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Summary

Title:Planted Guides using the Plant Guide Tool do not respect properties set in Guides from Mesh
Category:Crash/Critical
Status:Closed
Posted By:afite1 ( Andrew Fite )
Date Created:2 July 2019

Problem

Description:

Hi,

I am trying to build a groom from scratch manually planting guides as needed as I build out the groom.  I found that i could start buy setting up a basic groom that begins with a "Guides from Mesh Operator" and set it to the lowest setting of 1.  From there, I can use the "Edit Guide" operator to plant guides precisely where I want them 1 by 1 using the "Plant Guide Tool".  This at first glance works wonderfully until you realize that there is no way to edit basic properties of the newly planted guides.  For example, I can't change the point count of the guides.  I would have imagined the newly created guides would just inherit the properties listed in the "Guides from Mesh" attributes, but they only seem to have an effect at the moment of creation and no effect at all after the guide is planted.  

I am assuming this is a bug and should be inheriting the properties of the Guides from Mesh operator in real time.

Steps to Reproduce:

Create any geometry object.  Add basic FurBall groom.  Use "Plant Guide Tool" under "Edit Guides" operator and plant a few new guides.  Try adjusting attributes in the "Guides from Mesh" and you will see it has no effect on newly create guides (ex. length and point count). 

5 July 2019
#25597
afite1

I was hoping at least somekind of follow up on this issue.  Right now the manual planting of guides is almost useless.

5 July 2019
#25600
Jeordanis Figuereo

Hello, sorry I missed this post. 

This is not a bug, this is intended behavior. The way the hair stack work is: Each operator takes the hair data provided by the previous operator and do something with it. For example, Guides from Mesh generates guides, the Hair from Guides takes those generated guides and generates hair with the specified interpolation properties, the ChangeWidth takes the generated hairs and assign a Width value to each strand, and so on with every operator.

In your case, Guides from Mesh generates a single guides, the properties of this operator will affect ONLY this guides because this is the only guides that this operator owns. Then you added more guides manually in Edit Guides, those new guides belong to the Edit Guides operator, not to Guides from Mesh.

That being said. There are several ways to change the guide point and length of the new guides you added:

1. Use the Detail modifier to change the amount of guides points on a single guide or all of them. See the documentation HERE.

2. Use the Length modifier to change the length. See the documentation HERE.

3. Plant Guides tool have options to set length and guide points before planting a new guide. This option is available on Maya and Max but is not implemented in the beta for Cinema 4D yet. Will be there soon.

Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.)

5 July 2019
#25601
Jeordanis Figuereo

3. Plant Guides tool have options to set length and guide points before planting a new guide. This option is available on Maya and Max but is not implemented in the beta for Cinema 4D yet. Will be there soon.

The team just implemented this on Cinema. Should be available in the next nightly build. 

Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.)

5 July 2019
#25602
afite1

Thanks for clarifying the intended functionality.  

I would say though that your overall system is still a bit confusing when it comes to manually creating guides.  If the 'Edit Guides' can own/generate guides by itself it is weird that I need to have another operator in the chain like "Mesh from Guides" to even see the results.  I feel like it would be nice to either have a dedicated operator to manually create/generate hair with dynamic properties like length and point count.  I think from a workflow point of view, one typically starts with the lowest amount of detail needed and then adds detail as needed.  The detail operator and length operator do provide me with a work around but it would be a nicer experience if this was all bundled in one tool that worked more similarily to the other guide generators like "Mesh from Guides" or "Guides from Curves".

6 July 2019
#25603
Jeordanis Figuereo

Thank for your suggestions. 

Guides from Mesh and Edit Guides are two different types of operators. One have parametric parameters and the other don't. Guides from Mesh provides data to EG, not only guides, and it provides the mesh dependency like topology, normals, UVs, etc to EG and other operators up the stack can use it too. Some users have requested the ability to use Edit Guides without adding Guides from Mesh, we are planing to add this feature in the next major version. That being said, we need to have both options. Imagine you want to add 2000 guides to a mesh, would do it manually? Not only plant them manually, but distribute them with different algorithms like Guides from Mesh do: UV based distribution, Random distribution, Uniform, Even distribution, etc.

I think from a workflow point of view, one typically starts with the lowest amount of detail needed and then adds detail as needed.

Sure, but that's not always the case. Imagine fur for example or individual feathers.

The detail operator and length operator do provide me with a work around but it would be a nicer experience if this was all bundled in one tool that worked more similarily to the other guide generators like "Mesh from Guides" or "Guides from Curves".

Ornatrix have to be parametric. Most operators are non destructive but some operators and features are destructive. For instance, Edit Guides is destructive. Adding such feature in EG will not be very useful once you add another EG on top. Mesh from Guides and Guides from Curves don't modify the input data, they take the input data and create a new, different output, Edit Guides is different. As I said we added options like decide beforehand the amount of points and length of planted guides, but this is not procedural due to the nature of Edit Guides. By the way, there is a brush called "Length Brush" that was designed for this purpose. Find more information about this brush settings in the documentation HERE.

 

 

Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.)

 
 
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