C4D Essential Motion Graphics: Morphed Splines

hello and welcome thanks for joining us again and we're delighted also to welcome jonas and dustin on this fourth of our demystifying sessions in february hi guys hey guys beauty hi everyone we're there if you had forgotten to unmute i only just did it so the um i'm simon walker i'm head of training and learning at maxon and um thank you for the lovely comments that you've got coming in already and we really appreciate that because we are responding to your questions and your enthusiasm for using the tools and that's really the driving force for all these sessions and just talking about sessions and talking about topics we've just on the screen at the moment this is the events page that you can navigate to just go to maxon.net and hit events under the news heading and then you can see all the sessions that we got coming up so we'll talk more about this in a second when jonas runs you through some of his mograph techniques that we based on the christmas messaging or the holiday message that we put out towards the end of last year as we've been investigating this process and we'll also have some of the comments that also are useful from dustin based on his session last week by the way you got some great comments on your session last week dustin so thank you for sharing your workflow for that and we've got even more coming up so if you wanted to jump into redshift a bit more ellie's got her fourth workshop on the intro to redshift this wednesday and also you'll see next we're just a little bit down the page you'll see that we're piggybacking from that and ellie is inviting dustin back and leonel back to dive into redshift a little deeper and as it says here raise your redshift games all sorts of things including particles and subsurface scattering and how to set up renders and get more out of redshift so please feel free to join us for that um greetings to newcastle from jay hi kent thanks for checking the everything's working and sounding all right hi hannah greetings to hamburg hi enders we've got lots of regular viewers here so thanks for joining us again and also just keep looking through these little sections that we've got coming up where we're extending what we've already built on and so jonas and those men will be back um next thursday so thursday week to continue the journey for um effectors in this case on ask the trainer and this thursday we have max carrying on with his max on color series where it's um a a series where we dive into color correction in a variety of tools including the maxon tools but also including number of the hosts as well as in resolve and supporting hosts too for the red giant plugins but also what the whole point of these things is to delve into the color science and so he's got some great guests we got some fantastic skills on the training team at maxon and we've got lined up chad and also dr sassy are going to help us increase our color science knowledge but also we're going to be inviting or other max is going to be inviting industry colleagues to come and talk about their workflows too so this is a response to the amount of requests we had to jump into this and talk more about a balance of the creativity and the science behind doing color correction and grading so please join us for those and of course just a little bit of housekeeping if you want to see anything that you've missed just go to maxon training team on youtube and that's where we put the recordings of almost everything that we do on these live sessions and then you can see some of the ones that got coming up so just set a reminder for those here's the one for max on thursday and then also the honest and nose ones one on effectors on thursday week and also at this the important thing about this is that we tie these into the sorts of topics that you can then get certified for so we've got a range of certifications starting with a free knowledge test so that you can then gear up and plan how you might become certified or at least test your knowledge across all the different maxon tools so that that's something to look at as well and you can find that under the learn button on the max on site and finally just to say thank you again we've got our ask the trainer exclusive free t-shirt offer so thank you for joining us and to get that t-shirt you have to put in a special secret link and that's on the pdf document which is here but you can also grab this document from the handout section inside the go to webinar interface and we'll post it on the chat and also an answer to some of the questions so you can see this again the trick is that you go to this particular address and then you put in this password so for february it's o2 beautiful stuff and the idea is that we can give you free t-shirts you just have to pay shipping which is three or four euros or dollars but then at least you can wear one of our t-shirts with pride so we really appreciate that um and that's just a really a little thank you for joining us on these sessions fantastic great um and thanks for the kind comments as well and thanks bernd for that as well we we appreciate your feedback if you've got any further questions just jump them into the chat section or even email us training maxon.net and then we'll look at those we read every single email that comes in and that helps as i said form the basis or lots of these sessions great i think that's the fastest i've done the intro because i didn't want to use that too much time because you've got some amazing stuff to show you honest what are you going to be showing today well today um i'm going to be showing the well one of the shots that is that you can see just for a few seconds like for three or four seconds um and it's part of um of this uh diagonal um transition um it's a shot created by tendril and um yeah i want to break this down a little bit and show you how you can recreate it um i don't know if they did it the same way um but i'm gonna do my best to recreate um yeah the look and feel of it and the animation excellent fantastic cool i should throw the screen at you in that case and make you a presenter yes here we go so yeah here we go you should now see my screen and it's the one with youtube on it and with the game boy um and what we see here is the max on holiday greeting and i'm going to hit play and now you see this transition and this is the shot that i'm going to recreate so you can see it for well maybe less than two seconds even and that's why i also brought it up here so you can see it a little bit slower so i'm going to scrub through this we have this whatever shape that is turning into an x and those circles around it and i'm pretty sure that the original one um involved some sort of simulation and so on but i'm gonna try recreating this without any simulation so it's fully controllable and yeah let's see how far we get okay so let me jump into cinema 4d and we will start from scratch so what i want to show you first is how we can well let me also jump back to this one how we can create this transition from like this shape or i will start at a circle to the x so that it's looking interesting and then we're gonna do pretty much the same with those rings that you see here those golden rings so let's start with an object and well i'm gonna go to top view first and i'm going to create a circle and i'm going to make it like 50 centimeters in radius and one of the important things here is in order to get like a full circle like a a really smooth circle later i'm gonna increase the number of intermediate points to let's say 100 and immediately you can see that it's now a little bit rounder here all right so this is our starting shape now the next thing i want to create is the x so i'm going to start with a rectangle you cannot see it right now because it's too big and i'm gonna bring the size down to let's say 25 and here let's try 200 maybe a little bit less than 200 centimeters let's go with 190 i think i think that's good and then i'm going to create a copy of this rectangle and rotate it by 90 degrees and what i'm gonna do next well let me let me double check the width i think it's it's a little bit too too thin so let's go with 40 40 is looking great and now i want to make these two rectangles one shape and i can do that with both rectangles selected and then i go to spline rule commands spline union and once i do that you can see that i have this one object that's what's supposed to be the x in the end and i've got the circle all right now let me jump to points mode and i want to select all of the points here simply by hitting uh control a and then i'm going to right click and chamfer the whole thing all of the corners here and i'm going to do something like 11.5 centimeters or so and that's fine cool so now we've got these two shapes we've got the starting shape and the end shape and one of the interesting things here is that we want to create a postmorph tag to create the transition but let me show you one thing so if i make the circle editable you can see that the circle has got four points only and the x has got 24 points so it cannot be morphed simply so let me quickly show you um what will happen so if i create a postmorph tag i will explain everything in a second but let me just show you that this is going to be problematic and you can see that already so we've got the circle and once we morph that circle into the x shape you can see that it's just the first four points of the x-shape that is going to be that are going to be used for this and that's a bad thing so we need matching point count and the other thing that we need is um we need the splines to start well let's say at the at the same point when you see like the full the full circle so to speak um so let me get rid of that postmorph tag and let's oops let's create this all right so one thing that is pretty handy inside of cinema 4d is um when you want to create splines with matching point counts the easiest way to do that is by using a mouse blind object so what you can do is you create a mouse blind and in this case that's gonna be the most blind for x and i'm going to set the mode to spline and under spline up here i'm going to throw in the original x now you can see that it's already a mouse blind but then we are also going to adjust the generation mode to even because this mode allows us to define a point count and i'm going to bring this up quite high because you can see that we have um like corners in here we don't want that we want this to be as smooth as possible so i bring this up to let's say 600 and now you can see that it's pretty round all right that's looking good and then i'm going to create a copy of this one and rename it to circle and just replace the source line with the circle and now we've got two splines here two most blinds that are based on the two splines that i had in the scene before so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select both of them and make them editable and delete the previous two and what we can see now is um in points mode that these are pretty dense also the circle is pretty dense and the good thing is that they are that they both have matching point counts now so the second thing that i mentioned earlier is that the spline start and end have to be well at the same um part of the spline let's put it like that so in this case um the start and end point is here so you can see that by the colorization of the spline line so it's white here that's the start and it's blue here that's the end and on the x you can see that it's not here it's somewhere else let's find it it's here so we need to adjust the spline so that the starting point is here how can we do that well we can simply select this point and then we right click and go down to point order set first point and now you can see if we select both of these splines that that we have the white line beginning here and going upwards same here and the blue is coming from the bottom and going until here and that's perfect so now these two splines are prepared so that we can morph them right how can we do that well we need to morph the spline points and this can be done by using the post morph tag so let's create the postmorph tag i right click and then i go down to rigging tags postmorph and there are many things that you can morph you can morph positions rotations whole hierarchies and so on but what we or the thing that we want to morph here are the points so i take points and now you can see that we get a list here with the base pose that's the circle and we can add new poses to that so it's working as follows we do have a couple questions here before you get into the into the next one okay uh so is there is the point order always default clockwise or counterclockwise so the orientation of the points that actually i don't know that's something i would have to try i never thought about that um and and see if it um if it works the way i want it to work or not and if not i'm going to reverse the spline you switch it right and that's that's kind of the same answer i would give if i were doing it maybe i'll open up a scene here and see uh while we're doing this uh the next is uh why did you choose 600 points and would it make sense to do it at 360 or 720 um well the only goal i had is to have enough points to to have a good rounding here so i just wanted to have enough let's call them segments on this rounding here that's why i chose a number that is high enough to make sure that i can have this rounding but also that it's not too high so it's an average arbitrary number that i just found out by testing awesome and i'm looking here it does look like it's clockwise oh i do see i see janet left the note here that is clockwise as well for the default yeah well in this case it's clockwise correct in this way in this case let me double check if i open the spline what's going well i have the tag already on here so let me delete that oh it doesn't make a difference that's interesting let's just create a new one and find that out so i'm going to make this editable and if i open the spline you can see that this segment is missing so that's the starting point the white uh side and the blue side is the end point so in this case it's counterclockwise um i mean we we could go to uh through all um of the spline primitives right now but um yeah for practical reasons i would leave that because in most of the cases it doesn't really matter but there are a few like the one we have at the moment um where it is important because we are going to morph splines and those or spline points and those spline points will be um morphed by their index so this point is going to go there this next point is going to go there the next one there and so on so if we would have one clockwise um spline and one counter clockwise blind then uh the morph in the end would just reverse itself which would lead to some unwanted um morphing okay so let's get back to what i created so i created the postmorph tag and i already explained that we want to that we want to morph points and this is the interface that you get we have edit mode and animate mode and edit mode of course is the one that we use to create our morphs and the way how it's working is well you can you can select a few points here like so and move them here and then this relative um movement or this relative change in position is stored in here and now if i use the strength slider i can blend between these two states it's the same technique that you use for for example for character animation where you can um yeah create all of the all of the mimics of a character like a smile and a frown and so on you can do that in here and then animate the sliders in the end and we can also use that on splines however we don't want this pose because one of the cool things about this tag is that you can also drag and drop other splines in here like the x and then this guy is coming up and it's not just like a dialog that tells you do you really want to do that yes or no but it's asking you if you want to add this as an absolute or relative morph target and absolute means yes relative no so what is the difference between absolute and relative that's an important one so let's hit yes to create an absolute morph target and also another one where we say no which is a relative one so you can see that there are two different icons one is the a for absolute and this one is the relative one so if we watch closely the main difference is that the absolute one is referencing the existing spline here the x spline so as soon as we delete that this morph it was the first one um doesn't work anymore it it's now a relative one but it doesn't have anything to morph to that's why nothing happens so we can delete that but the relative one that we created is storing the new shape inside of the tag and this is why we can now blend between the two states all right so that's good and we are now finished with editing our morph targets so we go to animate mode and that's important for the next step we're now in animate mode this is the one where you can activate and deactivate this whole thing and animate it and we can also animate the strength and so on so this is the mode that we want to use for animating all right but now the thing is in here inside of this tag we can only blend everything together so all of the points in here will be blended uh from zero to one hundred percent from the old shape to the new shape um with the same yeah with the same um yeah transition ratio or value so it's not too too interesting to watch that what i want to add here um is actually some falloff that we can animate that allows us to um let's say animate these inner parts here first and then the outer parts and this can be done by using fields but we cannot do that inside of the morph tag instead what we can do is we can go to the deformers and down here there is a morph deformer and this is the one we are going to use so i'm going to make it a child of the circle and then well if you had the the morph target selected it would edit here automatically we have to throw in the morph um the post morph tag and now you can see that we have the targets listed here or the one target that we created and we can now blend between the two using the slider and we have our fields our fields tab so what we can do now is we can create a field and i'm going to use a box field for this and now if we scale this field you can see that we can create a much more interesting um transition between the two so first of all it's sucking in these parts here and then you can see that it's pushing out the long ends of this shape so let's keyframe this i'm going to start here and i'm going to select keyframes i'm going to create keyframes for all of these then i'm going to go to frame 60 or so and see where the shape is completed here and i'm going to set another keyframes here on size x y and z and now we have this and we can fine tune this a little bit for example by going into the remapping and let's say we want to adjust the contour mode to be a curve maybe smoothen it a little bit more like so and then let's say i'm happy with this for now okay so that's a good start let me make the box field invisible here in the viewport and the next thing i'm gonna do is i want to add some yeah some some waves here some um yeah some curvature that that makes the impression that um there is not enough tension in here to to make these lines straight and so on and i want to add this by turning this into a mouse line again and then adding some randomness to the shape so let me create the mohs spline put it here and i'm going to set it to spline mode again and i'm just going to drag and drop the circle in and now you can see that it's all working i'm going to leave it at vertex this time so it's just going to copy the vertex points of the spline of the initial spline the source spline all right and now here's a cool trick so what you can do now is you can add a plane effector and in the plane effector in the parameters tab i'm going to deactivate y or set it down to zero and then you can use the x parameter to offset the spline to the left or to the right like along the spline or to the inside and the outside so i'm going to set this to let's say 10 and now we want to randomize this so that this line is the baseline and it's going outwards and inwards and so on so let me do this by creating a field and i'm going to use a random field for that so let me add this random field here and now you can see that we have this shape but everything is still inside so nothing is going outside here so let's select the random field and in the remapping tab we are already in here i'm going to reduce the minimum value to minus 100 so here we go now you can see that it's much closer to the original spline you can also see that it's clamped here so it's going inside but it's not going to be pushed outside and the place where we can change that is this little button here on the right that's the clamp uh button and if we want to unclamp this whole result of the fields list here we just hit that and now you can see that we have parts going inside and parts going outside great so what else can we do here well of course we have to animate that with with our box field so let me add another spherical field here and just multiply it on top so instead of setting this to max i'm going to set this to multiply and this will mask everything so i'm going to scale this down and let me go to frame 0 so that it's i think frame 50 size 50 should be the correct size here and i'm going to set a keyframe maybe not at frame 0. we're going to make it start growing when these long things are going to be pushed out so here we go and until here and now i'm going to bring up the size a little bit more to something like that and set another keyframe so what we have now is this it's also um well it's looking much more interesting than before but we can still make it more interesting and one thing i noticed in the original is that these waves are moving towards the inside and we can achieve that by playing with the scale value so if we make it bigger it will be scaled bigger which means that all the um waves are going um to the outside and if we make it smaller they are going to be yeah smaller but the center of the noise is the center of the scene here so we're gonna start with 170 or so and i have to move that keyframe to some earlier time and then let's say here at frame 60 i'm going to scale this not not so much let's scale this down to 120 and set another keyframe and what we have now is this movement where we have a little bit of waves going on to the inside and then they are going to stop and this is also where we want these waves to be faded out completely and we can fade this effect out by going to the plane effector and in the effector tab there's a strength slider and we just keyframe that one so let's set it up like so and now we have our animation here so let's let's save this for now so that's my x and let's also make this invisible and just play back the animation yeah okay that's that's good for now cool the next thing i want to do is i want to um yeah of course make this um an object that we can render and something with a profile and we need a sweep to do that so i'm going to create a sweep and make the most blind a child of the sweep like so and then we need a profile and as a profile i want to use a flower spline and i'm gonna set this the inner radius to one the outer radius to two and the petals to four so i have a spline like this and now i'm just going to throw that into the sweep as well and we have to adjust the plane x y should be the correct thing and there we go maybe maybe it should be a little bit bigger and now you wouldn't increase the size by using the outer radius or the inner radius because this is based on the most blind so actually we now have to adjust the most blind width to adjust the width of the whole thing and then in the sweep we can make it a little bit more interesting by adjusting the end rotation to 720 for example and now let's have a look at our animation like so i'm going to rotate it by 45 degrees approximately so that we have the x here yeah i'm happy with that so that's cool i'm gonna save this and are there more questions dustin for now otherwise i will continue with the background yeah so i was gonna it was kind of at a weird moment to uh ask but the primary question right now is uh how would you animate more than two shapes so maybe morphing between three shapes that's a good question and one thing you can do is you can create more morph targets because those will be listed here and as you can see in the postmorph tag as well as in the in the morph deformer you can animate the strength and then the second thing is uh let me let me try that if we go here and create another one you can see that we can have two postmorph tags and yeah let's just do something like the stuff that we did before and in the basics tab i'm gonna rename this to one or two in this case it's the second one and now if i create a new morph deformer i never tried that before to be honest um we can use the second one here and just yeah bring that in but i just well i just noticed that the first deformer is overriding and the second one is overriding the first one so that's not possible uh we have to solve that um in a way that that we animate the strength here in here but well if you want to mask the if the effects separately that is then not possible but um if you have everything like at a weight of 100 you can then animate those um those parameters that you set up those um those uh morph targets that's actually also a pretty common technique that you create something like um that is called half shapes where you have one shape that is going from like the initial pose to your final pose and then you create something like a half shape that is mixed uh that will be mixed um into the whole thing uh when the strength is at 50 for example then the half shape would be mixed at 100 and once um you're approaching like 100 of weight of the primary shape um the secondary shape or half shape would then go down to zero percent again so there are various ways how you can animate and automate uh this stuff and espresso is a good um is a good um thing to do that like if you have those two shapes and you use a range mapper then this would allow you to define a precise graph on how you exactly want those to be mixed is there another question awesome so i'm actually i'm going through here uh that was the uh primary one that's we answered some of the other questions earlier regarding splines charles says wouldn't you just put the second spline into the pose morph and then animate the two sliders sorry can you repeat that let's see here he said uh charles says wouldn't you just animate the second spline in the pose morph or just put the second spline in the pose morph and then animate the two sliders and that's what we had what we had just uh yeah let's see would you have to use mograph for a spline for uh spline text for words so i would if you were doing words like this i would just use the the spline text yeah correct yeah same yeah awesome yeah that's all the questions for now cool so then let's continue and what i want to create is well pretty much the same as this one but i have two other splines and i already prepared them so you don't have to watch me creating these and i was already anticipating that we're going to be running out of time so i pre-created those so now i have two splines well let me first of all uh clean up the project here a little bit so this is uh the x here we go and these are my new splines and they have matching point counts and you can see that we have this inner one like the circle one and we have this outer one but what i want to do here is i want to adjust them in size a little bit so this one this one should be like a little bit smaller like so and the circle one let's make it like this size and then it's pretty much the same workflow here i'm going to go to rigging tags pose morph points and then in here i'm going to delete the post 0 and just throw in my waves as a relative morph target so i hit no and now i can blend between the two and i'm gonna get rid of the waves um spline because it's now also stored inside of the postmorph tag and then i'm gonna set this to animate mode and again i'm going to create a morph deformer and now you can also see that everything has been assigned automatically and now the interesting thing about this is um let me let me bring up the um the animation again that we have like multiple rings of this second one and that's the challenge here so what i can do is i can throw this into a cloner and this would create a shape like this or a clone pattern like this by default and what i want to do here is i want to set the mode to linear and then i'm going to get rid of the position y so i don't want to move them i just want to scale them so let me set this to let's say 140 by 140 by 140 maybe that's a little bit that's too much 130 by 100 to 30 by 130 that's okay and we're going to create multiple of these like seven and now the interesting thing is that we can create um a few fields here in the morph deformer and we're going to start with the box field again so once i create this box field you can see that i can now scale it and all of these clones here will be scaled or will be morphed at the same time that's not what i want and because what i want is i want one field to control the morph state of all of these rings but respecting their like initial size so what i have to do in order to do that i have to move out the box here from the hierarchy and now watch what happens if i scale this up that's a moment of satisfaction for me by the way it's definitely satisfying to watch it's pretty cool yeah so um yeah let's animate this i'm gonna start here i'm gonna select uh all sizes and let me yeah let me start at frame 24 something and then um yeah just go to another frame and scale this one up like so okay so now we don't only have this initial movement but we also have this secondary movement coming from those other objects okay so i'm quite happy with that but not a 100 percent so what i want to do now is i want to mask this whole thing so that even if it's even if it's um or when it's becoming um like morphed into the second state that we have less influence here on the outer ring than on the inner ring and i'm going to do that by selecting the morph deformer again and then i'm going to create a spherical field and i'm going to move it out of the hierarchy here and now we can set this up in the morph deformer and set the blending mode of the spherical field to multiply to mask the effect of the box field again and then i'm gonna scale up the spherical field like so so this is this is the maximum that i want to to have here but you can already see that well we have we have some some deformation here but these here are intersecting of course we can counter that by by adjusting the cloner but another thing we could do here in the spherical field is if we go to the remapping we can play with the inner offset and that's already doing quite the trick another thing we could do is we could go to the contour mode and adjust it to be quadratic and in here we can now make like a quadratic falloff like so so let's just assume we would be happy with this and i'm gonna make these two fields invisible yeah not too bad i have to adjust the timing a little bit especially the one of the box fields so here we need to make this keyframe so that it's starting at let's say frame 10 yeah that's looking better maybe even earlier a little bit later so yeah that's that's something um we can spend hours on like fine-tuning the timing and so on um yeah but let's assume we're happy here we just want to adjust the starting point because one thing that we see here is that even in the beginning there are these little waves here but only in this area and i want to show you how you could achieve something like that using the radial field so i also want to show you another way of creating this connection so i'm going to go to the fields menu and just create a radial field and then in this radial field i'm going to well first of all i'm going to throw it into the morph deformers fields list so that it's in here as well and right now it's set to normal that's okay for now and let's have a look at the radial field the radial field is actually a pretty powerful one because it allows you to create those radial transitions and we also have a parameter that is called iterations and if we set this to let's say two then we have two of these so let's have a look at this you can see that we have like this this sort of radial symmetry and then if we set it to four we are already halfway there so you can see that we have four segments here or not segments but four four parts and if we now go to the remapping we can go to contour mode curve and now if we adjust this curve let me bring this down to zero and bring it in to something like that and let's bring this one in as well and now create one point here in the middle and move it up and now you can see that we are creating exactly this um or that we that we are morphing exactly here um where we want it to morph so that we have this initial um uh yeah shape and in the morph deformer i'm going to set the radial field here to let's set it to max because then yeah that's looking great so this is always um using then the the maximum amount like one thing i see here is something i'm not very happy with so we have to fine tune the curve a little bit so let's do this here you can see it's coming from this one let's um yeah just get rid of this little corner so here we go great so now we have this animation and the last thing i want to show you well there are two more things that i want to show you actually is um how we can use these splines here now to deform a surface because if you have a look at this one those rings here are not splines those rings are actually like displacements on on a plane so let me first of all create a plane and i'm going to make it a little bit bigger and i'm going to rotate it by 45 degrees like so and well maybe yeah it can be a little bit smaller and then i'm gonna have a look at the segments and i'm gonna bring them up to 100 by 100 and now i'm gonna throw this whole thing into a remeasure because what i want to have here are little triangles uh very small ones so i'm gonna add a remesh generator here and instead of creating quads i'm going to create triangles and you can see that we now are getting this sort of shape and i'm going to bring up the mesh density to something like 2 000 let's wait for a second until it's calculated here we go and yeah now let's just make this editable and rename this background and the other stuff is our background splines group and i'm going to throw everything that we created before in here so now we've got x background splines and background great so now we have this and i want to displace this shape or this um this plane by using these splines here and the way i can do that well there are actually multiple ways of doing that um we could use a displacer or and that's the way i'm going to choose just to show you um that it's also possible i'm going to create a plane effector and in the plane effector i have to set up a few things so first of all in the deformer tab let me set this from off to point so now we are deforming points using a mograph effector and in the parameter tab i'm going to adjust the transform space from node node is the every single point in this case to effector which will use the effector axis so instead of going to the side it's now coming towards the camera to y direction and i'm going to bring this down to let's say 10 or even less so that we see the cross like so and now in the fields tab what i can do is i can drag and drop the cloner with those background circles in here and we need to make sure that we import it as a spline object so let's do this and now you can see that something happened let's have a look at the cloner so by default the distance mode is set to a long so we are creating a falloff along the spline that's not what we want what we want to have here is um a falloff that is based on the radius so let's do this and here you go now you can already see that we have a deformation going on that is pretty close to what we want and yeah i'm also pretty happy with the radius already the only thing i want to adjust here is the remapping so what i want to do is in the contour mode i'm going to set this to curve and then i'm going to extend the tangent of this one to make those waves more wavy so as you can see here it's a little bit um yeah for my taste it's a little bit too um well how can i say that it's it's not really a wave so i i want to have more of of um like this slowly coming into the wave and then i want this this sharper top here so i'm pretty happy with that and i'm going back to my parameter tab and i'm going to bring up the y let's say to four you can see if we really want to make this uh production ready we need to um crank up the the count of polygons uh in the remeasure before so maybe let's let's go down so that it's a little bit more beautiful we can also play with the phone angle to get rid of those artifacts like so and now we have the shape cool and well the last thing i want to show you here is actually how we can create a redshift material that allows us to um to have those tips of the waves to be golden and the rest to be um like gray unless there are questions before that we do have uh we do have one question a bunch of oohs and oz that was definitely a wizard moment that's great um one question here from uh from blair scott can you link one of the spline points to a null or point on another object and then deform that will then influence the second object so perhaps with with expresso um was the the last part of that there that should be possible that should be possible to a null or point or not an object yeah i mean you can create spline rigs and then play with those spline rigs in theory that should be possible yeah and then we have the one from russ here that just came in could this be done with the volume mesher as well um yeah i mean um you can have like any sort of object that is flat in this case and then um like create those splines and throw everything into a volume builder and then just use um use smooth filters on it it wouldn't be the very same look because in the volume builder i think you would lose the control over the slope exactly yeah but in general it's possible in general it's possible i mean you could also like throw the splines into um like an um what is the filter called into a or is it not the smooth but the yeah the dilate and the road or close and open because those are there to move like the the surface in normal direction and then these can be masked using fields here so that would also be possible in some cases though it's a good idea to instead of play with the offset to create like the the um the the change um in the surface along um the normals um not doing that by the offset but reducing the offset a little bit and instead going up with the iterations that most of the time leads to better results okay so let's jump into creating the materials or the one material here because we're already on top of the hour but i think the material we can still create so as always there are multiple ways how you can create that material well first of all i'm going to set the renderer here to redshift and then i'm going to create a new node material and open it up like so and well my first attempt was to do this with a vertex map and this is absolutely possible so you can create a vertex map onto the background object here and then in the vertex map use the very same field that you used in here that's no problem and can be done another thing that you can do is you can search for the curvature node and if we solo that one and start the ipr and first of all of course we have to assign the um the material you can see that we now have um have the very same shape but based on the curvature of this this object so we can increase the radius let's set it a little bit higher if we go too high it will be blurred away another thing we can do which is something i like um most of the time or many people i saw using um like note based materials in general is that they don't think of um color and anything else as data but everything in here can be used like in a mathematical calculation so if that's too dark if that gray is too dark you can simply use a multiplication node it's called mul and let's just um solo that one so right now everything is black because input two is set to zero of course everything that is multiplied by zero equals zero if we set it to one we have what we had before and if we set it to let's say 5 it's becoming much brighter and can be used as a mask for two materials so that's the way i ended up with because it was a little bit easier and i didn't have to create a vertex map so what i want to do in here now is i want to make this main material a little bit darker like so and actually one thing i don't like about this at the moment is that we don't have any lights in the scene therefore it won't look good at all so let's create an infinite light source like so and let's rotate it a little bit so i think i'm happy with that that's looking cool and also in the details i'm going to increase the softness of the shadows and the light and now you can see that we have a little bit more um like gloss in here but that's actually some something i don't want so i'm going to bring up the roughness here and you can see immediately that it's looking much better it's always a very good moment in a project when you start defining those shapes with light and so on i really love that so the second material that we need is a gold material so i'm just going to create a copy of that material here and for the sake of ease i'm just going to use the gold preset and now i want to blend those two materials together and i'm going to use a material blender for that so my main material base material is the first one and then i'm going to create a layer one with this material it's the gold material and this one is supposed to be used in here in the layer one blend color and now you can already see that we have golden edges up here of course at the moment it's not looking very good and this is because we don't have anything that can be reflected in this gold material so let's add a dome light and in this dome light i'm going to use a texture so let's go to the asset browser and search for hdr scroll down and let's see one of the studio ones should be fine this one here yeah look at this that's good it's just too bright so let's get down with the intensity because the main light is still supposed to be like the the infinite light that we created like so and well that's that's pretty much uh the thing um of course you can you can now fine tune it even more for your example we need some something to break up like these massive gray areas here so what we can do about that is for example we can add a noise and i'm going to solo it and let's set this noise to i think luca is quite good for this and make it bigger something like that and also adjust the colors do something like this oh yeah i think i'm happy with that throw that into the diffuse color and you can see that with everything that you add here it's getting better and better of course now we can also add some bump and all of that stuff but in general we are quite close let me save this and let's screw up the timeline a little bit so yeah although we don't have a material for for this guy yet um pretty good happy with that yeah so that's awesome uh so a couple questions here uh let's see is redshift now completely supporting c4d node based materials no there are still some some things that that are not supported like the substance for example and i believe well a few other things but usually those are edge cases and since i like the workflow with the cinema 4d note system a little bit better because you can do stuff like um so for example if you want to adjust or if you want to add a note in between here you can simply like for example let's add a ramp you can simply throw that onto the existing line um and so on um yeah i like the workflow with these nodes better i only use the other like the the redshift jadeograph when i really need something from that system but it's getting better and better awesome okay so there are a couple questions here about some of the small uh small things here in the project like the overlapping of of the primary x shape with the uh displacement rings if you will that are coming off of that and asking how you would go about fixing that uh in the gap that's in this in the lower right corner of the axe uh so actually i can let you handle i can let you handle that okay let's let's have a look at well the the thing with these rings not intersecting the x is actually something that is just happening here because i created those independently uh from each other and i just copy pasted the other splines in here that's why they are not matching in my previous projects when i tested this workflow it just worked because i created them in a way that they were really matching each other i mean one thing we could do here is um uh for example we could let's go to the x and where do we have this here we go the box field that's the one that we animated um i mean we can we can make it stop around here at this size so that it's not going too far we can also scale the whole thing down but in this case we need to make sure that we are in object scale mode or in object mode then we could do something like that that's actually looking much better and about this one here that's an interesting one but i think let's have a look all right so let's investigate a little bit so it seems like seems like the spline wasn't closed so where do we have it this one here close spline that should fix it [Music] fixed that was easy yeah let's render this again yeah now the gap is gone yeah i mean that's that's pretty much it are there any more questions uh let's see here all right substance is not native on m1 yet right uh let's see i would have to open in rosetta any eta not to my knowledge i think i think they still have to release something there but i'm not 100 sure so that's to be confirmed by um someone trying it out yeah i'm i'm not a mac user myself so i'm not exactly sure how that one awesome yeah i believe that's uh that's all the questions here cool that's great in this case i would um wrap up because uh yeah so simon had to leave in the meantime as i noticed um yeah whenever you want to come back to one of our webinars make sure you go to the maxon events page um if you go to the maxon website then under news events this is the page where you are going to land and here you can see all of the free webinars that we are i'm going to do um listed and of course if you missed one of our sessions um most of them are going to be hosted on the maximum training team youtube channel so here you can see um like the demystifying post-production webinars like the series that we are running today also as the trainer is here and so on so yeah then the next thing i again want to talk about simon mentioned it in the beginning we also have these little certification tests and also a bigger one so here you can take a free test which will take like one hour and you can assess yourself a little bit by doing this test and there's also the cinema for the basics comprehensive certification which is like more like a pro certification pro user certification and of course as mentioned in the beginning there is a pdf in the handout section of the go to webinar interface here and if you click that link and type in the capone code then you will come to this page and you can order one t-shirt for free you will only have to pay for the shipping which will be like three or four dollars euros depending on where you are so yeah that's it for today and i hope you enjoyed it see you next time everyone make sure you check out our other webinars and yeah bye everyone take care stay safe everyone thanks for coming you

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 21,971

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, C4D, Cinema 4D, Trapcode, Universe, VFX, Post production, tutorial, webinar, Magic Bullet, Redshift, Morphed Splines, mograph

Id: 3Da0M-DSK64

Length: 73min 47sec (4427 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022