[Steve Bentley]

Wasn’t there a C4D matrix export for the whole file? I’ve never used it but your question twigged a memory.

[Steve Bentley]

An object’s enterable coordinates are in the attributes manager in the coord tab. Just changing things there won’t do anything either unless you have auto keyframes turned on. Or you can make the change, then click “record active object” (bottom right area in the time line) to force the keyframe.

[Steve Bentley]

Here you go Allan
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/19/893079

[Steve Bentley]

I’ve never tried attaching a tracer to an object so this idea might have one more step than is needed.
Can you have the reel drop objects (with rigid dynamics) tags as it rolls and then have particles use the position information from each object and then assign the tracer to those particles? Then in a second grouping drop objects linked to particles generating traces )same as before) but use those “splines” as warping splines in a deformer applied to the first tracer spline?
If that doesn’t work or is too hair-brained, what about looking for a “string” tutorial. This problem seems to be a chaining issue so the string tutorials usually use chain physics. And really that’s all cloth engines are so you aren’t far wrong thinking that way.

[Steve Bentley]

Sure thing. Sorry for the delay. Been busy.

Here’s a simplified Steno Chair project. You can animate the rotation of the chair separately if you like but of course the challenge is to make the wheel stick to the direction of travel and ignore what the chair is doing. This includes the Expresso set up and there are notes in each node under the basic tab of the node.
In this file the chair moves along the path based on the frame you are on. To see it work (no keyframes!) just drag the time slider. I’ve used easy math here so that at 100 frames the chair is 100% of the way along the path. To change the animation length just change the first “constant” node value in expresso. But you can also hand animate this or use a align to spline tag. The key is to get the percentage along the path value from the chair and path combo and then turn that into a vector which you pass to the wheels.
If you want to add wheel chatter, just bring in the wheel’s parent to expresso (the null) and animate its rotation and then add that rotation (with a math node) to the value coming out of the matrix node before it goes to the wheel’s node. You could also do this with a sin equation so again no keyframes to worry about or just put a constant node in there an animate that value (remember that C4D uses radians for rotation)

One thing that always trips me up when working with splines: you have to drag the spline in from the object manager and then add a spline node to expresso. The spline object feeds its object info to the spline node. It shouldn’t matter, but I’ve never been able to use a spline object dragged in to expresso as a spline node and have everything work, so don’t even bother trying anymore and just use this method.

13754_stenochair.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Ya gotta watch that scroll wheel. Depending on your set up you can actually be changing your focal length instead of dollying, which is why, after a bit of in and out and moving around (no really, I’m talking about C4D here) you’ll find that your camera is now crazy wide and everything is distorting and clipping or your lens is now so long that it takes a lot of scrolling just to move a little ways in.

I finally broke down one year and picked up a Connexion Space mouse. I don’t use it every day but when I need a walk through it’s really nice.
We also built a DIDO that mimics the pan, tilt and ped cranks of a real fluid head and also has a dolly crank. When a shot isn’t looking right we’ll often get the DP in to move the camera for the shot and they love the controls. Then the shot has the same feel since its the same guy behind the “camera”. But once they use that dolly crank, they leave wanting more control over the guys who push the dolly in and out.

[Steve Bentley]

Just ran into this myself in R19. Not sure what the problem is but a restart didn’t help.
Finally I tried changing from model mode to object mode and that seemed to do the trick, Of course you have to go back to point mode to access the points but toggling the object mode seemed to release whatever lock was preventing the handles from responding (the whole point would move instead) .
Once toggled it looks like you can go back to model mode and things continue to work.
Buggaboo I would guess.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian,
Time to throw the prefs out I guess.

[Steve Bentley]

You have to use an Iterator node. This node will count up from its start value to its end on each frame and inject whatever value you like into each object in turn. You can use the same node to line up a list of values with a list of objects in a link list. In a sense it focuses the iterated object in the list as the object doing the work or receiving the value.
Remember that the first object chosen will be a zero referenced value. So a list of three objects will have iteration values of 0,1,2.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian, I had forgotten that trick. That means the “cap” of a cylinder isn’t actually attached when it come out of “make editable” – at least not at all the vertexes.