I am new to c4d and would love some advice! I am trying to create a gut microbiome., which I have posted a picture below to reference what i am trying to accomplish. I have tried with hairs inside a cylinder but it didn’t give me the look I was going for! It looked a little fake. I need to have this done asap! I have posted a screenshot of what i am trying to accomplish below! If i can just get the inside walls started, I can figure everything else out. Any help would be so so greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Creating 'Villi' or gut microbiome
Gwelchster
#2
Suggest using a LOD, Level of detail rig in a cloner with the multi millions or whatever its called option, each villi could have animation that is randomly offset using a random effector and adjsuting the time option. Can also set the random effector to turbulance or noise to get waves… if you are animating those fellas, other effectors like the shader effector with a 3D noise shader that animates works well too, for scaling them up and down in little in waves.
JoelDubin
#3
There are a few ways to approach, Gary’s (above) being one of them. Here is another way that is pretty much parametric.
FYI–Also in actuality you’d never see the villi in this tube view, although it is a common and accepted way to visualize them. They are actually microscopic features of the intestine. Im guilty too however of showing them this way. 
Hope this helps!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/stz6z2f8mfx7pm7/parametric%20villi.mp4?raw=1
(There was a lot of GPU fan noise in the background when I recorded this and I was kind of mumbling a bit–but hopefully I cleaned the audio up well enough to be intelligible )
I forgot to mention that you can get some animated motion in the vlli fingers by applying effectors to the extrude objects rotataion parametrs.
infograph
#4
You can use Hair with a custom polygon object.
Hair is a much overlooked way of scattering objects IMO.
JoelDubin
#5
^ Good one. Uses instances so may be limiting to the numbers you can render compared to cloning with pre animated render instances, but you can get some nice dynamic motion this way.
addieg10
#6
Thank you SO much! The video helped me a ton! However, when i add the extrude, they extrude outward for some reason, not exactly looking right. I tried reversing normals but it didn’t fix the problem either. Any suggestions?
JoelDubin
#7
if you watch the video again–I actually explain this.
Because you are extruding inward from the surface rather than outward from the tube, you need to use negative values in your extrude settings. That should fix it?
(though reversing normals should have worked…hmmm)
JoelDubin
#8
To add–I realize that extruding negatively will mean you will in fact still need to make things editable and reverse normals prior t rendering–if using subsurface scattering, or else things will not render properly.
Mike_Abbott
#10
That’s a neat approach Joel !
Colon animations seem popular : ) - I did one myself a while back - a colon polypectomy. Ouch!