[John Hammond]

This did cross my mind.. I shall report back on how it went after I have done some real animation using this ‘cut out + puppet’ method.

Personally, I’m not a great drawer. I’m move of a techie – more comfortable writing expressions than using a pencil. Bad, I know. I wish I stuck with art at school! Luckily I am working with some illustrators – however they are not animators.

John

[John Hammond]

Ah yes I do remember seeing that tutorial about flowing air across a car..

Since I posted I have taken the technique further..

I have used Puppet to animate an arm at the elbow, nice and bendy!

Then pre-comped the arm and used a cut-out style animation with anchor points and heirachy to attach the pre comp to a body, and added rotation animation to the arm here.

Then pre comped the lot again,

Then to this pre-comp used puppet tool again to animate the waist, with lots of flex and bend.

So far it’s working OK, though I am still testing on a simple character rig.

One limitation I have encountered is that I am doing layers of animation in different comps. I.E animating wrist + forearm in one pre-comp, shoulder joint in another, and waist in yet another. Having it all separate means that if I change say, the timing of the animation of the wrist, I have to navigate to all the the other comps to change other key frames. I think good planning and use of storyboards and dope sheets, and a good mental vision and mental breakdown of the motions will make life easier.

John

[John Hammond]

Yes I think you are right,
I’ve just done a quick test using points and spheres.

They both had similar poly counts after metaball is applied. The only difference is that with a sphere you have a radius control which affects the metaball. With the point you have to add a metaball tag to adjust the ‘radius’ of each point.

Once you make the sphere editable the metaball gets a lot bigger, so I suppose it is then using all points in the sphere’s geometry, where as when it is a primitive it treats it as a point with a radius. I think this is where I went wrong before.

Thanks for the tips

John

[John Hammond]

I have just tried your method using a polygon primitive, then deleting 3 points, and it works, so thank you!

Before I was using Object/Polygon to create an empty polygon, and then I used Structure/Add Point to create a point. I read a tut somewhere that used this method. I don’t understand why it doesn’t work but your method does, so that’s great.

Thanks
John

[John Hammond]

I had similar issues. Here’s my setup:

make ‘cut out style’ animation by animating separate limb layer rotations, with a heirachy setup from torso down to fingers.. etc.

Then precomp the whole character after it’s animated.

Then add puppet tool layer of animation. I had trouble with bits of the character going transparent, but I fixed it by changing the puppets mesh expansion right up. (find it by twirling down puppet tools in timeline on your layer, twirl down mesh – find expansion.

I know its a few months since you posted. How is progress? I just posted on the AE forum a post about using puppets with rigged characters, you may be interested or have some tips for me.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/954942

John

[John Hammond]

Ah I see,
I guess it is all in the name, although in my circumstance all I wanted to do was rotate a whole object around global 0,0,0, not it’s own axis.
I guess I can use the axis tool and manually set it to 0,0,0

As for the axis centre function, that’s one for me to look up!
Thanks for your help.

[John Hammond]

Thanks very much 🙂

[John Hammond]

I just tried making a cube editable and tried to change the modelling axis.

What I am now finding is that in object mode I can’t right click and get the context menu (or change it in attribute manager). But, in point, line or polygon mode I can.. Strange..

[John Hammond]

Hi,

First off, to get a simple cloner to animate randomly this is the process:

create cube, size 20, 20, 20 (or any other object)

create mograph cloner and drop your cube (or whatever) under it in heirachy.

with the cloner selected, create a random effector. This should now automatically be set as an effector under the cloner’s effector tab. The effectors position in the heirachy doesn’t matter.

Now here’s the bit that also stumped me for a while. Click the random effector’s effector tab and change Random Mode to Noise. Noise animates over time, random does not. There are other modes like Gaussian to play with.

Hope that was clear and answered your question.
John

[John Hammond]

If you make a cube, make it editable, and then go to Structure, Break Apart, it should make 6 seperate planes.
Or something like that, I’m new to c4d and not at my machine this weekend. Hopefully someone with a bit more experience in c4d will confirm this….