Hi.
I’ve attached a helmet to one of the non-4D characters from Anima inside Cinema4D and while I generate a preview (with open C4D), the helmet stays where it should. But its the second time that the helmet wanders off / drifts away while I render the scene with the Render Queue (don’t know if thats the reason).
Is this something that can be fixed or am I doing something wrong? Don’t know what I could change in that setup. It looks like the animation of the character and the animation of the object the helmet is attached to aren’t in sync.
Thhe link points that I have access directly in C4D, as seen in the first screenshot. They only show up if I enable the ‘Show link points’ and then disable them again. And afterwards they kind of do always the opposite. And it is some kind of lottery if the 3D model is displayed after opening the scene. Right now the 3D model is only that little grey ‘arrow’. But the checkbox ‘Is arrow’ sometimes brings back the 3D model of the person. But if I render the scene it works. The helmet stays where it is. Generating a preview does work. But it loses the sync after I close the scene. So next time starting up the helmet is off. Don’t know if this whole system is kind of buggy(?) or if I’m using it entirely wrong.
I confirm that the toggler is not working as expected, it does the opposite of what it is supposed to do as you well pointed out.
About the display of the 3D model, that is not random behavior. It depends on the viewport optimization settings you have in the plugin properties. We use it to optimize the viewport response in C4D, which is especially useful when dealing with big crowds:
To fix that, you can either enable the “show all” toggle or increase the Arrow/Mesh number. The higher the number, the more actors will be displayed fully in the viewport instead of showing their proxies (arrows).
Now the most important thing, I confirm the animation of the linking points breaks when reloading the scene. That explains why it first works when you try it on your scene but then it breaks when you send it to a render node. It breaks on every re-load of the scene, even in the same device.
I have reported this issue to the Anima devs (AN-1447), so they will start working on a fix for it soon. As a workaround, perhaps you could do the following process:
Show the linking points on the actor
Create a new point helper not linked to those points
Bake the animation of the new point helper in world coords so it follows the animation of the head link point
Attach the helmet to that new baked point helper
I created a quick script that does exactly that, you can get it here:
To use it, select the head link point, then execute the script. It will generate a new “…_baked_helper” that follows that animation. This should avoid the problem until a stable fix is included in an upcoming Anima update.
Thanks for your answer and help on that topic! The script worked perfectly fine I’ve already rendered the sequence over the weekend and there were no further problems with that little helmet. TBH, I was thinking about something like 'There must somewhere be an option to bake an animation about its World Transform over time. And voilà, it was already provided. Kind of next step Vibe Coding. Really big thanks for that!
Also thanks for pointing out the thing with the little arrows. Was kind of annoying, but it was always my own fault Just a little checkbox and everything was visible again.
I’ve already rendered the sequence over the weekend and there were no further problems with that little helmet. TBH, I was thinking about something like 'There must somewhere be an option to bake an animation about its World Transform over time. And voilà, it was already provided. Kind of next step Vibe Coding. Really big thanks for that!