[Paul Roper]

…in fact, the dragging of numbers thing happens even if I don’t drag the pointer off-screen – I can scrub a value up, then drag the mouse back down, but the value will continue to go up, regardless of the direction I drag the mouse. Very odd.

[Paul Roper]

D’oh! There it is!

The “Basic” section of the Attributes Manager so rarely has anything useful in it, I didn’t even think to look there!

Many thanks!

[Paul Roper]

THANK YOU so much for this, Dave!

I was just about to send a sweary, ranting email to Maxon, slagging them off for making such a lousy product, then a search for “timeline” in the cow forums brought up your post. Looks like I’m not the only one who fell into this ridiculous trap set by Maxon.

What a stupid and pointless “feature” this “Region Tool” is. Why can’t makers of 3D software just look at the way After Effects handles Bezier curves and just copy them exactly? Maya’s Bezier curve creation/editing is also completely hopeless. It’s really annoying when someone (eg. Autodesk, Maxon) tries to re-invent something and then completely bollockses it up.

It’s annoying that Maxon does not provide any kind of help system with C4D – sure, there’s the “help” system, but that’s as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Rant over.

Once again….thanks (in response to your post from nearly a year ago)!

[Paul Roper]

Thanks – I’ll take a look at that plugin.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thank you for the advice! Sounds like quite a hassle – I think I’ll just do it manually for now – I only have a couple of textures to tweak.

[Paul Roper]

Also, is it normal that the Xref manager does absolutely nothing whatsoever? The mysterious and unlabelled check-boxes to the right of each Xref do nothing, as does selecting “Exchange…”.

If I choose a new XRef in the attributes manager (I want to change the XRef to something else), as predicted, absolutely f**k all happens.

What a great piece of software.

[Paul Roper]

I’m on R14 too. R14.042

This afternoon it’s been behaving slightly better (as long as I make everything a “generator”). But after I bring in a new XRef object, and click “generator”, it asks me where each and every other XRef is. I can just click “no” each time the stupid dialog box asks me to select a new file path for each object, most of the time.

I did (foolishly) copy the project to another machine (another Mac, same spec, same C4D R14) so I could use it for rendering, but of course it flatly refused to ‘see’ any of the XRefs, even if I reloaded them or updated the file paths. C4D didn’t say it couldn’t find them – C4D thought everything was fine, and my scene was supposed to be almost empty. So I have access to a second nice high-end Mac Pro, just sitting there waiting to churn through renders. But no, C4D refuses to co-operate. Thank you once again, Maxon.

[Paul Roper]

Funny you should mention an SSD – I was wondering about moving the XRefs onto one to try to speed things up (C4D is SLOW!), but I won’t.

My whole XRef setup is as simple as can be – I haven’t moved any of them or changed any of the folder structure since I started the project, there are no duplicated files, the only animation I’m doing in the entire project is camera moves, and the models only have very basic materials. And the project has only ever been on this one machine. The only remaining options are user error or C4D sucks. In terms of user error, I’ve been inserting an XRef, then editing that source file, then trying to update the XRef. Not really much scope for error there.

I should never have left the wonderful world of Maya.

[Paul Roper]

Aha! That “show illumination” thing did the job – thanks!

[Paul Roper]

Perfect, thanks!

I’ve been wondering what Vanilla Ice is up to these days. After Effects. Who’d have thought it?

– Paul