[Steve Bentley]

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not sure I understand the extrusion part of your question (can you post a scribble?), but I hear you on the trunk texture for 3D printing.
Get a good fine mesh on your object then use a displacement deformer in mograph to add a texture for displacement. Then use the “current state to object” function in the right click menu to collapse all of the geometry effects into an actual mesh.

Back to the extrude. That’s not the best way to create a tree. There are lots of ways though (even with mograph since you have to get there anyway for the deformation effect).
You can use splines and sweep a profile tapering them to 0 for the branches and then bool all of them together. You can let mograph scatter and warp those splines for you from a master or a few splines.
You can use subdivision modelling to extrude polys off a core shape (and keep extruding and pulling and scaling down for all the branches) and then add a subD Surface as a parent and let it subdivide and soften the boxy model.
You can emit particles with turbulence and use the tracer to get the paths and then sweep those.
You could get a couple of profiles of trees going and then extrude them, Rotate them all differently about the y so you have branches going off in all directions. Make each extrude a single object in the extrude attributes and then make them editable, bool all that together then use the SubD as a parent to smooth it all out.
There are a few dedicated plug ins that make tree like things as well. Lots of free models too.

[Steve Bentley]

You’re the man Brian! Thanks!
This actually makes sense. When you use a texture in the shader effector for Mograph, C4D is putting clones everywhere and only showing those that fall within the white areas of the texture.** So even if you can only see one clone there might be 10,000 hiding all over the surface.
I had assumed this would be more streamlined using poly selections but I’ll bet its the same algorithm as the shader effector and the unselected polys are infested with invisible clones.

** this approach has always bugged me. We did an overly art directed wheat field last year and topped out the ram with too many clones, (most of which we couldn’t see), to get the shape we were after. Seems RAM wasteful.

[Steve Bentley]

Good idea Brian. I was thinking that I would dup the object and delete all the polys I don’t need and invert the normals, but the object is a character mesh and that would screw up a bunch of stuff with joint warps, vertex maps etc. But just turning the dup off is a great simple solution and then I could just invert the normals on the whole thing. I don’t even need to use a compositing tag, I can just set the dup to not render.

But I still really want to emit the hairs on an angle of my choosing from the poly surface. I thought I saw you could do that somewhere.

[Steve Bentley]

Hi All,
Unfortunately Brian, its gonna be hair (and I already tried making a model for the hair and ran into my other problem in a previous post (because the hair is distributing properly for “surface”, so I started “skinning another fish”,- what can I say I’m a cat person).

In this file you can see the plane and polys I want to emit from, But I want to emit them in the other “z” direction and there is no option for that.
Curling them around as Emir suggested would require insane amounts of segments (but hey we’d have the Ingrown Hair filter!)
Just like my “cloner on surface” post, I can’t use a texture for the placement but I don’t know if that would help. I think I could probably invert the normals and use normal mode instead of direction mode but then the model doesn’t render correctly.

What I really want these to do is emerge on an angle to the normal. is there a way to do that?

Again I’m sure Ive done this before but those brain cells have imbibed too often.

13783_hairdirection.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks for responding guys, I was on the middle of doing things in the complex file and hadn’t made a simple version yet. And when I did,I got one that worked (sort of) and one that didn’t (attached).
In the first you can see the kind of distribution I want (but incorrectly on poly center) and what I’m getting with surface selected and a selection tag. The “base” object is closer to the shape I’m working with in the big file. Do the poly’s have to be quads for this to work?

In the second example this works (sorta) but other than Quads I can’t see what is different. But perhaps it’s not actually working and its just a fluke., The selection tag does limit the clones to those polys but if you change the seed in the cloner, the clones go everywhere. It also isn’t distributing the number I’ve asked for.
What have I missed? I know I’ve done this before hundreds of times.

I know I could do this with a texture and the Shader effector but given the model l’m spreading the clones on that’s easier said than done. But writing that has given me an idea. Let me know what you think and I’ll report back on the now-rested brainwave.

13781_surfaceselectioncloner.c4d.zip

13782_surfaceselectionclonersortaworks.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

There’s a Tile button in the material tags attributes (about half way down). Just unclick that to get one and only one copy of the texture. Then you can just animate one of the offsets. Make sure your object has a UV tag.

[Steve Bentley]

Boy I’d be chomping at the bit for the answer so even if I wasn’t notified I’d be checking back for the answer. And if I solved it some other way, I think good etiquette is to post that answer so others can benefit.

[Steve Bentley]

If the subtractor inside the bool has been polygonalized (hit the C key to make it editable) then it should be able to bool properly – make sure your headstone is also collapsed to polys as well. (I mean this shouldn’t be necessary but when the bool has a heart attack sometimes its neccessary).

If you are using R21 (and maybe R20) this is sooo much easier with the new bool tools.

If that still doesn’t do the trick make sure to subdivide the shapes being booled – sometimes there just isn’t enough geometry to give the bool a clue as to where to cut.
Also try the bool with High quality turned on or off and the same with the Create Single object. You won’t always get the best bool but the bool will often work in one of these modes and not the other.
You could also try using straight text, do the bool, make the resulting object editable and then bevel the edges of the text to get that chiseled look.

[Steve Bentley]

Oh man! I’m gonna have to clean my tape measure now!
Real flow might be a big hammer for this but we’ll get to that in a sec.

Depending on your angle of view on the scene, will you really be so close to the thrown particles so see enough detail? If you just emit particles with varying sizes, shapes and varying textures(colors) I don’t think your going to see a difference whether its lead shot or manure. If you need to cut to a close up of surface tension holding the stuff on the water then that’s a different story. (in that case particle “flats” with images maps on them floating radially out from the landing point and rotating would be a good illusion.

As for using RF, (and in this case not using it) what about using a proximity tag to find where each particle hits the “water” surface and apply a deformer or shader deformer where those events happen? I assume that’s what you want RF for? This gets really easy in R 21 (and 20?) with Fields. But can be done with any version that has Mograph.