[Adam Trachtenberg]

Hi Frank,

I’d be happy to look at the project if you want to send it to me: adamt at 3danvil dot com.

Have you looked to see if the underlying textures are showing up in renders, as opposed to the viewport? You won’t see them in the viewport unless you turn on “Stacked Materials” in the viewport’s display menu. The only downside to that option is that it uses a fair amount of memory.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Ah, I gotcha. In that case what you need to do is:

* make a version of the text that’s suitable for an alpha (if it isn’t already);

* put the tex in a material’s alpha channel,

* drop it on the null containing the array objects and set it to planar projection;

* use the texture axis tool to rotate/scale the planar projection so it covers the whole array;

* right click on the tag and select “copy tag to children”;

* now, unfortunately, you have to drag each tag to the right of the original texture tag … but it will work.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I’m not sure what all the supported formats are. I’ve used .jpg, .tif, .psd sequences, .mov files, and various flavors of .avi.

Did you set up the animation parameters in the material? If not, you do that by clicking on the file name in the attributes manager. Once you do that you’ll see an animation tab at the top where you set the start/end, frame rate, etc. Don’t forget to hit the calculate button.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Did you put the movie file in the material’s color channel? If not try that. Also you have to set the material to preview animation if you want to see it move in the viewport.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Remove the tex tags from the individual objects and place one on the parent null, set to planar projection.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Sounds like what you want is actually the edge cut tool. So first use ring selection, then edge cut.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Try the built-in knife tool in loop mode. 😉

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Most of the MeshTools functions are built into Cinema. There’s a free plugin (ama multislide) that duplicates the loop slide function which you can dowloand from here: https://www.remotion4d.net/downloads_d2.php

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Here’s a better way to go about this: https://www.3danvil.com/tutorials/engraved%20stone.c4d

So, two extrude nurbs objects — one to extrude the cut out letters up, and another to extrude the stone down. The former spline is formed by connecting the text spline and a rectangle spline. Before you do that convert the rectangle spline to bezier type and set the points to hard interpolation.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I would select the exterior polygons and extrude them inward with the caps option checked. Then select the interior polygons and run the Functions>Split command. That will create a separate object with just those polygons, but you’ll have to delete them from original mesh.