the ribbon arrow again!

[Chris Smith]

Well to make sure your arrow has a chance, are you giving it a good amount of subdivisions on your loft nurbs? Also maybe check where it says “grid” having to do with the tesselation or whatever they call it in C4D. So that instead of ngons stretching all over the surface, it has a grid like pattern that’s more controllable and I imagine easily more bendable. Sorry I’m not at my comp so I’m going from fuzzy memory. Seems like you don’t need to do the hypernurbs thing as long as your loft nurbs has enough subdivision. Not sure why it’s twisting. I wonder if that’s a product of the path deformer.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Bender]

thanks for your help…yeah…the twist is from the path deformer…i dont’t know why its doing it but i will figure it out…i guess i have to set up a propper arrow before bending it! so it’s also a good exercise in training my skills in cinema4d!

florian

[Colinmcd]

You may want to try this as it would appear that the HyperNURBSs is putting the arrow structure off a bit.

– Select polygon object from the ‘objects’ menu
– In the plan view (F2) – create a number of points that will be the edges of the polygon(s) that will make up your arrow or ribbon
– Bridge the points to form the edges of the poly. Some triangulation will occur but don’t worry about it
– Once you have created your ribbon / arrow go upto the ‘functions’ menu and select the ‘subdivide’ option. Put ‘6’ in the number box & make sure the HN box is UNCHECKED. This will now make your ribbon into a lot more polys so it will move more fluidly (or should that be ‘ribbon-ly’!) You can continue to subdivide the arrow but the more poly’s = more rendering time. I tried it just by doing the 6 subdivisions and it worked alright.

I can email you a .c4d demo file of what mine came out like if you want

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Colin

[Richard Powell]

Wha…? Subdivide by 6? Create the shape point-by-point? Don’t worry about triangles?

Firewireflow: I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all, but you’d do well to ignore the previous message in its entirety. Function>Subdivide a simple 1x1x1 cube by six, and you end up with 24,576 polygons–whee! Not to mention the time-waste of creating point-by-point. Almost sounds like a Red-Headed League boondoggle.

Okay, that twist is what’s known as ‘gimbal’–google that term for explanation as it will come up again and again no matter what 3d app you use. The paid version of Path Deformer solves this using ‘up vectors’–I highly recommend purchasing it if you’re going to be doing these kinds of things. It’s an essential for motion graphics now.

The way to solve this in the non-free version is to construct your path rotated 90 degrees on one of the axes. Alternatively you might try rotating the axes of the spline and the PD object itself. You have to play around to get it right. But the answer is that it’s always going to happen at some point with complex paths unless you have the full Path Deformer.

https://mograph.net