I’m new at Cinema 4D (3 weeks when I wrote this). And XPresso and C.O.F.F.E.E only a few hours. But I used to be a programmer years ago. Yesterday I had the project of animating a clock. The movement of a quartz clock, not a continuous one (that would be too easy). It could be done manually by keyframing the rotation of the hands. But I told myself let’s learn a new part of C4D. I looked for an “XPresso for the Dummies” on the internet. Not much. So I experimented. Quite easy. But for someone without a programming background I can imagine the headache and discouragement. So, I decided it was time for a new section on Claude3D’s website.

So, create a clock hand (a pyramid would be fine). Right-click it in the object manager and attach to it an XPresso tag (in Cinema 4D Tags). Double-click

and you should get the XPresso Editor Window. On the left of the window select X-Pool>System Operators>XPresso. Under General & Calculate you will find everything necessary for the next example.

I’ll explain from left to right (the top row)

1. 1.Time (General) returns (in seconds  ex 0.05) the time of the present frame of your animation.
   

2. 2.As I want my hand to rotate only every second Math: Add is just integer(time). My project setting is at 24frames/sec. So from frame 0 to 23 Result is going to stay at “0”. At frame 24 it’s going the change to “1”. That’s the top left value.
   

3. 3.Second to angle - I want the hand to rotate 6º every second . So the math behind it is simply “Value1*6”
   

4. 4.Math Modulo - Just in case you want an animation longer than 60 seconds. I do a modulo 360 of the rotation angle.
   

5. 5.Deg to radian - Angles are expressed in radians so this conversion. ($1/-57.2958) . The “-” is because I want the rotation to be clockwise.
   

6. 6.And finally I feed the result into my arrow Rotation H.
   

    

That’s a lot of steps for something really simple. If you are ready to jump into C.O.F.F.E.E. just under is the equivalent.

main()

{

Output1 = int(Input1) * 6 % 360 / -57.2958  ;

}

Hope it helped. Don’t hesitate to leave comments, suggestions and requests.

Thanks      claude@claude3D.com