[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Steve! Agin, thanks a million for your replies!

I’m probably doing something wrong… this is what I get when I check Constrain:

When I set the spline to Uniform and jack the number up (possible Trypophobia warning! Haha):

And when I choose Adaptive and bring it down:

Could it be that the text is simply way too small and it “breaks” the processes that make it puff out?

[Xavier Bonet]

Hey, Steve! Thanks a lot for your response! In fact, thanks a lot for **all** your responses: I’ve asked several C4D questions in the last couple of weeks and you’ve responded to all of them, so really thanks a lot! For someone like me who’s just starting out in C4D, this is invaluable!

All the info you give me is very useful. I didn’t realise you could tie the enable Xs through Expresso. That’s a really good piece of info. I did know you could include/exclude objects but to be honest I hadn’t though of excluding the car from its own headlights… that could’ve resulted in some problems later on, so I’ll get in the practice of doing this each time I model cars.

In the end, to solve this I decided to “work around it” by using the intensities. I tied them together in Expresso, still, to make things easier to animate. That way the lights don’t appear onto things all of a sudden, but rather dim in. I still wanted some light to fall on the scene’s objects, but not so much that you can clearly see a spot coming from out of nowhere. I can’t understand, however, why a spotlight coming out of the side of the scene, still casts so much light on objects… more light, in fact, than when it’s near. It’s as if it takes into account the distance of the light to intensify it, instead of it being the other way around. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, though… But it’s the second time I see something similar. I was working on a train that had to reach the station from off the viewport and the light seemed really intense on things when it was far away.

Anyway, I still need to learn more about lights, clearly! So thanks for the great info!

[Xavier Bonet]

P.S. Ah, OK, that was easy! I just delete the tags when i had everything set where I wanted and now there’s no more offending tags that’ll make my life a nightmare! Still, it’s a pity the Constraint Tag is so buggy, because it’s really the only way I can think of to set more complex objects on other object’ surfaces and still be able to move them around. Of course, there’s the Surface tool… but that one comes with its own set of quirky behaviours I can’t get around…

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Steve, thanks for your reply. Yes, it really does seem a hit-and-miss tool. I’ve tried everything, including checking priorities, and the same thing happens. I decided to find a workaround for that specific object and now I’m finding the same issue on another object. This time basically I’m just trying to set a couple of buttons on a shirt; the shirt is a polygon inside a Subdivision Surface, so it bulges out a but. Every time I restart the project, all the buttons are reset to the center of the shirt! It’s really a very dodgy tool… Any ideas how I can “bake” the button’s positions and rotations so I can get rid of the dodgy Constraint Tag in this instance? It’s the only workaround I can think of.

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Steve, thanks for pitching in.

The Create New Object at View Center isn’t checked. But I don’t have it checked in any of my other projects, and they don’t have the same issue.

As to you other question: The axis gets sent to the world origin. But only when the object is converted to editable. While the object remains as a parametric object its axis stays in place.

What could it be?

[Xavier Bonet]

In view that the OP didn’t give us a more specific and clear follow up as to how he solved this issue, and that’s there are others who are having the same issue, I’ll add to this thread my own solution.

I built a rather complex car with various objects grouped into a null. I applied the Collider Body tag to my floor object and applied the Rigid Body tag to the car group. As the OP, I also found the car just fell through the floor.

To make it short, what I ended up doing was going into the Collision tab of the car’s Rigid Body tag, and under Inherit Tag I chose Compound Collision Shape. I left everything else as is, and the result was that the car, in its entirety, started acting as a single object and bouncing off the floor, which is what I wanted.

So basically the Inherit Tag tells the Body tag what it should do with the children of a group object. The Compound Collision Shape clearly means the tag should first compound the entire group and its children as one shape and treat it as such. The Apply Tag to Children option basically applies that same action to each of the child elements… which results in an aerial explosion! as each element tries to fall and collides with every other element! Haha. (Perhaps it could work for an aerial car explosion.) And the None setting basically just sets the object to be dynamic and then allows each child to have its own setting… In practice, when you give each child the same tag manually and set the parent setting to None, the card doesn’t explode in mid air as I stated before, now it falls and explodes upon hitting the surface…

Now you know. ☺ Cheers!

[Xavier Bonet]

Ok… so right after posting this question I kept on trying by myself and finally found a way of solving the issue… So it now works, although I don’t know WHY it works now and it didn’t work before… I basically did the same thing but used different variable names. I must have made a small mistake somewhere and not have been able to find it out. Anyway, it now works and I didn’t even have to parse anything. For what it’s worth, this is what I have:

slideName = thisComp.name;
slideNumber = slideName.split(" ")[1];
if(slideNumber <10) "00"+ slideNumber else "0"+ slideNumber;

If anyone has a more practical way of working this out, I'd love to know about it. Cheers!

[Xavier Bonet]

Thanks a lot for the reply!

Unfortunately, I do need to zoom the image way in in AE, that’s why I need such big images. The frame-by-frame animation is then given the effect of a camera zooming in and out depending on what needs to be focused on the scene.

Great recommendation about installing the latest one. When going up from 2015 to 2017 I felt like I hit a brick wall! It’s SO buggy. So I was really reticent to go for the newer version. But if you say you’ve been using it and it’s less buggy, then I’m game!

[Xavier Bonet]

P.S. Found the reason for the sudden Enter(Return)/Rename fiasco in this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1116107

Basically, it’s a bug in Mac OS Sierra: the Return key is both opening up the rename field and, at the same time, inputting a line break (Return), which is what is bugging out the script links.

[Xavier Bonet]

I know this is a one-year-old post, and am sure by know you’ve found a solution or have tired and gone on elsewhere. For what it’s worth (and for any others out there that come across similar issues), today I had the exact same problem and couldn’t understand why, as I’ve been using DUIK for years without any issues. After some tinkering I found out that, for some odd, twilight-zoney reason, when I was pressing enter to change the name of my puppet points, instead of just highlighting the name and giving me the option to write over it or add something to it, it was straight off erasing the name, which I found strange but, anyway, thought I was going mad and this was actually the norm! But apparently that’s not the only thing that was happening, as you can see from the following screenshot:

Notice how the bottom names (“Snout”, “Neck Front”, etc.) all have a space before them as compared to the top names (“ear_tip_left”, etc.). The bottom names are the original names I placed, which produced the error. The top names are the new names I’m placing after realising there’s a space before the other names. The top names don’t give out any errors. (And, no, the error has nothing to do with using spaces as a pose to underscores.)

So for some weird reason, AE is now erasing the names and placing a white space when I hit enter to rename a layer. If I right-click and choose “rename”, it does what it’s supposed to do: it highlights the name and does nothing else.

The issue with DUIK in this case is clearly the white space before the name. But how that white space is getting there and why my AE is now just erasing the name and adding that white space when I hit Enter, I don’t know. I’ve tried the preferences to see if I’ve clicked something weird that’s activated this function but there’s nothing there that seems to control what happens when one presses Enter to rename a layer. It’s a twilight-zoney mystery!