Thanks Dr Sassi, I did just that!
And also want to encourage anyone else reading this and who agrees to also send a suggestion to Maxon via that link.

Cheers
Andreas

Hi Dr Sassi!
Thank you for the reply, much appreciated.

It perhaps does not fully solve my specific problem, I might have to go the extra mile and do some quick retopo and exporting a displacement map from my sculpting app to get around the artifacting in my case.

I feel that maybe a rewrite/update of the Mesh Deformer to make it work more like the FFD, with smoother "interpolation" between the low poly and high poly meshes would be very useful, for other cases as well, such as for better/faster simulations of higher poly object.
You know the developers right, perhaps you could give them a friendly nudge...?

Thanks again for trying!
Kind regards
Andreas

Hi!

I'm doing some character work, where I sculpt very high poly models (in this case in 3DCoat) and want to really quickly bring them over to C4D to do some quick and dirty pose tests with Deformers. Using Deformers directly on a mesh with millions of polys obviously does not work well, so my plan was to build a low poly cage for use with the Mesh Deformer. However, the Mesh Deformer does not seem suited for this, as it generates a lot of surface artifacts, regardless of the Accuracy setting.

It also seems pretty problematic in other ways, as instead of working as an advanced FFD Deformer which has very smooth deformations, it is sharp and blocky.

Is there any way of mitigating these issues?
Or are there other solutions that could help me achieve what I want with posing/deforming the high poly models?

I'm attaching links to a screen shot showing what happens with my character model and also a simplified C4D file which shows how the Mesh Deformer creates very "unsmooth" results.

Thanks in advance!
Andreas

Links to files:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ooktifjpbe4ww9w5j6qke/meshdeformer_artifacts.jpg?rlkey=pe9fwjauy18zbii3xkzccg9mb&dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lk4wqiezyk017u1ik3z8u/MeshDeformerArtefacts.c4d?rlkey=giuf648kfnf7ir5m4e337h6gq&dl=0

Hello Dr Sassi!

Thank you very much for the files and explanation.
In this particular case I spoke to the animator and we decided to solve it with only keyframes, but I will definitely look into your solution and play around with your suggestions anyways for future use.
Very useful!

Cheers
Andreas

Hello Dr Sassi!
First off, massive thanks for the very quick reply (on a sunday no less)!

I see. My issue with the solution is that my part of the process is more preparing the scene for an animator/motion designer who will take it over and do final movement and such. What I'll do is have a chat with him and we will figure out how to move forward with this.
Perhaps even some hand animating will be easier to get an art directable result here. Maybe combined with a setup where the medallion part has a Constraint tag to help it be oriented downwards.

Fingers crossed that we will be seeing some improved rigid body dynamics in Cinema in the near future of course as part of the new improved dynamics system.

Anyway, again big thanks for taking the time!
Cheers
Andreas

Hello!

I am not very experienced using the Bullet dynamics system, and I have come across a job project where I am setting up an animation of a bracelet that has several decorative parts hanging off the main bracelet part, and figured the best approach is to use dynamics to simulate them moving realistically when rotating the bracelet.

However, I am really struggling to make this work. I have set up a simplified test file where I have a Collider object in the shape of a torus acting as the attachment part on the bracelet, and then a hanging "tag" dynamic object.

I have tried adjusting the Collision Margin, Scale and Steps Per Frame in the Bullet Expert settings , and played around with a massive amount of different settings in the Collision/Mass/Force tabs on the Dynamics Body tag of the dynamic object, but none provide a stable solution. The dynamic object either jitters or starts tilting oddly, seemingly regardless of settings chosen.

I have read that scale might be an issue here, but changing scene scale is not really an option as that would cause a whole lot of headache with other scale dependent parts of the scene.

I have attached my current test file. Any help with figuring this out would be massively appreciated as I have really hit a wall here and I see the deadline on the horizon.

Thanks in advance!
Andreas

dynamics small scale.c4d