[Adam Trachtenberg]

You have to drag the wind object into the hair object’s Forces box and set the mode to include. It will work better if you set the hair object’s Dynamics>Gravity setting to a positive number.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I think you’re after the “God rays” effect. Here’s a working example: https://www.3danvil.com/tutorials/Pyro_GodRays.c4d

The pyrocluster material’s volume and density settings are important. They have to be sufficiently low to allow enough light to penetrate so you can see the effect. In the above example I also used the “darken opacity” effect (shadow tab) along with ray angle illumination (illumination tab). The diffuse illumination model gives a more cloud-like appearance.

You might also try setting the light to inverse volumetric instead of volumetric to accentuate the light rays.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I can’t think of a setting that would change this behavior.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You probably clicked the top “traffic light” next to the object’s name in the object manager. There are two circles there that are gray by default. If you click them they cycle from gray to red to green and back. If the top circle is red the object will be invisible in the editor. If the bottom is red it won’t render. Green is in override, so if it’s a child of another object with red circles your object will still be visible.

You can also set these attributes in the attribute manager, under the basic tab.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Mmmm, you can’t! The idea is to assign a very tiny amount of strength to the explosion deformer before you do the current state to object, so it’s just enough to create the clusters but not enough to change the appearance of the text very much.

You won’t be able to avoid very slight changes, so what I would do is keep a copy of the real text and then animate/switch visibility just as the collider makes impact.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Unfortunately Cinema doesn’t have that neat utility that’s being demonstrated in the video, so it would take some work to split up the text. One way to do it would be to use the explosion deformer. I would center it on the letter(s) you want to break up, set the explosion force to a very low number (like .1 or less) and then make the letter editable. So it would go something like this:

*Extrude text (use triangles/regular grid on caps);
*Make text editable;
*Run opitimize to weld caps;
*Run “explode segments” to break it up into individual letters;

To fracture a letter:
*drag explosion deformer under letter;
*set strength to low number (like 100 or so);
*play with cluster settings to get appropriate fracturing;
*set strength very low (like .1 or less);
*make letter editable (current state to object);
*run explode segments on editable letter — that will break it up into fragments;
*apply dynamics to result.

Personally I don’t use the dynamics module (!) so I can’t help you from there. I use a dynamics plugin instead (Silver Bullet/PhyRis).

[Adam Trachtenberg]

There are few things more taxing on a cpu than 3D rendering. But hell, they need to upgrade those machines anyway. 😉

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Sound like you’re trying to use Clothilde (a cloth simuator) to do hard body dynamics, which doesn’t work so well. You can *sort* of do it if you turn the cloth stiffness way up, but it’s not going to give a great result.

Try using Dynamics module or the explosion fx deformer instead. Only the latter will give you fragmentation — otherwise you’ll have to break up the letters yourself.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Just running the client — if it’s not running a job — won’t put any kind of stress on the machines. If the clients are running jobs they put the machines under the same stress that you would if you were running Cinema on them directly and rendering.

So if it’s a heavy scene for a cpu (lots of raytracing, GI, caustics, etc.) then it can tax the cooling system. Also, if it’s a big scene (lots of big tex, many objects, etc.) and the machine runs out of physical ram it could cause the hard drive to churn.

But there are many people running Cinema on G5s with no issues. If the comps are in good working order there shouldn’t be a problem.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Just drag the emitter itself into the tracer’s “trace link” box.