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making an object lead an animated sweep nurb?
Hi, I have an urgent problem and cannot seem to find the answer anywhere. I need to have an object (mograph text object) follow but be at the start of a key-framed sweep nurb which varies in speed as it travels along, as if it is leaving a trail, think Tron light cycle as an example.
Can anyone please help with this? I suspect the answer lies in Xpresso, but I’m still fairly new to c4d so can’t work it out.
Many thanks in advance.
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5 Replies
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Since you have Mograph I would use a Tracer.
But to answer your question directly.
Make your sweep nurbs and make your text. Your text needs to be editable so you can move the Axis to where you want the sweep to touch. Then Select the spline used in your Sweep nurbs object an make the “intermediate Points” Uniform if you miss this they will not move at the same speed.
Then you can put a Align to spline tag on the Text object. Drag the spline used in the Sweeps into the Spline Path spot in tag attributes. Now animate your Align to spline and sweep growth tags.
This is where xpresso comes in since you can create a user data slider and connect that to both the sweep and spline tag.here is a starter file.
https://www.randyarchy.com/follow.c4d.zip/randy
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Cool thanks, looks like you have the solution there. My only problem is looking at that I’m a complete noob when it comes to Xpresso and have never used it before this, can you please break down a little how the text is connected to the slider and corresponding with the values on the sweep end point? I can’t seem to get it to link the two.
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OK, I figured it out. you my friend are a life saver! thanks again.
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The easiest way to do this, IMO:
1) give your text object an “align to spline” tag and use the path spline from your sweep;
2) animate the sweep end growth as normal;
3) right click on the words “end growth” in the attributes manager and from the context menu, select Animation>Set Driver;
4) now select the align to spline tag you created above, right click on the word, “position”, and from the context menu select Animation>Set Driven (absolute).
This sets up an xpresso for you that will drive the align to spline tag’s position with the sweep’s growth.
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another good solution, thanks Adam. That is slightly easier to adapt to what I already have, in typical client fashion they have asked for the objects to be added to the head of the streaks, after the sweep animation has already been done 🙁 so this method works well, cheers.
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