[Brian Jones]

mac/pc? OS version? version of C4D? Graphics card and OGL settings?Not that I’m going to know, I’ve never seen that happen, but it might be useful info.

[Brian Jones]

thanks again!

[Brian Jones]

select both splines in the ‘O’ (for example) and do a Functions/Connect. This will give you a new spline that contains both. Put that into the Extrude. The old splines will still be there, you can hide them or delete them.

[Brian Jones]

This is made from defaults from the Content Browser with the exception that the Colliders have a few new xpresso nodes to change the particles to a second group once they hit one of the objects and to pass the second group right to a Freeze node. The particles won’t render since there is no shape but I assume you know how to do that.

[Brian Jones]

1. add a compositing tag to your text and in the Object Buffer tab, enable a buffer and add your text (in this case anyway) all to the same buffer (the default 1 will do). If your text is more than one object you can add a Compositing tag to each and add them all to the same buffer.
2. enable Multipass rendering (go straight to a .psd file) and turn on Shadows plus whatever else you need, probably the Image Layers default is good, and the Object Buffer layers.
3. render
4. open the psd – add your desert image below the diffuse layer (probably the bottom)
5. you won’t find the Object Buffer layer here (in the Layers), it gets loaded in the Channels as an alpha – load it as a selection and use it as a mask on your Diffuse layer to keep the text but get rid of the original floor. Probably you will want to mask the Specular layer as well (and anything else that affects the sand when it shouldn’t)

[Brian Jones]

don’t think xpresso can do that, it would take Coffee script or something like that.

[Brian Jones]

Unfortunately, as far as I know, you can’t get around it – the quickest way is to pull the object from the solver, Clear the solver, change the object’s animation, move to the final frame of animation for the object (if not there) and drop it back in the solver.

[Brian Jones]

Well my tests in the next post work but the ‘real’ solution may be in understanding matrices and what to feed to what to get a simpler solution without having to work out the ports and negating the values to get the right spin. I’ve looked at matrix math before but have never had a good enough reason to wrap my head around it (assuming that that really would be a cleaner solution to the rotation stuff, I don’t actually know that it is)

[Brian Jones]

I had to split the rotation velocity vector into reals and run some tests with single axis spins to get the right spin to the dynamics. Results here. It works, simplified the xpresso too, it had redundant bits given that the Solver only uses the passed Start values once (what was I thinking?).

[Brian Jones]

tried some quick tests last night and a single axis rotation when passed into the Rigid Dynamics tag moves the wrong way (wrong axis). Vector rotation is non-intuitive for me, I can’t work on it until later but if I find consistent behaviour I’ll post some kind of example.