[Tim Vining]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, neither of those seemed to help, nor did increasing the mass or friction and a few other things I tried. What finally seemed to work was increasing the gravity in the Projects/Dynamics tab–that made it swing less, which makes sense to me–the gravity is “pulling” the object downwards harder–but it seems like your suggestions should have worked, but so many of the settings seemed to have little or no effect.

[Tim Vining]

Okay, thanks. Parent, from what I can tell, will only parent to the entire object, since the target won’t accept a point selection. I was able to clone my object to a point using Mograph, which is kind of awkward, honestly, since I’m trying to clamp to the moving hand of an animated character mesh, and positioning the clamped object to it is messy, but maybe that’s the only way to do it.

[Tim Vining]

Found the solution: make the particle object a Mograph object and use the Mograph baker. It seems like you lose a little of the Emitter controls over the object, but at least I can move the stream around, fully-baked.

[Tim Vining]

Okay, thanks! I looked into the compositing tag and didn’t find a solution, but I’ll take your suggesting to look into it some more. A solution for this would be great–I’m embarking on an animated fantasy project, and that means lots of fog, mist & smoke!

[Tim Vining]

Yes, thanks, I did try that and it looked the same. How apparent the alpha/trans looks seems to depend somewhat on what is behind it. The landscape above the wall is dark, so the alpha seems to be very dark.

[Tim Vining]

Great–thanks!

[Tim Vining]

Okay, thanks. Do you know if there’s a way to import the layers so they come in as separate clips and/or a simple way to break apart the Photoshop file into clips? It seems like you need to copy/past the get them out.

[Tim Vining]

Thanks, yes, I had seen some of those, but it is the stopping and starting that makes it difficult. That said, it doesn’t seem like it should be beyond the capability of C4D to do something like this to a plane object. The Collider deformer is actually kind of close to what I’m thinking, in that it uses an object to deform the mesh around a selected object, so I was wondering if there was something similar–maybe somewhere between Collider and the way that Cloth works– that a plane could react to the passage of an object through it, kind of “bunching up” a little in front of the moving object, and leaving a small trail/wake where it was, kind of like the Collider will do if you reduce how quickly it springs back. It wouldn’t have to be a huge effect to be effective (so to speak).

[Tim Vining]

Okay, thanks–bit of a drag. It seems like this should be a toggle on/off item, and not really that complicated to implement.

[Tim Vining]

Thanks–that gives an outline area, but unfortunately I was looking for image detail so I could adjust the position of text over an image.