Hey, I'm trying to create an effect where a tracer traces the vertices of an object and those traced paths become flared out over time. Essentially I want the tracer to start out small (and attached to the traced object) but then widen out at its ends. I've tried using a tracer with a gradient shader set to spherical. That's the closest I can get, but if you look in the top view you'll see that the effect is scaling from the centre of the scene, not the centre of each traced object. Am I missing something super obvious here?

thanks

Dr Sassi, a massive thank you to all the wisdom you've shared with us. Your dedication and passion truly shines on these forums. Good luck with the next venture!

Ah, that's so interesting! I thought the render instance vs multi-instance was only about how it handles the processing/rendering. I didn't realize it handles animation differently. Thanks!

Ok, I brought the flower petals cloner into a new scene and exported the the whole scene as an abc. Brought that back in and now it works! I'm not sure why it was causing issues. I guess cloning a cloner causes issues?

Hi there, I'm trying out an exercise where I take some animated petals that I've created with a cloner, and then clone them across the surface of a tree. It all works well and as expected until I use a plain effector to drive the visibility of the flowers. The plain effector has a scale set to -1 and is driven by either an inverted spherical field moving up the surface of the tree, or a linear field animated upwards. For some odd reason the animation/reveal only pops on mid way instead of gradually like you'd expect from a field.

It seems to work just fine If I clone a sphere instead of cloning a cloner. I've tried exporting the flower animation out as an alembic but it causes c4d to crash every time.

Attached is the file for reference. Thanks for taking a look!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QRA2n1J6idPULwrLxBt0BAhDOMtvMeTX/view?usp=sharing

thanks again! Lots to chew on!

this is incredibly fantastic, thank you! I've never use the particle node modifier so I'll have to spend some time wrapping my head around it. Thanks for the tutorial video. Going to watch that and see if I can make sense of it. I'm guessing the particle node modifier overrides any other forces in the particle group, right?

No worries! I think the link you just posted is the path to the original 3 files from your first post. Was there another one similar to the image you posted?

Dr Sassi! Thank you! The first experiements are fantastic but unfortunately I'm aiming to get something that resembles a more intricate surface like the tree, rather than a spline. I think as a last resort something like that might have to do. The preview image from your last post looks very promising! The file you listed in the same YouTube tutorial video. Would you mind sending me a link to the c4d file so I can have a look at see what you've done? Thanks again!

Hi there, I'm trying to achieve a sort of braided/twisted rope look growing on the surface of a tree. Have a look at the example image here: https://cdn.midjourney.com/6790e424-ca71-4d64-9258-0c49d0c16601/0_0.png

I'm less concerned about the small branches and more interested in the effect around the trunk of the tree. The idea is that these strands would start from the base and reveal themselves as they wrap around and move up along the surface of the trunk. I've tried two methods so far and both have yielded unfavourable results.

Splines + rope dynamics: In the first method I used a voronoi fracture + matrix object to break my tree object into linear segments. I then created splines from these segments and applied rope dynamics to them. I used a volume builder with noise connected to a field force so that the splines move along the surface of the tree. It creates an interesting effect but the noise just makes the strands look messy and I can't figure out a way to make them grow from the ground up.

Particles + tracer: In the second method I used a particle mesh emitter with the emission coming from a vertex map (the bottom portion of my tree). I used the same volume builder+field force setup so that the particles stick to the surface of the tree. The idea here is that I'd trace the particles and render them as hair or something. What I can't figure out is how to create a field force that incorporates an upward movement in conjunction with a twisting motion. I can get a linear field to make them move upwards but can't seem to figure out how to multiply that effect with a noise or a twisting motion. I've attached both scene files here in case anyone is interested and has any ideas! Thank you in advance!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/126GGWEEK9bPhcc1G9S3z28PMgFk-bR6I?usp=sharing

Amazing! Thank you. This method looks very promising. Although I don't yet have a Maxon One membership so I'll need to upgrade. Before I do, can you tell me how easy it might be to art direct the growing branches on the face? For example, I will need them to originate from the temple and more towards the centre of the face. I see there's a target mode where they can grow towards something.

@Dr-Sassi particle_on_moving_geo_v01.c4d

Hey Dr Sassi, I've attached a simple file so you can get an idea of what I'm trying to achieve. The eventual idea is that I'll have match move of an actors face who's moving through a scene. I'll be tasked with growing a vein-like structure under the skin. I was thinking of tracing particles that move along the surface of deforming geo.

In the example I've provided I just added a random field to a sphere instead of using the face match move. Let me know if this makes sense.

Thanks!

Patrick

Hey there, using "stick" modifier I've figured out how to get particles emitted from a mesh emitter to stick to a moving surface. What I can't figure out is how to apply field forces to them and have them swirl around on the surface of a animated object.

thanks!

Ah, it looks like it's related to the end growth of the sweep being animated from 0-100% over the first two frames. If I start the render after the first frame that it appears, the motion blur renders. If I start it 1 or 2 frames before, it turns motion blur off. How strange!

Hey Dr Sassi, I've encountered a strange problem with these splines in your setup where if I render an individual frame I see motion blur, but when I render a sequence of images there is no motion blur. I'm using red shift and have swapped between the progressive render and bucket and it seems to be the same with either method. Any ideas what might cause this?

genius! I can't thank you enough Dr. Sassi! You are a wealth of knowledge!

Ohh, I see I can use the cloner to wrap several cylinders along the spline!

That works quite well, but I think we're limited to wrapping just a single piece of geo around the spline. Is it possible to wrap a spline (in this example several complete circles) along a spline? I can't seem to get it to work.

Thank you Dr. Sassi! I see that you cached the rope dynamics. I didn't think of that!

Is there a way to get motion blur to render when putting the rope object inside a sweep? It seems as soon as I seep a circle across the rope I get the error "contains inconsistent topology. Disabling Deformation Blur". The end goal here is to sweep a number of circular objects using the pen tool along the length of the rope, so that one rope becomes many strands of different thickness. Eventually I'd like to texture this rope so that the ends are transparent and than ramp to opaque in the middle. However I noticed even when I use cylindrical mapping, the texture doesn't change. I'm guessing this is because of the same issue with the motion blur where it doesn't understand it's uv's?

Thanks again for your quick reply!

Hey there, I have a spline that's moving with a rope tag and and rs object tag with it's curve mode set to "hair strands". I've enabled deformation motion blur in the rs render settings. I've also enabled motion blur in the rs object tag. For some reason I can't get any motion blur to show up.

I also used a sweep with the spline to generate geometry but I get a similar result.

I've read somewhere that you need consistent topology for this to work. How would I go about getting this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Patrick rope_mb_problem.c4d