• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Metaball using particle emitter problems

  Posted by John Hammond on April 16, 2009 at 10:56 am

  Hi,

  I am trying to set up a metaball object which uses a particle emitter as the source geometry. I have created a polygon object which contains just one point, and dropped it under my emitter as a child.

  Then I drop my emitter under my Metaball. And nothing happens! I can make it work using spheres as the particles, but I read somewhere that using points is best.

  Any ideas?

  Thanks
  John

  John Hammond replied 17 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Randy Johnson

  April 16, 2009 at 11:12 am

  Not sure what’s happening there… works for me.
  Polygon Primitive
  Make editable
  delete three points.

  Object manager looks like this:
  Metaball
  -Emitter
  –polygon

  Not sure why using a single point is better than a platonic though… maybe something to do with less points.

  /Randy
• 

  John Hammond

  April 16, 2009 at 11:34 am

  I have just tried your method using a polygon primitive, then deleting 3 points, and it works, so thank you!

  Before I was using Object/Polygon to create an empty polygon, and then I used Structure/Add Point to create a point. I read a tut somewhere that used this method. I don’t understand why it doesn’t work but your method does, so that’s great.

  Thanks
  John
• 

  Adam Trachtenberg

  April 16, 2009 at 2:32 pm

  I don’t think there’s any difference between using a sphere primitive (with “render perfect” enabled) and using a single point.
• 

  John Hammond

  April 16, 2009 at 2:41 pm

  Yes I think you are right,
  I’ve just done a quick test using points and spheres.

  They both had similar poly counts after metaball is applied. The only difference is that with a sphere you have a radius control which affects the metaball. With the point you have to add a metaball tag to adjust the ‘radius’ of each point.

  Once you make the sphere editable the metaball gets a lot bigger, so I suppose it is then using all points in the sphere’s geometry, where as when it is a primitive it treats it as a point with a radius. I think this is where I went wrong before.

  Thanks for the tips

  John

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