Here’s a quick tip to output multiple shapes with Thinking Particles. This may sound like an easy task but it’s actually kind of tricky. There are a number of ways to do this, for example it can easily be done by cloning objects on the particles, but then you dont get the Thinking Particles rotations and interactions you may want. Also there is a preset for Multishape Emitter in the content browser that comes with C4D but it’s WAY more complex then it needs to be and adding additional objects is a pain. So I made this easy little setup so you can add all the objects you want quickly. Theres really only 2 steps to it:
1. Add all objects you want to the link list
2. Change the Random Integer upper limit to the number of objects in the link list -1(since counting starts at zero).
**Note: Couple of gotchya’s that always happen with Thinking Particles. If your shapes aren’t showing up, make sure you add your Particle Geometry object, and make sure you’re emitters “Size” value is high enough to see the shapes. Also if you try rendering a single frame in your Picture Viewer you will get the same shape on all particles. Thats because it didn’t get a chance to assign the shapes to the particles. It WILL work if you render a sequence from whenever you start emitting particles. So if you want to render a still, just render in the viewport and screen capture.
GREAT