I have this single object that is comprised of around 4,000 pegs.
I’m wanting to randomize the z location of each peg. Is there a way I can accomplish that in Blender?
I know there’s animation “noise” in the graph editor, but this will animate the entire object of over 4,000 pegs as one. If I seperate the pegs and apply noise to each individually, that’s manual work for over 4,000! That’s if Blender can even handle that, changing parameters. Currently, I can’t even “separate by loose parts” without blender crashing.
Just so you know I’m not totally crazy, I know this is possible within C4D for example! You simply apply a “fracture” modifier and separate by objects. Then, apply a “random” tag on top of that. I’d love to get this done in Blender and not have to resort to another program! Thanks for your help!
Was it crashing for you, or just taking forever? It’s not crashing for me (but hasn’t yet completed.) Taking way longer than it ought to if coded well. I don’t see any obvious problems that might break separate by parts.
Edit: It did eventually finish, after multiple hours of running in the background, but it should be said that was on an .obj import loaded into 2.79b. My 2.8 installation is old and I don’t like the interface, so I just did it that way.
Took about 40 minutes to separate the parts on a beefier setup - it shouldn’t take that long, the scene is not that heavy. Not sure what’s going on. Takes pretty long to open as well.
I’d suggest deleting anything but the top caps of the cylinders, adding a solidify modifier, an angle based bevel, and a subdiv to it - rebuilding the geo that way would give a similar result and make it a lot faster (took 2 minutes instead of 40 to separate the objects)
That is if you don’t need custom UVs or don’t want to fiddle with additional meshes for data transfer.
What I recommend is to use the particle system. You can cut the tops of the cylinders then merge the vertices with distance, close enough that only the bottoms will merge into a single vertex, so each cylinder will become a single vert. Then use this as a vertex source for the particle system. You will use to duplicate a single cylinder all over the particle system.
Or just select the bottoms, invert the selection and delete everything else. Once done, apply particle system and use faces as your source. The rest is similar to the above section.
Depending on how close up you need to shoot you may have two scenes, one for wide angle shot and a second for the close up scene… The second scene is high details… Then post production merge both
