C4D Pipes - Cinema 4D Tutorial (Free Project)

hey it's Dave from CG shortcuts today we're going to do this we're creating looping animated pipes in cinema 4d this video was brought to you by a skill share where you can get access to over 25,000 full courses on a huge range of subjects the class is a project based and teachers take you through all the steps in creating each project and when you're done you can share your work with teachers and the student community for feedback and support we've actually got three CG shortcuts courses on there now with new courses being released regularly covering a bunch of stuff we don't usually go into on YouTube so if you want to test out skill share there's a link below for a free two month trial that will give you access to the entire catalog of courses including the courses from CG shortcuts so you can see if it's right for you now let's get back to the tutorial okay here we are in cinema 4d and the first thing we want to do is come up here to the render settings we want to change this to 1920 by 1080 and we want 24 frames per second for the frame rate then we'll close that and hit control D on the keyboard to bring up the project settings and we just want to make sure our frames per second matches here so we want that to be 24 as well we also want to create a looping animation that loops every 5 seconds so let's come down here and we'll type 24 as in 24 frames a second times 5 and now we've got 120 frames and we're ready to get started so the first thing we want to do is draw out a spline for our pipe to follow so we'll come up here and grab our pen tool and we can probably do this a bit easier if we turn on our snapping so let's click here and enable snap then we'll click again and we'll turn on work plane snap and we'll go in there one more time and turn on the grid point snap and rather than drawing it in our perspective view lets middle mouse click to bring up all of our different views and it's probably easiest if we start drawing this over in the front view so we'll click our middle mouse button again to go into that window and now that we've got our snapping you'll notice when we hover over the grid now cursor is sticking to the grid points so this should make drawing this out nice and easy so let's give it a go I'll start by putting a point down here then maybe one up here then we could go over here maybe one down here and then if we switch to the top view we can have this going back in the Z direction the shape you make here is entirely up to you you can have it as complex as you like but we're just going to keep it nice and simple you just want to make sure that you keep enough space between these lines so that they don't overlap each other and judging by the perspective view I think we're just about done here let's just go to our front view and we'll add one final point down here okay let's switch back to our move tool and we'll go back to our perspective view and there's our very basic pipe shape and we might just turn the seam grid off now so we can see this a bit better we'll come up to filter and just untick grid okay so we can change these points if we like as long as the point selection mode is activated up here let's maybe move this guy down a little bit further and I think that will do us for now feel free to create any shape you like the next thing we want to do is create the tubing to go around our pipe shape here so we'll come up here and we're going to use the tube which comes in pretty massive to begin with so the first thing we want to do is scale this down so let's go and tweak the outer radius something like that although we might just make this an even 25 and I think I tubes a bit too thin so we'll tweak the inner radius as well maybe try 19 something like that and now we want a whole bunch of these guys so with it selected we'll come up to the mograph menu and we'll bring in a cloner so forget to hold alt so it's automatically applied and you can see up here it's become a child and we're getting our clones going up in the y-direction which is actually exactly what we want we can come down to our Y value here and change how those are offset from each other we can also bring up the count here so we've got a whole bunch of these and if you wanted to get rid of the gap in between each one of these clones we just need to figure out how tall our tube is so if we grab it you can see the height is a hundred centimeters so if we go back to our cloner we want the value in the y-direction here to match so we'll make that 100 and now those are fitting together perfectly and we can check that if we come up to display and turn the lines on and there you go I think I actually do prefer it with a bit of a gap in here so let's just bring that up and it might be easier to see if we turn those lines off again there's a little bit of a gap let's bring this up a little bit more okay about 103 it looks pretty good so the next thing we want to do is alternate the colors on here so let's come down here and double-click in our material palette to create a new material and we'll give that guy a nice reddish color then we'll do the same again but this guy will make a bluish color and one more this guy can be a bit of a yellowy color and then we'll come up and grab our tube and holding ctrl we'll drag it out here to create a duplicate and we want three of these all up then we'll apply each of these colors to each of our tubes like so and now we've got our alternating colors and materials so the next step is to wrap this guy along our spline and we can do that up here with a deformer called the spline wrap and bringing that in gives you this yellow box it's actually asking for a spline to wrap to we just so happen to have a spline so let's grab that and put that in here and now we need to tell it what to wrap to our spline so that's going to be our cloner and we need to do this in a particular order so with our cloner selected we'll hit alt G on the keyboard to group it and we can rename that null to something like pipes and if we open that and just close that one we need to put that spline wrap between the pipes null and our cloner like this which gives us a pretty crazy result at first but that's just because our axis is set incorrectly we just need to cycle through these until it starts look right alright positive way is looking good if we zoom in a tad you can see that's wrapping along our spline quite nicely now and it's finally starting to look like some pipes but we might want to round these edges out a little bit so we can probably start by fixing our spline let's just hide this for a second if we grab that guy we need to figure out a way to round off these pointy edges so with our point mode selected we can hit ctrl a on the keyboard to select all the points then if we right-click we have an option down here called chamfer which is going to allow us to round off those corners and to do that we just need to click and drag anywhere away from our object here and you can see how those corners are subdividing and smoothing out let's just undo that this might be a bit easier to see with our pipes on again now if we click and drag to chamfer again you can see we are getting these rounded edges but our pipes are still looking pretty chunky and that's because we probably don't have enough geometry in here so we'll undo that and we'll come back up here and turn the lines back on and you can see we don't have any subdivisions going this way so our tubes are unable to deform around that corner but that's an easy fix let's just come over and grab our tubes then down here under height segments we need to bring this way up and as we do you can see that extra geometry in there allows us to hug those corners a bit tighter so let's try a value of about 30 and hopefully that will give us a nice smooth result so we'll go back to our spline and we'll right click again and make sure we've got chamfer selected now if we click and drag we can get those nice smooth rounded corners and now our pipes are starting to come together we probably don't need those lines on anymore so let's come back up to display and switch those off and you might remember from our example we actually had all of these pipe segments at different sizes so how do we go about doing that if we were to just grab these tubes and resize them let's try making the height of that 150 and we'll grab the next one here and we'll make that 20 we've now got all these big gaps here and if we try to fix that why maybe going to the cloner and just bringing up the count they come closer but we can never quite fill these gaps up so let's undo that we need to find a way to stack these all up closer together if we turn that spline wrap off you can see that our clones aren't even coming close to each other here but lucky for us someone's figured out exactly how to fix this with a nifty bit of Python code if you go to a torture com forward slash pileup effector you can get this awesome Python script by Arturo Chow and I'm sure my pronunciation is way off there so sorry to everyone in Finland but nonetheless artoo has made an amazing script that you can download for free and basically it lets you stack all your clones together so download the cinema 4d file and you'll find the Python code as an object inside it and while you're here make sure you check out his other posts he's got loads of more cool stuff you can download and he's also got some amazing work on here so check it out and I'll see you back in cinema 4d ok so I brought that pile up script into our scene here now we just need to apply it to Al cloner and we do that exactly the same way we would with a normal mograph effector if we click on our cloner and go to the effectors tab we just need to drag it into here so we'll grab that and pull on him into here and now all of our clones are stacking up nicely let's go and take a little look at our pileup script here you can see it's working straight away because we've got the access set to Y here but we've also got options for the x axis or the z axis if you wanted to stack them in a different direction but obviously we want ours going up here so we'll leave that on Y and if we want a bit of a gap between each one of these we've got the option down here so let's just maybe set that to three and we'll zoom in and I think that's looking pretty good we could probably fill up the edges of our tubes here to make them look a little bit more interesting so we'll grab all of those and we'll come down here and switch this on then we'll try one segment and one for the radius and if we zoom in there might be a little bit too big maybe we'll bring that radius down to 0.5 okay I'm happy with that so next we need to wrap this back around our spline here so we can go and turn our spline wrap back on and that's starting to look pretty cool but we might just tighten those gaps up a little bit we go back here let's bring that down to maybe 1 okay so the next step is to animate this and to do that we'll come up to the mograph menu and we'll bring in a shader effector and we'll use our shader effector to drive the scale of our tubes so they can stretch out along our spline but first we actually have to apply it to our cloner if we grab this guy you can see we only have the pile up in our effectors list here so we need to grab that and we'll bring it down here where we actually need it to affect our cloner before the pileup so we need to put it in at the top and that way our animation will be affected by the pileup as well and you can see we're already getting some scaling happening in here and that's because if we go back to our shader we've already got some scaling values in here but rather than scaling uniformly we actually only want to scale these in the y-direction so they stretch out so let's uncheck the uniform scale and we'll just bring up the Y value here let's just try a value of 3 and so they're not so spread out here let's go back to our cloner and we'll turn up the count so we can bring in some more clones let's try 80 okay that's looking good so now we can animate this so we'll go back to our shader effector and under the shading tab we're going to drive this animation with some noise so we'll click here and grab a noise then we'll go into our noise and there's plenty of settings you can change here but the ones we're most concerned about is the animation speed and the loop period so we'll start by turning the animation speed up let's just try that at 1 for now and if we give that a play there's our animation but you'll notice when it gets to the end we get a bit of a jump we need our animation to loop at that point so we need to add the loop period if you remember we have 120 frames here which is 5 seconds at 24 frames a second so we need to tell it how many seconds we want the loop to be so we'll put a 5 in to the loop period and now if we play that back now our animation carries on and when we get to the end it starts looping and that's really the basics of this effect there's a few more things we could do to spruce this up firstly we could extend our pipes all the way along this spline because right now it's ending over here so to fix that we'll go up to the cloner and all we need to do is just tweak the y-axis here and that should sort things out let's give that a play and we'll just change the camera view here and it seems to fix that so we could make this a little bit more interesting by having our tube scale in all directions so if we go back to our shader effector and back down here if we put a value in the x-axis and we'll have to do these z axis as well so these don't squish up like that so we'll put a 1 in there as well and now we play that back and I think that's looking a bit more interesting this is the look I went with in my final render another thing I decided to do was that I wasn't too happy with the purple red yellow repeating pattern and you can make this a lot more random if we go back to the cloner we can change the Clones mode here from iterate to random and now we're getting some of these clumping up and it just looks a bit more interesting and if you're thinking there's too many blue ones or red ones together we can always come back over here and play with the seed value if we just cycle through this we can keep going until we get a look that we're happy with something like that and we're also not just limited to using tubes in here we can actually use any object we want if we come up here and bring in something like a torus then if we scale that guy down a bit that there and move that into the mix here and although it's been a bit squish there we now have it cloning along with the rest of our pipe and we can just scale that down a bit something like that that's looking cool and we could even give it its own color we make another material here let's make this guy a nice bright green and apply that to our Taurus we can quickly and easily integrate that into our animation and that brings us to the end of this tutorial as usual you can download the project file below to save a bit of time and if you want to get hold of the octane render ready project file so you can see exactly how I set up my final render you can grab that from our patreon page okay so before we wrap things up it's time to reveal our next monthly art challenge this month we have some epic new prizes to give away to our winners including render farm credits from drop and render for use in cinema 4d these guys give you lightning-fast renders and support pretty much every plug-in out there as well as CPU and GPU rendering so this is huge winners will also receive subscriptions to the quick saw me gas cans online library of 4k materials and 3d scanned models these subscriptions also give you access to the quick selects or bridge and quick saw mixer so you'll be able to take your renders to the next level so to be eligible to win all this great stuff you just need to create an artwork that features this month's mystery object and our mystery object for September is an umbrella so make sure your renders and CG creations feature and umbrella and you're in for a chance to win don't forget the judges are looking for the most creative use of the mystery object along with technical skill and overall creativity you can get full details at cg shortcuts com forward slash umbrella and don't forget to join our Facebook group for regular updates and to enter the challenge officially starts on the 1st of September but you guys get a little head start just make sure your entry is tagged hashtag cg shortcuts and hashtag umbrella and that you submit by the 25th of September good luck and I'll catch you next time 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: 133,844

Keywords: Cinema 4D Pipes, C4D Pipes, Shader Effector, Pipe Modeling in Cinema 4D, Looping animation, c4d, cinema 4d, animate, tutorial, mograph, tutorial animation, c4d loop, Pile up Effector, motion graphics, octane, cg shortcuts, 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

Id: 8QPNzU8DrGY

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Kabeeshs]

Wow. Wonderful tutorial.. I love it.