C4D 2023.1: Painting with Pyro

hey everyone welcome to another tutorial of friends of motion and today I am so excited to show you the new pyro simulation from Cinema 4D 2023.1 and how you can use it as a way to create these beautiful liquidy colorful inks and also use it with the volume measure to create something that feels more a little bit like paint I'm going to start this tutorial from scratch for those who are new to cinema so feel free to jump to the next chapter if you already know how to set up lights and Stage so grab a cup of coffee put it on double speed and let's dig in one of my favorite things of this new release is this new background that they included in the release just go here to the left into your content browser and start typing in back and you'll see it appears here at the bottom just for someone who doesn't have the grayscale plugins or any plugins this is just a really good one to start off with so you can create the height or the width and the curvature is actually also very nice so you can make it super tight or super wide so for now I'm just going to use this setup I'm also immediately going to add my figure because I know I'm doing simulation and everything needs to be world scale if your simulation is too big then it's just going to take too long so this guy is our average person height so it's a 180 centimeters and this is nice to always have it in here but I also like just to have it in while I'm setting up my render setup so I can immediately see what it looks like so make sure you're in redshift and because you are doing um pyro make sure that you are in advanced settings in switch Classics off but Global illumination should be on Brute Force apparently apparently you cannot do it without Bruce Force then also just in usually I just cheat and go basic and say low but if you go to an advance check Auto sampling on and then this should be a good enough setup just to start seeing stuff that's nice and then let's look at our view render View and I'm just dragging it in here on the side like that cool let me just render out see what we see we're not really going to see much because there's no lights and I'll show you also we need to put texture on that backdrop so but first let's add a volume uh not a volume a dome light and a an area light and I also like to put stuff in buckets so that it's organized so this is going to be the stage and Stage usually you just drag all your lights and things that is not the main focus the dome light I'm again going to go in here and just type in HDR I go to media and you'll see that I have way more than you might see because I have some grayscale gorilla hdris that are really gorgeous but for now I'm going to use the Studio 21 that I've used in my other tutorials just because that's something everybody can use that's in the built-in content browser all right so this is very shiny because there's no texture on it or there is a texture but it's a standard material it's not great shift so let's delete this and let's go back into the content browser search for plaster in the materials you'll see this one plus defined so you can add let me just see if did I download it yes so obviously you can add any background here maybe concrete or something nice but just because it's built in I like to use stuff that comes with the software I'm going to click on the area light what I love about area lights is that you do have more control like a dome light is good to get fiddle fill light but if you want to have a very specific look area lights are usually for me way more easier to or direct so I'm just going to put the intensity of the area light lower and we'll definitely come back and tweak but for now this is a really good setup to to have the scene ready so once you start rendering you already have immediate satisfaction all right so I'm going to copy and paste the Ampersand that I have in my my test file that I've already made so this is just a spline and let me I can get rid of my little dude but now we can see I can switch this off too close my materials and as you can see this is going to be the size of my scene what I love about knowing exactly outside how big it is I can now imagine is this going to be like a sculpture or a is it going to be small and dainty like someone really painted so for me this is a really good size for the scene let me add this to my null that is going to be my object no object [Music] good and delete that now and then we can also just delete our guide now that we know the size and this is going to be the shape if you don't have if you don't know how to make shapes in illustrator just use a pen tool and you can just make shapes like this or you can go into um this drop down here and there's so many splines you can use maybe a helix or a flower or something interesting so yeah so now we are ready to start with the brush tip so the brush tip is I see it a little bit like Photoshop brush tips it's the shape of the brush it's going to dictate the shape of how this paint swatch is going to look so for mine I use the formula effector and you'll see it's going to be very big but let's just change this to 3 point 3 point and the length is going to be this is kind of where you have to judge just by looking at like just kind of feeling it out there's no right or wrong but and I know it's going to be hard to see because my background is very dark um let me switch off my dome light or just the background off and let me switch this off there we go so you don't need to have a lot of detailing on this but you'll see that the more samples you have the smoother it's going to be but for this I just want like a jaggedy almost like a dry brush with bristles and this I think this is good enough let's make this maybe a little thinner is good enough for me all right so we want to have this brush stroke to go all along the spline to do that we're going to need an animation to spline but before I do that I'm going to create two nulls and you'll understand and you'll shortly see why so the one is going to be rotate and I'm going to add the formula I'm going to call the formula brush tip and I'm going to add the brush burst tip let me just spell it right otherwise it's going to bother me the whole time brushed it all right and then that is going to rotate that's going to this null will rotate the brush tip and this now will move the brush move brush all right and the reason for is I want them to be independent and you'll see and let's just zero these out so that my brush tip is exactly underneath my null and that's exactly underneath the move brush and to get this null to go all along this spline I'm going to go right click animation tag and align to spline I'm going to tell this align to spline for to move the brush along this ampersand and you will see if you use the position you are going to see this will animate along the spline nice I'm going to put it on zero percent in the beginning and Ctrl click to add the keyframe and then all the way to say 60 I'm going to add a hundred percent so that way it will animate all along the path and then end so as you can see my brush tip is not quite in the middle of the spline so I'm just going to manually move it this way in the middle and then the reason why I put it in the rotate now is to get this feel of it's made by an artist so it's calligraphy where the brush tip is never the same direction and if you know anything about calligraphy it's usually thick up and thinned down or on an angle up and a different angle down so there's no right or wrong on this method but I'm just going to maybe make it thin up and thick down so clicking on the rotate null let's move this say I want it to look this thin when it goes up and then I'm going to control click on these Keynote keyframes and as we go up it stays thin and then I'm just going to start tweaking the rotation as it goes down and I will spare you the time I'll fast forward this bit so you don't have to watch me keyframing all right so I've added some rotation and to be honest you're probably going to tweak this again once that we have the paint on the brush or the Pyro on the brush because you'll see that it's really just tweaking and feeling it out and see in your mind if that feels like someone is hand painting it so it's actually fun to sort of are direct on the fly but I just wanted to show you how how I set it up to start off with okay so the next thing is let's add the Pyro and I think I can actually switch on my let me switch on my background again and the Pyro is actually so easy that I'm so surprised how easy it is it's literally just right click simulation tag Pyro and you will already immediately have a really nice Spyro now there are so many tutorials out on the internet about the Spyro and I would highly recommend you going through the ones from Maxon and maybe um rocket lasso and there are so many settings in this that I won't be able to go through all of them so I'm just going to go through the ones that I'm using for this specific look so first of all there's two tags there's going to be this little flame icon and they will be the Pyro default tag that comes up this is your setting your overall setting and this is your setting for just the brush tip and what I've from what I understand was that this is sort of like a Photoshop if you think of a Photoshop file the resolution of the Photoshop file and the behavior of what the Pyro will look like globally and then this icon is just a specific tag on this specific brush or in the specific object I know it sounds a little confusing and I hope when I go through it it'll make sense also just so you know this pyro tag is actually when you go Ctrl D to your project settings this node here in simulation pyro is exactly the same as this one just so that makes so the confusion so it's not too confusing but this is the exact same thing I want to create I don't have any gravity so I'm clicking on scene zero gravity because I want to be able to control the gravity myself so let's click on the icon tag the Pyro tag and play around with these settings here so first of all I don't want any velocity switch that off feel is already off temperature should also be off and then the surface thickness is the amount of smoke around the brush and how wide the radius is so I'm just going to put it on one so it's really tight around the radius and then I also want to add sub steps to 10 and then in density I'm going to add 20 and add the add density off nice and then also let me make sure I have everything on this side the velocity voxel size one there we go now let's go into the global settings so here I'm going to change vocal size to 1. let's see it's probably going to start complaining hopefully not I also don't want any turbulence so let's switch turbulence off I don't want any combustion so anything I don't need I'm just going to close it so it's not so confusing and also no because we don't want any dissipation so I'm going to put this zero zero close it because we don't need it and then smoothing is very nice but sometimes I feel like if you have too much smoothing you're losing all that nice imperfection so play around with the setting I I think I was around 12 but for now maybe five we'll come back to that then I'm gonna add some forces to so that the next section I want to show you the the difference so also one thing I'm going to do in the studio backdrop I'm going to make this a collider tag so that the smoke actually starts floating on top and not going through the the backdrop all right so let me just move this down a little let's see and obviously there's no gravity so nothing's going to go through anything so let me add the gravity simulate forces gravity and I want certain areas to be have gravity so I'm going to add a sphere this end here and I'm going to duplicate the sphere adding this extra Fierce sphere also in here put on max and put it somewhere else and make sure it's touching the smoke otherwise you will not see anything happening all right let's see why is it not working is it working let's see how strong this is I think it should be quite strong like how strong is this should be around a thousand let's see and why is it going up it should go down oh I know so the reason it's going up is actually the important bit that I didn't discuss and that is the density buoyancy so density buoyancy is kind of what makes it feel like smoke and since we don't want it to make like feel like smoke we need to make it feel like ink and it needs weight so bring this back down to 10 all the way down to 10 or up to 10. and you'll see it immediately we'll start having this nice feeling of of weight now this one is not doing anything I wonder why let's see if I could move it make sure in the fields that they're all added on normal why is it not working oh it's working maybe it was not strong enough all right so that is nice one thing I'm going to change is the vorticity strength so the vorticity is the the size almost of how it moves the distance of how it moves and if it's smaller it has these bigger waves of I I don't know how to explain it but it's just bigger waves I guess it's almost like the turbulence so I'm going to move this to one see how it's huge it's more like a wavy movement instead of tiny Wiggles of um it doesn't feel like there's so much noise in it and then I still feel like there's not enough weight it still feels a little Smoky so let me see if I change the oh I think I can add the surface thickness let's see what happens there we go oh that's so nice beautiful okay I'm not going to pick any more um actually I just wanted to go I just wanted to make one little thing that is annoying me it's just the rotate here at the beginning it goes up and then it goes really wide so I think it should be let me just rotate it a little bit towards away from the camera let's see I hope I didn't screw things up now yeah that looks nice all right cool we are on a roll we're on fire okay so let's make the color so the color is the density because density is smoke and I'm gonna start with let's just start with say purple keyframe control click going up and then from this point I want it to be let's make something I want to feel completely different let's make it red there we go and then all the way at this point let's make it like orange and then it fades out to White White [Music] let's see oh nice all right beautiful so now you probably want to render this and you will see let me get my redshift render View and let's add it to just underneath there there we go you'll see obviously you're not going to see anything because we don't have a material yet well there's a few things the few reasons we don't have anything but so the material is easy with a new Cinema we have a new material called materials redshift pyro volume and if you add this to a pyro settings you don't you don't add it to the brush tip strangely enough you add it to this Pyro and if I render it nothing's gonna come up because you know those little check boxes you have to remember so you have to go here an object and let's switch all of this off and only switch the density on and the color on and just to quickly explain what's going on here this is actually such an important Tab and I should have actually told you about this tab before but it's exactly what so the left is what you see like this bit here is this column here is what you see in the viewport like in your render viewer this on export is what's going to export when you cache this simulation into vdbs and if it's off it just doesn't come out if either in the memory or in export so so if there's in any case where you don't see anything this is probably the place that you have to come and look and see what's switched on and off another thing that I have to mention in cash if this checkbox this is a very silly little checkbox that I've had on for 10 to 15 minutes before and I did couldn't understand why I can't see anything so this is another place to go and check if there's anything that you need to uncheck so just uncheck it because you'll see when you start caching and cleaning scenes and making space on your computer you're going to probably delete cache so this little silly checkbox just a little quick tip because it drove me nuts anyways okay let's get back to the coloring so this looks already very dreamy and very cool but obviously we want color so in our pyro settings and let me just drag this in here somewhere so everybody can see I can close my material View but I want to go in my node editor so the great thing about the Pyro is it already has our presets in it knows if you go to presets here it knows that we have switched off temperature and pressure and all those we only have color and density so it already is nice that it picks up what we have and since density is smoke it's in the scatter Channel and we also want the color of the smoke so this will be in this color Channel and it will go to the preset Spyro color let's see if it works yeah look it's already working so this is very dark and the reason for that is just a few things there's not enough light going through so we can add a little bit of the scatter coefficient in here why is it not working and then also I find if you add a bit of the absorption and you just bring it down a little you'll see if I put it at one it's going to be very light like almost like a laser or neon paint or something different which is also a cool look um but if you just kind of play around with this amount and this amount you'll get some really nice bright colors so it just all depends what kind of ink you want or what kind of look you're going for but that's pretty cool actually before I forget one thing before you start rendering anything you're going to need to Cache your whole scene and this cache files are ginormous I think one of mine were almost 100 megabytes per frame so make sure when you catch the scene you are caching it into maybe a different drive not your C drive because it will start building up a lot of files file space and remember to also delete some cache if you're just doing tests it's really going to take a lot of space on your computer so all right so I have a part two in this tutorial too I'm not sure if I'm going to break it up in two separate videos and part two is going to show you how to make this into more of like a liquid material where we're going to use the volume measure and I'll also show you how to add the color data from the smoke to the material in the volume measure so you have all that nice juicy colors to work with hi so this is part two of my two-part series of how to make paint with Pyro so to get to this point please follow along with part one to show you how I've created the smoke turn it into liquid that's a little how I created the smoke trails and adding color and also the settings to get it to feel a little thicker than smoke and also adding some gravity to make it ooze down to the floor all right so the first thing the basics are just we're going to use a volume measure to add the Pyro in so just moving it down adding it to the volume measure I want gravity to happen first so let's see and the default of the volume measure you'll see you won't see much it's just too big so I'm going to move this all the way down to one percent and basically switch off the pie row and then the Adaptive I'm going to put to one and that looks pretty good [Music] let me just simulate again and that looks pretty good and now so you're probably wondering how are we going to add the color and that is one of my favorite if you watched any of my other tutorials you know how much I love the color vertex tag so we're first going to need just a redshift material standard adding it to my volume measure and you'll see it's going to be pretty shiny and I guess I guess paint is quite shiny so let's keep it shiny I'm going to open my node editor and just drag it here so we have can see it and close my materials and then double clicking on the Node editor type in vertex attribute and basically the vertex attribute is going to find data from our pyro to add to the color so I'm just going to add this to my color and I know it's pink and it's because we don't have a Vertex color yet so I'm going to right click add other tags vertex color and the great thing about this vertex color field and it still blows my mind that you can actually add pyro to your vertex Fields so basically this pyro data is going to feed into the volume measure and then into the materials so you can tell it to find the colors in the Pyro to use as your color field and now the last thing we have to do is telling the vertex attribute which vertex to use and you want to use this one and also what I've learned from rocket lasso is that you need to really name these because they do get confused if if you have a few of them you definitely need to rename them so let's add this to double click on the vertex attribute here and in this attribute name drag and drop this hopefully it works yes it works nice so pretty and let's do one thing so creamy and light you want to add to some a little bit of brightness you can just go to the clamp and add a curve let me show you let me move this up and just crunch it a little see how it gets brighter and more defined more saturated and let's see nice there we go and of course if you don't want the colors this could be gold or something else but I had so much fun playing with this pyro and I'm hoping that you will too I'm looking really forward to see what you guys are making so please feel free to tag me on Instagram at friends of motion and I'm looking forward to see you until next time bye bye

Channel: Friends Of Motion

Views: 63,763

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Id: ZpLHSJoOmh4

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022