[Brian Jones]

in your Deflector node
Deflector Type – Geometry
Offset Type – Particle Size Travel
Offset – 1
uncheck Event Only or no deflection happens

[Brian Jones]

thinking particles has the pFragment node which works like that but without the ability to use a falloff. A search for ‘c4d pfragment’ brings up some potentially useful tutorials.

[Brian Jones]

your vibrate tag is going to vibrate all the clones together because the same object and vibrate tag are being cloned so they will all share exactly the same motion (it would be more obvious if you have more clones to make the helix) – I’m assuming you will want a random jiggling for each clone rather than them all moving together . If so, remove the vibrate tag and use a Random Effector on the Cloner set the Random Mode to Noise or Turbulence. If the individual parts of the molecules are going to vibrate as well the vibrate tags would work on each part…

The xpresso isn’t going to work that way I think, the best way seems to be using object mode with the cloner then attach the clones to a helix spline – don’t know it the geometry’s right for your purposes – but that way the xpresso works.

10403_fixcloneproblem2.c4d.zip

back to the original colouring problem – one way to do it would be put lights inside the metaball sources and use a Backlight shader to color the metaball – that will clone properly (though some tweaking would be required to get the look right)

10404_proximalproblem2.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

wet maps. XParticles, Effex, Blackstar’s Little Happy Paint Shader, probably vertex maps if you are good enough with xpresso, possibly Proximal with the right gradient or invisible objects trailing….

[Brian Jones]

don’t think so, the Proximal works with the actual placement of the referenced objects and the clones are not the referenced objects…. I think you’d have to make the metaball editable and bake the texture prior to cloning

[Brian Jones]

you have to make sure you are getting the surface normals to all point the same direction as well. Here is a quick fix (it’s not perfect but it’s better) hopefully it will show you sort of the way to go.

10402_mtrmapping2.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

it’s the construction of the tunnel. Select the floor polygon and right-click and choose Remove N-gons you will see the kink in the rendered image occurs where the now visible triangle crosses the floor. The floor is one polygon and it needs to be redone and it should end up as quad polys. Delete the floor and put it back in with the Polygon Pen. The door on the left will be a problem too after fixing the floor as it is triangulated.

[Brian Jones]

did you animate the character in the master file then turn on Generator?

[Brian Jones]

the rate modifier that kicks in at 500 (530) seems to be ‘xpRotater.1’ which does have a rate multiplier increasing but the group it’s affecting is the LINES group which doesn’t have any particles in it until ~790 when the flock->land group changer goes by.
The other ‘xpRotater ‘ does affect the RETURN group but does not increase the speed of rotation.

As for explosion, you could lower the Escape Velocity in the rotator but you would also have to turn off (or lower the force) of SPHERE_ATTRACTOR.2 which has the particles until they get shifted to the LINES group

[Brian Jones]

going back to your original uploaded file if you set the Tracer spline Intermediate Points to Uniform and then add a Target tag to the camera with the Target Object set to the Null which is a child of the tumble weed (but move the null up to be more the center of the tumbleweed). That follows the tumbleweed better (don’t know if it’s exactly what you are meaning).