Is your viewport open? (the 1 or 4 views where you see your scene). xpresso (and some 3rd party IPR render windows), can only update when the viewport is open and can update on screen.
So if you have opened the xpresso editor and it has covered your viewports or you have made it a tab and that tab now has focus, xpresso can’t update.

Hmm, works for me. See project.

It might be an ordering thing? You can also turn off the spec on all lights except that one (spec isn’t a real thing anyway). You can also turn off spec in all materials except that eye one and keep the spec on for all lights.

Eyes look better anyway where there’s a real reflection instead of a spec highlight. That…

Read more

Not sure if this helps but post R19 (and maybe R20) the reflection tab is used more closely with a PBR work flow (even in non PBR materials). So the idea is that you stack everything in there except Luma. When creating a material, in the reflection tab, just delete the default channels and then add in a lambertian for color, a beckman for…

Read more

This could be a couple of things:

The usual suspect is that the viewport isn’t visible. I have my xpresso window tabbed up along with the viewport and picture viewer and the material nodes window and often I will pop in to the xpresso tab and wonder why it won’t update – because it’s taken over the entire screen with the viewport hidden in…

Read more

There was a shadow catcher plug in for users prior to R19. Let me see if I can find it for you.

You can use the transform tab in the cloner to do this.

Too bad topic titles can’t be longer – anyway:

I have a comp that uses illustrator elements. These are toggled to 3D in AE and a camera is in use. These layers sit at various depths and have to be scaled to get them the right size relative to each other.

Normally I would use the continually rasterize button and the best quality button and all would…

Read more

XP is a big hammer for this but easy enough.

Make a poly selection of the end of joint, set XP emitter to object and insert the joint and the selection tag in the emissions tab object and selection slots. Set speed to 0 and emission type to shot and just emit on the first frame – you probably won’t need many particles. Set display tab to gradient…

Read more

The easiest way is to use a Link List node. When put this node in your tree, you can drag objects into the Link List’s attributes panel. Then you can use that set up you have already to iterate through the objects randomly.

You input your range mapped random number into the index port on the left of the Link List node and then, out of the “link”…

Read more

Ya I’ve been seeing things like this of late too in R25 (closer to your second image). I think its the GPU driver. I just take the window or the palette and drag it a little and then maximize again and it goes away. Haven’t found the sweet spot yet with Nvidia (RTX3090)

I’m not sure what you mean by a sharp angle. The sweep will take the profile of whatever spline you give it. Do you have a project to look at to see what the problem is?

I just thought of something re your blooming edges – the POS pass must be rendered without alpha.

And, are you working in a 16 bit or 32 bit AE project? These two items are essential to hold all the data from the EXR.

And (I’m just doing this from memory looking for things it might be that slip people up), don’t you have interpret the POS pass…

Read more

Hey, sorry – been on a deadline before we shut down for Covid again.

Will get you that AE file shortly.

As for lens lengths – the longer the lens the larger the aperture values or less DOF you can use to get results. But you can get extreme DOF with any length lens (these are virtual lenses after all so you can break physical rules). Setting the…

Read more

Go for it

Solved – it’s that Win 10 Adobe fight. (when will adobe get their UI fixed? – it’s only been 20 years)

Quit AE. Go to the properties of the AE executable, choose the compatibility tab, hit the change high DPI settings button, check the check boxes for Program DPI and High DPI scaling override, then choose the drop down in the High Dpi override…

Read more

As a rule of thumb, a larger scene is safer in C4D than smaller. There is no real scale per se in any 3D package, in theory the 3D world is infinitely big or small – but – when making a small scene, as you have found, you have to start using numbers down in the .0001 range. The problem here is that C4D’s math can only do so many decimal places…

Read more

See image below – is the value in this box 0 or 40 or 4? I know what it is because I put it there and you can see the value if you click to hilight the entry, but it just seems to be a flood of zeros filling the area and it has become a giant pain to work with. This has just suddenly happened after a week of heavy use. I’ve cleared the cache and…

Read more

It’s definitely not the easiest of work flows for sure but you get used
to it. The current trend of doing everything in the render engine I
think is unwise. You can do so much to achieve the final look of a shot
in post and at 300x the speed vs doing it in 3D, it only makes sense.
This new school of – where’s the button that says “a small…

Read more

Not sure if I’d call this a bug now but I have new info. This only seems to be an issue in some cases.

If you go into the designer and pick a particular (no pun intended) effect and then apply and start modifying, you can’t access the color grad or modify it, you can only pic from the dozen preset choices.

But if you pick another effect, that one…

Read more

I’ve been trying to use the Random From Gradient feature in Particular. This does work but I want to make my own gradient and not use one of the very few presets. The manual implies that if you click at the bottom of the column of presets it will generate a blank one to play with and save as another preset. That’s not been my experience.

I can find…

Read more

I ran into this today to in R25. It’s possible the auto tangents is defaulting to “On” now. So just click on one of the points on your animation path and then in the attributes dialogue twirl down the tangents preset and uncheck “auto tangents”. That should get your handles back. Worst case you can drag the Left value Right value sliders to change…

Read more

That fringe or halo IS the antialiasing of the Pos pass. This is why “Your depth pass is wrong” is the title of that video – depth passes are antialiased from the get-go and will produce fringes, Pos passes are binary.

Think of the black point sliders as a Levels control. The only difference is that Levels has an output setting as well, where…

Read more

Re the inverted map – yes that is mentioned in that tut and its because most depth plug ins in AE see “distant” as the opposite color that C4D puts out. So that’s normal.

But you bring up a good point re using levels. They mention that in the Tut as I recall and that got me scratching my head because that will antialias the jaggies just as well as…

Read more

That jagged edge must be there for the post DOF process to work correctly (and this is why you use Position instead of DOF pass as the DOF antialiases things.) By making the Pos pass really big and then scaling it, you are probably introducing antialiasing in that step through bicubic scaling.

The trick with the Pos pass is the setting in C4D -…

Read more

So lets say that the white cube is at the world origin. And you want to rotate the camera around it with the pivot point of the camera at the origin too. Where is the grey cube in the world that it could remain always in front?

This is a spatial problem and the only way I can see Blender doing this is if you put an image of the cube on a card…

Read more

Something is wrong there for sure. Try throwing out the prefs file and then restarting (you can find the location at the bottom of the prefs under the edit menu)

Something in the interface code didn’t load right there.

What render engine? What version of C4D?

You probably want to look at “baking”.

One of the problems with displacement is it’s not specific when it comes to subdividing. You need a little bump on one side of a sphere? No problem, but the whole sphere will be subdivided – wasting memory and polys. But if you bake the displacement and textures and bump and AO and everything into an object…

Read more

You could also just place a null on each doll where the mouth belongs in C4D and bring those nulls and the camera into AE through Cineware. Then you can position the animated mouths (a 2D texture) in 3D space (as children of imported nulls)and the mouths will track and orient to the angle of the dolls. If you use an alpha for the mouth it will…

Read more

This does seem to be an issue in R2 to R25 for some users on any object that is being animated transformationally. Here’s a post that deals with it. I’m not sure these are fix all solutions but its a start:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinema4D/comments/qarhy0/scaling_handles_missing_c4d_r25/

Displacement usually needs to subdivide the mesh no matter how you look at it just to get enough geometry resolution to simulate the ups and downs of a particular texture map – but you can choose to have the mesh subdivided just at render time. A cube made of 6 polygons won’t have enough geometry to make it appear like it is made of rocks so you…

Read more

That ripple is coming from the fact that the whole system is springs including the belt tags. When you apply gravity (or rather hit play) if you watch closely you will see the whole thing drop a bit and that gets the springs vibrating. With no “force” to stop them they will continue forever.

<div>You have some unusual settings in the Tag tab and I… Read more

Yep there’s something up there. The basic noise works fine but even on a clean new file on my R25 the noise node produces nothing. There is an update to R25, are you using that one? (I am not yet).

I’ll keep poking it and let you know what I find.

It’s kinda clunky – you duplicate your current manager (up in the file menu of the command manager), then make your changes, make sure your changed manager is the one selected for use, then rename that duplicated manager (Rename is again up in the file menu). I guess they ran out of “save as” slots in the menu.

If you save your layout as the…

Read more

A couple of things to keep in mind. If the scene is large it may not fit in the GPU ram and then it just won’t render, so back you go to CPU rendering which usually has more machine ram to use and disk swap space – in theory, it’s unlimited.

If you pole the guys on the web who use C4D professionally I think you will find a lot of threadrippers -…

Read more

Do you have the project to play with?

I’m going to take a stab at what it might be and it may help you along. (I couldn’t open the images for some reason so they remain small thumbnails in the post – too small to see what’s going on)

The first is that the node system is still in beta and those growing pains may include some of the more parametric…

Read more

Hey Daz,

I’ve never really understood why we see the parametric instead of the actual spline shape until you deselect it. You would think that would be helpful.

In place of this I usually just throw a short length extrude on the spline and continue editing – the spline stays smoother than it really is but the extrude will update in real time and…

Read more

There’s nothing here that can’t be done inside of AE – the only tricky bits are the fully 3D objects (like the Bradley and the Phone for instance) but even those can be rendered inside of AE with Cineware (that comes with C4D) or a plug in like Video Copilot’s Element3D. And then you aren’t hopping back and forth between C4D and AE when changes…

Read more

While it’s dangerous to say “never” with C4D, I very much doubt you can assign a polygon selection to an ID tag. How a poly renders (with a phong tag) is very much dependent on the poly normal next door so that selection would need more information to render correctly than an ID tag could supply.

But you can certainly get there with a full white…

Read more

Xpresso could do it and you wouldn’t need a tag on every object (not sure why the poster thought you would). You could use a link list and just iterate through the objects in the list and set each object’s visibility or object ID that way. You could do it based on frame# or just a count. So many ways. And you wouldn’t need to involve Octane in the…

Read more

The booles work well when the geometry of both objects has roughly (or even better, exactly) the same size of subdivisions, but that’s a rarity. I’m not sure why it’s so bad in C4D. Most other packages use booling as a normal part of the process and no issues.

What about using an effector and using the visibility button? Not sure what the test is for when to hide, but one of the effectors (or effector with field) will do the trick.

Any more info?

I see what you are doing now (thanks for the pics, I was scratching my head to figure out how a radial clone could have all the hemisphere’s centers all in the same spot).

That’s an interesting little problem. There are lots of ways to do this and I would probably normally approach this with xpresso or python (when you have a hammer…. or a…

Read more

I wont be able to look again for a few hours but in the mean time try a step effector. That might do the trick.

See link. Is this what you were trying to do?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VlPntMoSY26hMtfl1AgUvncUJOVmHyhY/view?usp=sharing

What do you mean by “hemispheres share the same center”?

The fall off should gradually affect the clones as it is animated across them.

Possible reasons why:

– You have no lights in your scene AND your default light is turned off in the render settings AND you have no emissive textures.

– Your camera isn’t pointed where you though it was.

– all your objects are set to not render (that lower stop light is set to red) but still visible in the viewport (top green or grey stop light).…

Read more

This is correct – the idea is that you can close all projects but not quit C4D. It’s not so much that it’s a new project staring back at you, it’s more an unpopulated interface now that all the assets have been removed with the close function.

Did you put the plain effector them first and then apply the linear field to the plane effector’s fall off?

You could also use a radial field and animate that around the “circle” of hemispheres instead of the change being a wipe across the “circle”.

I also just realized what you were describing with the “noisy or wild edge”. This may be the Straight Alpha type at work. The Straight alpha choice is like a cookie cutter for your image. But if it were a true cookie cutter it would get a little bit of the black around the object due to anti aliasing and then you get that bad 70’s blue screen…

Read more

Also remember to choose an appropriate mesh style to simulate with. If the object is changing shape over time (or the force or object it intersects with ) an “Animated Mesh” is often better than Static mesh or Automatic.