C4D Flag Looping with Cloth - Cinema 4D Tutorial (Free Project)

hey it's Dave from CG shortcuts today we're gonna do this we're creating a looping flag in cinema 4d so we're going to start things off in Adobe Illustrator this time basically we just want to design the overall shape of our flag and I find it a lot easier to draw this out in Illustrator we're going for the tattered flag look today and if we grab our point selection tool and hit ctrl a you can see how many points there are here it's nice and detailed if you were to try to draw this out with the spline tools in cinema 4d it would take forever so feel free to design your own flag here or you can just use the one that's included in the project files so in easy ways to get this into cinema 4d is to just come up here and choose save as then pick a file location and when this menu pops up make sure up here under version you change illustrator CC to illustrator 8 and that should import nice and easy we'll hit OK and I'll meet you over in cinema 4d welcome back I'm just gonna go up screen here and grab our illustrator file that we've just made and drag that on here when this menu pops up make sure connect splines is selected we'll hit OK and there's our vector art as a spline we might need to do some cleanup so let's come up here and pop this open and see what we've got looks like we've got a few paths here let's click on one of these and we'll zoom in here sometimes you get a few stray points I think in this case we'll just get rid of these so 6 7 8 and 9 as well let's grab all those and hit delete then our path 1 seems to be what we need let's drag that out of there and delete that null and we'll rename that flags flying ok I like to work from the center of the world so let's come down to coordinates and we'll set these all to 0 so it's right in the middle of our scene and we'll frame that up and now we want to turn our spline into a mesh that we can work with so with it selected we'll come up here and we'll grab an extrude remember to hold alt so it's automatically applied and it's come in a bit too thick we want this to be nice and flat like a flag should so we'll grab that extrude and down under object you can see this is the z-axis we'll bring that down to zero so it's just as flat as abnormal plane would be so it doesn't actually have any depth it just has that front surface now if we come up here under display and turn our lines on you'll see that there isn't any we're going to need a bit of geometry in here because we're going to be deforming this as cloth so let's go over to the caps tab in our extrude object and then down here where it says type we want to change that from end guns to quadrangles which looks a bit crazy at first but if we come down to regular grid and switch that on you can see our geometry over here is a lot more even and that should work quite nicely for our flag so the next step is to convert all this into a single mesh so we can start our animation if we go up and right click on our extrude and down here we'll select current state to object which will create a new single mesh for us so we'll get rid of this old stuff delete that and we'll grab our new geometry and rename that to flag one and there's a reason we've put a 1 on there which you'll see later on in the tutorial and well here let's hit alt G on the keyboard to put this in a null and we'll rename that to flag so we can keep all this nice and tidy ok let's zoom out a little bit and we'll quickly add a flagpole over to the side here we'll keep it nice and simple for this tutorial let's just come up here and we'll grab a cylinder and it's just a matter of repositioning this and grabbing this one we can stretch it out and move it down and we can adjust the radius by grabbing this outside dot and just scaling that in a little bit now that's all looking a bit more flag like let's reposition that and we'll quickly go up here and rename our cylinder to pole and we'll drag that down under our flag null ok let's turn our flag geometry into a dynamic cloth we'll grab it and under tags come down to simulation tags and at the bottom here we'll grab it cloth now if we hit play straight out of the box it just falls straight down let's rewind that so the first step is going to be fixing some of these vertex points so they look like they're attached to our pole so we'll come over and hit this button to switch into point mode and then will come up to the selection button here and make sure we've got live selection selected I think selecting points might be easier in the front view so if we just middle mouse button click then down here is the front view and one middle click again to get into that let's reposition this and zoom in a bit now all we want to do is click and drag to paint these points we'll put some there I'm down to the middle and down the bottom and then maybe some spots in between each of those zoom in a bit here yeah something like that cool so those points will be locked off and hopefully that gives us an interesting effect let's go back to our perspective view and if we click on our cloth tag and underdress up with those points selected we just want to click set for fix points and now if we give that a play we've got a lot of geometry here so it's going to run pretty slow but you can kind of see those points are stuck in position now okay let's just pause that for now and rewind and see if we can figure out a way to make this seem a bit faster one option we have is over here under the expert tab we can bring the subsampling down to one and we'll give that a go and that's definitely sped things up a bit pause that and rewind another thing we can do is go back to the tag tab and bring those iterations down we'll try 50 and give that a play and that's much faster and we'll pause that this might be a bit easier to see if we come up to display and turn our shading back on and then over here we'll switch back to object mode and you can see all those nice details in our cloth before we go too far with our simulations it's probably a good idea to set up our scene let's go up to the project settings here and we'll change our output to 1920 by 1080 and this time we're going to go for 24 frames a second let's close this window and if we hit control D will change our project settings to 24 frames per second as well then we'll come down to our timeline we want a few more frames to play with let's put 400 in here and stretch that out alright now we're ready to go let's go back to our cloth tag and down under the forces tab this time let's give our flag a bit of wind let's try 10 centimetres in the x-direction and five centimetres in the z direction bring that strength up to 20 and let's try this without turbulence we'll put 0 in both of those then we'll turn that air resistance up to 10 and hit rewind and play and if your simulation is suddenly really slow again I think it might be a bit of a bug if we pause that and go back to our tag tab you'll see that our iterations have magically gone back up again let's bring that back down to 50 every wine and play and now it's nice and fast again it does look a little bit springy though so that's pause that and over here on deflection let's bring that right down to zero maybe bring that bounce down to 10 and we'll give that a go it's looking a bit better it's still a bit too stretchy looking for my liking let's pause that and if we come over to the forces tab let's try bringing that drag up to 4% let's give that a try okay cool that's good enough for now I think let's pause that if your folds are looking a bit jaggedy we can always come up and grab our flag and then over here we'll bring in a subdivision surface remember to hold alt when you click it so it's automatically applied and that's looking a lot smoother ok now that we're ready to finalize our simulation we can probably come back to our cloth tag and back in the tag tab we can bring those iterations back up to something like 600 just to make our final simulation a little bit more accurate let's rewind and now we want to cache our 400 frames so under the cache tab all we have to do is hit calculate cache you'll get a little warning pop-up and just press yes and it'll start caching those frames could take a couple of minutes so we'll come back when it's ready okay so when that's all done you can see over here that it's cashed successfully and if we hit play the playback speed is much faster because it doesn't have to calculate anything anymore it's just reading from the disk and we can speed it up even more by disabling that subdivision surface and that's pretty much our flag animation sorted let's see if we can figure out a way to make it loop if we let it get to the end you can see it doesn't yet let's pause that again and rewind also with the cache you can choose to save if you want to save it as an external file okay let's make this loop the first step is grabbing our flag one and holding ctrl will drag that up there to make a duplicate let's rename that flag - and we'll duplicate it one more time and we'll just call this one flag main we don't need that cloth tag on this one so let's delete that and we'll just hide the other two for now if we go down hit play now you'll see that our flag main is back to the original shape that we had when we built this without any animation and if we go back up and hide this again and bring our flag to back this is the duplicate of the flag one with our cached animation built in but what we want to do is come back to the cloth tag now we put a little feature in here where we can offset the animation so if we bring this back negative three hundred frames and play that through you can see we're just playing the last 100 frames before it stops which makes sense because it's gone back 300 frames so to get our looping animation we just need to blend our start and end animations flag one and flag two and to do that we'll have them both driving our flag main with the use of a pose morph and you can find that guy under tags character tags and the areas pose morph alright because we're going to have a hundred frames overlapping we want to bring the total frame number down to 300 so 100 frames left back in our pose morph we want to tick points because the points are what we have animated so pose zero is our current flat pose which is how our flag main is right now but we want to bring in flag one and just hit yes here and flag to same deal and yes again and you can see how flags change now and that's because if we click on animate here it's adopting the point positions of flag number two and if we bring that down you can see it reverts back to its initial pose let's bring this one down to zero as well and we'll play this ahead a few frames and hopefully I can give you a better idea of what's happening here if we unhide both of these and spin around a little bit we want our flat flag which is flag main this guy to morph its points to flag one and flag two and if we come down and bring the slider up its morphing to flag one and if we're bringing flag two up its morphing the flag two so if we go back to the start we want it to assume the shape of flag two so let's bring those down and add a keyframe and we'll go back up and hide the animated flags so we can just see our pose morphed flag let's just get this into position somewhere like that now while we're on frame 0 we'll set a keyframe for flag 1 we want to slowly bring this on while fading out flag - so at frame 100 we'll set flag 1 to 100% and flag 2 to 0 and keyframe both of those now if we play that back from the start you should see a seamless transition from one flag to the next and if we let that play all the way through we shall get a nice seamless loop ok that wasn't quite as seamless as I'd hoped for I don't think cinema 4d is refreshing the frame quick enough but we can fix that let's go back to the start and over here under the basic tab in our pose morph we just want to change our priority to initial and that should force it to update and hopefully give us a nice smooth transition ok everything is looking good so far and as we come to the loop point seamless also if you want it to be a bit smoother don't forget to come back up here and turn on that subdivision surface again and there we go we've got our looping animated flag of course you can go back to the cloth tags and play around with it to get a different look but I think that will take us to the end of this week's tutorial as usual you can download the project files below to save a bit of time and you can find a whole bunch of extra stuff on our tree on page thanks for watching let me know what you want to say in the comment section below or you can leave a like or dislike and don't forget to subscribe and click on that little bell icon for more videos and free stuff catch you next time [Music]

Channel: CG Shortcuts

Views: 65,149

Rating: 4.9509563 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, tutorial, mograph, tutorial animation, motion graphics, octane, cg shortcuts, Game of Thrones, GOT, cg, free project, template, cinema4d, animation, 3d, motiongraphics, motiondesign, 3d animation, cgi, rendering, design, graphics, dave bergin, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, maxon, cgshortcuts, animated, render, intros, 4d, cinema, blender, effects, 3dsmax, 3dmax, model, models, animate, Stark

Id: f4PHXTqlGu4

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018