[Jack Evans]

Hmmm… I’m not sure how many bites you’re going to get on that, unless it’s from somebody who does this as a hobby and has some spare time to kill. For example, if I were doing it, I’d have to write a contract (to protect both parties), we’d have to agree to all the elements, and get it signed. Unfortunately, I’ve lost a lot of money on projects like this for which I’ve never gotten paid. I’d be willing to bet anybody around here has horror stories like that.

For the job itself, there’d be designing the particle elements, setting up an emitter, testing the animation, compositing the animation and text layers, packaging the resulting video to whatever the specifications would be, delivery of the package, and adjustments that would have to be made after the fact. I can’t see that taking less than three or four hours just for making the logo originally, and I bill out at more than $40 an hour already. At that, I’m not a professional graphic artist (I’m a software developer, and I bill at an even higher rate for that).

I don’t want to be discouraging, but I’m not sure that you’ll get quite the quality you’re looking for at that price. I think there might be more working artists here than hobbyists, and hobbyists might give you more choices at the rate you’re offering. A couple of good places I know of for a variety of hobbyists would be Renderosity (they have a job posting forum you could use) and Daz3D (the folks in the Carrara forum are often very helpful).

I would recommend that you get a written agreement up front that specifies the animation size, format, frame rate, and that you’ll have ownership of the final product (the work should be considered “work for hire” with you as the hirer) so there won’t be any issues with you using the art and possibly registering it at a later time with the U.S. trademark office or any other authority.

I must say, that’s a pretty concept for a logo. Might be hard to get the right look for it on letterhead; you might want to have the artist do a still with transparency and another black on white for masking, too.

Anyway, best of luck, and I hope it works out.

[Jack Evans]

They are great… I think that “Fireworks Glitter continuous 03b” is one of the best I’ve seen in a really long time. Actually, I think it’s good enough to be in one of the pro emitter libraries, so it’s amazingly cool that you shared it. Thanks, Alan. 🙂

[Jack Evans]

There’s a really nice set of video tutorials on adding effects that follow a moving soccer ball here at Creative Cow (https://library.creativecow.net/tutorials/particleillusion) that might be what you need. It covers following the moving object and allowing for camera movement in Particle Illusion.

[Jack Evans]

All of the emitter libraries are available at the downloads section of the Wondertouch web site (https://www.wondertouch.com/), so I’m sure you could download them via a computer that is connected, and move them manually to the defauly emitter library on the disconnected computer.

[Jack Evans]

The libraries look especially nice this month. There’s a couple that are almost exactly what I’ve been looking for a some different projects. Thanks for all your hard work, Alan.

[Jack Evans]

You might try a formula deformer on the plane. If the plane is normal to the Y-Axis (which it is by default when created), try this formula:

-1/(.5*sqrt(4+256*sqrt(u*u+v*v)))

with the effect set to Y-Radial, and you’ll get a parabolic depression in the middle of the plane, while the rest of the plane stays (almost) flat. You can adjust the values to change the size and depth of the depression (the numbers .5, 4, & 256). You can get a slightly different curve if you replace u & v in the formula with x & z.

If you move the deformer, the depression moves around in the plane. However, the depth of the deformation varies slightly as the position changes; I haven’t checked the formulat to see if that’s inherent to the math, or if it’s possibly because of the way the polygons are cut.

You might want to make the plane a child of a HyperNURBS object, too, so you get a smoother bottom to the depression.

[Jack Evans]

Hmm… I still can’t get that poke-through fixed. Not sure what I’m doing wrong (again, complete C4D noob here) but it won’t accept any changes to the P.Z value for the cloner object at any frame. I change the value, then it blinks back to what it was before. I can change the position value of the arrow head object, but that doesn’t do anything; the sweep object continues to follow it. It looks like the end of the sweep object is tied to the center of the arrow head; I’m wondering if the sweep were following a null object parented to the arrow head, if it would work differently.

I’m ordering the live version this week, I’ll try it again once it arrives (maybe there’s a patch that covers it that didn’t make it into the demo). Since the problem is reproducible and the scene file here is pretty basic, I would think it wouldn’t be too hard for the engineers to track down if someone sends in a bug report.

[Jack Evans]

I can duplicate this, using the file that Brian posted above. If I render it to the picture viewer, I get spikes sticking through the arrow heads. If I do a render view, or if I render a preview, I don’t get the spikes. When I render out the animation, I get the spikes with full render, hardware preview, or software preview.

FWIW, I’m still using the demo (R11.010) on a Windows Vista 32 bit computer. I wouldn’t think this would be a demo-related thing, but, ya never know.

Other quirks: In stepping through the frames one at a a time, I notice right away that the circled rectangle object is poking through the arrow head object. You can see this pretty clearly around frame 9. It seems like it would look better in any event if the rectangular end of the sweep object could be made to just touch the back of the arrow head object.

Also, if you step through to, say, frame 25, then click the button to jump to the end frame, the arrowheads jump to the correct position, but the sweep object doesn’t make its arc; it jumps in a straight line from it’s position in frame 25 to the end. If you do a render view of this odd arrangement, it does show up in the render.

I don’t know enough about C4D yet to suggest a solution, but maybe there something that can be tweaked in the sweep NURBS object.

[Jack Evans]

I would start by:

1. Add the blank emitter to the stage (“New Emitter” from the blank.IL3 library).

2. Right click on the emitter, and click Properties, which will bring up the emitter properties window.

3. Click on the particle in the tree on the right (labeled “New Particle Type” in the blank library).

4. In the Particles tab in the middle of the window, uncheck the box marked “Use emitter’s emission angle and range”.

5. Click on the “velocity” property in the tree on the left. In the Behavior tab, in the graph window, slide the value for frame 1 up to about 110.

6. Click on the “emission angle” property in the tree on the left (this didn’t exist until you unchecked the box in step 4). Adjust the slider for frame one up to 90. You’ll now have particles streaming straight up.

7. Add points at different frames to the emission angle, and adjust each point up or down, to make the stream go in arcs left or right.

On that last step, you’ll have to experiment with different frames and angle values to get the look you want. I expect you’ll also want to change the particle image. I’d look at the Water Faucet emitter in the water_01.IL3 library; that one works best if you set some motion blur.

I left out some basic how-to’s in the above steps, but you ought to be able to pick up the basics from the tutorial docs that come with PI.

Hope that helps. 🙂

[Jack Evans]

If you’ve never downloaded it, you can get it by clicking on Check for Updates in the PI help menu; it’ll show up in the list of free emitter libraries to download. The one I was referring to is named emitters_06_07. Once you download it from the update program, you should be able to bring it up with the Quick Load Library option from the libraries window.