[John Willard]

What concerns me with displacement mapping is lack of fidelity and realism, each individual stitch should look like a short tube that extends beyond the surface. I ended up using Rhino and manually creating all the curves on the surface matching the UV map and then creating offset curves (used for rail curves in C4D) normal to the surface, then importing that into C4D. The result is good, but takes a huge amount of time. I’ll see if it’s possible to get similar results with displacement mapped stitches.

[John Willard]

I’ve found the solution to my problem, and that is to create an Xpresso tag and place it on the parent node (e.g. called “GEOMETRY” which is set to the “GEOMETRY” layer). In the Xpresso editor I’ve place two nodes, an object node and a python node. The object node outputs are Object and Layer. The python node inputs are inObject and inLayer. In the python node code I wrote this:

#This script will set the layer to every
#child object to the same layer as the
#parent object (the object which contains
#the xpresso tag)

import c4d

def SetChildLayers(inObj):
for child in inObj.GetChildren():
child.SetLayerObject(inLayer)
SetChildLayers(child) #recursive

def main():
SetChildLayers(inObject)


Now, any time I place objects under the GEOMETRY node, their layers will automatically be set to the GEOMETRY layer. This works perfectly and is a real time saver!

[John Willard]

Yes, that’s correct, but when there are lots of objects and children, then that procedure is too time consuming.

[John Willard]

It works, you’re a genius!

[John Willard]

One advantage is that you don’t have to know the name of the view you want in order to perform the command. And an even bigger advantage is that the view is aligned to the same rotation. By that I mean, normally in C4D when you execute the “left” command, the view automatically rotates where Y is the up axis, then you have to manually rotate so that for example the Z is the up axis. With this new auto-align-view command, if you already are working in a view which is approximately the left view with the Z up, just press the button, and the parallel view will align itself orthogonally (left with Z up). It’s very simple, intuitive, and saves a significant amount of time.

[John Willard]

It worked! Thank you so much!

[John Willard]

Thanks Adam, I’ve tried that, but there is no improvement over the fill selection tool.

Here is a screenshot of the nurbs model showing the tangent faces to have a separate texture (in blue):

And this is what it looks like after importing the FBX model (converted in Rhino) in C4D:

As you can see, only a single “patch” can be selected, regardless which tool is used. For this example, I would have to manually select about 30 patches to select the blue area.

Here I’ve attached the FBX file, if you want to experiment:
9104_selecttangentfaces.fbx.zip