OT: how to project holes evenly across the surface of a tube

[Deleted User]

Hello,

It will be easier to post this onto the Maxon Cinema 4D forum rather then After Effects.

[Chris Smith]

Quick thought. Break it up into 3 parts. The straight cylindrical part is cylindical mapping, then make a selection of the polys on the end and assign a copy of your material to it with the selection restricting it to the end but set it to sphereical mapping.

Other thought:

Use TP or the free plug-in OBAN to align small cylinders to the main object. If set it to align to normals, all the little tubes will stick straight out from the surface at the angle of the poly’s normal. Then select the ‘particle geomtery’ object and hit ‘c’ to make it real objects instead of instances. Then use these objects in a boolean object with the original surface to cut the holes.

OR

The new “Mograph” module will easily align cylinders to the surface and maybe with the shader effector do all the work on it’s own.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Nicholas White]

Chris,

Thank you for your reply, your method is interesting and got me thinking about all sorts of other neat things I could do with materials, I did some reading on the plugins you mentioned:

1. What is ‘tb’?
2. I believe that to use OBAN you need one or more of the modules to use it, please correct me if I’m wrong. I am using only the demo of 9.5 (waiting for my real copy to come in a work), do you know if I will still be able to use it?
3. I’ve read about a plugin called ‘place on point’, I’m going to give that a shot.

Take care,

Nick

[Chris Smith]

TP? It’s ‘Thinking Particles’. If you’re using the demo, then it won’t have it, it’s a separate module. Oban requires TP to work.

If the plug-in is it’s own plug-in and isn’t an xpresso tag using particles, then yeah, install it and it should hopefully do the same thing. But make sure it aligns the objects to the normals of the host surface so they all face outwards.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Chris Smith]

BTW, if you’re getting C4D and you do graphics, I cannot plug this enough:

maxon.net/pages/products/c4d/modules/mograph/mograph_e.html

The new ‘mograph module’. It is insane and a dream for a 3D app.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Dwaynne]

Chris –

On the topic of C4D, are there any DVD training series around? I recently started looking at 8.1, and I like the app’s intuitiveness and featureset (pity I can’t use the path deform plug-in, though…when I upgrade!) and well, it works with Ae, so I’m more than game!

Thanks for any advice!

Dwaynne

[Dwaynne]

Scratch that. Saw the reply on the C4D forum. Thanks, man!

[Nicholas White]

Hey,

Thank you Chris for your help. I ended up modeling it using polygons, here is the result:

Take care,

Nick

[Chris Smith]

Extremely nice. What was your methid exactly? Did you select every other poly and delete it, then throw it in a Hypernurbs?

BTW, That’s a nice render, did you use sky reflection or a sky map of some sort?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Nicholas White]

Hey,

Thank you for the kind words.

Briefly, I followed this tutorial:
https://www.penrith-high.net/cinema4d/golfball.gif

Then I cut this into a quarter, cloned two rows of the holes and ‘flattened’ them to flow along a straight curve (like a tube), then stitched the two rows back to the quarter-sphere using the bridge and build polygon tools.

Then it was simply cloning the flat tube section, moving it down the y-axis, and stitching it to the existing body. It took, as you can imagine, a LONG time; the biggest problem was not all the points lined up perfectly, so there was a good hour or so of just selecting rows of points and setting their y-positions so that when I lined everything up, it wouldn’t look too bad. I’ve become very, very familiar with the points manager, I think that it is going to be my friend when I need to make something and I’m not clever enough to do a trick to get the points to do what I want them to.

Finally, the object was dropped into a hypernurb and rendered.

The material was the ‘chrome1’ preset in one of the shaders…Channel shader, I think.

At a distance it looks pretty nice, but up close it is a mess, some of the holes are stretched in all sorts of directions, you can see little bumps here and there, but for the learning experience it was fun and when I finally get my work copy and can save my projects, it will take a lot less time to model.

Take care,

Nick