[Adam Trachtenberg]

You’re having a banking problem here, which you can see if you uncheck the “Banking” box in the SweepNURBS. Cinema thinks the profile curve is flipping as it goes around the circle. The banking parameter tries to correct for that, but in this case it isn’t doing the job perfectly.

You can fix it by using a rail spline and the “use rail direction” option. In this case you would just copy the circle spline and drag it just below the existing circle spline inside the sweepNURBS (same heirarchy level — not as a child). Then move that new circle spline a little bit in the Z direction (doesn’t matter which way).

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You have to install the Cinema->AE plugin into your AE plugins directory. The plugin comes with Cinema and you can find it in the Maxon>Exchange Plugins directory.

When you save the compositing file in Cinema it will create an .aec file that contains the camera (and other) information. Open that file in AE and the plugin will translate it — including your Cinema camera info. — into After Effects.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The main thing is to increase stiffness — probably to somewhere around 70-80%. You might also want to bump flexion up a little. Then in the forces tab I would add a bit of global drag and maybe reduce air resistance.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can do this with Xpresso. Drag the null and the object into the Xpresso editor. You’ll need to know the index number of the point you want to constrain to, which you can find in the structure manager. Then create a point node and connect your object’s “object” out port to the point node’s “object” in port. Click on the point node and set the point index number in the attributes manager. Then connect the node’s “point position” out port to the null’s global position in port.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

1. There are no plugins that will take a model and blow it up that convincingly, out of the box. There are a number of things you can try, however:

* use Cinema’s built-in explosion deformer. It’s pretty good and could be used in conjunction with particle effects;

* PhyRis or Silver Bullet plugin by Remotion. These are physics plugins, but they rely on existing objects, i.e., they won’t break up the building for you.

2. You can generate particles based on collisions with Thinking Particles. You would use an Xpresso Ray Collision node to turn on a particle generator at the moment of impact.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You’re out of luck with Object Blur. You can speed up SMB by turning off anti-aliasing, which is performed by SMB anyway. You can also use Reelsmart Motion Blur in post if you have it, either in basic mode or supplemented with Cinema’s vector motion pass (but that’s tricky).

[Adam Trachtenberg]

[ryan chan] “hello everybody, i wonder how can i transform a paragraph made by Text Object to a Spline(Circle) using Spline Effortor, in the order of text’s index, rather than using box or linear or sphere etc.
and also, if possible, add a little bit randomness to it as well.”

One way to do it is to use a step effector set only to affect weight. So you would set it’s weight transform to 100%. Then you would go to the spline effector’s falloff tab and turn it’s weight setting to 0%. As a result the step effector will determine how much influence the spline effector has, and you can animate the step effector’s spline graph to make the letters move in index order.

Note: the step effector must be on top of the spline effector in the text object’s effector list.

You could also use a shader effector in place of the step effector — animating a gradient in the shader effector’s shader tab. That way you could add some turbulence to the gradient to give it a little randomness. Or in either case you could add a random effector to that end.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

It depends a lot on how you constructed the card house. If it’s individual objects, I’d use a random effector in deformer mode, set to “object”, then change the random mode to “noise” and set a small parameter for the movement. You won’t have object collision, but if the movement is small enough it should look okay to add a little chaos.

But the best way to construct it, IMO, would be to clone the cards onto a matrix object in grid array mode. Then you could use the bend deformer (or any deformer you want) to distort the matrix grid and it will move the cards without distorting them.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Try quantize 1.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can use the boolean object for this.