Cineversity

Hi Doc,

I’m working on a scene that has dozens of balloons clustered together in a very specific position (please see attached JPEG).  The balloons (clones) were imported from another scene file, so I “locked” their position before importing them by Setting an Initial Dynamics frame and by adding a MoGraph Cache tag and Baking it.

Upon import into the new scene, the balloons collapsed into their old, overlapping positions, but when I advanced to frame 1 in the animation, they reset to their proper positions…at least in the Viewport.  But when I render the frame to the Picture Viewer, the balloons are again collapsed together.

Can you please help me make it so the balloons render exactly as they appear in the Viewport (after playing forward to frame 1)?  I’m using this dynamics scene as a static frame that will be printed.  Therefore, I don’t actually need any animation.  This said, when I tried Connecting the Objects, the balloons did indeed maintain their proper positions, but I lost the variety of colors created by the Variation shader and all balloons took on the same color…so as far as I can tell, Connecting Objects is not a suitable solution.

My C4D file is 27 MB, so I can’t attach it.

Thanks for your advice!

Mark

P.S. Doc, I’m also wandering if there is a way to scale down the entire cluster of balloons while still maintaining their relative proximity to one another?  Thanks!

Hi Mark,

I have sent you an upload link. Since I haven’t seen the file yet, how about pressing the C key and have all the dynamics gone. Since you have a backup copy anyway, why not doing this for the still? Scaling would be easy as well, based on that step.

I typically try to avoid guessing, but could it be that the render-settings are set to frame zero?

I will explore the scene at the moment I have it here.

All the best

Hi Mark,

If you go to the Project Settings, you will see that the max time is 208.33

Which leads me to assume, that the initial scene was cached at 30 frames/sec.

The current scene is set to 25 frames. I guess, the decision is then made to use the data from frame zero.

My suggestion:
•Cache again, in the frame rate you have now.
•Render frame 0-2 as an image sequence. Pick the one you need.
•Or use my ‘fake-bake’, well it is not fake, but I replaced the Balloons with a Polygon…,

I used the Current State To Object, and the Connect and Delete, to get one Polygon object.
This object was then placed into the Cloner Object, set to Polygon Center, while the Transform was set to R.P negative 90º
The Polygon Object needs to be invisible for the rendering. This will be stable. (BTW, before I did so, I have set the scene to 30fps, to get perfect results).

The setup without the balloon object is below. I wasn’t sure if the balloon was OK to post. Please replace it with the placeholder

Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/FP0EXKyvttZ2WZcIhVoVvKmvjzdXUXqHcN22Jt86pg3

I hope that works for you

My best wishes for your project

Awesome, Doc!  Thank you for working on this!  I’m so glad you know Cinema 4D inside and out.  I’d be lost without you.

You’re very welcome, Mark, thanks for the kind feedback!

Let me know if there is anything else, I’m happy to look into it.

ENJOY!