[Steve Bentley]

I just realized I should have put what amounts to a pinch roller in there because the tape twists as it comes out. So just take that right capstan and duplicate it, make the new one a child of the right one and move the new one to the left, leaving a decent gap between for the tape to slide through. This will keep the tape from twisting until it has left the cassette.

[Steve Bentley]

How about this? You can make the Birth spline longer and tweak the angular clamp to help or hinder twist. Currently this runs right out of the cassette. Still thinking about best way to stop it (fields maybe?). Right Capstan can be animated more or less to provide tape undulations. Tape width can me modified by the rectangle spline but you will also have to alter the Pearls’ z width as they are the only objects colliding – the swept tape is just along for the ride.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mfoe7O8wa4mkkfo1j5tYEjg4GePipBl0/view?usp=sharing

[Steve Bentley]

Unless the pawn has UV’s (and UV’s that have anticipated the pinch at the top) then spherical will be the best choice. But this will still produce a pinch at the top. There is no true solution for this even with UV’s because if that was really made of wood, the straight grain lines on the sides would turn into rings at the top. So here’s the trick:

Take your wood map into photoshop and crop it so that it’s square with the grain going from bottom to top vertically. The higher rez the better. (don’t stretch it so that it’s square, that will distort the texture). Now go find an image of the same wood or color correct one to match that is a version of the rings you would get from cutting a log in half. Make that a square image too by cropping with the center of the rings in the center of the square image.

Take the straight grained image and apply the polar filter to it. (rect to polar). Does that pinch look familiar?

Now take the rings image and paste it on a new layer right in the center of the polar image. Scale the rings down so that they take up about a 1/4 of the image. Mask it with a circular mask and feather that mask (be careful of the rings image edge sneaking inside the feather, we don’t want that). Make a copy of that layer (the rings) and make the circle mask smaller and again feather it. So from the top down we have: small circle of rings, larger circle of rings and the polarized image. For the middle layer set that to either multiply or darken. We want the rings to step on the straight lines of the grain with a bit of a feather but both to show through and blend.

Save a copy of this. Now flatten the image to one layer and save again as another name. (you may need to tweak the stack again later). Then run the polar coordinate effect again but this time go polar to rectangular. You should now have your regular straight grain again but with a funky cloudy thing going on near the top.

Now scale this image so it’s twice as wide as tall and use the sharper of your scaling routines (not bicubic). Save this as your final texture. Now wrap this texture around your model with spherical mapping and right click the the material tag and choose fit to object. You will have to experiment with the size of the circle rings in the photoshop file to get it the right size for the top of the pawn. If it’s too big it will bleed down the sides and if too small it will get gobbled up in the polar loss that happens with spherical mapping (in a spherical map of the world, Antarctica would be missing). You should have vertical grain on the sides undistorted and rings on the top. You can do this all in C4D with material layers and masks but it’s easier in PS.

If the straight grained wood is not tileable in the X (you will see a vertical seam where either side meet up on the pawn), go back to the PS file and Offset the bottom layer by 50% (Offset is in the “Other” filters). Then rubber stamp the seam in the center until it’s gone.

[Steve Bentley]

What version of C4D are you using? Volume builder was added in R20 or 21. So if you are using 19 or before that would explain why that feature is “missing”.

[Steve Bentley]

This has been solved over on Reddit, but if you want to give it a go by all means. There is never one right way of doing things in this game.

[Steve Bentley]

How has the “pile” been made?

You could:

-Put a very small noise on the pile and use a displacement (with SubD displacement in the material)

-Make the pile a volume and use a volume shader on it to give it a bit more depth

-Add sub surface scattering which would allow more light to penetrate through a little – sand grains are usually translucent so the top layer will let light pass and reflect back out.

– do an xpresso and Thinking Particle sim to build a pile of sand (time consuming and memory intensive)

– use a third party plug in to do a fluid simulation and then apply particles and geometry to the backed sim (sand is just a chunky stubborn fluid)

– use a very small cell noise shader and put the noise in the reflectance channel. This will add sparkle and life to the sand – add this to the deformation idea above and it has promise!

– populate a “hard” cone shaped object with thinking particles on the surface only and that will give you the little grains and you can have it “shift” with gravity or a pushapart on a voronoi fracture every once in a while to add life.

[Steve Bentley]

Update – turned out C4D was just corrupt. Have had to resinstall. Going to recheck after each of the scripts or third party renderers or other plug ins to see if I can determine which one broke everything.

[Steve Bentley]

Turns out its not just the gradients. A lot of things are this way, even inside third party render engine attributes. (like animating a noise – it does animate but you would never know it by the feedback you get in the attributes or the keyframe button indicators)

I’ve tossed the prefs but the problem remains – what is the point of setting keyframes if you can’t be sure they are set.

[Steve Bentley]

I don’t actually remember when it wasn’t like that. It goes along with other misordered lists like the thinking particles display type – perhaps in German it is in alpha order?

They have one upped themselves though. In R24, the attribute coordinates of an object are listed in order of PRS but the actual coordinates pallet is in PSR (as its always been for both). No confusion there.

[Steve Bentley]

I should mention this has been creeping in for some time – it started in the emission setting of the particle emitters – so if you wanted to do a shot of 1 in the PMatterWaves and then keyframe it to 0 on the next frame you can’t. (for a true “shot” – why it can’t automatically do what the name of the slot is I’ll never know) So now this seems to have infected the Constant node as well now.

I should also mention the work around, in case someone comes upon this in a search. You key frame your first frame the normal way – that works. Then go into your dope sheet or Fcurve time line and advance to the next keyframe position and add that second keyframe there in the dope sheet or Fcurve editor, and then set that keyframe to what ever value you like.

Computers as labor saving devices, right?