Awesome, thanks again for that and have a great Christmas and new years (if you dont hear from me again before!)

I ended up using edges for the project, I thought I tried every cobination of settings, but great to know it actually works in a cloner on polygons!

Shame there isnt just a simple constraint you can use for this kind of thing, makes it kinda complicated when doing a lot of objects.

Thanks again Dr Sassi!

I tried parenting it to an edge instead and it works fine. Looks like the normals in a cloth sim are fine on edges - weird that polygons get messed up though

Looks like the moving mesh (which was a cloth sim) is the problem - for some reason the normals flip randomly in the sim itself

here's just the original plane sim, you can see if you select any polygon that the normals freak out during the sim. https://we.tl/t-oyCm5fWeg2

Do you know if thats something that can be fixed? Or do polygon normals always go crazy in a cloth sim?

Cheers, basically Im trying to make a popup book - I want the page to turn (deform) and some paper objects pop up attached to the surface of the page.

Using the Cloner method almost works but as you can see in my project, it flips around strangley at the start

https://we.tl/t-0VUqoubtzG

I've baked the popup animation as keyframes, but the rotation seems to go crazy when it travels along with the mesh.

Any idea if there's a better way to stick objects to a page like this: https://youtu.be/1jxodEBzsRc

Cheers, I mean it needs to stick to the polygon and move along with it as the mesh moves and deforms, so it needs to be locked to the surface not just placed there

Hi again Dr Sassi,

Do you happen to know if its possible to parent a Null to the center of a polygon on a deforming mesh?

I can get it working with a Cloner or Matrix, but I was wondering if there was an easier way with Xpresso or Constraints.

I can constrain to Points with Xpresso and Constraints and to a polygon, but I cant get the Null to align to the polygon normal and have it stick while rotating.

Here's my test file, any ideas if its even possible? https://we.tl/t-5fPW19qO3C

Thanks again!

Awesome, thanks for that, worked like a charm! Been a while since Ive needed to rig something like this up, this work flow makes life much easier! Cheers!

Hi Dr Sassi,

I'm trying to rig the spine of a book to open using joints and weighting.

I've painted in some weights with the Weight Tool and intend to smooth it out. But there's a few weighted points I'd like to set back to 0 weighting as they poke out when adjusting the joints - but no matter what I do I just cant seem to remove the weighting with the weight brush.

I tried many different modes - I would think subtract mode, or setting absolute mode to 0 and painting would work but it doesnt seem to do anything on the points, sometimes it even adds to the weighting. I also thought holding CTRL and painting would work which is what Chat GPT recommended - but it doesnt work.

Do you know what the steps would be to remove the weghting on the wrong points by painting?

Here's my file so far: https://we.tl/t-6lejxCn0rX

Thanks again!

Yes you're right! Moving those broken keys seems to fix the problem. The bake must have messed up the keyframes - I just used a track modifier for the bounce originaly. Weird that it looks fine without the cloner.

you've done it again, thanks for that! Now I can finish this one off, cheers!

No worries, I did the test but I dont understand why that matters. On every frame mode in the timeline it should force it to perform the calculations shouldnt i? so if I do a mograph Cache it should work, but it still glitches. Are you saying it works fine for you and that it must just be my computer? I never would have thought it could be a hardware issue

cv4_2026_drs_25_mgta_11:

Frames: 301
Total time: 0.950
FPS: 316.91

Test001:

Frames: 81
Total time: 2.189
FPS: 37.00

Sorry yeah it renders exactly the same with the glitching, my computer is pretty powerful so I cant imagine it could be that. I guess in that case it must be a bug, I thought it might just be something about the behaviour of the fields I dont understand.

When I try Maxon Support they always send me back to the Cineversity forum instead, I'll give it a try though. Thanks for looking into it for me!

I see, it's weird that it wouldnt take the transform into account from the Cloner, I guess it just doesnt adapt to that when being generated from a particle. I need objects to apear while being oriented upward so I guess i'll just change the object axis. All good, thanks for that - good tip on triangle mesh too!

Sorry about that, here's a video showing what I mean https://we.tl/t-tNtohUs64h. See how the baked animation is fine, but when I put it into a cloner and try to offset it with fields it just goes crazy, I just dont understand why as I follwed the cineversity tute to achieve the effect. All I want to do is offset that baked animation so it plays via a field

if I disable ALIGN CLONE in the Cloner it seems to work, but why would that have any effect on dynamics? Could this be a bug?

Hi again, is it possible to generate clones from a particle emitter and have them be dynamic in the new simulation engine?

I swear this was possible before easily but I just can not get it to work

here's my project file: https://we.tl/t-1OXBmqFIuu

I put the rigid body tag on the object alone, it works fine.

Then I put it on a cloner that is generating the same objects from particles, and it doesnt work at all.

Again I thought this would be so simple in c4d, Im sure there's something super simple im missing.

Thanks again for your help

Thanks for that, that method works well, but if I make the effect happen from the center instead (attached cv4_2026_drs_25_mgta_11 v2.c4d), it doesnt work properly any more - the speed is all messed up.

Also I tried making the fields scale of your first file linear, but they still seem to move at different speeds (cv4_2026_drs_25_mgta_11 v2.c4d)

I've been struggling with this one all week, I watched all those Cineversity videos you suggested and tried a new setup (test 1 and 2 attached) but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt

Test 1 - the animation alone works great, but when i put it into a cloner it freaks out - seems to be something to do with the delay
Test 2 - is an almost identical setup, but works well, however if I replace the objects with the ones I want to use for production, it freaks out again like Test 1.

I really dont get it.

Seems like it would be such a simple thing to do in C4D with Mograph - It used to be easy to do this kind of thing with just falloff before fields were introduced.

Any ideas? I'm about ready to give up on it.

Files: https://we.tl/t-DykuPMNtDQ

Thanks again

Thanks for that, problem with this method is that the rotatation speed seems to be different for each clone which also makes the delay different for each one, so not quite as controlled and uniform as Im hoping to get.

Its a shame the cloned keyframe animation from that cineversity tutorial doesnt work because that would be ideal.

I found another tutorial here https://youtu.be/UYJ2orFw95w that shows how it could be done by baking the animation as Alembic, and I've managed to get it closer here https://we.tl/t-UVSDQolAUv

• but I still can isolate the transition to within a spherical field.

Do you think this method might work or should I give up on trying to clone keyframed animation and offset it with fields?

Hi again Dr Sassi,

I'm now trying to create a mograph effect similar to this https://www.instagram.com/p/DKcExJrtJgW/

I've done a keyframe animation of the flip and midway a circle shape turns into a star shape (with track modifer for a little bounce)

I then tried this Cineversity setup to bring the keyframed animation through to the clones https://youtu.be/zuIMmId4oIU

But it doesnt seem to work in the latest version of c4d - reading the comments of that video it may be something to do with the RESET COORDINATES checkbox of the Cloner, but no matter what I try I cant get the animation to play correctly within a spherical field like the example.

I'm guessing I've just missed a setting somewhere, or maybe there's a limitation I'm not aware of - again it seems to be something that should be super easy to set up.

Here's my project: https://we.tl/t-39wpYDWzEM

Cheers

Great, if I just make the Field Force a negative value instead, it kinda does what I want. Thanks for that!