Adam Trachtenberg
Forum Replies Created
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There are a few example scenes in the MoGraph presets if you have MoGraph. But the presets don’t actually USE MoGraph, oddly, so it’s not needed to duplicate. 🙂
What they do is use an extruded text spline for the numbers and animate the text field. So for example, type “10” into the text field and keyframe at frame 0, go to from 30 (or 25 for PAL), replace the “10” with “9” and keyframe, etc., etc.
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A lot of painstaking point-by-point modeling. The key would be to get the edge flow right so you could create the appropriate creases. A few months ago I modeled a whole bunch of mattresses that presented the same sort of challenge — though less complex. I tried to use cloth and few other things, but at the end of the day it comes down to building the correct topology and pushing points.
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I don’t know if this will help, but you can clone onto TP particles by setting your cloner to object mode, opening the TP settings, and dragging your particle group into the cloner’s object field.
If I was to do this from scratch I would use a Matrix Object to generate the Thinking Particles. The Matrix Object has sliders to control the extent to which the particles are affected by MoGraph vs. Thinking Particles.
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Through Boot Camp Windows runs exactly the same way that it would on a purpose-built PC. It’s not a virtual machine but a native install just like any other PC — no reduction in performance whatsoever. I’ve been using it for over a year on a quad-core Mac Pro 3 Ghz with no issues running C4D, AE, PS, Rhino, etc., etc. It’s actually the best PC I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned and built quite a few. 🙂
Under the original Boot Camp you couldn’t access more than 2 gigs of RAM under Windows, but I understand that that limitation has been removed with Leopard and the new version of Boot Camp.
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I don’t know if it’s a *better* way, but another way would be to render a sketch/poste effects pass and use object buffers to split up the objects and fade them in/out in post … but that might be a bigger PITA than what you’re doing now.
Another option would be to use Xpresso to drive the opacity of multiple materials with the opacity of one material.
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My advice would be to get a Mac Pro and run XP 64 on it through boot camp. You can also load XP 32 and have the option to boot into either variety of Windows or OSX for ultimate flexibility. As far as graphics cards go, Cinema doesn’t benefit from high end adapters, so get a mid-level nVidia or ATI card. As a general rule nVidia has better drivers but things change so frequently in the vid card area — I can’t really say what’s the best choice at the moment.
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Sounds like there’s something wrong with your weighting, but hard to tell without seeing the file.
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Use a random effector: check the “visibility” box in the parameters tab, set random mode to “noise” in the effector tab, and play with the animation speed, scale, and min/max parameters (effector tab) to get the look you want.
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If you click on the null and look in the attributes manager you’ll see a “Thinking Particles” tab at the top right. Click the tab and you’ll see a “polygon surgace” box. Just drag your object in there.
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Are there perhaps keyframes on the camera?