[Jim Scott]

Good thinking Brian. Your way is better.

Rick, here’s another example using Brian’s suggestion:

11375_planksdynamics2.c4d.zip

Here’s how I set it up:
1) Create all of your planks with Rigid body tags and a Floor with a Collider body tag.
2) Move the planks vertically to separate them.
3) Press play to run the dynamics.
4) Once they fall into place, stop the animation, and with all of the plank’s tags selected click on “Set Initial State.”
4) Return to frame zero.
5) For the plank to be moved laterally (cube.1 in my example) set Dynamic to “Off” to make it a Collider Body.
6) With the above plank selected, move the timeline indicator to the point in time when you would like the plank to start moving and click on the “Record Active Objects” icon (the keyframe symbol within the circle, or F9) to create a position keyframe.
7) Move the timeline indicator to the point in time when you would like the plank to stop, move the plank out of the stack, and create another keyframe.

When you play the animation the plank will slide out of the stack and the other planks will drop down.

[Jim Scott]

You need to have the dynamics disabled (uncheck “enable”) in order to move the plank using position keyframes. Once its movement is complete, enable dynamics again by keyframing “enable.” As mentioned in my previous post, you need to make a keyframe with “enable” unchecked at a point in time after where you intend to stop moving the plank (in other words, where you stop keyframing its position), and then another keyframe with “enable” checked to again have dynamics take over control.

I have to go to an appointment now, but let me know if you can’t figure it out and I will give you step by step instructions later.

Have fun.

[Jim Scott]

When dynamics is enabled it takes over control — meaning you can’t have dynamics enabled on a plank AND keyframe it to move out of the way. In order to do what you want you need the dynamics to be disabled until the moving plank clears the stack. Make a keyframe with “Enable” unchecked in the Dynamics tags of the upper planks and the moving plank at the point where the moving plank clears the stack (select all of the Dynamics tags to add a keyframe for all at once), and then one frame later keyframe it to be enabled.

For example: 11374_planksdynamics.c4d.zip

[Jim Scott]

You need to select the cameras to be used, at which point the Camera Morph icon will be available.

From the C4D help file:

First, create separate cameras for the various objects/regions on which you want to focus.
Select all of these cameras and then select Camera Morph from the Create | Camera menu.
Finally, animate the Blend setting in the newly created Camera Morph tag. Done.

[Jim Scott]

Draw a spline for each path and sweep a flattened rectangle along it.

[Jim Scott]

Nice solution Cassius. Hope that works for you Manuel.

[Jim Scott]

Hi Manuel,

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question, but what are you finding inefficient about using a linear cloner object to stack the rings? Once you have it set up, adding layers of bricks is simply a matter of increasing the count, so I don’t know how it could be any more efficient. Is your circular wall similar to the one I have created below? If not, I may again be misunderstanding your question.

[Jim Scott]

The example project in the link you provided used MoText objects for the letters. Since your original images did not have the Extrude objects expanded I assumed that they just used Text objects. However, looking at your new images I see that the letters used Spline objects for the extrudes, which means you will need to replace them with either your own drawn splines, splines converted from Illustrator files, or with some other spline objects. Since your project is creating text, Text objects would be the quickest and easiest to use. But, not having seen the project itself, only you could decide if that would be satisfactory. Also, like the example from the link, each letter is using two versions (or copies) of a spline object to create the text, so you will need to replace them both in order to edit the text.

If the above doesn’t help, I would need to see the project file to offer more assistance.

[Jim Scott]

Click on the + symbol next to the Extrude object to expand its hierarchy. Click on the Text Object to select it.

In the Attributes menu select the text in the “Text” window and change it. Repeat for each letter.

[Jim Scott]

I have never used it, but check out the script “CompsFromSpreadsheet” from aescripts + aeplugins. It may do what you want.

https://aescripts.com/compsfromspreadsheet/#/discussion/embed