How to make this effect in C4D?

[FloydBishop]

Certainly not the most desirable way, but a way to do it would be the following:

Six square splines with emitters following each spline. The emitters spit out the little green boxes with no speed and a long lifetime. This would give you a result similar to the still you've posted.

What you probably want to do is to attach objects to the edges of polys. I'm not sure that there is a way to do this in Cinema, but a script (expression) could probably be written.

Be sure and post a pic and an explaination of your solution!!

[robertkist]

there is a plugin named chestnut. it allows you to place objects on vertices of polygonal objects. The documentation is japanese (the interface is english), but you basically used the "chestnut selector".
The objects can further be aligned along the axes of the vertex. That means your reference object should have some irregularities in it's sruface, or otherwise all the boxes will be aligned the same.
I think the last thing chestnuts allows you, is to randomly adjust the scale of the objects you place.

If you speak german, there is a tutorial on chestnuts online, which demonstrates just this by showing you how to randomly distribute stone pebbles on a surface.

I guess you can also figure out most chestnut functions by trial-and-error.

Good luck.

p.s. I might even try re-creating this myself over the weekend.

[robertkist]

ok, here is what you do:
1) create a 3x3x3 box with a hole in the middle. I made mine with extruding from a 1x1x1 cube and then using the structure->bridge tool. This will be the reference object.

2) select structure->subdivide. I used 2 as value, but it depends on what you're aiming for as final result

3) select structure->edit surface->crumple. select the axial mode to get a nice crumple effect.

5) create a new box, make it pretty small. we will distribute this box along our reference object.

4) go to vertex edition mode and select all the vertices of the reference object.

6) select plugins->chestnuts->chestnut duplicator with the reference object selected. In the search for field enter the name of the small box. hit ok and a new null object will be created holding all the small boxes.

7) select the null object and select functions->randomize.

voilá.

now try setting GI that doesn't take forever to render, slap some material on the boxes, create a floor, etc. and you have what you're asking for :)

p.s.
you can find the chestnuts plug here:
http://homepage2.nifty.com/aquawave/e/index.html

[FloydBishop]

Nice solution. I've been out of the Cinema loop for too long, I'm afraid.

Oh yeah, the Lightwave boxes were green. Doh!:D

[michaeli]

Thanks, Kwramm, the chestnut is good, and this is my try


http://keya.d2g.com/lb5000/usr/6/6_338_3.jpg

:beer:

[LucentDreams]

pretty good but keep tweaking, I think what works best in the original is it is really randome and clustered, yours is tight and less random, and Kwramm's is good for randomness but has the gaps, I know they are just tests though. Very nice image. interesting style.

[robertkist]

your right, there's a lot of tweaking involved. I made this thing in like 10 minutes. To get rid of the spacing, you can either make the boxes bigger or add more boxes (that means cranking up the density of vertexes on your ref object)...or you can do both :)

[fxgogo]

What about writing a script to randomly rotate each box after it has been placed? It would be nice to use a spline as the basic alignment tool and then there is random position, scale and rotation values added to that.

Does that makes sense or am I speaking ddog dodo? I have done no scripting in C4D so I might be saying something silly.

[robertkist]

there is no script needed for the rotating thing (of course you can write one just for the kicks of it ;)). The randomize function takes care of that. You can give it a maximum scale factor (minimum being the current size of an object) and also rotation maximums. Mine were pretty low I think - just 45 degrees for each axis.

Now for the spline...I dunno. But in this case a poly works out pretty well, and you can tweak it much better.

I think c4d has some pretty powerful functions for doing random stuff. I think you could even do mathematical stuff with the formula object...like creating a 3d sinus wave form and arrange stuff along that...just some ideas, but I'm not really into abstract 3d art :)

[LucentDreams]

Kwramm have you seen the new parametric primitive that comes with the Ditools plugin, really cool for creating objects based on equations. OUr users are really outdoing themselves with all these plugins available.

[video567]

hi I followed the instructions an d i came up with something close to the pictures posted above but i dont understand this step

4) go to vertex edition mode and select all the vertices of the reference object


how do i go to the vertex edition mode? or do you mean just select all of the polygones in the box? is that the same thing?

i hope to hear from some one soon

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