Cineversity

Hi, I am making a swarm of sharks. I created a cloner with balls moving randomly but in a circle with dynamics, created a tracer and put the fish on a splinewrap where the spline is the tracer. All worked well, except I couldn’t stop the fish rotating sideways. I tried rail, up vector and didnt work for me.
I am attaching a simplified version, any ingenious ideas to use only the position of the spline and ignore the rotation?

For some reason I couldn’t attach the file (invalid content for its MIME type??)
Here is the link to dropbox;
https://www.dropbox.com/s/77ndx6nz6fwh8v5/myswarmtrial.c4d?dl=0

Ahh, just got a brainwave after posting it and fixed it!
Duplicated the tracer, and offset in -Y direction a bit and used that as a rail rather than a circle spline..

Hi ortakcio2,

Thanks for the use of Dropbox, very much appreciated. The Mime type should work fine with zip files, but also here, I had trouble with different flavors of it.

Yes, the Rail is the key element here. Which allows more animation per element, if you go with the file …_01.c4d.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/YvczChPV1nTRm4Nkk7DDm7swEeAkvg62BkhqxlAuWxG

The first file uses even a copy of the Cloner first, then produces a new Tracer. BUT: it uses as well a new Random Effector, with a different Animation setting. This adds more motion details to the objects.

The file …_02.c4d is just a little idea to get the Rail with an instance instead of producing it each frame newly. Perhaps with large swarms a plus.

You might be interested in looking into fields as well…

My best wishes

amazing help as usual. much appreciated.thank you.

Thanks a lot, ortakcio2, very kind feedback.

I mentioned the Fields as a base for such swarm animations.

Here is a little sketch, in the simplest form I can think of. Which also means, it might lead to some intersecting Hammer Sharks if you dial the number too high.
Example
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/r1huSshtwmNf0QpWeAJfmd7q7KvxuIDhTaMif51hFqa

Enjoy.

One more question
I am making varity of scenarios with swarms. In the first one, I used the method in the C4D file I sent you.
I want to bake the animation of the fish and remove all the mographs etc (having problems when rendering as is, animation I see on view port is different then rendered). How do I bake this animation, tried mograph cache, point cache, but no luck.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ijqi58yqaybyom/Capture.JPG?dl=0

I found a solution, baked the fish as alembic. Not ideal but it is working.

Hi ortakcio2,

Alembic is excellent for that. But yes, it certainly has two downsides. First, it is baked, which means every change needs to be re-backed. Secondly, you have more data to store.

My first attempt would always be to cache the MoGraph Cloner. This often takes priority problems out.

Since you said you were not happy, why not take a different route?
Set you Main Menu> Animation> Play Mode> Simple (Perhaps increase the project duration for this step.)
Start from the earliest frame, press play. Let it run one time through.
Select both Tracers (or one, if you instance it) and use the Object Manager> Object> Current State To Object.
The results can be used in a MoSpline> Spline and set to Separate Splines.
Set the end to 5% and use the Offset to animate.
If you have used only one Tracer, copy the spline and move the Copy upwards. If you had two Tracers, no copy.

Place both splines in a MoSpline. The MoSpline then into the Spline Wrap.
I have connected in the example the Offset with the other Offset. Right Mouse Click [RMC] on Offset> Xpression> Set Driver. On the other MoSpline Offset> RMC> Xpression> Set Driven Absolute.

Example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/Lmp0qPYJs6oZOzRj7XZn7tsBomyDWkDsWRQKOi5eyIh

Have a productive weekend!

Cheers