C4D: Designing with Fields in Cinema 4D

good afternoon everybody and welcome to another one of our demystifying webinars as you can see i am joined by uh my illustrious colleagues we have simon walker director of training and our senior trainers jonas and ellie so today we have um a nice walk in the fields as it were sorry for that terrible pun yeah that's what you can expect those for me if i'm gonna do the presenting um all the way through please all the way through the fields no no sorry all the puns sorry um yes we are going to be looking today at hopefully to demystify cinema 4ds fields um the question is can you all hear us i suppose that's the thing we need to make sure we've got hello and hello from everybody so i'm guessing so and i guess i need to share my screen can you see my screen not yet okay um i need to not talk about the presenting then hello to all our regulars by the way j matt's ken simon rob grant and from all those various locations london rotterdam um and newcastle of course as well and thanksgiving it's all looking good good to hear that's brilliant okay so yes this webinar is being recorded thank you yeah i just thought i'd ask put that out there and we need to make sure obviously that you guys have access to the recordings afterwards and they will be emailed to you an hour after the final presentations are finished and you will be able to just go in and get any recordings and of course we have our links to some other recordings and features and emails and all sorts of videos that we have here from previous webinars including look at this one who's that i wonder who that is is that simon there smack bang in the middle i like that well done it's obviously a professional model used for some sort of a graphic thing yep of course um so we've got our volume training program there on youtube of course for other tutorials and things like that we have our cineversity.com login which you can get through through a subscriber account with my max on and of course we have our continual demystifying webinars here um and today it seems that we will be as you say looking up the next level with fields okay so are we all sitting comfortably i don't think everyone gets that reference matt no i know but we would so that's fine okay so i'm going to stop sharing my webcam and let's have a look at cinema 4d so inside cinema 4d we have of course various um mograph objects that we were looking at last week one of which i'm just going to set up exceptionally fast because if you want to know more about mograph stuff then i think you can obviously watch last week's webinar um but this one we're going to spoke focus specifically on something called fields now what are fields i hear you say fields are cinema 4d's ability of controlling effects they are our sort of falloff modifiers so i have my array of cloners here or my array of clones sorry being created by a cloner and i can affect them using effectors like we did last week and the one i'm going to use is a plane effector and that plane effector i'm just going to accentuate by doing 500. so my clones have all jumped up 500 centimeters in my universe what the falloff does is choose where this occurs and we can do that with our cinema 4d fields now they exist down here in this little linear field object which has a tiny drop down triangle and you can see the various other fields that we can create and the fields also exist up here as well in a separate object but for the moment because i want it to have its association with the plane of effector i'm going to create my linear field boom now we can see that we've got something that's different to what we had we have half of my squares are blue cubes sorry are blue and up and half of them are down and actually about one percent of them are smack bang in the middle this is because this is where my linear field has been created this linear field on its own has a 100 affected area as you can see by all of the blue squares that cubes that are above and a zero percent affected area by all of the cubes that are not affected yet and a gradient of zero to a hundred percent in between if i move my field you can see i am able to affect those at one line at a time because of the width of my linear field it has a very very tiny little dot that i can expand out and that will increase the size of my linear field meaning that i now have a wider area for this gradient to have an effect and i can cause my objects to jump up or slide down depending on where the position of my linear field is now this is all very well and good and this is the sort of a behavior that you've been able to do in cinema 4d for quite some time um but when we created fields we gave us the ability of being able to stack fields and add more fields to a cloner than we could have before so clicking and holding on my linear field drop down here or my fields drop down i can add another field so for example a spherical field and i can expand that out and now you can see i have a secondary field that is also working alongside the linear field so wherever the spherical field is it is doing the same thing with the clones and at the moment this is called this blending layer is maxing out so if it goes over the top of where it originally was then the cubes don't get any further or any higher or anything like that they are to the maximum that the effector the plane effector has been told to jump up you can see the color goes a little bit interesting because the colors merge you can control color merging via these three dots here so in your spherical field sorry in your plane effect of falloff tab i can tick or untick the color and now i can control these separately i can untick the color completely from both of them and then it doesn't look anywhere near as nice at this point and you can't see what else is going on to control the color that you want to do then you can select on an individual field so let's select my linear field and look at color remap and you can see that i can swap my colors here please note that the color creation of the fields is random so don't worry if yours looks different to mine i'm quite pleased with the colors that it's selected normally it kind of puts mine in a very murky brown which doesn't ever look very nice for demonstrations but nonetheless here we go we've got some interesting mixes here but the fun thing with being able to have two fields is these blending layers allow you to do different types of blending so at the moment i was on max let's try minimum so this is where the two have to be overlaying in order for the full effect to occur we can also do subtract which means that wherever my sphere of influence is quite literally this field it will undo what the linear field is actually creating and this works you know not just left and right but also up and down as well because it is a spherical field this allows you to effect all sorts of you know different falloffs and these are different attributes depending on where your spherical field is very similar to the linear field you have a 100 affected area which is the inside of the sphere and a 0 effect which is the outside of the sphere that's very easy to change if you want to you can just select your spherical field you can go to remap and then there is an invert function so now it will only have an effect inside which is very similar to kind of just changing the blending layers though to be honest in this instance this is where i would want to untick the color so that the geometry is having an effect here rather than anything else you can add more and more fields if you want to so i could add a box field into this and again i've got a very small um area of influence so i can expand that out and now i have a box field so that i can add back into all of these this interesting setup to create something that would have been quite difficult to have created any other way before fields were accessible to us now fields can come in a variety of different um shapes and sizes of course obviously just looked at the box field we've got formula ones group fields we've even got a random field now this random field allows me to have a random distribution of my heights of my object it is not like a random effector which would choose a random height for this to be created or a random position what this is doing this is allowing the plane effector to occur through a sense of randomness now randomness as you can see if i move up and down will change depending on where my random effect my random field is a random field is actually just a selection of noises so if i go to my plane i can go to my view settings you can see i have a yellow and red noise map and that is effectively what is creating this difference in height of my object so wherever it is uh reddit is unaffected wherever it is yellow it is being affected and depending on the size of my random field and obviously not the display box itself but the actual noise that is being created you can see i've got under the field random field noise it's got a random seed variation which is just basically the random noise that maths is used to create this distribution and also i've got scaling so i can see if i make that much bigger the scale of what i'm creating spreads out so rather than so many different cubes being affected by a very small area the larger your area the more it sort of looks like it's in waves okay matt can i ask a question about versions because um the fields came in a couple of versions ago didn't they so does it matter which version of r20 yeah and which version are you using uh i am currently using r23 is that a new version it is a new version yes it came out two weeks ago and for more information on the different features of r23 please see our previous webinars so we can affect an area so let me um just set this up so rather than height or actually no let's do height let's do animating height so with my random field let's add a loops uh animation speed of 50 and let's press play now you can see that this animation starts to go up and down let's whack that up a bit so it's a bit more inviting there we go and this is nice you have a loop period if i set that to 90 frames can you see i have a looping animation so depending on the scale that my random field is set at will depend on how much you can make this look like waves so with a smaller scale there are more dots to affect these individually with a wider scale the yellow and red pattern that is being created over it is much bigger so areas of clones are affected rather than just individual ones and you say if i make that 10 000 now we have a nice sort of wave effect being created by my random fall off of my simple plane effector and you can do really nice things as you could with the plane effect as before i could add in let's choose scale and i always like scale minus one because it makes life easy so where it goes up and down now it will change scale as well and you can get some really interesting effects with this um and of course with my plane effector i can put back in my spherical field because i only deleted them out of my plane effect i didn't actually delete these and if i put my spherical field back in let's do a max overlay again i can still choose where all of this disappears as opposed to appears whilst the random effector is busy creating its own sorry the random field is busy creating the stuff around now the fields can be used across multiple objects and of course multiple cloners let's create a cloner that's almost exactly the same but this time i'm going to create spheres and my cloner is currently being affected by the plane effector so it's moving everything up so i'm going to delete that so that my spheres are there instead and i'm going to create a new effector or actually i could just inverse can i reverse that that's a good question um let me just create another sphere sorry move my clonus of spheres up and i'm going to create a what am i doing i'm going to create a plane effector that is going to change the scale of my spheres as well but it's only going to create the spheres with my fall off because i already have a spherical field i can put my spherical field in there and now if i move my spherical field i have one spherical field that is changing the scale of the spheres in one cloner as well as the clones in the cloner below so you can have all sorts of different cloners all sorts of different mograph generators everything that we experimented with the other week with all of these being controlled by the same field doing various different things in fact fields exist across so many different areas of cinema 4d and let me have load my fields use cases thank you jonas you will be able to see that my spherical field here is having an effect on mograph objects here if i move my spherical field further along it is now having an effect on a deformer a displacement deformer that exists on this plane but nonetheless the same spherical field is having an effect on that you can also use fields to affect vertex maps which means that you can control all sorts of other interesting animations crossovers and things which i believe ellie and jonas will be experimenting with in a bit and then i can move it further across and i can effect polygon selections which would allow different materials to become visible depending on where it is i can control point selections which means that under my point selection i have bevels that are being applied to my object only where my spherical field is i can go to volumes so my volumes of my fields can be created and if you do that with a random field then you get some really interesting results and if i move this across to my dynamics o you can see nothing happens this is because you need to make sure you press play and now wherever my spherical field is i can have an effect on the volumes uh sorry effect on the dynamics of an object or a scene setup okay that's me done with my basic introduction i don't know if anybody wants to a asking questions or if jonas and ellie have anything that you wish to add to that before i pass it over to you guys well nothing to add from my side marvelous that's good to know italy no that was great that's all good it might be worth just quickly um covering a couple of the things that were asked jay's had a couple of interesting questions just in case somebody's watching the recording and they can't see the questions list because i know they've been answered live but it just might be interesting to mention those okay what questions have we got um likely to answer sorry can you can you see the questions field or i can read them out if you like i can um i was just wondering if there's anything specific if adding multiple foods to a cache no doubt they would be render intensive uh the tent the intensity to calculate fields highly depends on the fields that you use um so yeah it's very kind of scene dependent depends what you've got set up really um as to how intense you're rendering or calculation stuff will need to be um do fields act differently in order of stacking yes so depending on the order that you have them and the blend modes that you've got um here under your falloff will depend on how these work so if i reverse these i will get a different result so it's you can get some really interesting results it's well worth playing with orders and blend shapes and blend modes sorry depending on what you are wanting to get what else does the plain and random field effect work with other techniques like octane um octane apparently scatters onto cinema 4d objects i'm obviously not sure but i don't really use octane unfortunately i don't have much experience with the third-party plug-ins um can the properties of a field be affected by another field and i don't use that but jonas i'm assuming that would be where subfields comes into play yeah exactly um so yes that is possible for some of the parameters but uh not for all of them um yeah we just exposed it for um parameters where it makes sense but you will see um an example for that later it's marvelous okay um we've had the question is can the example project be downloaded for tinkering um jonas i think that means your wonderful scene set up um is that okay to go to the customers absolutely yes okay marvelous so we will make sure that simon gets that to add that to the email um right okay so that's me done and i will be in the background answering questions who am i passing it to um well i first would like to show um the group fields and then i will pass on to ellie marvellous great so bear with me a second um i will pass it over to you thank you very much here we go can you see my screen yes yes perfect perfect so what we what we have here is a small little setup where i've got a spherical field and a plane effector and also a box field that i can rotate here in the middle and i want to use the very same fields that i use here in the plane effector like this field stack in the random effector here right now you can see that the random effector just affects everything by default and of course you could just right click on the fields yeah parameter here and go copy and then go to the random effector and just paste it and then you would have the effect that you might want to have so that you are controlling multiple fields using these two multiple effectors using these two fields like so but there is even um well a better way because what if you want to add something to the stack here but for both effectors and this is where the group field um comes into play so let's go to the fields menu and let's create a group field and in the group field i will also just paste what i just copied so now we've got the two um fields in here and this is why i can just delete them from the other fields lists here okay here the group field is already applied let me get rid of these two hello just put them out here and let's delete everything and now instead of assigning the box field and the spherical field we just assigned the group field here and we do the very same thing with the random field we just assign the group field and because the box field and the spherical field are part of that group field these fields will now have a weight on both effectors and the cool thing is if i now want to add another field like a linear field for example to this list this field will be automatically applied to both effectors because it is part of the group field and the group field is linked to these two effectors that's basically what i wanted to show that there is the group field and that you can use that to use the very same setup maybe a setup that you want to adjust at some point in multiple effectors all right i will show you another use case for this later uh for now i will just uh pass on to ellie yeah are you ready yeah ready you're ready that's good you go cool can everyone see my screen yes okay perfect yes absolutely cool so um as matt showed in his examples there's a way you can kind of use fields within like vertex maps and control like displacement so this is a little setup where if i play it you get like this kind of really cool looking organic growth and this is using fields and vertex maps and um displacement so i thought i'd um run through how to set this up and then i'm going to throw it over to jonas who's um going to then show how he can use this vertex map to trigger like some animation i think that's right all right so let me show quickly how i set this up so grabs have a plane the segments and then come in here and then hit c just to make editable i'm going to grab some of the points so i'll just grab just these ones here then we can set the vertex weight and here we've now got our like our vertex tag and you can see our selection is just these like this yellow part here and what's cool if we go up to our tag there's a little option here that to use fields so if we check that you see your fields menu pop up and by default it creates a modifier which is the freeze modifier and that's coincidentally the one that we need because one of the modes is grow so if i change that and if i play you can see how the freeze modifier within our light fields menu is um affecting our vertex map selection and it's growing in quite like a cool way and we can then use this to we can use this like vertex map to then trigger things like displacement but let's first let's make it a little more interesting at the moment it's a little bit a little bit like a plane grow so if we select like a random field just make that a child and then change that to normal and let's change this to something like 500 and then now you see it's kind of growing the um the vertex weight is growing depending on like the noise of the random field so it looks sort of like much more interesting um than just kind of like the basic growth before and then what we can do with this we can actually smooth out these edges and if we just duplicate our our vertex map delete everything from in there and you can actually drag and drop your original vertex map in there and if we change that to average what you have to do is you have to rename your vertex maps this to kick in there we go so now we can see how that's affecting that and let's change that to something like 20. so this is now creating like a smoother edge and so when we add like some displacement um you won't get like those jagged edges instead it'll be nice and smooth so that's just a little trick that um jonas showed me thanks for that cool so let's now add let's add a bit of displacement now on this so if i grab my displacer i make it a child of my plane within here i'm going to select color and just change that blue black and then in the fall off we can actually just drag and drop our vertex map and hopefully you can see the vertex map is actually um controlling the displacer so if i come back and press play we've now got this really cool like organic growth it looks like really nice and that's all based on the vertex map that's being controlled by the fields um then what i did i shoved it into a subdivision surface just to create some smoothing the playback is going to be a little bit slower because of the high poly count but for like a final render obviously the smoother it is um the nicer it can look and then we can grab can you just scrub slowly through that because we're getting a bit of a drop off because of the webinar of the frames per second is it possible just to scrub along the timeline to see how it progresses i thought it might be a little bit is that showing it a little better yeah that's better yeah too far i can do it with the subdivision surface off and that's not like a massive you still try hiding the points as well um so that you're not displaying the lines it might respond a bit faster yeah new house new internet not doing wonders for me is it right so i've got my um second displacer so if i make that a child um what we can do we can then add like a noise to this one which is what i did before turn that global scale down and then we can in the fall off again drag our our second vertex map let's do sort of like that and so now if i come back like let me turn this oh it's not gonna playback is it very well if i play it and then i'll stop it just to show so you're getting this grow and then it's sort of growing with the displacement as well i'm hoping that's at least partially played back so that's all being controlled by um these vertex maps here so sort of like that and then the next thing we can do we can actually use this same vertex map to kind of affect the color so if we create a material and go to effects and then vertex map you can then drag and drop your vertex map into there oh let me apply that first and then you can add a colorizer and then this is when it starts to get quite cool so we can affect the colors if i you know you know me i love my pink so now it's got like a pink glowy outline and that's again literally using the same vertex map let's have a little do-do-do make this look nice so yeah that was kind of it and i did a couple of renders earlier and this was sort of one of them and this is exactly the exact same project just added a light and then i did a secondary one it was a bit lower bit of depth of field um yeah so it's quite a cool effect um you can use with fields like it doesn't just need to be like the mograph stuff um yeah fields can be used for so many things and what i'm going to do i'm going to throw this exact project over to jonas and he's going to show you how you can use this to like trigger some animation that's very cool ellie also it's fantastic how quick that is to set up for like a fly through or um ideas and backgrounds it's really great yeah yeah it's a very quick setup yeah with some cool cool outcomes cool sorry jonas are you ready i'm ready some cool stuff let me need some more cool stuff some even more cool stuff all right can you see my screen should be the same scene as ellie just showed you um i just deactivated the subdivision surface here and uh just to get some better feedback in the viewport and what i want to show you is how i created um an effect that looks like this so this is basically the same thing as ellie showed already but what i did then so here in the background you can see this is the growth effect underneath or beneath the street but then i use the same vertex map to trigger the dynamics of fracturing and this is what i'm going to show you now so first of all of course we need something to fracture and the best thing to fracture and also the easiest is a cube and i'm gonna set this up so that it's 400 by 6 by 400 something like that and i'm gonna move it up by three centimeters here we go so now we've got like a little bit of thickness on top of that um plane with the vertex map effect on it and then i'm going to go to the mograph menu and just create a voronoi fracture i hold down alt because i've got the keep selected and this way it will automatically create the voronoi fracture as a parent of the cube and it will start fracturing it in the morning fracturing i go to the sources tab and just select the point generator here which is in there by default and just crank up the point amount which is pretty much similar to the amount of fragments here and now i've got this thing fractured all right so the next thing i want to do is i create a simulation tag rigidbody and if i do that and play back the animation again you see that everything is just falling down you can see you can see it down here and the effect is starting here and they are not connected okay so how can we connect these in the dynamics tag you see that there are two fields here for or that are asking for a mograph selection one is for the enabled so that you can enable dynamics using a mobile selection and the other one is to set the dynamic state for the mograph selection which means if it's set to on an object will completely behave dynamically and fly around and so on and if it's set to off um objects can collide with this but it won't fly around for example okay so how can i get this mobra selection here well it's actually not that hard we just have to go to the mograph menu here and then we go to mobile selection and now you see that there are um these brown dots here and i just select one of these because these are selections or yeah the selection points for the fragments so now you see i got this one selected and the cool thing is as with the vertex map there is a checkbox which is called use fields it's a tiny little checkbox but once you check it you've got the full power of the field system here so we just delete the freeze field because the freeze field just stores the um yeah values that have been in the system when you created this so the selection of this one here i'm gonna delete this we don't need that anymore and instead i'm going to drag and drop the vertex map in here so now we've got the vertex map and let me also make the attributes manager a little bit bigger and in here you can see that the mode is set to nearest and that's exactly what we need because if i press play now you can see oh maybe let me let me just delete the dynamics for now so we can see that let's selection growing here you can see that the selection is growing along the same path or pattern that the vertex map is growing another thing that you might have seen is that some of these points are flickering which means that they belong to the selection at one frame and maybe not at the next frame and then again on the next frame so i want to make sure that once they got selected that they stay selected and you can do this by using a field that is called decay field so in here in the very right um yeah menu here we've got the modifier layers and these can be used to remap some values or to do something with the weights that we created before and in this case i just want to add a decay and the decay is set to 50 and once i set this to 100 everything that has been selected once will stay selected let me go to the very first frame here we go and we also need to make the voronoi fracture um or we need to place it down the hierarchy because of the execution order here so first of all um these vertex maps are being created and then as it goes down here after that this mogra selection will be created this is why we have to place it beneath um the vertex maps so again here we go the vertex map is growing and you can see that there is no flickering anymore and now we can use this mobref selection to trigger the dynamics so let's create a simulation tag rigidbody again and now let's just input the mograph selection into that dynamic field here and i will also swap the two here just in case and now if i hit play you can see that the pieces are falling down um similar to the vertex map here which is pretty cool but maybe we want them to fly up and um to have some um yeah a little bit more variation um applied so the first thing i want to do is i go to edit project settings and in here there is a dynamics tab and we've got a gravity setting in here which is the default gravity and i will type in minus 200 which means that the gravity is now going upwards so now these pieces are start starting to float around and then the next thing i want to add is in the simulation menu i go to forces and i add some wind and in the object tab i just bring up the wind speed a little bit and also the turbulence let's say to 20 something like that and that is basically the setup here yeah and if you spend a little bit more time and tweak it a little bit more then you can create something like that just scrub through it you can see it cool all right so that's the device and i want to give it back to you ellie so are you ready i am ready you are ready all right here you go cool thank you very much um cool so i wanted to show a cool effect using like the field force stuff in um in cinema 4d and this came in in r21 and i guess kind of without going too much into it it's a way of using fields along with like the mograph tools um but i'm going to use it with like particle emitters to create let me find a something like this um so hopefully you can see that it says the word max on um and then also like this one that says fields for today's webinar um yeah so i'm going to run through this like relatively quickly because there's quite a few steps but what i'll do um i'll add the project file um to like this link that you guys will get um kind of an hour at the end of this session so you guys can break it down and what's nice is um it's procedural so you can change the text to say whatever you want and just change a couple of settings so i'll run through how i made this and i've also got a little animation i rendered of it as well just to show hopefully it's playing back well that's awesome it's really nice yeah okay cool right so i'll let's let me show you how i set this up so grab myself a text blind and just write the word max on so i'm going to keep this this like default font because it's nice and thin which is what we need anyway and then in simulate we can go to particles and go to emitter and then i need this to be kind of like the width of my text and then like nice and small nice and thin bring it up to the middle let me just increase some frames i'm gonna just um keyframe some rotation so keyframe at zero and then 90 just gonna do some 360 rotation and then keyframe that so now when i press play my emitter should rotate 360 degrees firing particles everywhere which doesn't look too great at the moment but it's getting there so with my emitter we can now add our new newish field force and one of the options let me just hide that one of the options we have in the object mode as you can see it's sort of like similar to the field menu you can change direction and you can actually drag and drop your text into here and then if we click our text we want it to go like along which is what this is set to along the spline so now if i press play you can see the particles are sort of following along the spline let me increase these in my shirt a bit better so they're now sort of following along and in our emitter let's change a couple of these settings just to make it look a bit bit nicer so i want the emission to stop at 90 frames i want them to last 90 frames but i'm going to add a little bit of variation just so some kind of like die at different times and then speed that's that's a bit too quick and then a bit more variation on that as well but it should look a little bit nicer and so once we've got our particles moving where we want them to let me just hide my misser we can actually use a tracer which i think we sort of went through a couple of weeks ago uh in the first webinar um and we can actually trace the paths of these of like the particles and it would it will eventually spell out like the letters so if i grab myself if i know what i'm doing uh tracer change a couple of these settings right and now so now it's tracing the paths um which are particles sort of like spelling out the word max on um and you could let's say like we could if if you wanted more lines you just need more particles to increase that to 100 and you can see it much clearer there but what i'm going to do i'm going to do 50 and then i'm going to duplicate my emitter and my tracer and then in my emitter i'm just going to change the seed so now i've got 100 particles and therefore i've got 100 of my kind of trace paths but because the seed of the two emitters is different um the lines will then kind of be in different places so instead of having 100 all in the same place i've now got 100 of them in kind of slightly different areas and so this alone i think actually looks quite cool so as we learned a couple of weeks ago um this won't show up in a render so you need to create a hair material let me just quickly do that and if you drag that onto your tracer and my other one so that's already i think looking at kind of cool but there's now what we can do we can use like um some of the mograph tools to turn this into some geometry and add some right squares and that can be controlled in the fields menu um with the tracer and i'll i'll sort of show how we can do that so if we grab like a matrix in the mograph menu it's going to rotate that and we just need this to fill the same sort of area that our text blind's filling so if we come into here and go to end point and drag that over so as long as it's filling that area that's all we need to do so what do you reckon 30 maybe okay let's go to that and then 50. okay cool i'll leave it at that so with our matrix selected we can then because it's a mograph generator we can then use an effector so we can grab our plane effector get rid of the position and our scale we can go to minus one and what we can do within the fields menu of the plane effector we can actually if we drop in a solid we can then put our tracer in there and you can see it's now kind of following along with our tracer if we go to down in our layer controls select radius and then subtract our matrix is now forming along with our tracer and our like emitted particles and i think like this looks quite quite like a cool look and you can affect things like the radius so if you want to see like more of the matrix or less you can bring that back down and of course you can mess with the blending options you can also drag and drop the other tracer in there what i'll do so as well the matrix doesn't show up as geometry much like the tracer but what we can do we can grab a cloner and a cube and let me just do this eight by eight by eight a little filler on here drop my cube into my cloner and if we set our cloner to do object mode and then drop our matrix in here hide that matrix and now hit render a little bit too small at the moment so back into my plane if i increase this up here so now we we have the geometry which is my cloner so if i and this is all i did um and then just added added a new material which we have let's have so this is kind of red as you can see normally my material is all basically the same settings every time but it works let's make that a little bit redder redder more red and then why isn't that showing hmm any ideas uh yes on that why this isn't showing um maybe so if you let me play this one let's just cancel that oh this one will show it so let's just pretend i've just done this one now and it hasn't gone wrong in the other scene and so when we hit render we if only we could cut this out but it's live so when we hit render no one noticed dilly it's on youtube well now you can see that they actually showed up they have been just this is the the separate different sections so this is what should happen i'm not too sure what's happened on my other one um yeah so once this is that while it renders and we'll see if we can sort it because that's quite interesting if anyone's following along they might have the same problem yeah i'm i mean i've made this about eight times today and not once has it happened so of course it's happened right now on the live one yeah on the live one the first thing i would check is the instance mode actually on the cloner well that should work um the second thing i would try is not to use the matrix but um just create a cloner grid were you trying to render because the tracer can't render to the picture view what it sees it's a simulation so it needs to start from the beginning in theory yeah but my the concern is that the cubes aren't showing of the cloner which i thought it should i mean for people who are watching this is um then what the final output will look like and so it sort of like spells it like max on and you can increase like the amount of emitted particles if you wanted to have like the um trace lines be a bit more prominent so yeah there's that's that um yeah i think i think matt is right um try just um rendering to the picture viewer add to the to the viewport let's see if it works now there we go yeah there we go yeah so this is an issue that we discussed the other day when it came when it comes to the tracer the tracer is a simulation um that the viewport doesn't know how to just kind of jump in the middle of so because loads of this stuff is being is dependent on the tracer cinema 4ds x well external renderer needs to think about the simulation from the beginning so if we were to render out the animation it would work fine but just trying to pick an individual frame in the middle of the animation the external renderer goes i don't know where i am and panics cool well yeah so that was that effect and what's nice about it is um you can go into tech spline you can change this and it will update in in its time so if i do like fields it's then clever enough too so it might inv it might need um kind of like the matrix or the emitters being extended a little bit um because i think this is perhaps a bit bigger than the actual word max on um but yeah aside from the uh render issue i hope you guys liked that um that effect and so i guess there's no questions jonas did you want to show something quick with some volume stuff um yeah there was one question do you have a couple of questions so there you go the question um was can you explain what the solid is doing there you had one um uh one fields layer uh one field setup where you um created a solid in was it the matrix i think it was in the matrix yeah there it is um do you know what i'm gonna be honest i'm not too sure what the solid actually does i don't know whether either of the guys know i have to say i was wondering the same thing can you just get rid of it and just have the blending mode of subtract as normal no because i suppose it's got nothing to subtract from i wonder whether the solid um is what helps the tracer turn into actual kind of solid information um that do you see what i mean that can then be followed along with the effector jonas he is the expert no you get white and you subtract that well i actually think that you could delete the solid and somehow recreate the okay now select the tracer and go to remapping remapping and invert yeah exactly and invert the whole thing there's a right hand checkbox on the right my webinar ah there we go here we go so multiple ways of doing the same thing which is what we love in cinema 4d oh yeah yeah there are so many ways of doing stuff and yeah it's always cool to see how other people um use it and create this cool stuff with cool so yeah yes yeah i'm ready yeah i got two minutes that's going to be tough for it yes 10 minutes very well did i not worry it's great also there's been lots of comments um uh about saying how useful it is at seeing things when they don't go all right and how you then think through the operation and how you might fix them in the workarounds and i think that's as useful as showing the techniques as well so thanks everyone then kent and robin glenn um and a couple of the others i've also been saying that's me going wrong and jonathan as well so yes we know this is planned we deliberately did this oh yeah this happened on purpose i meant to do it wrong perfect so yeah um in the next setup i'm i want to show you how to yeah turn a field into a mesh and what i created here is this so it might be a little bit well less than 30 frames per second in the playback but if i scrub through it slowly you can see that we've got an animated noise here which is meshed and this is the viewport renderer so there's no post involved and all of the the nice um glow end here was or has been created using magic bullet looks inside of cinema 4d okay but now let me show you how i created this and i'm going to start from scratch here so the first thing we need is a random field so we create a random field and if we go to the view settings and enable the view play preview you can see that this is what the noise is going to look like now if i scale this up you can see that we've got a bigger noise and if i increase the animation speed and hit play you can also see that this is animating now and this is the interesting point all right now let's turn that off and let's turn this whole thing into geometry and the easiest way to do that and actually also the only way that i know is to use um our openvdb stuff the volume builder and the volume measure so let's hold down alt and create the volume builder because we got the random field already it and this way it creates the volume builder as the parent and then i'm also again going to hold down sorry minecraft noise yeah exactly um and here we go so this is already a meshed noise so you can see that um yeah it's doing something let me just well also do something to the voxel size with volumes um well volumes are based on voxels and voxels are like three-dimensional pixels and in the volume builder we've got a parameter called voxel size which is set to 10 centimeters if i bring that down i increase the density of the voxel grid and now you see that all the edges are getting a little bit sharper and so on you can also see that um the performance is not as good as before anymore because we've got eight times more stuff to calculate but here's the thing if you want to mesh a volume uh if you want to match a field then you need to set the volume type to fog so the technical background of this is that in a fog volume every single voxel stores a value between 0 and one and this is basically the very same thing as with the fields because fields are weights they store values between zero and one hundred percent which is the same as the range between zero and one okay so here we go that's basically the whole thing but um i want to set it up a little bit um more like in a little bit more flexible way so if i let me let me just create a um a smooth filter here and let me create a copy of this whole thing and in the second random field in the remapping i just choose invert so that we get these two parts here and so you can see they are not intersecting each other but it's just two parts and if i want to change the the movement or the animation for example or the size of the noise i always have to go or i always have to select both of the random fields and adjust both of them so that the values match up but there is a way um that you can use to make it all like more flexible and also that you just have to use or to to adjust stuff in one place so let me get rid of one of these setups here and let's also go to the volume builder and let's get rid of the fog smooth and let's also just drag and drop the random field out of here and this way we don't see anything anymore so why am i doing this because i want to use this group field here again remember we had that earlier in the group field you can assign or apply a field and this field or this group field can then be shared within multiple setups and whatever you change in here in the field list will be inherited by all of the other setups and this is exactly what we want here so now we set up one of the three elements that we had before so let me just go to the rendering here again we've got three elements we've got the white one the black one and the golden one and all of these are being controlled by using the same noise so the next thing i want to do here is to create another modifier layer and i will use the curve layer so i'm going to remap the whole thing first of all i right click this spline interface here and set the spline preset here to linear and then let me just create a step here something like that it doesn't look too impressive right now but we will create the counterparts to that in a second okay now we've got the group field set up and in the volume builder we are missing the smooth part and we can do this by creating the smooth filter layer here but this only works in one volume builder so instead i'm going to go to the volume menu here and create a fork smooth object so here we go in the volume builder i'm just going to drag and drop it inside here and then i can go to the filter tab and just have a look at the settings let's just go down with the voxel size for now so this is our first noise that we created as geometry right now it doesn't look too too impressive but if i now create a copy of this one and i'm going to rename these here so this is my prime for smooth and this is my what did i write here prime and this is also my primary random field prime and now i'm going to create a copy of this volume measure and the only thing that i have to adjust now is in the group field remember the random field is in all the group fields now but the curve is just a part of well this of exactly this group field here this one the random field has been shared it's like an instance of this primary random field and this curve belongs to this group field so what i can do now um is i bring that over to something like that and i create a few more points here like so so that i just grab the middle part so we're basically remapping um the whole thing that we're just showing values from the random field here that are between 50 and 60 now if that makes sense and now if i hit play you can see that this is already working and now we just need a third one of these setups so i'm just going to create another copy and go to the group field and adjust the remapping here so i'm gonna delete these two and move the other ones over so that we have something like this and this is already the whole setup so now we've got the three parts and maybe i can make this more visible simply by creating a new material and applying it to this one and then i create a copy of this adjust the color like so and apply it to this one and then for the middle one i'm just going to go to the note material presets and create gold material and here we go so these are our three parts and the cool thing now is that i can now go to the random field to my primary random field and for example i can go down with the scale let's say 500 then i've got this or i can up this again and go to the smooth here and under filter i just increase the voxel distance which will which will also increase the smoothness here i can drag the slider and you can see that the smooth effect is or has been applied in all of the three setups here so this is a quite powerful setup and of course we could add multiple more and simply by by using another range here in the curve adjustment layer um yeah we can remap the values of the noise to anything that we would like to have all right so that's basically it are there any questions [Laughter] we appreciate everyone staying with us for the extra 10 minutes or so that we we slightly overran but of course we never overrun this time is flexible we finish exactly when we mean to yes a trainer does exactly that very good um some other questions would you mind sorry um can you use another model instead of a cube um in this instance yeah um we're just using a uh a field in order to create this but yeah you can this you can overlay this with all sorts of different objects if you want to yeah so if you look in the content browser we've got a nice one to do with text which is quite clever so let me just uh see if i um how would you trend my linear transition from one fully solid material to reveal these you these different materials um you could have several you could have a another builder another volume builder that you have a different field on an effect and you would use a field to reveal that by slowly removing the volumes and the voxels from that effect would be a reveal couldn't you you could kind of peel stuff away and have these materials underneath would be one way of doing it yeah so but um regarding the the other question let me go back to the other setup that i just created um in the volume video we um just assigned this group field here and by default the creation space is a box but if i now want this to be like let's say a sphere we can just drag and drop the sphere in here let's do this here on the on the first one we can drag and drop the sphere in here and put it at the very bottom and then we just set the group field here not to creation space box but to objects below now if i make the sphere invisible you can see that the white parts are restricted by the by the sphere there is also a very flexible way to set this up you could for example create an instance of the sphere and then create another instance and put this instance into the volume builders and then you've got one instance object where you could just swap the objects and then it could be the sphere the torus the figure it could be everything cool is there an advantage to using instance objects as opposed to just dragging and dropping the sphere into the volume measure because i don't know if guys have noticed that but there are two different ways that you can put the sphere or an object in a volume builder you can drag and drop it so it is a child but you can also just have a live link as well just by dragging and dropping it into the object information of the builder the problem with the live link is that uh once you deactivate or once you make the object invisible at least if i remember correctly it will also be invisible in the volume builder that's why i always try to put them into the volume builder and yeah this way i can just make like the instances invisible maybe maybe i should show it just takes another 20 minutes hey [Laughter] no i'm kidding um it doesn't take so long so um let me select the sphere here and just create an instance object and we call this place your object here and then we create an instance of that one here we go and this instance is going to be a child of all of our volume builders and in the volume builders we have to place it at the bottom and set all group fields to objects below we just have to set this up once once it is set up it is pretty powerful actually so here we go this is our sphere and yeah now i can just create let's say a taurus and i'm also going to make this invisible and then i just drag and drop the chorus into this reference object link field here and now you see that the whole thing is a taurus and yeah now we can do this with any object like also with the figure let's just scale this guy up a little bit and make it invisible and just place it in here and you can see this is my figure with the very same effect applied to it modern art there i think so this is this is quite a powerful way to set up things if you need to stay flexible or if you need to animate the overall the overall shape i mean this could also be some animated stuff that you also created with fields and volumes and so on and or just some cache object from coming from alembic or obj and whatnot and then you could use this as the overall shape for that effect and yeah yeah can create really cool effects with that but that's really everything i wanted to show excellent matt would you mind just giving everyone a reminder about where they can see the recordings for this and the previous sessions and just showing your screen quickly i'm just going to pass it to met cool thank you very much you're welcome here you go so there we go for the people that were asking you can find our previous webinars so for those of you who think that they've got a setup to remember you can uh don't have to remember it you can in fact just watch it again um up here on our maxon volume program training youtube channel okay and don't forget of course that we've got various tutorials over in cineversity um although that still says look at what's new in r20 and looking at our red giant webinars you can see that refresh the page yeah i might need to refresh that um next week join us again for looking at fracturing in motion graphics okay we had one one question earlier on about what we're doing for october so i just wanted to jump in we've got a whole program for ev every monday for the rest of the year um and in october we're heavily featuring doing um fast graphics on the timeline whether that's premiere pro or after effects or in fact avid media composer and how to swap graphics between those and so on so i will post more information and we'll definitely have that all up online by the time next week and we can talk a little bit more about more about that when we talk about the last um session that we've got next monday on the 28th but just to let you know yes we're we're just slightly behind in publishing it on the page but we're going to continue this for at least the rest of the year and most likely into next year too every monday fantastic okay right well if that's it thank you very much all for joining us and we will see you all again next week bye everyone bye everybody thanks everyone thanks for watching comments as well we really appreciate them we do thank you very much take care guys stay safe out there bye bye

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 14,967

Keywords: C4D, Cinema 4D, mograph, effectors, fields, motions graphics, design, 3D, tutorial, demystifying, post-production

Id: dTlEk5sJy80

Length: 78min 34sec (4714 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020