[John Hammond]

There is a helix primitive spline that you can use. It’s located with all the other spline shapes like cube, n-gon etc. Once you have created it you can manually adjust it’s paramenters such as radius, subdivision and so on. Finally, you can click ‘make editable’ and then go to point-mode, where you can manually drag the vertices around with the move tool.

If you’re splines are jerky try changing their sub division in Attributes Manager. Natural and subdivided are generally smooth.

[John Hammond]

These look really useful – Only had a little play around as yet but I can already see them saving me loads of time.
Many thanks!!

With regards to the R11 installation ..I suffered the same confusion a few of you guys had.

Here’s what I did:

Put the CStools folder somewhere on your drive (I put in program files/Maxon root)

Open C4d, go to window/Content Browser.

Now navigate to your CStools folder with the explorer, click the folder and on the right all the CStools appear.

To use one, right click it and choose either OPEN or MERGE (Merge to load the CSTOOLs object into your current scene.

–I couldn’t set it up so I could access through Object Managet / load preset. Is there a way? Not that using Object Browser is much more effort..

[John Hammond]

Thank you all!
I’ll try that when I get home. The was indeed very simple. It seems like it makes sense using 0 – 1 instead of 0 – 255, for the reasons you mentioned. Also, in this case, I can leave out the normalise line of code now.
Thanks
John

[John Hammond]

I’ve just tested this out in AE,
Working great for me, I can see many cases where this will be useful.

Could it be modded to make the ‘foot’ point at a target point, rather than ‘downwards’ ? for example a robot arm with a lazer on the end that’s ‘locked on’ to a moving point target..

Just a thought – expressions are still new to me.

Thanks for the knowledge.
John

[John Hammond]

hmm I’m not sure about the degradation.. could be a codec issue? I know that when I look at my footage through Quicktime it often looks bad (I use PC and render to uncompresed .AVI usually, before encoding to MPEG, or whatever)

As for the mismatch in colour / gamma.. It could be to do with the colour profile being used on each machine.. I only say that because the other day I looked at one of my videos through VLC (a free video player) and my whites had turned greenish! It was because VLC ignores my color profile that I created with calibration hardware..

[John Hammond]

viewing SD widescreen footage and a SD comp with wide pixels (1.42) will always make footage look blocky. If you press the pixel aspect ratio correction button it shows u how it really looks.

[John Hammond]

I’ve never used the plugin you mention.

The only thing that comes to mind is, in your composition settings, go to advanced, and increase the shadow map settings values.

[John Hammond]

Well.. you’re on the right forum, so that’s a start.

There is no short answer to your question..

A few keywords to look into..

Compositing
Green screen
match move (or camera tracking)
colour correction / colour grading
alpha channels

..Good luck!

[John Hammond]

for the text.. try adding a glow to the text layer, selecting ‘use original colors, not A and B colors.

For free fonts, try dafont.com – They have a selection of computer-like fonts, if I remember correctly.

To animate the text appearing, try using the text animation tools (twirl down the text layer and select ‘animate’. Start with opacity, and animating the ‘range’ value over time. This will make the text appear from left to right. (see AE help for more on this.. I can’t go into detail right now!)

Hope that gives you some pointers.
John

[John Hammond]

Thanks for the info.. I am slowly getting my head around how all this stuff works..
So I’m setting my working color space to my intended output, say SDTV. And then if I want to see what it will look like through say, HDTV, I can use the simulate output option. And when I render I choose my output color space so that the colors are transformed to look correct when viewed on the end user’s device.. OK!

Thanks all
John