to build a version of that project, with a proxy object serving the same purpose, but I'm finding the results are different enough, to likely not warrant the effort.
Complicating matters (as you certainly know) is that the final banding results don't entirely manifest until the whole particle system is cached, and even then, only at final render.
I'll continue to see whether I can create a scenario which illustrates the issue, then I'll post the example project.

As a side-note: I've come to find an serious issue between the "sphere instances" and "optimized spheres" as they relate to rendered particles.
When I view the optimized sphere particles through the RS viewport, they appear as expected; just like the sphere instances.
However, upon final render, the optimized spheres tend to have an offset from the emission source, by a noticeable amount of pixels.
I'm aware that the Maxon documentation warns that there may be certain limitations for the optimized spheres, but the fact that the issue only manifests in final render, makes it extremely time-consuming to find.
But this is likely more a Redshift issue, being that it directly relates to their render tag, right?

Thanks, Dr. Sassi.
I'm moving ahead with a workaround; on deadline right now. I'll circle back, and build it a representative scene, after I finish this.

Greetings!

I'm encountering some obvious banding, in particles which are emanating from the surface of an object (mesh emitter).
I'm utilizing a Follow Spline modifier, with rather strong settings so that the emitted particles rapidly move away from emitting surface. This, is where I'm getting banding. I've tried the obvious, by radically increasing the simulations / particles / substeps.
But to no avail.
Are there any other critical settings that which I'm unaware, that would affect particle banding?

I'm sorry, this is happening in a client project, and I don't have the time to reduce it down to something I can share; but maybe in a little bit I can.

Thank you!

Good idea. While, it doesn't necessarily present itself as a bug, perhaps it's an efficiency aspect which could be improved, in the future.

Hi, Dr. Sassi.
Thanks for the suggestions / questions.
Unfortunately, I really can't get around the direct use of the "live" vertex maps, on the active objects. There is simply far too much direct control over the RS materials, to do anything else.
Over the weekend, I tested different ways to actually construct those vertex maps; some using freeze objects, others, directly linked to the polygon tags, etc.
Ultimately, no real difference in performance. Interestingly, the performance hit comes when the actual objects (with the vertex tags) are animated. When those are static, and only the camera moves, it's as fast as can be.
So, clearly, there is something "under the hood" with the way Cinema processes vertex maps, when motion is involved.

I already just posted one question, regarding the creation and modification of vertex maps.
However, I'm finding that regardless of that, I'm still encountering extreme viewport performance degradation, directly related to my objects' vertex maps.

So...is there any way to optimize such maps, or more realistically, a way to only have them active at render-time?
I'm only using them for material creations; not for deformations, nor other FX. So, they only need to be active when RS needs to render a frame.

Does this question even make any sense?

Thanks.