C4D 2023 Tutorial: Abstract Flowers with Hair, Dynamics and Redshift

hi this is Elizabeth from Friends of motion and today I'm excited to show you how to make these organic abstract Flowers by just using Cinema 4D hair and the richest material I'm also going to add some Dynamics with a little bit of turbulence and that's it let's dig in so I'm going to start with a scene that already has in my render settings redshift activated um I also have a dome light a rest of dome light with an hdri that I found in the content browser here you can just type in hdri and you can find in media a whole bunch of iced your eyes and just drag it into the texture and then I have an area light that is kind of above the hair and a helix and my Helix Helix is pretty small and the reason for that is because we are going to use Dynamics and with Dynamics you want to be as close as possible to real world scale and to get the real world scale is to use this little guy this figure and this figure is the size of a regular or I guess a man size so 180 centimeters almost two meters high and that is your real world scale and let me delete that and since we are going to make a flower we don't want a ginormous flower you'll see if I create a just a generic which is your default Helix it's going to be huge so and so we don't want this big Helix we want it to be small because this is more or less it's probably still bigger than a normal flower but for me this is good for this tutorial and the settings are zero centimeters 0 10 7 20 40 20 centimeters 55 percentage in 100. so while we have Helix selected we are going to go simulate hair object add here and you'll see we'll immediately get quite long hair which is even long for hair it if you click on guides you'll see that it's 100 centimeters so let's move that to 20 centimeters and the count can go way lower like um we're going to do 400 and this is one part that I think it's a 2023 bug that because when you bring the count down it should just be less hair it shouldn't go like a offset so just keep scrubbing and it will eventually figure out what you want to do so I just put it here at 170. that's good and we can close the render view for now because we just really want to get a nice big view of what we're doing so the first thing I want to do is create some imperfections and this is actually my favorite part of this hair tutorial is the grooming so click on the groom tab at the top and you'll see these tools will appear on the left and you are going to pick the brush tool and you'll see there's going to be the circle and the circle is to show where the brush is so I'm going to hold down Alt and as I hold down Alt I can rotate and then I release alt and I paint so it's like alt release and in pain so you can kind of go around this hair and and I have to say this is very therapeutic I can Comb hair for hours but I won't do that so let's go to the beginning still you're still at the beginning so let's stop here and we want this to be the first frame of our animation so I'm going to go simulate here edit set initial state now if we click on the Helix and you play you'll see that the first frame is this combed shape you've made nice now this looks very funny because it's dropping down and there is a gravity and gravity is not the settings of the project it's actually gravity can be found here in forces in the hair object and you'll see it's minus 9 and we just want it to be one because we want it to float instead of flopping so that's very nice and this movement is just barely the graphic the gravity and we are going to add some turbulence to get some to have some more control on the movement so turbulence is at forces turbulence let's just add everything in the object null and I actually like to add my hair under my Helix so I know they're all the same family and if you look at this the turbulence let's add a bit of scale so it's bigger waves and you'll see if you dial it up it's going to go wild like a gust wind but we just want it to be subtle like full nice all right so we are now ready to create the shapes so to see the shapes you'll have to have a render engine and I'm going to use redshift of course RS render View I'm just going to drag it underneath here and then also let's view it yeah and you'll see we'll already have a hairy looking hair Helix and the hair shape is made by this hair material and it's a funny thing because this is actually a cinema 40 hair material and you're gonna have to keep it on when you do red shift so just just a note don't replace it just keep it on and to get that shape is this this thickness where the root is one and the tip is one and I'm just going to make them both one and you'll see that they are now equal lengths and I'm going to change the shape a little to create something more like a flower and I have some flower references for us just to get some inspiration um and you'll see that flowers usually the petals start a little thicker it has this s shape then it goes in in a little taper and then thick at the end so I'm gonna try to mimic that and this is really where you can experiment with what kind of flower you would like and I think this is kind of how I had the previous one I have the old one open so I can kind of see how I did it nice so to get the if you look at the previous one you'll see these irregular lengths and there's like a little bit of Kinks and clumping and just on just some more organic layers of imperfections and to get that I am going to tick a few boxes so double click on your hair material go to Basics check the clump check the length scale and that I think that was what I used and out of the box it's already cool looking and you can just tweak a little bit I would say variation is important for all of these settings and that will just add more realism nice so now we can start coloring which is quite fun and you would think that I'm going to use a redshift hair material but that is actually wrong I'm going to use a standard great shift material and I'm not even going to use this one I'm let me and let me add it to my hair you'll see that immediately you have some shading and highlights and specularity but I'm not even going to use this standard zero I'm going to delete it and what we're going to need is you press on the plus sign type in here and we are going to need this principle here we're going to need the hair position and here random color but unfortunately you can't select them all at the same time so I'm just going to do one at a time so first we're doing principle here typing again here pair position that I'll use a little later and while I'm here I'm also getting the hair random color cool so this principle here is pretty powerful let me show you once you put it in it immediately has that nice it's almost like an emissive backlighting some roundness some beveling it just you can see that there's some there's definitely some intelligence in this material um and it's great for hair but obviously we want to make it look like a flower so we will start tweaking and the tweaking is going to happen with this random hair color and I just want to show you back to our to my first one you'll see that there are all these different Hues of pink in my petals and it's literally just in nature you know petals are never the same color we get like all kinds of variations of tints of a color and if you go back if we go back to my file if you double click on this hair again um this hair random color is really amazing so when you first start with a hair random color you are going to think nothing's happening and this is not great but if you start tweaking the Hue amount and the saturation amount you'll immediately see why this is so useful because each hair has now its own color and this is all that color information is this going to help us tremendously making each petal a different color so how we how do we do that we are going to put the principle here back into the surface I'm going to plug the hair out into my Albedo and my tint and then in here I'm just going to mix um by the way if you just want to see what this color does by itself click on this little s icon for soloing because we just want to see what this is doing while we're tweaking so I want to kind of blend I want to have a bit brighter Orange and then blending this rainbow colors with my orange color and that's very nice let me unsolo and what I'm going to do in the principle here what makes it so dark is this melanin that is a 0.5 so let's just bring that way down and you'll see It'll get brighter and brighter the less melanin is in there look at that oh wow that is so cool I also like the fact that there's these blue it's almost becoming more like a magical my magical petals so yeah let's leave that like it is and now let's do the green one because we want it to go from red to Green so I'm going to make duplicate this copy paste and plug that into the surface so we can see double click on the hair random and double click on the color and just pick like a desaturated sage color and look at that oh man this is just so pretty look at her blues and there's like Grays it's definitely some richness to it that when you just do one color would not achieve all right so now we are going to add a blend material to blend these two but what are we going to use as a mask we are going to use the hair position tab node and this node is really cool you can see that the node picks up the root to the tip and make it a gradient and as you see if you click on this you'll see that there is no way of controlling it that way we will have a ram searching RAM and this ramp will help us to have more control over that gradient so I'm plugging in the out color into surface and then this out Vector into the alt input and now you'll see if I double click on the ramp oh General and I just drag this up a little I can control how much green it's going to show and how much red it will be revealed and let's get our trusty material blender and this is going to be used to blend the red with the green and this is also this cold as red and this is green so that we are organized material blender is going to go into the surface this red is going to be the material color layer one and this actually it's the other way around but I would probably do it this way around this is the base color and the ramp is going to be the mask the blend color let's hope that works yes it works cool look how fun that is I love the it's almost like candy cool and it doesn't look quite like my original but I even like this one a little more one thing I would say is the shininess because with flowers it doesn't really have a big specular highlight and I think that's where this one is quite successful and this one is maybe a little too shiny and to change that to get a little less shiny even though it looks cool uh just move the roughness to the end or just further away to the right and you'll see that the specularity gets a little less pronounced and looks pretty nice cool so if you already know how to set up renders uh feel free to hop off and go make some pretty flowers I'm going to now go over the render settings but also over the just a little bit on my Hardware side so that you know what what you compare your end is with right I'll quickly run through this um I call it my lazy art director setup because it's really very easy it's literally just checking this box Auto sampling and sampling and move it around 0.1 then motion blur is of globals are set up set a default Global illumination is Brute Force Brute Force 4 and 16. caustics is off aov is disabled optimization is default system is default remember to set your hair under to the checkbox is on then before you render make sure to Cache your hair because there's Dynamics and usually if you don't do that you might get some glitches in your renders and this I rented out at 1920 by 1920 and just to give you my results and also show you my Hardware because I think it's not fair to show your results if you don't know what the hardware is but I got a really good um oh I mentioned also sorry I forgot to mention I do have um the redshift denoising on let me just show you or did I did I mention that but anyways the denoising is all to single and it's just the default setting for alter single and then my render time is uh was really good and like or a good but you know it's not production quality but just good enough to get some frames out and I feel like when you're not a director you don't have time to wait too long so for me anything over a minute is it is just taking too long but I have to be um transparent I do have a really good graphics card or it was really good two years ago I'm pretty sure there are better ones out now I also know there are people that almost have double this or four of them in their box and uh you know for me this was already a big Splurge so this is I'm hoping I can keep this art for forever but um this is my graphics card and my CPU is a threadripper uh 16 core uh 1958 1950x so with that setup I got get really good results and also the one reason I'm just saying this and it's by no means telling you to go and buy a graphics card I actually just know when I started Cinema and I didn't know what people's Hardware was so I was constantly trying to create recreate things what other people are doing and I could hardly move around the scene or I couldn't even render anything and with that said I would say instead of trying to battle the hardware expensive route just optimize your scene for example this scene you don't need 600 hair or 500 hair you can literally make a beautiful frame by just dialing down the air or maybe instead of an animation just render out one single beautiful still and make a poster or bring it into after effects and figure out other ways of just bringing in text and animating it that said I'm very excited to see what you guys will build with this flowers please tag me if you want on Instagram on I'm on Instagram too thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time thank you

Channel: Friends Of Motion

Views: 51,810

Keywords: #cinema4d2023, C4DTutorial, Redshift tutorial, C4D Hair

Id: 0XosOdyghIM

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022