MoGraph arrow head alignment problem

[Brian Jones]

can you post it?

[John Hammond]

I’ve put both versions (using just mograph, and using mograph and TP) up on sendspace.com.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/7l1vf9

As you can see.. neither option seems to be working quite right at the moment.

Many thanks

John

[John Hammond]

I have just test rendered my animated lines and found that they seem to render horribly, jumping about all the time. When I play in the C4D timeline it looks nice and clean… Any ideas? I’ve had trouble like this before with tracer, where it jumps from point to point (would need some kind of sub-frame sampling maybe).

Maybe I need to approach my 3D arrows in a different way. I could use tracer or any method to create a bunch of Splines, and then use the SweepNurb’s End Growth Parameter to animate the Sweeps across the splines.

I could then attach the arrow heads with the Align to Spline Tag, again with the position parameter animated in sync with the End Growth % of the SweepNurbs. Maybe wire the two parameters together with Xpresso.

Would love to know your thoughts after you’ve taken a look at my scene file.

Ta,
John

[Brian Jones]

here’s a setup using some of your parts, kind of like you describe, no effectors on the Cloner (yet) just basic

[John Hammond]

Hi,
Thanks for this, it seems to work well when I play it in the software, but as soon as I render the animation (either with or without saving) the render looks terrible with the 3D lines shooting way forwards jumping through the arrow heads.

Any one else get this problem?

[Brian Jones]

not happening here, it renders just like it looks in the viewport

[John Hammond]

very strange.. I have put a quicktime movie up (only half a MB) encase you wanted to check out what I am getting:

https://www.sendspace.com/file/dxz44q

Really not sure what is causing this. I didn’t modify your .c4d file in any way..

thanks,
John

[Brian Jones]

I can’t replicate it, anybody have any ideas?

[Jack Evans]

I can duplicate this, using the file that Brian posted above. If I render it to the picture viewer, I get spikes sticking through the arrow heads. If I do a render view, or if I render a preview, I don’t get the spikes. When I render out the animation, I get the spikes with full render, hardware preview, or software preview.

FWIW, I’m still using the demo (R11.010) on a Windows Vista 32 bit computer. I wouldn’t think this would be a demo-related thing, but, ya never know.

Other quirks: In stepping through the frames one at a a time, I notice right away that the circled rectangle object is poking through the arrow head object. You can see this pretty clearly around frame 9. It seems like it would look better in any event if the rectangular end of the sweep object could be made to just touch the back of the arrow head object.

Also, if you step through to, say, frame 25, then click the button to jump to the end frame, the arrowheads jump to the correct position, but the sweep object doesn’t make its arc; it jumps in a straight line from it’s position in frame 25 to the end. If you do a render view of this odd arrangement, it does show up in the render.

I don’t know enough about C4D yet to suggest a solution, but maybe there something that can be tweaked in the sweep NURBS object.

[Brian Jones]

[Jack Evans] “I’m still using the demo (R11.010)”

I’m using 10.5 on a Mac and can’t get it at all. Maybe something to do with the version…

[Jack Evans] “circled rectangle object is poking through the arrow head object”

you can get rid of that either by scaling (End Scale or Scale in the Details) the SweepNurb or by adding a little to the P.Z in the Transform tab of the Cloner Object.

[Jack Evans] “it jumps in a straight line from it’s position in frame 25 to the end”

that’s just normal if you jump to a frame. It can’t calculate the frames in between, the spline that’s being swept is the result of the Tracer inside the SweepNurb and that needs to be calculated.