[jkwarner]

Hello all,

Sorry if this has been asked before, I searched but couldn't find anything...

Is there a way to prevent a Random Effector from causing clones to intersect or overlap?

I've got a cloned grid array of 15 x 1 x 15 capsules standing vertically. I then add a random effector (with only X and Z position randomness) in order to create a more natural "crowd" of clones. I'd really like to avoid any of the capsule "people" overlapping but can't seem to figure out how to accomplish this -- outside of "expanding" the clones and manually repositioning, which I'd like to avoid for animation reasons.

I tried messing around with MoDynamics and Forces and the like but couldn't get anything to work without it "spitting" the overlapping clones across the scene. I also looked into Surface Spread but I'm not sure if it has a "no overlapping" setting...

Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations? Hopefully there's a simple/elegant solution that I'm just overlooking.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Jonathan

[3DKiwi]

Yeah this one is a bit tricky. What I think you need to do is set up a scene like the attached and stop the animation at frame 0. You then have no intersecting clones.

Hope this helps.

3DKiwi

Attached File(s)

•  NoInteresections.c4d (89.92K)
  Number of downloads: 29

[jkwarner]

3DKiwi,

Thanks so much for that file... I figured the Mograph answer was probably something like that. Interestingly, your file still has the balls moving/drifting after hitting frame 0.

But, I think I might have just stumbled upon an even simpler answer: In the Rigid Body Force tab, adjust Linear Damping and Angular Damping to both be 100%. If you press play it only takes a few frames for everything to lock into position and stay there without wobbling or drifting.

Oh, and for the record, I did some more research on SurfaceSPREAD and I think it does actually allow for a "no overlap" option where you can even put in a "minimum distance"... I've wanted that plug-in for a while anyway so I went ahead and purchased. Now I'm just waiting on the confirmation/serial email to get my hands on it and try it out.

Thanks for your quick response.

Jonathan