[Simon Matthews]

Hi,

Thanks for replying. I started by following a tutorial called ‘C4D Rope(Spline Dynamics) Tutorial | By TheJoekerism’, but with this tutorial you are left with a piece of string that stretches to infinity with a pyramid attached to both ends. Is there a way to stop the string stretching to infinity? If there was then this method would work fine. I then found a tutorial by Emil1585 called ‘Springs & Spline Dynamics in Cinema 4D’. This is the one I followed and it works ok apart from the flaw that I mentioned.

Having studied the animation very closely in the editor I have now noticed that as the letters/objects drop into the frame, there is a thin red line that fluctuates in length at the connection point between the string and the object. This red line represents the gap between the connection points, and it stretches longer as the letters first drop, then contracts again as they come to rest. It’s as though the software knows that there is a gap occurring at the connection point. I’ve adjusted just about every setting a million times now and have all but given up. If you watch Emil1585s tutorial you can see that his version has the gap also during the tutorial, but is not evident in his final animation.

In the end I did give up but last night I found a very amateur way of wangling it to work. I chose a very chunky font for the letters (which Emil1585 uses as well, which may or may not be a coincidence), then buried the end of the string deep inside the letters and connected it using two points instead of one. It has worked, but I’d much rather know how to do it in a more controlled way.

I found a 3 part wrecking ball and chain tutorial last night which looks really good. I may give that one a try later.

Thanks again for your reply,

Simon.

[Simon Matthews]

Brilliant, thank you very much!

[Simon Matthews]

Ok, I’ll have a practice with that and see how it turns out, thanks again 🙂

[Simon Matthews]

Thank you very much. My trees are on a transparent background. Is there a way I can choke in the alpha within C4D or do I have to do it in Photoshop?

[Simon Matthews]

Update:

When loading the image into the colour and alpha channels, originally I clicked on ‘no’ when asked to create a copy of the image in the search path. I just tried clicking ‘yes’ instead and the results are much better, though still not quite perfect.

Simon.

[Simon Matthews]

Hi, thank you very much for replying. The object was already inside a null, but changing the rotation order as you suggested sorted the problem out for me. Thanks again, your reply was very helpful!

[Simon Matthews]

Hi Gene,

Thanks for replying. I’ve already tried applying the footage as my colour image and also applied it to the alpha channel but the result was a poor, ghost-like image. I see what you mean about importing it as a black and white sequence and I’ll give that a go next time to see if it works better.

Thanks for your help,

Simon.

[Simon Matthews]

Hi, yeah I was trying to map a canned texture image. For now though I’ve decided to stick to presets until I learn a little more because as you say they look better. Thanks 🙂

[Simon Matthews]

But there are some things within R13 that are quite different to the earlier versions, which makes following tutorials pretty much impossible at times. Ie. I can follow a tutorial made for R12, click for click, but some things will just not work the same way in R13 as they do in the R12 tutorial. I just followed a tutorial to model an XBox controller, but had to stop some minutes in because it just didn’t work the same way.

[Simon Matthews]

Do you mean load it onto a new material in the colour section of the material editor as you would normally do in standard layout? I think I did that, but had to drag the material onto each side of the object. I covered each polygon with a texture image in Photoshop, so that the texture only covered the parts inside the lines of the polygons and nothing else. When I loaded that onto a new material it didn’t cover the material sphere completely. I’m obviously doing something wrong.

I noticed that you could load a texture back into the little viewport on the right of the screen in UV Edit mode, where the object is originally unwrapped. I did this but couldn’t get it back onto the object. Need more specific instructions with this bit I think.