[Brian Murphy]

Hey thanks guys. Mr. Jones, you’ve inspired me to retry the standard particle emitter with dynamics. I was able to modify the gravity and was extremely pleased with the reliable collision detection. After many trial and error attempts, I ended up with what I wanted.

Cheers!

[Brian Murphy]

I do have dynamics but I need these particles to hover until they go into the tube. I could never override the gravity in dynamics to have the particles simply float through the air and bounce correctly like I can with TP….or am I missing something?

Agreed – I really like the dynamics collision sampling – reliable.

Thanks for answering,
Brian

[Brian Murphy]

Ahhh, good question!

But, without reservation towards them being some odd shape, they are simply spheres.

I think I solved this though. There has to be a really strong force pulling them in the direction towards which I want them to go. I added a wind tunnel and it seems to keep them from sticking. In this case, I WANT that sudden burst of speed from the particles as they enter the tube.

But I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t’ need that speed boost, they would still stick….I suppose I would have the same problem. So, without any dire need for an immediate answer, how would I solve it?

Thanks!

[Brian Murphy]

I would extrude a spline square that is subdivided several times, have the extrusion create a filet cap only on the top, just a bit. Then apply the texture to the top of your extruded tile to occupy the original plane and the extrusion (fit to object).

Next, I would add some light displacement noise in the material on the displacement channel, unless you just want to “Set point value” using a subtle crumple effect (convert to mesh first). Finally, apply Hypernurbs to the object for smoothing.

[Brian Murphy]

Thanks Adam – I guess this answers the question as to whether or not I am able to use two planes of blur, which is what I was trying to accomplish.

Yea, one blur or another works fine but both simply won’t work.

Thanks for confirming.

[Brian Murphy]

Ah, got it thanks.

Adam Trachtenberg…hmmmmm, that name sounds familiar. ; )

[Brian Murphy]

Thanks again Mark – you’ve provided me some direction here. I appreciate you offering up the advice!

-Brian

[Brian Murphy]

Yes, previous material comes out the same way. It is all footage from a Canon HF10 HD video camera in the form of MTS files. There are only a few third party programs that will convert MTS files and Toast Titanium is one of them so I’ve been using it to convert to Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60. I wonder if it’s doing the job right!

Do you work with MTS files at all and if so, how do you convert them?

Thanks again for your time and expertise!

[Brian Murphy]

Hey Mark, Thanks so much for taking your time to go over this for me. I am still getting the same results and I just don’t understand why. I’ll try to upload a still of the video here. It is most obvious when the camera pans to the left. Notice the patio chair backs….double image. The balloons as well. I did check the Inspector and the footage is coming in top field first. Doesn’t make sense.

doubleimage.png

[Brian Murphy]

I’ve had problems using Quicktime movies as textures in C4D – especially on NetRender. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t…and sometimes it stops working after it had worked already….I have yet to figure it out. The solution I found was to keep the animation as PNG sequences (with alpha included), which it sounds like you’ve been doing. They seem to be the most reliable…only thing I could recommend is to take down the frames per second on your sequences, not to mention their physical dimension. This could reduce the files size(s) considerably.

Are they close to the camera?…enough to ruin the “illusion” if you were to follow the above suggestions?

Brian