Cineversity

Work continues on this printhead animation I’ve been working on for months, and I’ve run into issues when I use the Scale Project function in conjunction with an X-Particles Skinner object.

The elements in the scene are a hodgepodge of scales parented to various nulls.  I initially tried to keep the scale very small to match the real thing, but that presented a lot of difficulties from an animation standpoint, so I scaled everything up using nulls.  When I tried to incorporate the X-Particles Skinner object I found that I couldn’t make that mesh small enough to work, so I used the Scale Project tool to make everything 20 times bigger.  The problem now is that the minimum polygon size of that Skinner object is now also 20x larger.  If I build a Skinner setup in a new scene at a size that matches my master scene I can get that mesh small enough (.01mm) to work, but once I try to bring it into my 20x scaled scene that minimum size increases to the point (.2mm) where the tool is unusable.  I can only guess this is related to the 20X “artificial” scaling of the scene.

Are there any other ways to scale up everything in a scene aside from parenting everything to a null and scaling that?  Any way I can “trick” the X-Particles tool?

I tried creating a new screen from scratch and merging in my 20x master scene, but that destroyed the bubble morph animation I’d perfected.

I’ve posted this in the X-Particles forums on their site to see what my be causing this behavior.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

Hi Shawn Marshall,

To answer the question “Are there any other ways to scale up everything in a scene aside from parenting everything to a null and scaling that?” —that would be the Main Menu>Edit>Project Settings>>Attribute Manager>Project Settings. [image]

How far that has any influence to the Skinner-object is not to my knowledge. I do not have the X-Particles. I wish I would have it to help you here.

Is there a way to export an object cycle out, so you have an polygon object cycle from it? Not that I have any idea here, that is just a very wild brainstorming. Similar to that would be a suggestion using X-Ref. (?)

Edit: I got my demo. See below./edit

Good luck

Sassi

Thanks for the fast reply.

The Scale Project tool is what I used to scale everything up 20x.  I had the Current Scale set to 1 cm and the Target Scale set to 20cm.  Everything was now shown as being 20x bigger, but the Skinner object’s minimums are also now 20x larger.

Shawn

Sorry, Shawn, But not having access to the X-Particles makes it impossible to say anything.

I hope the X-Particles company’s support has an idea.

However, I have requested a demo version, so I hope to get an idea while playing with it.

All the best

So, having had a few minutes with it, I used an xpEmitter and placed it into the Object list of the xpSkinner.

I was able to change the scale up and down:

I checked if I could use an FFD—set to 2x2x2 segments as kind of “Scale Deformer”, and even that works without any problems.

I also tested a MoGraph Plain Effector, set to Deform>Object and scaled it to -0.95 (an equivalent of 20:1) see image. The cube was always in my tests as reference.

The simplest way would be to use a Null as Parent and scale from there, but after one run, it has no influence. All works fine even animated with the plain effector for example, so parent influence is zero, child influence (Deformer) works.

Let me know a little bit more about the problem, perhaps a little example scene? I have 29.97 demo days left ;o) I wish I had a full version.

All the best

P.S.: ...exploring it further, a Spline Wrap might help as well. Detail>Size. But that depends on your scene, which I don’t know.