[Pierre Paslier]

This is brilliant! Thanks so much Brian.
I didn’t know you could get that through the falloff effect in that way.
Looking forward to the weekend to play around with this. Ultimately, this is to mess around with a pen plotter, and I’m using sketch & toon to export to vectors to feed it to an Axidraw.
Gave it a first shot with your previous suggestion.

[Pierre Paslier]

Thanks Brian, that’s brilliant.
I’m on R19 but I think I got the setup you described. Been playing with it this morning, it’s working super well for blending from a non deformed circle to a fully deformed circle. Cheers!

To push it further, I’m wondering if there would be a way to blend between two noises with different configurations? Or have a series of 4 or 5 morph from one noise to the other?
A bit like the attached photo (which I made with baked distorted circles)?

Cheers,
Pierre

[Pierre Paslier]

Hi there,

More questions!
It’s been a few months but the project is still running! I’ve managed to make quite a few versions of leaves and now I’m hitting a new challenge. The goal is to 3d print these leaves to then cast them in bronze. In order to 3d print them I have to give a thickness to the surface I create with the displacer.

I’ve tried a few different ways but nothing is working perfectly so far.
The best I’ve managed to do is to create two surfaces, offset them by ~1mm and then stitch and sew them together. The result however leaves the “steeper” parts of the surface very thin. 3D printing services don’t like that.
Surface.stl

I’ve also tried to use xsthickness but then one of the faces becomes very glitchy.

Does anyone have an idea of a trick in c4d or in other software to create a nice yet relatively consistent thickness?
Cheers!
Pierre

[Pierre Paslier]

Yeah, for each one I have an alpha image to cut out the shape and a displacement image. So I have a folder with thousands of each file.
Haven’t really played with Coffee but that might be worth getting into if I can save 1000 times the time it takes to make one leaf…

[Pierre Paslier]

OMG that hand recipe worked very well actually. I’m ordering a 3d print right now to check how that looks like.
Thanks Brian. Any idea if that kind of thing can be xpresso’ed? Cause I do have 1000 leaves to go through…
Cheers!

[Pierre Paslier]

Thx Brian,
Very helpful to understand better how vectorizer and displacer stack up… or not.
The nature of the project is more artistic than science precision, so what I’m after is a simple way to start with 1000 pictures of real leaves and end up with 1000 leaf shapes polygons that have some sort of “microtexture” and some thickness that would make them 3d printable.
I like your suggestion to start flat? Would it be easier to displace a plane and then cut out the leaf? Boolean?
Any idea how to get 80% of the result with 20% of the work?
Cheers,
Pierre

[Pierre Paslier]

Thx Brian,
Here is the scene file. What matters for me is the result so if you think there is a better way, I’m definitely interested! The project will involve doing this for a lot of leaves so I’m keen on finding a rather automatic way to generate 3d models from the photos. I’d have hoped that using the same texture for the poly outline and the displacer would have mapped perfectly onto each other, which means I could Xpresso something for the 1000 leaves to come…
10525_leaf.zip
Cheers!