3D Modeling Made Easy with Cinema 4D R20 Volume Modeling

hey everybody its EJ from Inez I'm calm and today I'm gonna be talking all about the new volume modeling features added to cinema 4d are twenty and you're gonna find out why this is such a game-changing feature and how it's gonna change the way you work and how it's gonna absolutely change what type of project you go after in the future let's check it out the new volume or V DB workflow is added to cinema 4d R 20 as far as my workflow it's gonna totally change the way that it work and the most important thing it's gonna change the type of work that I attempt as well the models I'm showing you right now are things that you can model very very easily using the V DB the volume modeling workflow and it allows me to tackle models that I would have never attempted before and I think this opens up a whole new world of client work for someone who might not be very comfortable modeling the traditional way like myself so what I'm gonna be doing is breaking down these few models showing you how easy volume modeling is and how you can apply it to your workflow and hopefully you'll see that this can totally revolutionize the way you work alright so let's start with modeling our cheese and you can see I have the base cheese form that is just basically a cylinder three rotating segments and a little bit of fill it to round that out but we want to actually have holes cut out in this little slice of cheese and if you ask me how the heck you do that traditional modeling method wise I would have no idea I couldn't tell you but with the volume modeling workflow oh my goodness so stinkin easy so we're gonna go ahead and let's start by adding our volume builder and this is what you're gonna start out with to build out your volume so it's aptly named and how you build a volume from an object like our primitive object here you just place it as a child of that volume builder object so you're gonna see a couple things one your object is going to be added to this object layer list now this layer list is very similar to photoshop where you can stack up and layer up a bunch of different primitive objects that help build up your volume form so you're also gonna see that your form or your your object change to a bunch of voxels or 3d pixels and I like to consider them 3d pixels because if you look at the volume builder object here you look at this voxel size you can almost think of these voxels sizes as the pixel size so if you have a you know an image where the pixels are so large like 8-bit you're not going to get a lot of resolution or a lot of detail in that image but same thing is with voxels so the bigger the voxels the less of that original detail of the cheese we're gonna get but if we put say a voxel size of 2 you're gonna see that the voxels are so small and we're getting that definition that resolution of our form again now one thing I really really like is you can go a little bit willy-nilly with dragging this up and down and I'm sure if you've worked with meta balls before sometimes you'll you'll put the value so low like this and you'll your computer will just be crunching forever but luckily Maxon thank god Maxim did this but they save yourself from yourself and give you this little error or this little popup box it says hey that's probably not a good idea so it can help save you from yourself so I'll just hit cancel I don't actually want to make it that small but that's cool that that's there Thank You max on from from not crashing my computer so here we go we got our volume now we need to start cutting holes in our cheese okay I want to cut the cheese we just want to cut holes through it so we're gonna go and we're just gonna add some fears that we can then add to this volume mesh so what I'm gonna do to add this new sphere to that volume is just simply click and drag it make it a child of that volume builder and you'll see that that sphere will now be added and I can adjust this these are all primitives it's all live and you can see that the voxels are now meshing these two objects together what you're gonna notice is our sphere looks kind of weird you're gonna see all of these facets that's because what the ball donar is doing is actually looking at the polygons and if I go to my display garage hitting lines you can see exactly where those lines are or those edges are but because we have this render perfect turned on it's going to render perfectly smooth but the volume builder checks out all those edges and that's why you can see him there and if you look at my little volume builder layer list here so you can see my spheres at it I got my cheese my cylinder on each object you'll get different options that will show up and for the sphere primitive we have a different set of options from our cylinder you'll see that we have this perfect primitive checkbox and if we turn that on watch what happens that just smooths everything out we no longer get those little segments there so without that though the segments is really what's going to be driving how smooth your object is so luckily for a sphere we don't need that but for other primitives you may need to up the segments to get it all smooth down so we'll turn on perfect primitive for that we'll move this around select the sphere first and then move this around and we'll just kind of position this where we want now this is kind of just adding a pimple on to our cheese and we do not want that so we're gonna go into our volume builder and on our sphere we're gonna see this mode drop down and what we're gonna do is use a boolean just like we would could subtract from like a spline mask we have all these different modes here as well unions subtract intersection for the volume builder we're gonna we're gonna have to subtract the sphere from the cheese to make that little cheesy hole right there okay and what's great about this is again this is live I have all my objects that are still primitive and I can still adjust things okay so this is really great we can use these boolean operations to subtract objects from their objects and you can see that we we can easily add holes to our cheese so now I can just start command click and dragging to duplicate the cheese and just moving this scaling this down and that's gonna automatically add that new sphere to our list into our volume but we're gonna need to manually go to the subtract to subtract that and check on that perfect primitive again to get rid of those little polygons that show up so this is a little bit cumbersome but one thing that's really nice is the organization features in the volume builders or even in fields is that we can start to add folders so basically what I like to do is I'll just switch this back to Union and I'll create a new folder and I'll double click on that folder and just have this named holes and what I can do now is place these two spheres underneath that folder and you'll see that the folder will actually have its own mode and if we set the mode to subtract it'll subtract these two spheres that are actually combined together under this Union and subtract that whole folder from the cheese so this is a way easier way to start adding a bunch of of little parts here a little bit of these little holes adjusting this and you'll see that if we go to our volume builder we don't have to manually do the subtract we can just add that to the folder and it will automatically be subtract now we will have to manually check on that primitive the perfect primitive but you kind of get the point there so what we can start doing just start pulling it up blasting holes in this little cheese here one thing that's one thing that's kind of useful is you'll see that accidentally duplicated the wrong thing there we go we'll just add another sphere here one thing that's nice to know is if you hit the Q shortcut key it'll actually deactivate the volume builder so Q will toggle that on and off so if you needed to just see where your objects were you can do that again we'll just place the sphere turn on the perfect primitive I just put it in the wholes folder and it will be subtracted and just start you know adding all these little pieces so we're gonna do a little cooking show trick where I already have a holy cheese that I made already so you don't have to see me kind of chucking all these cheese holes around now you can see we got our holy cheese got a whole bunch of spheres here just placed a whole bunch of spheres in vats little holes folder and again just subtracted all of those from the main cylinder there and we got this kind of shape now what we have right now is absolutely nothing when we go to render because all we have right now are some voxels okay so we're gonna make some geometry we're gonna make a mesh based on this volume we're gonna use the aptly named volume measure and how this works is you place the volume builder as a child of the volume measure voila we have some stinkin geometry that we modeled using volumes which is pretty incredible we made that very very quickly using the boolean operation subtracting a bunch of spheres primitives everything's a primitive still everything's still editable and we have this little volume mesh and again even when we mesh it we can still adjust things and move things around okay so really really massive workflow right here so you're gonna see that things are looking kinda cruddy around the edges here okay cuz basically we're just meshing what we had before and we're starting to see are the crunchiness or the pixelated voxels we have here so what we can do is use these really handy adjustment layers basically so we have what's called a smooth layer that whatever is underneath it you can see that right now the only thing the smooth layer is doing is just smoothing the cylinder but if I place the smooth layer on top you'll see that it's not only smoothing the cheese but it's smoothing the holes as well so we're we're got rid of all those little you know pixelated edges those little rough edges that we had before if you can just check that on or off and see what's going on there when we deactivate that smooth layer but basically what the smooth layer is doing is blurring out those voxels and blending them together and you can see we have the overriding strength of our smooth layer here we also have the voxel distance of like how much do we want this basically this guy see in blur to kind of span out there okay so we can adjust this however we want we can make this voxel distance a little bit lower but this is just massive like we can make this really nice organic shape using voxels using smooth layers to smooth everything out and this is looking a heck of a lot nicer than it was before that now there's another type of layer that we can use and that's a reshaped layer and what a reshaped layer allows you to do if I just click on it here is dilate or erode you can see that as I bring the strength up and down you can see that basically I'm just thickening this up if I make the offset a negative 5 you can see that I'm actually eating in or eroding my cheese here which I don't really want to do but if you ever want to think of thicken up a mesh this is a great way to do it we also have this closed and open which is a different type of method for doing this and you can see that I put in a too high of a value because again this is all based on you know the centimeter distance so if it's a little bit too big you can see what's going on you can see this is a different type of offset and command than the dilate in a road if I just kind of switch back and forth there so play around with those two different types again we can go into the negative values as well you can see that the volume builder is kind of calculating down here chugging away in my trashcan Mac here but you can see that the closed opened is kind of eating away and making this cheese look kind of melty versus that dilates any Road so you can Det you can definitely tell the difference between these two operations maybe we'll say well thicken it you know a point v amount just make it a little bit thicker and looking good now a lot of what this looks like right now is also going to be based on this voxel size so you can see if my size is too high again we're losing that definition and then once we smooth out those bigger voxels it just turns the mush so again the resolution is going to be very important I'm just gonna do like 1.5 to get those nice move edges back we can even see what one centimeter looks like as well to really sharpen that up but I think 1.5 looks really good we can you are moving and grooving around this scene and you can see what our mesh actually looks like if I just undo that move you can see that it's actually a pretty clean mesh we have quads everywhere okay so this is really really clean mesh again if I crank this all the way up you can see that still maintaining a pretty decent mesh there so really clean geometry from this volume builder so we got to reshape we got our smooth layer again it's really really huge to help us out there one thing we can do is start to add because this is a little bit too perfect I would say is we can go ahead and maybe add some displacer x' so I'll go and add a displacer I'll maybe add it too let's just go ahead place the displacer underneath the volume builder and let's just group all of these spheres together so I'll group the objects no notice what happens when I group that under a null you are gonna see that my null replaced all of those spheres that were under my holes folders so I'll need to just drag and drop this holes underneath there and just make sure that that null which I'll name just you know holes and have that under there now I can add this displacer load up some noise and maybe scale the snowy's up a little bit so basically we're adding a little bit more organic miss fears were a little bit too perfect but now we have these different shapes and sizes and looking really good we can also you know we can go and add the displaced or just command click and drag and just have it displace the actual cheese geometry here and we'll have a little bit more of organic look to our cheese as well the little cylinder there so maybe we crank this up to 500 maybe we change the seed here a little bit too so you know those displacer is actually added quite a bit you know this is a little bit too perfect we have the volume modeling making it look really nice and organic and we have the displacer x' and again everything is still live everything is still editable now one last thing I want to cover about just the volume measure there's a couple options here that are really useful the voxel range here and what this is doing is kind of like the dilate erode layer what this is doing is either using the outside of your voxel the inside of your voxel in order to create that mesh hovering around the 50% range and maybe just crank this up a little bit to like 70 we can actually thicken up or model this way or maybe shrink it down go in the negative way but you can see once we go to like zero and go to the the extremes doesn't look so hot right another thing is if this is if you have a lot if you have a really big mesh using this adaptive basically helps pare down your scene if I go to my garage seeing lines to make this nice and Swift in your viewport and then when you go to render just crank down that adaptive so basically that's just an adaptive level of how much definition how many polygons are in your viewport just a nice little workflow enhancer there you can see as I brought that back up we just need the you know the volume builder the volume measure to do its thing and calculate and then we're moving grooving so one other thing with the with texturing is just apply the cheese or your texture to that volume measure say you're done with this and you want to start doing other things with it we can just right click current States object like we would any other kind of object and here's our actual polygon object so super super easy workflow another thing I like to do as well is maybe add a smoothing to former add that as a child of the measure and this is another way to kind of smooth things out a little bit as well okay so let's go ahead onto another example and we're gonna go and do some fruit this time get a raspberry so now that you have a pretty good understanding or at least the basics of volume modeling and it's such an easy workflow I just want to show you how I built up this raspberry model very very easily so I started out with a simple capsule subdivided very low added a taper and a twist okay and then what I ended up doing was just cloning some spheres onto that capsule cloning them onto the capsules vertices okay so we basically have what the beginning shape of a raspberry is with just a bunch of spheres I also used a plane effector to kind of beef up the center spheres here you can see what is going on with that plane effector with a box filled and then basically once you go and volume build that you have a little smooth layer blurring all that out and combining all of those little spheres together and turned on the volume measure okay and you can see what my my whole system here looks like so I have my perfect primitive turn those on looking really nice we just have those set to Union we just drag and drop our clone or object in there which is huge that you can bring in and hold corner and you'll recognize all the spheres underneath I also have these spheres on the top and bottom just to close those little holes there okay so just really really awesome stuff you can see we have these weird kind of I've gotten off the measure you can see all the little voxels here kind of building up and making these new pixelated type of things right here with which look really odd especially right in here you can really get a sense of those those little voxels so again we can go and use a smoothing to former again making a child of that measure wallah totally gets rid of all that we can adjust the the iterations you can see the how that looks before and after we no longer get that sense of all those little pixel little weird circular looking things hopefully you can see we just got rid of those with a smoothing to former and how this is different from save like the smooth layer is the smooth layer is smoothing out those voxels the smoothing deform er is smoothing out the actual geometry so that's how we can get this extra smoothness from the muda former and again this all started from a capsule clone stmas fears onto it and there's no freaking way to ever be able to model this traditionally okay I just would not be able to do that but let's go ahead and just show you how I made the leaves of this little guy - a little wet raspberry so let me just go ahead and show you how I did that and let's just break down what I did with this leaf so this leaf is just a spline okay and I extruded it there we go he's just extruded about 20 centimeters and then subdivided it with a regular grid to add more subdivisions here and that was for me to be able to do some FFT deformation modeling here to be able to just adjust all that stuff maybe make it Bend like a nice little leaf and now we can just you know take this simple extrude object and this doesn't look very organic II at all okay but the great part about the volume modeling it just makes something like this look so nice and organic again we're gonna place all the objects including the null underneath this volume builder bring the voxel size down to say you know three and maybe add a nice little smoothing layer here maybe adjust the strength so already we have a really nice organic kind of shape here that is just looking really really good so let's go and just add our volume measure just place the Builder under the measure go out of our garage lions and you can see we got this really nice leaf meat organically with just a simple extrude object I mean this is pretty crazy like there was that easy to do this one thing that's really nice if I add a reshaped layer again we're thickening up the the whole entire mesh the great thing about all of the either the smooth layers and the reshaped layer is that we can actually use fields or fall offs to control where that thickening is going on so say if we wanted the leaf to be a little bit thicker in the middle and taper off at the top well we can go ahead and add they say like a box filled in everything inside this box will have that reshaped layer okay she just got to make sure it's big enough here and let's just make sure again order means a lot here so if we were reshaping and then smoothing we're not gonna be able to smooth out the weirdness that's actually happening from our reshaped layer so we need to make sure there are smooth layers happening first then our reshape and there you go now we can see that we have this nice thickening part of our leaf just by this nice little box filled here so really really cool stuff to be able to you know control where the thickening part of your object is and again we're getting some weird stuff these weird circular kind of things so again go and just grab a little smoothing smooth it on out smooth nice and smooth now okay using that that smoothing smoothing deform so really cool stuff and that's how I made the nice little leaves on my object again just started from a basic really crappy looking extrude object and and turned it into a nice little leaf okay so that that is the freakin power again all editable are all live so I can still edit all of my stuff here all procedural this is why I'm so obsessed with this like this is gonna allow me to make so many things that I wouldn't never have dreamed of modeling before okay all right onto our last project here boom Roman column again there no no way I'm actually modeling this in in real life without volume modeling something I would never model on my own I would buy a turbosquid model or something like that but I made this in a little bit less than an hour using volume modeling so I just want to demonstrate that you can use all type of objects to build up a volume for example I have this little example off to the side of how I made this little ionic a little curl here you can see that basically this this is comprised of a little sweep object if I turn that on and off you can see I have my little helix here that I just drew just swept a circle around it added these little curl elements as well these are just little splines and if I throw this in the volume builder boom we just meshed that all up and one thing that's really awesome is I have these curls in a in their own folder and what this allows you to do is if you have an object like these little curl elements right here if I just select one you can see what I'm talking about here we can throw them in a folder and be able to add a smoothing layer that just affects the objects in that folder so we can smooth these little curls out or you know a road or anything like that and kind of grow this out without affecting the other objects in our little layer system here so here's my little helix as well and you can see that basically what I did was I have my helix my my copy of that object and I just pressed it right up against kind of scaled it down a little bit and right did was use this spline to kind of just cut out and subtract that object to get this nice little indent here and again I can go grab my helix again just pull this out and can see exactly what's going on to make this really nice indent now how splines are handled with the volume builder again I showed you that some of these objects have different properties than others when you select a spline and drag it into your volume builder add it to your volume builder we have this radius and we also have let me just turn all this other stuff off so here you see we have our just our helix by itself okay right there and we have the radius which is just the size of the growth or the volume that is deriving from that helix so it's almost like you're sweeping a sphere along this or something like that so what you can see if I bring this density low enough that what this mesh is actually made out of or little tiny spheres kind of like a metal ball where if you increase the density of it meshes all that together to create a continuous form so these two options are only available on a spline to be able to mesh a spline shape so that's exactly what I did with these little curls as well so again we can adjust the distance here or the radius and also adjust the density and see they're just made of some made up of some spheres there so a lot of possible things here using splines to be able to help you build out something like this this whole object here okay so I use splines for if I turn this on it's around the measure just got a lot of stuff going on here again if there's enough people out there they actually want to see me build this from scratch maybe I'll do a tutorial just on this but just a lot of primitive objects to build this up and that's kind of the great part of this workflow is you can model something based on just the the forms that form that shaped this this kind of object okay so and again this is kind of slow as I as I kind of adjust things you're gonna see how this kind of slows down got the volume builder but it's cranking away and once it calculates we can move and groove around here really really quickly so again I just subtracted a whole bunch of capsules from this main cylinder to create the little indents again this is absolutely something I would never try or attempt to model at all these little divots I just cloned some cylinders if I hit the Q key to turn this off turn off the volume builder you can see exactly what all the objects look like that made this made this all of got few splines there's our capsules so you can get pretty crazy with all this and the one thing that is actually really cool is you can actually use fields in noise fields and use them to subtract from some layers okay so I have this main column base here and what I can do is activate that random field and that's basically just gonna apply some random noise and because this is set to subtract it's gonna subtract from my volume now it's calculating down here in the lower left so we're just using some 3d noise so check that out how cool is that so basically the 3d noise is acting as a mat whatever is that lighter yellow color is gonna eat away from our voxels and therefore our geometry and create some deterioration to just the base of our column now we can see that this main column is in its own folder so only the random field is affecting that but if I take this out from that folder and subtract it from everything we can see exactly what that looks like - there you go we have some nice little decay little chunks of marble that fell off or fell off from the top of our Roman column as well so this is just so so cool again if you actually animated something like this so maybe you wanted to animate the random field maybe the inner offset of this thing kind of crumbling or something like that you could bake out animated volumes by just right-clicking and they added this new bake as a limbic it'll actually save out your your volume save it as a limbic file that you can use you know elsewhere and it doing it this way exporting this Alembic actually saves out all the animations so if you have animated voxels so you have that noise animating this will then export this out bake it and you no longer have to have that that volume as you're calculating all the time and especially when you have something as dense as the object I have right now your once you get it to a point really like yes this looks good and you have this and add this into another scene or something like that you're gonna want to bake out that volume measure so this is exporting as our limbic file now that that's baked out you can see we have this whole limbic file in here this limbic object and you can see the actual path of that Olympic file that we had saved so it actually saves it out any folder wherever your project file was and you can then go ahead and let me just open up a new project and we can go ahead and just open that up and just hit OK you know just import that volume measure and we can easily manipulate this inside a different project so this is great when you have a a mess you want to bake it out and use it in a larger scene so really really awesome stuff so I yeah there's absolutely no way I'd ever be able to model that or anything I showed in this video from scratch and I hope that kind of gives you an idea of just how massive this this whole volume workflow that has been added to our 20 how big a deal that is I mean I'm just thinking of there's so many instances of when I wanted to work on a client project but I kind of shied away or I wanted to do something for a project but that barrier of me not being a very good modeler always got in the way and you'd always try to shortcut you just you ditch an idea and I just think this is such a whole huge thing that's gonna allow you to unleash your creativity in if your artist and creative it just allows you to create art without having that barrier of like I want to do this I want to make this thing but I just have no idea how to volume modeling if you just get the basic shapes and you know if you're good at design you know you're you're you are good with your basic forms and stuff like that this volume workflow this volume modeling workflow is absolutely huge so again this is just kind of scraping the surface of what's possible with volume modeling I didn't even do any animation with it so there's anything in this tutorial that like modeling wise that you want to see me do a standalone tutorial for let me know in the comments that below and if you have any questions about volume modeling or anything like that also leave them in the comment section below I this is an area where I'm super pumped to get more into it so any questions any tutorial suggestions that you want to see me do I'm all ears so let me know so thank you guys so much if you if you like this video please be sure to like it if you like what I'm doing here on the channel please subscribe and and as always especially with this volume modeling stuff if you make stuff I want to see what you guys are making and unleashing your in creativity with all this volume modeling stuff so be sure to to share it with me on Twitter on Facebook all that stuff can't wait to see what you guys come up with and again huge things to all of you for watching I'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 249,177

Keywords: cinema 4d r20, volume modeling, 3d modeling, 3d models, c4d r20, cinema 4d r20 tutorial, r20, volume modeling in c4d, vdb, volume mesh, voxel modeling, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, motion graphics, mograph tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, learn c4d, eyedesyn, cinema 4d modeling, open vdb, cinema 4d r20 volume, cinema 4d r20 features, cinema 4d volumes, volumes, openvdb

Id: xR2Uozqcd0M

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018