[Jeremy Allen]

Does this tut help at all?

https://www.pariahstudios.co.uk/dynamic_deformers.html

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

here is a tut on bending certain parts while keeping other parts rigid.. You control the flexibility by painting a weight map over your polygons. Not sure if it is exactly what you need, but its only about 9 minutes so it may be worth your time to check it out..

https://www.pariahstudios.co.uk/dynamic_deformers.html

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Man, I hate to say it, but that pretty much went right over my head.. I think I get the idea in theory, but don’t know where to start. I wasn’t really looking for a step-by-step, as I do like to try and learn this stuff on my own, but could you possibly expand on that answer at all?

I have very little experience with C4D at this point, but I’ve been reading as much as possible. I’ve read about SPD, but never really used it yet. And I havent touched BodyPaint either..

Thanks for your time, I really do appreciate it.

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Edit > Project settings > Modynamics tab…

Keyframe the Time Scale to 0 whenever yo want it to stop, or some other low number like .25 if you just want slow motion..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

I come from a design background, moving into 3D for the first time very recently. One of the first things I noticed about C4D was the lack of proper text formatting. It drives me nuts!

I can’t understand why they give you such great animation options with the mograph text object, but you can’t really take advantage of it if you have to create all your text in Illustrator… Or can you? I know you can disconnect and fracture your text, then use Mograph effectors to animate each letter separately, but it seems like such a hassle when the Mograph text object was made for just that.

Is this pretty common for most 3D apps? With C4D being the new popular choice for Motion Graphics and broadcast design, I kinda thought text formatting would be a no brainer.. Maybe they will address this in a future release?

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

The only way I know that you can reliably scrub through a dynamics simulation is by using a Mograph Cache tag. This tag will “bake” in the animation, so you can then go to any frame and see what it would look like at that point. One thing to note though… if you change something about your animation, you need to clear the cache and then re-bake it. If you forget to do this, you will become very frustrated wondering why the viewport hasn’t updated your animation to reflect the changes you just made..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

I have no idea if this will work, but I wonder if you could clone a bunch of circle shaped splines along a path, and then use loft nurbs to fill out the shape. This way you could tweak your thickness and shape, and still have the “round all over?” look.. May be worth a quick experiment anyway.

Good luck with it, and please show us the results when you get it worked out. I’m interested to see it!

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

After playing with this a bit more I realized the balls are overlapping slightly, so if you want to use this with dynamics, they will repel each other when the animation is initialized. So the simple fix is to adjust the width and height of your triangle until the balls separate slightly. I used 995 and 875 and it worked great.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

Here’s how I just did it. The short answer is that you need to make a triangle shape to clone the balls onto. If you need more, read on for the step by step.

Add a sphere and give it a radius of 124. Add a polygon from the primitives menu. Click on the triangle option in the attributes manager for the new polygon. Use a width of 980, height of 855 and 4 segments. Select the sphere, hold down option and add a cloner object. Holding option will automatically add the cloner as a parent of the sphere. Now click on the cloner in the object manager and select object for the mode. Drag the triangle from the object manager into the object field.

Viola! It took a little trial and error to get the size and spacing right, so you may have to adjust the sphere size and triangle width and height for your particular setup.

Also, I’m still pretty new to C4D so there may be a quicker or easier way to do this.. This is just a way I figured out how to do it after seeing your question. I would upload the file, but my demo of 11.5 just ran out and I can’t save! Hope this helps anyway..

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Jeremy Allen]

For the sake of clarity, you are referring to IMPORTING not OPENING the .aec file correct?

As another precaution, are you sure you installed the correct plug-in for your version of After Effects?

I’ve only recently begun using C4D, at 11.5, so I’m not sure what issues could arise with 10.5

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1