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Introduction General Tab Alignment Tab Distribution Tab Effects Tab SplineSPREAD Shader Documentation & Conclusion General Tab
The General Tab is where you define the basic settings. You can see in the image above I have dragged and dropped a Path spline into the Path Spline Field and enabled the Clone option and said that I want 10 clones. The result in my case is 10 cubes arranged around a Circle spline. If I was to enable Automatic Animation on the Distribution Tab the result would be my clones moving around the spline but the movement would be quite jerky. This is caused by the Spline interpolation and not by the plugin. MoGraph Cloners also suffer this problem as well and the fix in both cases is to either increase or change the spline interpolation points or to enable the Smooth Splines option or in the Case of MoGraph the Smooth Rotation option. The Smooth option has a number of interpolation options once enabled but generally Auto is sufficient. The In Editor option is really handy. Say you have 5000 clones on a spline, viewport speed is going to be slower. The In Editor settings allows you to reduce the number of clones visible in the editor but all of them are still there when rendering. e.g. 5000 clones and the In Editor is set to 10%. Only 500 clones will be visible and if you have an animation then playback speed will be quicker. The Rail Spline field is for an optional Rail Spline. This is usually but not always a copy of the original spline but offset. The basic usage of a rail spline is to prevent clones flipping as their Y axis will point towards the rail spline. I'm a little puzzled as to why a rail spline is required to prevent flipping. A MoGraph Cloner in object / spline mode doesn't require a rail spline (there isn't an option for a rail spline on a Cloner object) as there is no flipping. The Segment option is where the Path spline has more than one segment. Text splines are a good example of this where there often is an inner and outer part to the spline. Next to this Segment option is the word Max followed by a number which indicates the maximum number of segments. Note that a spline with 2 segments like a letter A spline has the maximum segment number of 1 since the first segment is segment 0. Like many things to do with C4D, counting starts at zero. Below is a simple animation using 2 SplineSPREAD objects utilizing the segment option. The animation is generated by the Automatic Animation option on the Distribution tab.
One thing that seems to be lacking is the ability to distribute clones around multiple segments all at the same time. A text spline made up of several letters is a prime example of this. MoGraph has this ability so I would like to see the same with SplineSPREAD. The Blend Spline option is probably one of the most powerful features of SplineSPREAD. What this allows you to do is set up 2 path splines and have the clones or objects aligned to one spline move or morph over to the other spline. This is done by animating the Blend strength parameter. Anyone familiar with how MoGraph Effectors work and the ability to move between Effectors by increasing and decreasing the strength will pick this up in seconds. However throw in a bit of XPresso using the SplineSPREAD XPresso node and very slick animations like the one below can be achieved. This is an example scene that comes with the plugin. I did an editor render so that you could see both splines. Hidden from view are 2 rail splines.
Pretty slick eh!! Much better results than using a couple of Spline Effectors in MoGraph where the transition between the splines isn't nearly as smooth. The Random Order option is where you have more than one object as a child object of the SplineSPREAD object. Rather than having these objects alternating if there were 2 child objects (and you cloned them so that there were say 100 clones) you can make the clones appear in random order / sequences. The Seed option just changes the random sequence to another random sequence. Here's a simple animation where I have enabled the random option plus used 2 splines and blended between them. Animations like this are very easy to do.
The Virtual Parent option allows you to simulate having an object like a Metaball object as the parent object. Note that it won't work with hypernurbs object as only the first object under a hypernurbs object is smoothed. The same thing happens with SplineSPREAD as clones are treated as virtual objects. The Convert Clones button command when clicked converts clones into actual objects e.g. you have a cube under a SplineSPREAD object and have it set to 10 clones. Pressing the button creates 9 additional cubes under the SplineSPREAD object (and disables the clone option). The Object Animation panel is used when the object or object being cloned have animation. Say you have clones of an animated bat flying, all clones will flap their wings exactly the same time and things will look very robotic. The Object Animation options allow you to Offset this animation and make it look a lot more natural. Below is some fun I had where I modelled and animated a Batman logo with flapping wings which are just extruded splines. The animation on the left has an offset of zero whereas the animation on the right has an offset of 9. Things can still look a bit too regular so the Variation option can randomize the offset amount between zero and whatever the maximum offset value is although in this case I didn't need it. Click on the still images to play the animations.
The second animation with the offset is very impressive (despite the modelling being very crude) in my opinion especially when combined with the scattering options. The bats could have been made to fly along the spline continuously or as I have done got them to fly in one group. It's just a matter of adjusting the settings to get precisely what you want. I think this feature on its own could convince people to buy the plugin as there are lots of times in animations where you want to simulate a crowd of animated objects but not have them all move etc at the same time. Someone is bound to ask, no there isn't object collision detection so it's quite possible to have your clones geometry intersecting each other. Just a matter of tweaking the settings to minimize or avoid this. In the 2 animations I used Scattering on the Effects Tab to scatter the clones. Finally the Information panel at the bottom of the General Tab displays the number of objects or clones, the Spline length and the distance between objects or clones. If there are 2 splines then you get 2 lots of information. Introduction General Tab Alignment Tab Distribution Tab Effects Tab SplineSPREAD Shader Documentation & Conclusion Review by 3DKiwi / Nigel Doyle |
