Hi Dr. Sassi,

that helps a lot - many thanks once again! Also sorry but I find two challenges here:

1. The animation along the spline is happening with linear speed and I can't really art direct the particles to start slow, speed up and then slow down the way I'd do it with a Spline Wrap or Align to Spline Tag. I tried doing speed control with a friction object and some fields and that might work with an open spline but if I have a closed loop it would be hard to have the particles start slow in the beginning, then do a few loops at high speed and then slow down on a final loop. Especially if I don't want all of the particles to speed up and slow down at the same time.
2. The transition between the two particle groups is super helpful but has a distinct hickup at the frame where the particles cross over between groups - it snaps over to the new position. Probably how it is intended, but if there'd be a way to have it "cross over" between two groups over the course of more than one frame that might help to smooth that animation out. Couldn't find that though.

Don't want to take too much of your time but if you have any pointers there, I'd appreaciate it a lot.

In any case - thanks a lot for all the help. Extremely helpful as always.

Hi Dr. Sassi,

many many thanks for answering so quickly and many more thanks for taking the time for a second approach.
I think the particle solution would be more art directable since I wouldn't have to bake the keyframes each time I changed the animation. It also solves most of my other challenges. The only thing I can't seem to achieve is that the animation along the spline is timed to a curve.
I'd like to achieve something where a particle/cloned object is born, stays where it is for a few frames, then starts moving along a spline but I'd like to ease/f-curve the speed of that animation fully art directible. Is that achievable with the particle solution?

Thanks again and all the best.

Hello, maybe you can help with this, I couldn't find any info on this. Maybe I wasn't sure what to look for.

I'm having an animated object.
I want to clone said object with a time offset, so the clones animate in with a delay. That works fine.
Now I want those clones to follow a spline but I also want the movement along the spline to be delayed with a time offset.

That's where I struggle. I attached a file for testing in there. I'd just like to have the movement along the path also affected by the time offset. Does this make sense?

Many thanks in advance.
Cloner_Offset_Test.c4d

Actually I really just need this setup to build the whole geometry until I'm happy with it. Connect Objects afterwards and I can scrub the timeline fine again.
The first plan was to make all lights blink and change color, but that would be overkill anyways. I'll just add some manual blinking lights here and there and that will be fine.
Anyways, as always you were a great help, so many thanks again!

@Dr-Sassi
Many thanks! This works perfectly. I think I'll need to work in Instances Mode anyways, since I have 3 more noises randomizing each server-rack:
-one noise for which rack element to take
-one noise for which small elements to randomize in some of the rack elements
-one noise for which color the buttons have in all of the elements

So thats like a hundred layered cloners now that all are in instance node, so that the cloned randomness from the bottom cloners doesn't get lost in the top cloners. If that makes sense. What can I say - I really don't like repetition

I think I'll just work in multi-instances mode and and render time it will be time to face the music and switch to Instances mode. Since all my cloners are called "Cloner" that should go pretty easy with a search.

Bigger Resolution: https://f.io/LLcU9dHS

Hello,

I've got a bit of a problem with a I'm trying to build.
I want to build a server room with multiple server cabinets. I'd like to randomize the height of those server cabinets so that some of them have more or less elements built in and I'd like for the height of the cabinets to match the number of elements per cabinet.

I've built a simple expresso rig and achieved that outcome on a single server cabinet. Then I randomized the number of elements in that cabinet via a Shader Field with a noise that controls the Cloner of the Server Elements via a Field Driver.

I've tried incorporating that same random number into the Expresso Rig for the Server Cabinet. That too works fine as long as it is a manually placed Cabinet but as soon as I clone the cabinet, the functionality gets lost. I guess it has something to do with the XPresso-Rig that samples the original position of the cabinet instead of the position of the clones.
I've tried multiple ways to fix this but I couldn't get it to work.

I've attached a file - there's a "working" and a "not working" null in there. If you move around the Shader Field while the "working" null is visible, you can see what I'm trying to achieve.

If anybody has any idea for a better solution or has encountered this issue before I'd be really thankful.

Many thanks in advance and kind regards!

Server_Kit_Help.c4d

Hi, I couldn't find this one in the forums:

I've built a simple setup - a shape being distorted by a random effector. The random effector is set to noise and the noise has a certain animation speed. Works like a charm, but I'd like to create kind of a stop-motion effect by having the noise animate in a different framerate than the project and render framerate.

Meaning - I want to render with 24 fps - so the camera moves with smooth 24 fps BUT I want the noise of the random effector to change only every second frame so the displaced object has kind of a jaggy stop-motion look.

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for any help, everything is appreciated.

Hi Dr. Sassi,

awesome - that cuts a few steps in between.

Thanks again!

Hi Dr. Sassi,

many thanks for your reply. I think I've found a solution with your help. (I'm working in Redshift by the way).

One more about the problem - as far as I can tell and if I understand everything correctly - the growing tracers have a different number of points/vertices every frame since they grow with the motion of another object. As soon as I set up Motion Blur in Redshift, the shapes get all whacky - wild guess would be that vertice A on frame 1 is on another point on the spline on frame 2. Which would mean that the RS Motion Blur calculates the movement between those two (as it should) but it looks super strange and makes wild shapes. This happens even if deformation blur is off.

With your tip - which was worth gold, thanks again - the motion blur works as intended as long as deformation blur is set to off. I guess that the alembic file stores fixed positions and changes them from frame to frame without interpolating between them, while the tracer object is able to generate in-betweens which the RS Motion Blur pulls from it although they are gibberish. So - that's a great system for just camera motion blur. BUT, I still had some Macro-Setups where the growing splines are visible and which looked really jaggy without motion blur.

For that problem I'm using another workaround right now, which seems to work. I take the baked alembic-tracer out of my sweep-setup and instead use a Spline-Wrap deformer on a cylinder that uses the alembic as spline source. And while animating the end-point, it stretches the cylinder (which has a crazy amount of height segments) along the alembic. It's a bit of a workaround and sadly the percentage of the baked alembic spline-wrap doesn't match the percentage of the original animation, so I have to animate it frame by frame. BUT since I don't have any textures and just need glowing light streaks, the motion blur works as intended.

I hope that makes sense. Thanks again for your help

Hi, I hope this is not a stupid question that has been answered elsewhere, couldn't find it. I'm a semi-noob in C4D.

I am building a setup where a tracer object is tracing cloned objects that are moving around. Said tracer is in a sweep nurb so the objects leave trails.
So far so awesome.

As soon as I enable Motion Blur in Redshift, the already traced splines begin to shift around - I could trace this problem back to the Tracer Objects Intermediate Points. The Tracers Splines change every frame since it grows and it seems a lot of the already traced points change to accomodate for the new shape.

So the only option I found to enable Motion Blur is to set the Tracer Objects type to linear with no intermediate points. But that produces clunky traced splines.

My workaround right now is to change the framerate from 25 to 200 since this produces 8 times the points in the traced paths and render only every 8th frame while still having the Motion Blur on 1/50th second.

It works but is a bit annoying. Is there any way to make the Tracer Object create these subframe steps without doing this workaround?

I hope this is the appropriate place to ask this and appreciate any help.