So I'm working on a large architectural project with lots of cloners, instances, you name it... Because such scenes get very heavy I tried making layers (as in the Layer Manager) so I can hide some less important parts while working. However, the visibility toggle does nothing! It works in simple scenes where I replicate the setup but here it only works in some occasions which I can't define.   I'm adding a part of the C4D scene so you can try yourself.   My guess is that the system either dislikes cloners, or it gets confused with the "stoplight" visibility on some parts. It would really benefit my workflow if I could just hide/unhide layers, hopefully someone knows what's up.   Thanks! layervisibility.c4d

Does it have to be dynamic ? You could fake it with an XPresso memory node. In this file the lower girder X position is 15F behind the top one.   IRL the lower girder would rise slightly when the top moves - to keep the chains a constant length.   fake.c4d

i'm trying to make a fairly universal space scene that I can use for animating stuff in space. the physical sky, with the atmosphere turned down to 0%, does the stars for me and also provides a single bright source of light from the sun, but I also want to use an HDRI to provide just a little ambient lighting so my ships and space stations aren't mostly in the shadow.   example 1 is when I have the sky with the HDRI. example 2 is when I have the physical sky turned on, notice I get the sun and the stars, but I lose the HDRI.   what should I do to get both?    

I am using the Physical render.  Render times are pretty long (around 30 minutes on a 4 core 3.7GHz Xeon E3-1245 V6 processor).  For all but close ups the port hole luminance maps do not need to be GI enabled which they are right now.  Turning that off could speed things up a bit.   I am not really worried about polygon count.  I used to be, but computers are so powerful these days it is not that much of a limitation.   The whole project has been slowed down a bit due to work (traveling to Juarez, San Jose, back to Juarez and then to the Czech republic on business) and family (lots of great weekends spent with pretty much everyone).  Also, a very good comment was made Vizn about the paneling that has got me going back a bit to redo.  It is more work than expected, but he was spot on.   Put all that together and progress has been slow.  I hope to get  to spend a bit of time on it this weekend before my next trip. My perfect retirement job (hopefully 7 years away) would be to do something (anything actually) with C4D  as I find myself really looking forward to being able to spend some serious time on it....but time for my hobbies is so limited right now.   Dave

Could you use the Voronoi Fracture object?

On your dynamic connectors (Hinge) turn the bounce down, but more importantly, Go into your project settings (Ctrl D) > Dynamics tab > Expert tab, then double the steps per frame and Maximum Solver iterations per step. Hope this helps.

Hi there, relative noob here.   I'm trying to build the moving parts of a construction crane that's moving a girder, like the attached diagram. The top block should be slowly moving left to right, and the girder at the bottom moves a bit behind it, the top bit stops and the girder slowly swings to a halt underneath. The strings can be rigid, they simply pivot.   In my mind it made sense to use a set of four hinges (i only need the objects to swing in one dimension) but for the life of me can't get it even close to working! I got some success with a basic arrangement swinging very light and bouncy, but as soon as I made the girder have a bigger mass the hinges seemed to stretch, gaps appeared everywhere, and things refused to swing how I wanted them to...   How would you experienced guys go about doing this? How would the parenting work? Which bits would have dynamics tags, all of them?   Thanks for any help you can give!   S  

Sorry to bump this up, but I cannot in good conscience leave this thread without closure. I'm happy to report that I was able to get the rig to work (not without constant crashing though; even in skeleton mode. EDIT: Fixed that by turning off Open GL), and here's the result:       Not perfect, but not bad for what's essentially my first time at IK rigging.   I have yet another one of these videos to do (working on it as I type this) and I'm now enjoying (not) trying to find out why I can't rig each leg with the foot and toe as a second link in the IK, but that's another story.   Thanks again!   -Kurt