animate a spring in cinema 4d

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davide

Well-known member
Does anyone know how to animate a spring in cinema 4d? I'm trying to do a sequence where a spring grows toward the camera then compresses as the camera moves forward and then finally shoots back sending the camera flying.

I've made the spring shape with by creating a helix spline and a circle and then using the sweep NURBS. I've tried animating it by playing with the height but it's to jerky. I'm pretty new to Cinema 4d and haven't done any of the physics stuff with it yet. If anyone could help me out it'd be greatly appreciated.

I've found this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDDS2RsNCrU&fmt=18 but I can't make out where he's clicking most of the time.

davide
 
Do you have the character module?
Adding a morph tag would do it:
*r-Click and add Character Tags->Morph.
*re scale your spring spline.
*Vary/animate the Strength in the morph tag attributes.
After that, you can also drag the tag into expresso and maipulate the variables in there.
 
Oops.

A better way is to just animate the Height property of the helix spline.
You can keyframe that without having to use the tag.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

Thanks raptor. Keyframing the height of the helix was what I tried first, and while that worked for compressing the spring it didn't look fluid enough for when it sprang back into place.
 
davide said:
Hi,

Thanks raptor. Keyframing the height of the helix was what I tried first, and while that worked for compressing the spring it didn't look fluid enough for when it sprang back into place.
Click to expand...

You should be able to achieve this with more realism in the curve editor. Look up some stuff on squash and stretch, basic animation 101, that'll get you on the right path.
 
Thanks, I was able to animate the spring with physics, but I figured out a way to achieve a spring animation by keyframing the height as well as using some deformers that looked just as good and wasn't as hard on the processor.

davide
 
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