shawnroelofsen.com » Quick Tips

C4D Quicktip: Using Dampening to Keep Clones From Exploding Apart

Shawn — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 02:23:12 +0000

Have you ever cloned a sphere to an object only to experience them explode outwards when you play the simulation?

I have found an easy way to get the clones to maintain the shape they are being cloned to without exploding away from each other and all it takes is 2 keyframes.

The exploding clones happen because the cloner object places the clones at random and cannot detect if the clones are overlapping each other, when the simulation is played the dynamics engine tries to put each clone in it's own space resulting in the clones exploding away from each other.

I have found that setting the linear dampening and angular dampening to 100% at the beginning of the simulation allows the clones to find their own space without them exploding away from each other. After about 10 frames the dampening can be key-framed to 0% and the first 10 frames can be trimmed off the simulation.

Linear dampening and angular dampening can be found under the force tab of the dynamics tag and is only available in C4D R12

How to freeze time with Realflow meshes in C4D

Shawn — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:07:31 +0000

This is a quicktip tutorial to demonstrate how to stop a Realflow mesh to make it look like time has frozen.

First import your Realflow mesh using the Realflow mesh importer which is a part of the C4d Realflow plugin.

In order to freeze time we want to add 2 key frames to the "Lock current frame" selector, which is under the setup tab in the mesh importer. The first key frame should have the check mark deselected and the second key frame should have it selected.

Thats it for stopping time. Now if you want to restart time just reverse the key frames. If you play your timeline now you will notice that when it starts up again it will skip some frames. This is because the mesh importer has mapped each frame of the mesh to correspond with the timeline in C4d.

In order to get around this we need to adjust the offset value. To easily calculate what number we should put in the offset box take the frame number of the first key frame and subtract that from the frame number of the second key frame.

In the video above the first key frame to stop time was set at 118 and the second keyframe was set at 176 giving me an offset value of 58.

I hope you enjoyed reading this quick tutorial and I hope I can make many more!

Tilt-shift Lenses Demystified by Stillmotion

Shawn — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:16:43 +0000

A great video showcasing what tilt-shift lenses can do and a couple tips on how to use them with a video DSLR

C4D Quick Tip: Enhanced OpenGL

Shawn — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:26:54 +0000

Have you ever been working on a complex scene that was causing your scene to slow down and not play back in real time.
If you are using a gfx card that supports OpenGL it can be used to help accelerate your scene. To do this go to Display -> Enhanched OpenGL

The GFX card can be used to render the transparency, shadows, post effects and noise channels when you are working in your scene.

EnhancedOpenGL

C4D Quick Tip: Frame Scene

Shawn — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:04:32 +0000

Have you ever moved your camera in a weird way that caused you to not be able to get back to view your scene?

Here is an easy way to fix that. Click Edit, then click Frame Scene. Its as easy as that.

Frame Scene