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Time offset Instances of an animated object
I am trying to figure out the best way to go about this….
I have a sperm cell, in which i’ve rigged and animated. I’d like to clone a ton of these guys swimming towards an egg.
I’ve thrown the sperm cell into a cloner object, turned off instances, and used a step effector with a time offset. Now i have many sperm cells swimming around, and thanks to the “time offset” it doesn’t look like they all are moving exactly the same.
My problem is that cloning a ton of these sperm cells (about 5000 polygons each) is too much for my computer to handle.
Is there a way, or a another method in which i can use instances of the sperm instead?
Unfortunately, the step effector’s “time offset” option does nothing when I have “Render Instances” turned on in the Cloner object.I’ve also tried using Thinking Particles, but i run into the same problem…..emitting hundreds of sperm cells with too many polygons become impossible to work/preview. Actually TP seems like it would be great for this…..if i could figure out how to use instances instead of duplicating the polygons a hundred times….Is there a simple fix to this that i’m missing?
Again, I simply want to use the original sperm’s animation…but offset the timing of it……without having my machine crawl to a stop.
Thanks!
Dean
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4 Replies
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The best solution may be to download TCA’s free SteadyBake plugin which will bake your mograph clones to a single animated object: https://homepage.mac.com/tcastudios/steadybake.html
You can use render instances with TP by checking the render instance box in the Pshape node’s properties, but I think you’ll have the same problem with the animation being synchronized.
Also, why do you need such heavy geometry? Seems to be you should be able to model this fewer than 200 polygons. Then you could use hyperNURBS and just turn it on for rendering.
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Hi Dean,
I’m having exactly the same problem and I’ve looked everywhere for a solution and have found nothing that works.
I have a fish that I’ve animated with an IK chain controllers and constraints. I then want to clone the fish but offset the animation. No matter what I try nothing seems to work, even placing all the elements within a null and cloning the null.Did you find a solution to your problem? Is there anyone out there who knows how to achieve this?
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Naw, haven’t found a solution yet. Kinda moved on to a different area of my animation and figured I’d re-evaluate this issue later. I had already used the steady bake suite, Adam spoke of. This’ll bake your rig and animation onto one object…simplifies things. But I still have heavy geometry being duplicated too many times…
I just tried setting up a cloner object with a 10x10x10 grid array. With instances turned on, I get a preview in the viewer, and a test render of about 11.5 minutes at 720×486 for one frame. If I turn off instances, I have no preview, and when i hit render….i wait about 20 minutes while it looks like it is trying to render, but hasn’t quite started. I quit after 20 minutes of waiting…
Adam, if i create an object with a few hundred polygons (or a proxy) for previewing purposes….and then drop the object into a hyper nurbs or substitute the proxy for a high poly object when it is time to render, won’t i still be stuck with the issue i face now with rendering….waiting an eternity to render…or crashing?
Thanks,
-d
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Hi, Dean
I eventually found the solution. I had to bake the mesh and use that in mograph with a time offset applied to a random effector.
I also had the issue with not being able to view anything realtime on playback and I only had 12 instances in my cloner array. Rendering though wasn’t too bad although it was an uncomplicated scene.
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