[Brian Jones]

eyes are a child of the head or all parts as a child of a null? Either way you should be able to change the Collision/Inherit Tag setting of the dynamic body tag to Compound Collision Shape with Individual Elements – Off to keep the eyes from exploding out. How are you doing the hair?

[Brian Jones]

yeah testing your other scene I saw the same thing, some of the puffs don’t render. Looking at the scene from the top and seeing where the Side.1 camera is (right dead center inside the matrix, past many of the points but since it’s a parallel camera it can do that) I wondered if that is something Pyrocluster can’t handle, so I moved the camera straight back along the Z of the camera (in the top view) out of the matrix and it appears to all render.

[Brian Jones]

you can get brighter renders of the volume by turning off Use Illumination in the pyrocluster material settings and you can make the render quicker (it’s still a volume render) by going into the Volume Tracer settings Render Mode, Crispy is the slowest, Crispy Gas then Hazy quickest or you can go to User and set the World Step Size larger (15 was the max I could go to, it disappears after that) – the look keeps changing as the settings change so you have to decide where is the sweet spot for you

[Brian Jones]

select the edge you want to rotate/flip and right-click and choose Spin Edge

[Brian Jones]

can you post the c4d file?

[Brian Jones]

You are looking for Bevels. If your cube is editable you can use the Bevel Tool (in Edge mode) and if the edge you want is selected it will bevel only that edge. You can also use the Bevel Deformer which will do the same stuff and can be restricted by a selection tag to operate on only one edge (or any number of edges). The Bevel deformer can also work on a parametric cube and can even work on a single edge of a parametric cube by first using a Correction deformer to select an edge, saving that as a selection, then using that selection in the Bevel deformer.

and for completeness – subdivisions can be controlled and can even have sharp edges (Via the SDS Weight tag) but control like you would want would likely also involve using the knife tool to add edges in the right places. In other words it’s possible but the bevel tool or bevel deformer would be easier.

12517_bevelexamples.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

if you use a Bend it will distort the letters (which could be what you want) – if you want no distortion on the letters, just want them following a curve use a spline to describe the curve and use either 1. MoText or 2. put your text in a Fracture then use a Spline Effector to stick the text to the spline

Another way to do opacity would be a black/white gradient in the Alpha channel… how do you want the text to fade in? One letter at a time or across multiple letters?

[Brian Jones]

use the Boole object to delete parts that are in other parts, if you are not familiar with it try it out with some simple objects like a cube and a sphere to figure out what it does on all the settings

[Brian Jones]

you’ve got all the text penetrating into the base object most of the text either penetrates itself or it’s neighboring text (overlaps) by a bit and you’re telling it to close holes. It may be one object but it’s made of 10 pieces in the one object and all embedded into the base and others to some degree (try selecting a point or poly and doing a Select Connected). Optimize and Close Holes is going to have a hard time getting it right in those conditions and I can’t see why it would be necessary, there are no holes in your objects (that I can see on a quick look) you just have 10 objects (pieces) where there should be one.
How you want it to break should determine what the construction should be it should be. Do you want it as one object or should the text be separate? Given it’s chocolate I would think all one object but with the different colors in the render it would depend on how the ‘chocolate’ was made.

And what about the nuts? In the example file the nut cloners are all deactivated but assuming you want nuts there too…
– why not only one cloner, just increase the count and keep the nuts from occupying the same space with a Push Apart effector, the Random effector isn’t necessary, I think, as the Surface distribution of the cloner is already random. The problem right now is since the letters are still whole objects the nuts are covering all the hidden areas of the letters too so you are loosing many of the nuts inside the chocolate. That would be fixed if it really was one object.

I just tried to turn this all into one object (minus the nuts) and it wasn’t successful even when I took all the letters of each word and Unioned them then all those and unioned with the the base. I suspect it’s because the words have overlaps in the corners of the bevels – and more testing, that seems to be true. Back in the original version try re-filleting the caps but use Constrained so the tight corners in the text can’t fillet ‘over itself’. That gives limits to the amount of fillet you can have but it’s a lot cleaner construction with script fonts like that.

[Brian Jones]

it’s definitely working here, it can’t not work I think, since the symmetry side is a direct copy. You won’t see it unless you select the Symmetry object after the cut or change the display mode from Gouraud Shading to Gouraud Shading (Lines) – or any of the (Lines) modes – or are you meaning something different?