[Aaron Pozzer]

restarted many times, but not tried trashing prefs. it doesnt happen all the time. it seems random, or theres something im doing that i havent identified that is making it happen.

in the mean time…

ver: 13.2.0.49

[Aaron Pozzer]

answer from darby on c4dcafe…

“The only thing you should need to change to get this to work is to switch the Animation Mode on the Cloner’s Transform tab from Play to Fixed.”

[Aaron Pozzer]

not quite sure i understand, but based on looking at the video, if i had to do it, and use clones, id make 8 or 12 separate cloner rings (or however many rings of satellites you want), and just animate the rotation of each one, slightly offset from the last. that will give you the varying rotation on each ring of satellites.

[Aaron Pozzer]

thanks brian. good point on the cubes pulling it along. maybe if i slowed that down it would drop the overall energy. the reason i did it that way (flat to bend into position) was because it was easier to UV a flat object, and then let it get bent, so id be reasonably sure the UVs would be preserved and suffer minimal stretching. even if i modelled it flat and tried to bend it into position, i would probably screw up the UVs.

i did end up getting a decent solution after all. its not perfect, but its way better than the file i posted originally. i used a combination of your suggestions/settings, and a later file id been working on after my original post.

the one thing i kept fighting was collisions simply not registering. the strap would always end up intersecting itself. i tried turning up the sub samples, increasing the collision distance, and nothing mattered. i also, for a time, had 1 collision object simply stop calculating randomly. i would have to re-add a cloth collider to it every other time i pressed play it seemed.

so if i had to do this again, would you recommend soft bodies over cloth? or perhaps another method all together?

[Aaron Pozzer]

thanks for digging into it brian! i see you put BACK some things i had in previous versions, like self collision, higher sub samples, etc. Like i said i bounced around so much trying different things, the version i posted is just where i stopped, posted, then kept trying hoping someone would have better luck than me.

regarding the flexion, that one keeps confusing me. i click on things and bring up help when i dont understand them, but the wording on flexion was never quite clear. so i usually bring it to 1, or 100, compare the results to try and figure out what is making it stiffer or floppier, than i forget an hour later, and start again. my understanding was higher flexion makes it LESS stiff, as it is more able to flex. Lower flexion increases rigidity…. right?

interesting point on the rubber %… to absorb energy. Ill keep that in mind as i tweak.

as far as softbodies or other methods, i think my first idea was to do it with a dynamic joint chain, but then i know even less about setting up joints. The low poly cloth cage was something i used to use alot in Lightwave, so i knew it was at least a method i could work with and know basically what i was going to get, as long as the c4d cloth behaved. If i know a enough about cloth to get this far, i know even less about softbodies. but since this is most of the way there, ill keep going this route.

Ill fiddle with this for a bit and see what i come up with. Thanks for your help!

[Aaron Pozzer]

thanks brian. that seems to have done it. i swear i tried that though and it didnt work… maybe my cache tag was still active and i was just watching cached craziness. eitherway, had to set the animation speed to 0 on the noise, but it did the job.

thanks again.

[Aaron Pozzer]

k, just wanted to make sure i wasnt missing something simple. seems like an obvious oversight on their part.

[Aaron Pozzer]

yup, here you go (r17)…

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u5bv2ig56exx4r6/layerNoise.c4d?dl=0

i made a noise, added movement, applied to cube, scrubbed, worked. duplicated cube, duplicated material, renamed, simply clicked the texture slot noise and switched to layered, and now its broken.

[Aaron Pozzer]

thank for the response brian. i had tried with and without the animate preview turned on before i made my initial post. in my case it doesnt seem to help. the noise evolution works, but not the movement.

[Aaron Pozzer]

bah, i was hoping that wasnt the case. ya, i thought of a workflow if i had to render twice. its just unfortunate cause id have to render the DOF twice as well, which already added a good chunk to each frame time. oh well. thanks for confirming.