Chris Schmidt @ NAB 2020 | Maxon Cinema 4D

[Music] hi everybody I'm Chris MIT from rocket lasso and I was started out with a big THANK YOU to Matthias and to Maxon for putting this entire show on and inviting me to participate again on c4d live our pseudo nab should be really fun and I'm looking forward to this presentation I've been looking forward to this idea for a while the idea actually originated as a question in one of my live streams I do a live stream called rocket lasso live every week on Twitch and on YouTube where I just take questions live from the audience we try and create things primarily in cinema 4d and there was a rag doll question that started there Brocket lasso was a company started about a year ago me and my brothers started it were hard at work on tools and plugins primarily for cinema 4d working on tutorials and like I said I do the live streams and it's just a lot of fun and I hope everybody comes and checks it out I have a patreon set up if anybody sees anything that they like here all of the scene files I'm creating are going to be available for anybody supporting at any level on patreon but without further ado let's take a look at some other things so that we're going to be tackling obviously we're gonna be creating some rag dolls and here you can see we're going to be implementing some nice realistic characters in here and I think it's actually a pretty straightforward technique for getting them fully integrated I'm actually kind of shocked at how simple that is some of the techniques just get really nuts where I've been trying to push the technique a little bit further and you can kind of see here the raw dynamics but you know you can take that implement it and start making the fancier versions of ever I don't know it's just a really open technique and I'm really excited to see where everybody goes with this all right here we are in Simba for the r21 I've got a scene file prep just so we have a little bit of texture a little bit of lighting so we're not looking at a blank gray screen the entire time now we're gonna begin with a figure it's great because first of all everybody has access to it and second of all the scale of this is going to match everything that comes in from mixed-mode probably because both are based off of the average height of a human we get this figure I want to see the polygons okay and B we want to make this as low poly as possible so I'm actually gonna drag this all the way down let's drag that and okay maybe that's a little too low poly we want a little bit of detail enough to fill out the form so I'm gonna tick it up take it up again there we go that's pretty good so very low poly but we're not really wasting any and of course the fewer objects the fewer polygons and the quicker everything's gonna run especially we're gonna be cloning a whole bunch of them we will make this editable it's gonna explode out to a bunch of pieces if I lay on control or command its I hit plus it'll actually expand everything out you see all the different pieces involved in the character and that's looking great but there's a lot of pieces here we don't need all of these so we use a function we don't use too often I'm gonna select the bottom on hold on shift so like the top one and then we can right-click we're gonna do a function that we don't use too often and that is going to be ungroup objects we click on that and now everything's been pulled out of the group it's gonna make it easier to select all of the different elements and now I can grab my rectangle selection and just drag and grab a whole rectangle and now it's gonna be grabbing the floor so I'm gonna temporarily hide that floor and I'm going to select the entire hand like that you see we get two different pieces and the way we're gonna build building this we don't need both of those to be separate objects I'm just gonna right click and say connect and delete we're gonna do the same thing with every relevant pair of objects here so grab those right click connect and delete we'll do it with these right click connect and delete the upper leg connect and delete the knee and the shin right click connect and elite and the foot right click connect and delete and two more we got the torso and the little waist I'm gonna make those as one object connected delete and we got the head and the neck can also be treated as a single one connect and delete now we're only gonna work with off of half of this model because hopefully we can save ourselves a little bit of time later not needing the entire collection in addition to that we got a couple extra objects here that aren't doing anything we got this effector that's an empty object right foot effector essentially anything named effector that's not doing anything it's empty geometry head effector don't need that and let's see is that everything Oh figure that's an empty one it's an empty polygon object now essentially in L there we go now you see we've actually knocked this down the very few objects we don't have to worry about that many of them so with that in mind let's immediately make them dynamic select everything right click simulation rigidbody I'm gonna copy one of those rigid body tags over to the floor and now it should be ready to hit play and everything falls apart that's that's great it's fun to play with dynamics and cinema but obviously this is just the very beginning now I want to add as much clarity to this setup as we can I want to get so much information as we can because it is a fairly technical setup I think it's pretty straightforward and hopefully this will be explained in a way that that everybody can follow along but we do have to be very specific and anything we can do to add clarity to our testing and our building is a good thing so I prepped just the generic checkerboard material here so yeah this is the checkerboard and we're going to apply that to everything in fact I'm just actually um why don't we create a null I'm create a null and we'll name this a rag doll and make all of our geometry a child of that and that way we don't have to apply a tag to every object we can just apply it directly to the top and they'll filter down to all of them so you get that rag doll it's gonna show us the rotation a little bit but you know what to tell you the truth I would like to see it even more clear so I'm gonna select all of our geometry grab our live selection tool and I'm gonna select all of the polygons that are front-facing very quickly let's see you grab those I guess we can grab that even on the hand even on the leg and this believe me this is going to be very useful to us later on spending this little bit of extra time is totally worth it and I missed one grab that excellent so we've got all of those polygons now we can create a selection tag so we'll say selection sets selection and if I were to grab this just green luminous material I'm gonna drag that also onto the rag doll it's gonna apply to everything but we made all these tags and all the same name so if I grab that material and drag the tag it'll automatically override that you can see that now we have a nice stripe down the front of so it's very easy to tell what the front of these are and if they're twisting in a way that we don't want them to excellent all right so all these objects are dynamic if we hit play they're all gonna fall apart and we can see them very clearly there's actually a really good step to save the scene file so let's do that and let's go on and start getting some control over this now if they're all just gonna fall apart it's gonna be very difficult to see what's happening so I actually want to take the pelvis select its dynamics to AG and inside of there I'm gonna go to the dynamics tab and I don't want it to be dynamic anymore gonna say dynamic off and that means it's still dynamic it's just isn't gonna be affected by gravity it's stuck in the same place and everything else is gonna kind of bounce off of it but that kind of gives us a foundation to connect everything to and when it comes to things like character animation it's like the movement originates in the hips so that's why we're using that as our base so with that in mind we need to why don't we order this up a little bit we'll make a little bit cleaner so we're in start with the pelvis go up to the upper body that will then go to the head and then from there we can take the upper arm lower arm left hand will move those up and then though the leg and foot will be last just a little bit more organized so first thing we want to do is actually connect the upper body to the pelvis we can do that in a pretty straightforward way using a simulate dynamics connector if you've never played with connectors or only use them in the most basic way they're actually incredibly powerful and I've actually learned a lot about them in this last year and especially in the time of putting this presentation together and I highly recommend going deep on them now we're gonna begin that by actually what I'd like to do is adapt the position of the upper body that's what we're gonna be pivoting from so I'm gonna make it a child of that and we can click the reset PS R button which is up here in the interface now you see that's gonna reset and can be perfectly lined up there nice now I actually enjoy putting the connector in kind of the parent object it's like the parent that this pelvis is going to drive the upper body so I'm gonna make it a child of that you don't have to it's just a way of me being organized with that in mind we want to grab the connector I'm gonna drag the pelvis in the top because that's a start the top was kind of like like I said the parent and the bottom is gonna be what is getting connected so those two should now just by doing that should be connected and when I play we should see that that tap part is now stuck to this other one but it's it's passing right through and it's falling down with gravity so not exactly what we want in addition to that this is a hinge connector there's a lot of different types of connectors and they're really powerful they each do their own unique thing well we're aiming to do here is build the most robust but simplest kind of combination of settings and connections to make to make the best rag doll that we can in this time our connector in this case is going to be a rag doll we're gonna be using a lot of those so this rag doll connection is going to enable it to move anywhere within this cone I'm gonna hit R for rotate and spin this up exactly 90 degrees holding around shift is going to enable you to rotate it properly in that orientation now here's something I did not know for a really long time and is incredibly important is a lot of connector types they should not be perfectly on the axis of the object it doesn't know what to do if it's exactly on the axis if you ever played you ever done like I can ring and you've ever tried to build like an elbow or knee and it suddenly is backwards it's that same idea it doesn't know which way is forward unless we give it an idea of which way is forward what I'm actually gonna do is take this connector and I'm gonna scoot it down just a little bit and the instant I scoot it down in fact I can undo when I scoot it down just a little bit you're certainly gonna see the cylinder pop up and that cylinder is kind of representing the direction of you know these two objects combined and you see that that is existing inside of this cone the cone it's kind of like a thing you put on a dog in a head surgery so it can only move within that cone and it the cylinder has to be upward to be able to move within this cone and when this is perfectly lined up it doesn't know if it's inside the cone or outside or what it's orientation is so now it's properly lined up and I want to hammer this home it's really important it's messed me up a lot of times that is now upward and we're trapped in this cone so if I hit play then now you see the torso falls over and it's being stuck inside of this cone so that is excellent we have a lot of control with that and I want to push this as far as we can I want give the raggle a lot of freedom to bend in a lot of crazy ways so inside of this connector we're gonna increase its radius all the way up to almost a full 90 degrees it's as high as it can go and now it can be anywhere essentially on that half of the plane so we're gonna want to be a pretty organized here so I'm gonna rename this upper body and that becomes our connector there now it's currently just falling down and we want it to have a little bit more control in order to do that we are going to use some Springs now I did not respect Springs enough in the beginning I kind of ignored them I didn't I needed them but they are awesome I'm gonna go ahead and actually as a way of saving time and being a little bit more organized I'm gonna make a child of this upper body that way I kind of know okay it is doing the same connection that that upper body is I can hit reset PSR and can jump up there that's actually not needed but why don't we go ahead and drag in the same objects so the pelvis and the upper body and those are now connected now currently we are on a linear spring but there's two different types of Springs there's also a angular spring and the angular spring is you know you can kind of see it's like if you twist something one way it's gonna want spring back like a little watch kind of mechanism mechanism so with that in mind first I want to make sure that I do the reference axis and you see there's aiming up on Z so I'm gonna set that to Z I I'm not a hundred percent on that but it does seem to help so just by applying that we hit set rest length where you see the set the rest length is going to be already at zero because that isn't rotated at all but if they were at different rotations that would do something and if I play we should hopefully see that the torso is not spinning around backwards anymore our Green Line is trying to stay lined up now we could push that further by doing things like increasing our stiffness if I crank that up to 11 then well actually well yeah that's a good demonstration of it I tend not to like cranking up the stiffness because when you crank up the stiffness it it can get a little bit twitchy because it's trying really hard to get to a direction but it's almost a 90 degree rotation so it doesn't know how it should orient itself so there are there are limitations on how far you can push a spring alone a rotate an angular Spring especially so that should be trying to get it to have the proper rotation but it's not gonna keep us vertical so let's make a copy of it here's a second spring and let's just call this this at just spring is actually fine we'll just call it a spring actually it'll be the spring position so it's trying to keep this kind of straight so I'm gonna change that from angular angular back to linear and you can see there's a connection from one section to the other if I play oh actually and really important the rest length we have to say set rest length so currently there is a distance of about 29 units in between those two if I play it just falls down it's not doing too much but if we start increasing that stiffness let's jump it up to five you can see now that it's attempting to keep these at a certain distance now there's a lot of different ways of using these Springs that I have found and the way I would have done it in the past and it is super valid is to take the rest length and make it longer so typically I would double its I'm gonna say times two and it's gonna double that and now the spring essentially thinks it should be twice as long as we can visually see it and that's what's trying to get to so even with the stiffness at one if I play you can see it's trying really hard to keep upright and there's a nice springiness to it so that is a super valid thing to do is just increase your rest length but there's a different technique that I've found is a little bit more controllable and art correctable and that is we're gonna change this from center of mass which is currently just trying to find the middle of the dynamic body we're gonna change both of these to offset so it is set looking for the offset looking for the offset now by default at zero it just means it's gone to the access point it's snapping to the axis but I'm gonna grab the pelvis and I'm gonna say actually I want you up here near the tip of the torso right where that would be ending and then I'm gonna grab the offset of the body and I'm gonna also move that up to about that same point I'm just gonna eyeball it you could be very precise if you want to but if I had set rest length you can see that the rest length is incredibly small so with everything at defaults with a stiffness and damping this spring that this torso is being connected to a spring that is connected to the pelvis and the pelvis is saying like hey I've got a point up here in space and that's where I'm trying to get you to wherever the pelvis rotates to that's where it's offset is going to live so even if it rotated it would be up there and it's kind of putting this torso the top of the torso on a very short leash so if I have play even at these default settings you can see and ignore that spinning that that's that is behaving correctly but you can see that's actually staying very very upright it's very controlled we have very precise control over I want you to go there and what's great about this is actually instead of increasing the stiffness which can introduce some sort of jitter we actually lower this I can say like point to and now you can see that it is free to wiggle around a little bit at an even lower number so that is a that's a very good start and as we go it's going to be changing the dynamics of the way it's set up so I'm not gonna worry too much about all the little specifics as we go step by step by step but I just wanted to make it clear how that is connecting now now that that's being sprung forward you can more clearly see that this rotational this angular spring is keeping the correct rotation it is facing its facing pretty forward but I know for a fact that later on once we start dropping this and applying different forces this angular spring is not going to be enough so even if we're not gonna see the effect very strongly right now we are going to build in the slightly a slightly different system that should help us out here and that is going to be creating a copy of our spring art you know our position spring here so I'm gonna rename that and we're gonna rename this one spring forward and what this is going to do is the same idea we're going to offset let's reset these actually we're gonna offset this so let's say the pelvis is going up here you know you know about the halfway point or a little bit up the torso keep in mind that this little middle section is also part of the upper part and then let's see I'm okay I got this so I'm gonna scoot this forward just by offsetting I'm gonna pull it pretty far forward maybe like two or three times the width of the Baudette we're seeing and then I'm going to grab the upper body and I'm gonna scoot that one up a little bit and also offset it about maybe about half way the distance this is just kind of my current work flow like this is not to say it's the best way of doing it but I've gotten very reliable results from this and I think the basic idea here would be that it's it's pivoting you saw up here we really locked into position but here we're giving it a little bit of room there's a little bit of wiggle room on ER there there's little bit of length so this could actually rotate and pivot a little bit and still have control it will have control but can it can have a little more freedom to rotate so just by doing that we now have a spring that's saying hey there's a kind of a like a floating point in front of this body and that floating point is always trying to stay connected to the spring at set rest length this distance so that is going to force this in a much stronger way to be forward so it's it's gonna almost make it impossible for it to twist around backwards and that can happen very easily as other forces are applied so we're gonna be building that that idea into every system as we move forward so there's a lot of explanation just on one little section but now it's gonna go a little bit quicker as we begin to copy and paste this and to other places so let's do that again and we're gonna step-by-step do all of these because I think it's really important I don't want to lose anybody so I'm going to make a copy of this and it's for the upper body but I gonna copy it into the head as a way of getting its position so I can say 0 on Y and I can't reuse it reset PSR because I don't wanna lose my rotation so I just zero out and y-you see boom it jumped up to the head now I can drag that onto the upper body and here's something that is great connectors and Springs share an identical parameter these have the same parameter ID behind the scenes so when you select all of them you can see we have the object a object B and they're all there so I want to replace with what's doing the driving and the driving is the upper body and what it's being driven the head so let's drag the head into the secondary object and so all of those have jumped to that now let's go through them one at a time and make sure everything's correct now remember we were talking about before we don't want to be lined up on the axis because it doesn't know what direction it should be so if I just take this and scoot it down just a little bit oops I'm moving in three dimensions if I move it down just a little bit it's gonna shoot straight up and now it knows what it's orientation should be so very important next up let's just do the springs one at a time and we just have to kind of tweak the variables so this is our spring position so it's kind of the upward one so let's make sure we're up at the top of the head and up at the top of the head and all we have to do is tweak those numbers set set the rest length it's very close then we've got our forward one let's make sure that it is doing a very similar thing scoot this up to about the middle of the face about the middle of the face set the rest length excellent so that should be facing forward boom did that now that is connected it should be staying upright it's all connected now you see as soon as we added the head on here it's so much heavier that the entire thing is flopped over and that's what I meant when I said we're not gonna worry too much about the specifics until we start connecting more of the body parts but we can see that this is now connected we can see that it's continuing to face forward and the rotation seems to be correct excellent so let's do it again copy this oh and we're trying to stay organized so I want to rename this one to head because it's connecting from the upper body to the head and it's important to keep these organized and named properly because now this upper body is going to get this entire rig a second time so I made a copy I can go continue from the bottom so I'll just delete that and rename this one and we'll name this one left arm so that is going to connect to our left arm now actually I'm going to move it down here into the left arm and zero out any positional information so let's snap it essentially to its access point okay r for rotate we know that right now it's kind of the the cone is facing upward if we want to visualize of course we can grab that and shrink this a little bit and what we want to do is grab this and spin the entire thing 90 degrees holding on the shift it's a negative 90 and excellent now we know it has a proper position so I can drag this back into the upper body hit e4 move so I can scoot it back just that little bit and as we scoot it back hopefully we can see well actually this is not let me make sure I put this in the correct position looks like I hope I put it in the head and there I think we won't be in the upper arm and that is zeroed out so I guess I maybe I just have to scoot this back a little bit extra so we want to make sure that that angle is the correct orientation so I'm going to scoot this back but actually this is interesting the axis so uh the axis of the upper arm oh no is there interesting so what let's just uh let's just figure out exactly what's going on here now if I were to as I scoot this around it should be relative to that position and the way these are getting connected so it's the center of mass and the X oh okay okay apologies I was just making a little mistake there I forgot to relink all this to the new connection so that's why it's it's trying to line up with the head as like what's going on so okay ignore that everything we just did is valid we just have to select the left arm and all of its children and let's make sure that we are connecting the upper body which we are to the left upper arm there we go that's what we were missing so let's go through them one at a time let's grab love throw up her arm just scoot this back a hair and as soon as we do let's zoom out you can see that the the cylinder is shooting out forward so it has a correct orientation you want to make sure you don't move it back too far because the further back you move it the more it's going to not accurately rotate that point once it's in ragdoll you're not gonna notice too much but yeah very important ok now the position spring now this is completely different orientation so I'm actually going to zero it out zero it out you can just right click on any any number here and it's going to read reset it to default if you right click on little up arrow down arrow thing let's grab the upper body and it's offset is gonna move up and then probably here along z and I don't have to get this perfect but I want to scoot this back to kind of where that pivot point is so we'll also scoot that back in space a little bit and now we can grab the upper arm and scoot that along here so that lines up pretty well right there and it probably should all set a little bit on Z as well those look pretty close hit set rest length again the very nice small number excellent so I've we've built the testing rig so we can just keep on let's do all of them actually let's grab the forward and the exact same ideal it's zero out zero zero zero zero and reposition these now like I said we're gonna be very meticulous here we're being very careful even though we're gonna repeat these ideas it's the same idea kind of over and over again I'm going to spend the time and do this properly here cuz I don't wanna lose anybody it's very specific and once you have the rag doll you can reuse it again and again and again everywhere so you can see that I took the the thing that's doing the driving and I pulled it more forward and then I'm going to grab the thing that's being driven and scoot it to about the same position and go meet it but not quite all the way it's just the current tech that I find is working very nicely set the rest length and we grab the spring the spring is actually doing the correct rotation I don't know that we need it and in fact the spring is probably pretty redundant we might turn those off later and see that they're not doing that much because we've built in this forward spring but it's working well so far let's go ahead and copy this entire rig again into our lower arm now it's for the upper arm but I'm gonna put in the lower arm so we can we can once again adapt its X and what we row out its position so it zeros out and snaps over there and now we can move it into the upper arm now immediately let's grab all of its connections and connect the upper arm and drive the lower arm and it looks crazy when they're also likely but let's just go through one at a time but when you when you're building when you're bending your elbow and when you're bending your knee they cannot pivot in all directions like your head or your shoulder might so we're actually going to change this connector type to a different type we're gonna change this to a hinge type now our access is getting a little bit crazy it doesn't really matter but just to be a little bit cleaner I'm gonna see what we can zero out in fact thing a zero them all out and let's see what the orientation is okay so it's rotated like that we can just spin it up exactly 90 degrees so negative 90 I want it's all bit cleaner of rotation so the elbow can only bend in that rotation and that is that is very powerful and it when it comes to that kind of rotation when comes to the this one I don't know if it's as important to offset but let's take a look and we might be able to see that more clearly because on this one we are going to limit the angle we absolutely do not want the elbow bending backwards if the head twists a little bit more than it should like I don't think it's gonna say at that much but the arm bends backwards we'll see so in this case we will set an angular limit and by default I didn't used to know this it used to drive me nuts but I used to think that the solid part was where it was allowed to go but it turns out that's like a blocker that's blocking where it can go you can see right now that it's you know the thing being driven is showing this axis right here so that can rotate in this big range so by default with this current rotation we did get what we wanted but something I would like to do is limit the rotation even a little bit more I want to make it so this arm can never get all the way perfectly straight you can see right now already that's a little bit bent so I'm actually gonna grab this or number and I'm gonna start shrinking you see up here it's bending a little bit and now it's not going a full 80 to 180 degrees which means it could never quite straighten out and the reason we're doing that is later when we're applying different forces if they're perfect all the way perfectly straight it doesn't want to bend over as much it's kind of like oh no I'm a I'm a straight connection you imagine like two cans stacked on top of each other if they're perfectly lined up they don't want to bend off of each other but if they they're forced to bend a little bit first then it's going to allow for more of a rotation more easily allow for a rotation so that's excellent we have a spring position for where we want it to end up so let's you know just just to be clean we'll zero everything out where do we want this to be attempting to get to so we will offset the upper arm first so let me scoot this way over here towards the end and a little bit here on X so we have open arm if that's a Z so we have X Y Z and then we can grab the lower arm and it should also be equivalently offset and like I said don't sweat these being identical just just kind of closest is more than enough set rest length and they go it's very close again and then we have our spring which is going to try and keep it rotated to a particular angle but you know in this case I think that's significantly more redundant so I'm going to just turn that one off we'll keep it we'll turn it off and then we've also got our spring forward saying what is the forward direction of this but I don't think we need that in this case either I'm going to just turn it off but maybe we do so I'll leave it there but I don't think we need it because the type of connector that we fed into this which we should rename this is uh that's the left arm and now this one should be the left lower I'm just keeping the naming of what came out from the original figure based on that rotation I'm it cannot physically rotate in other orientations so we don't have to worry about it being forward so we get that one kena for free all right so let's pick up the pace we need to copy this also to the lower the left hand so a copy of the hand now you see I actually did not copy the left arm one I copied one of the ones from the upper arm because I wanted to go back to these settings more I didn't want the hinge connector I wanted the ragdoll connector so once again zero out the position and move it up to the parent the thing doing the driving select it it is driving the lower arm to the left hand and that should do all those connections I did do that with these right yeah upper arm lower arm and actually we it's on both now but we should always make sure to check kind of do a little check to make sure it's working each step of the way so we see now that that falls and you can see that it is not twisting sideways and you can see we do get a little bit of a bend in it so it's excellent all right now we're back on this one let's rename it to left hand and check our spring position so 0m all out zero zero zero zero zero and get our offsets proper so we'll scoot that one to the tip of the hand and scoop this one to match it that one was nice and easy set the rest length very very very close the forward one this one is actually kind of important we don't want the hand to be twisting around at all these crazy orientations so zero everything out get it to the middle of the hand scoot it nope not that one let's scoot it forward on X no I'm sorry Zeke I keep doing back there doing those backwards give it a few more and also offset the actual hands positions will scoot that in and pull that one like I said I like doing I've been kind of doing half the width of it and then matching it because they when they're smaller they weigh less so excellent so that should be controlling that and we also the spring which is but perhaps redundant but it's also adding some of that rotational energy and so we have play and now we should hopefully see that the hand actually you see the hand got a little bit crazy there it flapped around towards the back actually nope that we forgot to step we have you careful we forgot to move this backward look this the cylinder is moving it's aimed down we have to take this and scoot the whole thing just back that little bit of hair that tiny little bit and now when I play now the hand doesn't seem to be you know it's not twisting around as backwards but you know it's still flopping around more than I want it to so just to show you we can we can exaggerate these if I push this further and I push this one to go match it and we set the rest length and we'll guide the forward one and make sure that it is out even more let's go even a little more than that and a little bit more than that set the rest length on that this is forcing its hand more to be in those orientations it's kind of like a vector and there we go now you can see the hand is trying to be very far forward it does get whipped around a little bit here when it seems to collide with something but we might well let's we'll deal with that as we get to it but it seems okay all right excellent so those are all set up let's work our way through the leg very quickly once again this is pure iteration but we're already doing all these forward ones so we'll see how this goes so all this is fine I'm gonna copy this directly to actually we're going back to I'm hit escape because we're going back to the pelvis so I'm gonna grab the let's collapse all the ones we don't need cuz those are done let's grab this pelvis one and duplicate it into the left thigh zero I'm just gonna reset PSR it's gonna spin it in this crazy orientation let's shrink the cone so we can see it a little bit more clearly you see it's aiming backwards and at our for rotate spin it straight down now we could be a lot more picky about the orientations here and make it so it's only limited to particular angles I'm keeping it very freeform we're just kind of saying like hey try and stay forward like here it's gonna try it's gonna aim down it can't twist to a crazy angle but it it can bend in ways that legs probably couldn't so you could definitely go through here and tweak these so it's like okay the light can't go beyond that point but I'm giving it as much movement as possible that goes in there it's zeroed out let's select all of it this is going to connect from the pelvis to the left thigh as I said I like these to live with the parent so I'm moving it back up to the pelvis and as always let's move it up a little bit from here cuz that's the orientation the cylinder shoots downward that's working properly and let's very quickly reset our spring positions this one's gonna be a little bit a little bit different because it's off see of these are offset from each other so we'll scoot this one down to about the knee that seems lined up pretty well and offset downward to go match it set rest length and this one's the forward one reset reset reset reset scoot down about halfway scoot it over and pull it negative on I think worlds II a little bit more forward this one this one the this one the the leg definitely ends up with a lot of kind of twist on it so I give this one a little bit more distance and we'll pull this one out about half way as well maybe pull it down there we go nice straight line from it set rest length I'm being a little more precise than I have to be but you know it couldn't hurt and there's gonna be this is also an infant Legg to not to try and stay more straight here excellent so that's that one rename this one to I guess we'll just grab the name so this will be the left thigh rename it and then let's do it smart let's copy this into the left shin and the zero it out zero zero zero on position not reset TSR and of course this one is a hinge because it's a knee we don't out rotating all crazy actually I guess I could zero out our for rotate spin it 90 degrees so the knee will Bend properly link this to all the proper things which is going to connect the parent to the driver to the driven child left shin for the left thigh to the left shin move it up again make it a child of a parent and let's once again limit this one the way it was rotated is not quite what I wanted now we could wrote to fix this rotation we also just hit R and then spin this 90 degrees like that so you know that either work I like this nice clean zero to 180 and in the same way we were before our leg is free to spin back in this area this is the blocker so I want to limit how far this can rotate in this case it's going to be increasing the zero and you can see right here that is going to make it so it can't quite store its it's never gonna be able to go fully straight because he already legs a little bit bent excellent and then we've got our spring position this is gonna try and pull this leg down towards the ground so we do want that one will scoot this one down and that's already matching pretty well let's get rid of that offset there we go very close hit reset there we go and then we've got our forward once again we don't need a forward and we don't need this spring for this particular instance I don't think we do and we got one last one to do here once again I'm gonna go select it from the top because I want these settings we'll put that on the foot a copy I'm holding on control as I make a copy and now we can zero out the position hit enter and then move it up to the shin its parent select it and all of the connections connect to the shin to the left foot rename this left foot and scoot it up that little hair pink very important cylinder aim down and this one the man the foot is the most important one to get the spring position correct now I'm actually gonna hide the floor so we can see down below it just a little bit because we want to take the spring position which I'm actually gonna say I remember you name it spring it down and this is what's gonna keep the foot going down so I'm gonna pull this one down pretty far and actually gonna pull it back in space a little bit so it's kind of lined up with the axis and then this one of course should be about the halfway point so you see that I went pretty far for the distance of the foot to say like no aim down excellent and now we've got the a spring forward which is also very important let's zoom these and this is what their reset these it's very important because it is what's going to keep the foot facing forward so incredibly important if the feet twists the wrong direction man it looks wrong so let's scoot these back and this one's gonna pull far forward and I'm gonna make this one pivot from here so it really wants to get pulled that direction set rest length and there we go we have now done all of the basic connections we should have probably been checking the feet as we went but let's turn our floor back on the visibility and hit play and let's see okay that seems to fall over the legs seems pretty stable so let's uh turn the pelvis off or turn the pelvis I suppose back on it's gonna become dynamic again so we can drop this and see if it's working so it's turned on and everything is now dynamic do you select everything hit play boom it all crumples down it looks pretty good except like I said well this upper leg seems to be twisting around quite a bit but I also noticed that we were working from our Springs were set down 2.2 I'm gonna put those back to one which is you know way stronger so now we should see that that is trying really hard to stay forward now it were really crumpled chrome you know it's crumpling in a very very rough away right now but let's let's keep going you see the connections are there it's trying to stay as far forward as possible and then it does fall forward so all of that seems to be working very well so we need to mirror this there's also a good place to give ourselves a save there is something that I had not mentioned yet and that should have been filed b-but let's go ahead and make this see something hadn't mentioned which is it is incredibly important to make sure that this is all happening at the time of zero do not make changes to dynamics in general but especially not to dynamics and connectors and springs not at the time of zero because it will lock your model into some new rotation and there is no way to fix it except for completely manually it's a nightmare okay so we've got we've got to make a copy of this entire thing mirrored over now the mirror tool was not designed for this type of mirroring so we'll have to do a couple tweaks afterward but those work pretty well we've got a rag doll I'm going to go to our character tool click on the mirror tool and the only thing I'm going to change is go to the naming and I say I want to replace the word left with a word right that's the only change I'm gonna make and now let's make sure we're viewing this from the front or front - ish like this because by default it's actually snapping - whichever view it's closest to so we can click mirror here and so actually going to boom create a mirror of this now this top one is the original so it's I think that is the originals I'm gonna hide that and now this one is the mirror and you're gonna see that all those objects that were in the middle every every piece of geometry that was at the halfway point has gotten deleted now that's okay because we actually copy the entire object and those middle points we don't need those so we're going to completely ignore them and pretty much just extract all of the rest of this and move it into our main body so everything here in the pelvis we well let's delete the things we don't need we don't need this upper body connector because that's gonna be going away we don't need the head at all we don't this upper body we don't need the head connector so and then we're not going to need these bodies in the moment but let's move now we've got the right thigh connector let's move that up into the pelvis let's make sure we grab it and it's children and make sure that we link to this new well I'm sorry well to the original pelvis because otherwise when we delete the second one that will be D linked make sure you get that one correct and then we have the upper body which is connecting to the arm so I'm gonna select that and it up into our other upper body and just to show you will do the opposite this I'm going to delete the pelvis delete the upper body which we don't need and now when I go back up here into the right arm you can see all of these have lost their object a so we link to the proper upper body and those have linked to that so I believe actually that is pretty much all that we need to do let's go ahead what move it's all we need to do to move those things I'm going to collapse everything in the hierarchy by holding down control as I click and let's move our new copied pieces into the appropriate spot so I'll move them above the equivalents left one as as a group so there we go so I'll keep the you know the right leg together the left leg together so that's fine so a rag doll mirror this job will delete that and unhide this and now we've got a mirror but we should go through all of the direct connectors that move actually almost everything we have to go through almost everything and make sure that everything that we just made is connected properly because certain things might not translate over to the other side very well specifically the springs you see as soon as I click on the right leg so this connecting from the body to the right leg what's happening is there's one value that can't get mirrored and that is our X the X value doesn't get mirrored so it's actually pretty quick to fix I'm just gonna hit negative on that and it should spin it there and boom you see it's lined up properly now if I had set rest length it didn't even change because now it didn't match so it's mostly this X value needs to get flipped to the opposite side now I actually haven't tested it but there's a chance that if we grab all of those pieces that we just were moving over and well there's a chance when you grab all of them just do the mathematical equation study truth i it's so specific that I don't want to risk it so anywhere we have a x value on the right arm I want to invert those so I'm gonna say negative negative and boom you see it jump to the proper spot and we have the spring forward on the right arm so let's go negative on X negative on X boom that snapped correctly and then it can I think it might be able to filter down in the rest of it now this one we turn them off but let's click on this and yes you see it is on the opposite side so let's go negative negative so these are all the things that got mirrored and we're fixing those the spring forward we didn't even use that so we'll leave that off for now position spring that one's wrong negative negative there we go on the tip of the hand now and forward negative and negative there we go we had the forward one and I believe that was its that was actually that was less painful I thought would be for mirroring everything so if this is working properly which you never know if it is or not we should hopefully be able to hit play I'm gonna save this first and this will be them later 1d and this will be the mirror mirrored step and T select everything I'm gonna even collapse the hierarchy down re expand it so I hold down control as I collapse it and then don't hold it down so now everything's collapsed I can just see those levels let's hit play and see if it seems to be working yeah actually that seems to work pretty well there's a pretty good just like fall down kind of rag doll so excellent that's a that's an excellent start in theory we've got a rag doll we just start messing around with it but let's let's start getting some controls it's get a little bit of something going on in here so we don't want just falling onto the ground so the first thing we need to do is actually let's turn off gravity then that's gonna be the very first thing in fact let's set let's do some universal settings here I'm gonna hit ctrl or command D command to D if you're on a Mac and go to dynamics and I'm actually gonna take our time scale I'm gonna set up to 150 I've always kind of felt like the dynamics in cinema or feel a little sluggish so we're gonna speed it up so it'll be quicker and then under the expert tab essentially we're making the time go faster and if the time is goin faster then that means essentially more movement is happening in a shorter time so we should give it some more steps for frame just to make it equivalent so jumping this up to seven or eight in my in my mind makes it so that's like at the same amount of time for calculation for movements as we had before so it's just a little bit faster and I'm gonna go back to general and take our gravity and set it to zero so now there's no gravity and if we hit play this should you start gently floating up into the air excellent now the reason we're doing that is because now we can make a simulate force wind we could use gravity but I like wind I hit our and we're gonna point to straight down and the reason we're doing that is just so that we have a wind that we can easily turn on and off so I'm gonna rename this one gravity and I did a lot of testing and the number for gravity to match what cinema has is 44 zero and I found that out by having one wind counteracting it until it just barely flit until a perfectly floated exactly 40 now that should be applying to everything now we turn gravity off but we should be able to play everything runs a little bit quicker and this still falls down the way we would expect boom excellent now let's make it so this continue standing we want to stand let's have this thing stand it's just falling down with gravity I don't want to see the gravity so turn that off and we could use another wind to do this but let's start introducing some field forces so under simulate forces let's create a field force this field force I'm gonna say I need to give it a direction so I'm gonna save the direction we can do that via solid and yeah just click solid and now you can see it's 1 X Y Z positive Y that means it's pointing upward so everything's pushing upward now I just know for a fact that the good value here is gonna be about 155 actually it's more like 200 so I'm gonna do 222 because it's quick to type and now I hit play you see zoom this shoots up in the air so okay that's really powerful and that's because it's applying to everything so what I'm actually gonna do is something a little bit unusual we're gonna select all of our dynamic objects and under forces I'm gonna say don't exclude things instead I want you to include things I can say everything should include our wind gravity so everything's being affected by gravity but only the upper body and it's like just that dynamic tag is going to be affected by this field force so let's rename this one upper body and now we have a field force that's affecting just the upper body so when I rewind have play now you see it's gonna go up in the air but the arms and legs are falling down this time excellent so now it's still flying up in the air so it's too strong so we need to do is limit it somehow so I'm going to on this solid create a mask and I did that backwards so actually i misclicked and me the folder so let's create a mask and in that mask i'm gonna create a linear field the linear field will become a child of the mask make sure you turn this on so it's actually affecting the mask set that's in normal and currently it's on x+ but in this case we want a Y - and now if I have play it should fall to the ground except you see it's kind of up in the air just a little bit at the bottom so if I were to grab this linear field and move it up as I move it up this torso is getting pulled in the air so much that it's it's wherever we pull this the torso wants to go and if we pull it up enough we should be able to find some sort of equilibrium where the torso is floating but the rest of it is standing so okay that's working well we don't have that much time so let's go and just turn off our display here we don't need to see that in fact we'll just make that invisible and now we can see now we can get a little more information from the body like clearly a bunch of things are happening like the this torso is not trying to stay upright enough the arms fall down pretty well like I like that they're they're kind of jiggly and loose but I feel like the forward-facing direction needs to be stronger on them so let's go and the head definitely needs to be stronger so now we can actually start playing a little bit with our simulation so let's go ahead to the pelvis and we've got our upper body connector and you see now how powerful it isn't important it is to have been naming these things so I'm actually grab both of those and let's just crank it up to one back to the original stiffness of one and now we can see that the torso is staying a lot straighter let's do the same thing on the upper body grab the head connector let's grab both of those and set their stiffness to one and now boom the head suddenly snaps up quite a bit and I was trying to stay upright you see the entire body is staying upright the arms are twisting a lot in the beginning so it's twirl down actually it's in the torso so we got the arm arm I'm gonna grab all four of the positional based ones we got positioned forward position forward in the arms and let's also set those to one and boom you can see that these arms are trying to face forward okay immediately seeing something that we forgot to do remember when we were fixing the mirroring problems well there's one we forgot to fix and that is on the arm there is a connector and this connector is this didn't get mirrored properly so the arm is being told that it can bend backwards versus what we want so in order to fix that I think all we have to do is spin this around 180 degrees nope maybe it's here let's do positive 90 there we go so that spins around in the positive orientation and now the arm is back to bending hopefully the correct way and the same thing probably happened on our right our left thigh no the right I guess this would probably yeah it would be the right thigh so in the right thigh we have the right thigh connector there we go and yet now we can see that this this knee can only bend backwards and that's going to trip us up so let's fix that I'm not sure what rotation it is so it's just actually I'll hit R for escape hit R for for rotate and let's spin that oops be very careful and grab the correct axis and out there it's that one so if I said that's a positive 90 then I should be flipped around and now those should at least be the correct orientation so let's just without changing anything else just while we do is flip those around to match our orientations hit play and there we go now you see the left on the right are behaving the same so they should be able to bend correctly and that the forward motion is being forced a lot more strongly there and let's see what else do you want to do I think I might want to turn off that spring the the right arm spring and that spring the rotational one the angular one just so it can twist around a bit and you see very much at the try and stay straight so I think that this forward are this positional ones that's keeping them very far straight I'm gonna weaken that one so what's that that's maybe 0.5 and we can even that one maybe go back to point 2 it's being forced to go very forward but now it's fit it's allowed to rotate and flop downward excellent so you can see now how we're like kind of rigging this up where we're now able to art direct the way that this is moving now having said all that something we should have maybe done a little bit earlier is in the rag doll something I've been enjoying doing is changing some of the settings we feed directly into it and along those lines something I've been doing is changing the world of density and I've been doing a custom density of 0.2 so what this is doing is this 1/5 of the density and I have found that the springs the density is very responsive to spring so Springs become more powerful if the density is lower and as long as this whole body is relative to each other I think it's completely fine in addition to that something just a good default I've been finding is you can end up with a lot of jiggle in the character so I've been doing an angular inside the dynamics on all of them under force I've been setting an angular damping of 90% and a drag of just 1% and that's gonna drain a lot of energy out of the way that they're wiggling and it's gonna calm itself down quite a bit now because well okay so that's all good the next thing I would like to do is make this maybe calculate just a little bit quicker and to show you that let's go ahead and pause it rewind hit save and let's go to the global settings again control D or command D and under dynamics I'm gonna click on the visualization tab if you ever clicked on this it shows you what the dynamics are currently doing now it only does it if we're in a different frame but you can see as simulate play this is all the calculations that is having to do it's like the directions and the speeds and but you see that it's got this very complicated mesh that's trying to do on all these limbs so what I'm going to do to make this calculate quicker and actually we can simplify by it we can hide all that extra informations and now we just sort of see the limbs what I'm gonna do is rewind and with all of our different dynamics selected I'm gonna change the shape from automatic which is creating that mesh I'm gonna change these because it's a very simple character I'm gonna change this to be ellipsoid that this changing needs to be calculating like they're a sphere and they can be a stretch to here but because it's such simple geometry this should make very clean very precise calculations but there is one exception when I hit play we're gonna see that the feet are gonna get really wobbly because they're being treated like they're they're spheres which means it can rotate and pivot around in a really weird way so we are gonna grab the two feet and I'm gonna set those and let's make changes at time zero let's change those to be boxes and boxes are gonna be very stable and look at that just by changing that look how stable the feet suddenly became now because we just changed the form that these were all seeing we changed kind of the density calculations a little bit so you can see that this is the the point where this is floating is a little bit different so let's turn off this visualization we don't need that anymore and go back up to our gravity our upper body torso thing and actually this is a little big I'm gonna pinch this in a little bit and I want to move this up and down and what this is doing is finding its natural equilibrium so if I scoot this down right to the perfect spot we should be able to yeah we should be able to make him not flip stand upright but his feet will be flat on the ground so that's pretty good right there excellent so that is working awesome now we are probably way over time so we need to just do the last little fun things here and it may be jump in the mix a mo bit we can create a cloner and everything we've done here is completely compatible with a cloner so by dropping this into the cloner I can drag this up in the air put a little more space in between them and I think we go to maybe about 10 or 12 with my computer it's pretty good computer but by doing that I should be able to just hit play and we've got all these independent ragdolls each calculating uniquely to just themselves let's give ourselves a couple extra frames here to play with and now we see all those falling down and they're all going to do their thing it probably a good idea to grab the cloner here and randomize the color so I can hit randomize I don't want the position but I do want to turn on a custom color of white use the Alpha strength I'm gonna go under effector and a0 this out and grab the cloner and make the initial value black and that should give us a very clean random black to white colorize actually uh I just I didn't do that correctly because we don't want it to do it that way we probably do want the colors so inside of the random eye we don't want that negative but I'm gonna turn off alpha and we'll just use the loose using effector color and that should randomize the colors now we're not gonna see that while these materials on there if I pull them off we see that yes they do each have a unique color so now inside is something like the front material we can go into the luminous Channel and feed it the mograph color shader and that should automatically work there we can go into our checker pattern and if we want to have this applied to a material as well that we've already got I can feed this into something like a fusion and in the fusion I'm gonna feed that also a mograph color shader have it multiply on top of it and that's you darken all of those colors up and if we reapply these materials on to our characters or on to the corner you can see that this has now been colorized and even their front stripe has adapted that color and we can see each individual character getting the different colors applied and now now we're at the point where you can just have fun with it we can do a lot different we don't have a lot of you know we have enough time to make it super crazy but what we can do is we got it we got to do this one I can create a simulate forces no it's not for sits under dynamics but it is called force so we're gonna create a force and I want to once again apply this to all the dynamics now we have to actually select all them and then not the upper body because the upper body has a different thing in its list so I'm gonna drag in the force to everything and then also now just grab the upper body and you see it's a different list so we had to select it separately dragging the Force there as well now I'm gonna turn it off and actually why don't we instead of dropping these let's make it a radial array we'll make 10 of them and spread them out so we've got all them they're all happy hit play we're still running in about real time like I said we get about two ten or twelve of them and they're hanging out but now we can start messing with them now I'm gonna crank this force up 211 just because I know it's a good value but now we can do things let's rearrange this a little bit we can do things like let's let them settle in a little bit we can do things like turn off their upper body so now if suddenly all falls down we can turn it back on again and then they'll stand back up again we can we need more time mooom raise it up we can now turn off I'm gonna turn off the upper body and then turn off gravity and now they're all going to float in the air and then we can suddenly turn on gravity and it'll fall to the ground and then turn it off again and they'll begin floating again but then one of the ones that's the most fun is force if I turn on force then they're gonna get attracted to each other brittle so force is kind of like a particle attractor or like particle on particle attractor so these guys are definitely not doing their social distancing but it's a really fun parameter I must you know yeah we got be careful about not breaking anything but if we I play right now they're all gonna get pulled into the center it looks a little more visually interesting if we let them float for a little bit randomly and then you let them get pulled in you get more ball and then we can turn the gravity on and they can fall into the ground and then we can turn off the force and they'll collapse into a pile trying to force back on they back into a ball float away you know turn off they turn on the torso floating turn this off and they'll all pop out and they'll all be trying to stand themselves back up again so you can see we've made an incredibly robust rig here that we have just a lot of control over now there's probably tweaks we do little little changes and when it comes to me playing with this making a bunch as many of these clones as you can and still running in real time is great because you'll see the mistakes quicker like if one of them's foot twists you're like oh the foot might not be reacting quite right and you make the changes quicker if you have this type of setup so yeah that is excellent now we're gonna have to probably fast-forward through this next part but I do want to cover it as much as possible so we will save this scene file here and once again if you follow on patreon all these scene files will be made available so these are I'll just call it rag doll because these are now rag dolls let's turn off the cloner and what I want to do is show you how to integrate a mix of mohair achter or kind of really any character but a mix of all characters gonna make it really simple to do so if you're unfamiliar with mix mo if you have an Adobe subscription then you can if you have mix mo if you have Adobe you can log in to mix mo comm and you can get a you see this big list of characters and these are all textured modeled rigged and ready to go and they don't have that many models and we don't have too much time so what I'm gonna do is click on the characters and I'm gonna go down to the SWAT guy I just really like it you say use this character and if you're not familiar with mix mo you should totally play around because it's really neat to be and click on animations and and click on any one of these and you're gonna have your character starts doing that motion and it's just a lot of fun if you're not familiar with it I highly recommend this this tutorial series from a school of motion specifically EJ put this together and it's all about bringing Maximo characters into cinema and making it linked up with the cinema 4d character tool and so you can add your animations on top of it it's really powerful and really nice but any case we get this character he's dancing around he's doing his thing let's pause it and hit download and leave it all default let that download okay that downloaded so I'm gonna open it up in my folder and then drag that directly in the cinema it's kind of all these import settings just leave them default and give that a second it's gonna pop in open everything up and there we go it refreshes and I can hit play and we've got a dancing character already textured fully rigged ready to go inside of cinema but of course we don't want the animation so we can get rid of it the way we get rid of is actually have to go to the takes system because it was imported into a take layer select the mix ammo layer and then say file and say current take two new documents I was gonna split often to a separate file and now we've got this if we expand this you see we got all these different joints now what we can do is put them to his tee pose by selecting the geometry and this particular character only has a single single piece of geometry so I can click on that and there's something called a reset bind pose if you click that he'll go to his tee pose so without clicking undo or anything let's go ahead and click the bottom joint and then all the way up to the topmost joint and you see all of the keyframes they're all here on the position and the rotation so I'm actually just gonna select are and then continue hold down control and click P and I see I have all all the ARS and all of the positions selected and holding ctrl and shift or command and shift if you click on any of those keyframe dots it'll actually erase all of them out and delete the track so now there's no animation here whatsoever so with that in mind we're gonna have to do the fast forwarded version of this but selecting all of that let's go into our scene file with the raggle paste this I'm gonna save it really quick because I don't want to lose any good information that we have so let's just change this to the mix immobile okay so now I'm gonna talk through maybe more of the procedure than literally going through the entire thing and if you do this in a kind of clean meticulous way it's not too bad so what we are going to need to do is go to every single one of our models every single one of our different meshes here and snap the axis to the equivalent joint now what I want to mention is look at how perfect this is matching our character like it is really really close and it's just a great workflow with mix mode but all I want to do right now is select the axis tool and I've got the pelvis selected and I want to snap the pelvises access to its equivalent joint so I'm gonna hit P for snap and turn on snap hit P again turn off vertex nap P one last time and turn on axis snap and now I am going to move the models access to every one of the equivalent joint and we're just gonna whip through these snap and I'll probably fast-forward here because this is just a little tedious it will snap okay so those are all snapped now what we need to do is move all of our equivalent controls and you're gonna see how useful it was for us to kind of build the hierarchy the way we did here we need to essentially do the exact same thing except we're gonna turn off the access tool make sure the access tool is off otherwise it won't move the children so I'm going to move that to snap to there and actually we'll just go through all of these and I'm just gonna snap all of every time we have a connector it's gonna snap to its equivalent spot and let's fast forward again and snap okay now that those are snapped let's turn off snapping letter P turn off enable snap and now I'm just gonna go back down the hierarchy again we have to the exact same thing that we had been doing which is before which is pulling that up there you know kind of offsetting at that little bit so pull up and make sure your blue line goes the equivalent down grab this one pull it up make sure that that lines up so let's fast forward one more time and make sure you do the opposite like that one goes up so let's pull it down so just give it that a little bit and so you can see your blue line going the correct orientation and scoot the last one there we go they're all snapped of course you do not have to do the hinge ones and now everything is moved in their new positions now the last part is you can can be as meticulous and specific as you want to or be very quick and sloppy but the last one is actually just going to polygon mode and manipulating the polygons of any given one of these objects and matching the model as accurately as you want to so I can scale these up it's okay if they pass through each other a little bit you just want to match it as well as you visually can and the more accurate it is the more accurate your model will be and even here don't worry we're not changing the access that's already in the correct position so just make this match as well as you kind of visually can and I'm not gonna really I'm gonna do this quickly and but you could go through and start moving individual polygons or even modeling a little bit and making the more accurate the more accurate you make it the more it's gonna match but I don't you don't have to go that far and it will look pretty good so let's just go through and speed this up again a little bit okay cutting back in for a moment I just moved all the arms up the same time because once again we're just moving geometry but I'm gonna select all of these and here's something cool if you didn't know with all these selected I can actually select any one other axis and that will become my pivot point so I actually move all three of them at the same time just on a single pivot so I once again I'm just moving geometry but I'm making it match as quickly as possible and I'm shocked how sloppy we can be with this and it should work pretty well so back to speedy okay and make sure you get the feet right if the feet are not quite correct these are gonna scoot back a little bit long t4 scale scoot them back to you for scale so if those are a little bit more accurate now once again you can see how crazy sloppy I just was with all that geometry I didn't really care how perfect they were they're not lining up by they're not even perfectly symmetrical in any way but before we break anything let's save it I'm gonna say this is number one G and this will be mix ammo' matched and before we do anything let's hide the mix Americ Teran make sure that this is still working if you did everything the way i just did it with any luck it might fall a little bit but let's hit play and look at that it is still a ragdoll it's still bouncing around and everything is still matching and not see the proportions don't look that crazy it's just kind of like a bigger character now and everything's still facing forward it's bouncing it's maybe a little bit shorter or the mass is a little bit different so our upper body maybe wants to be a little bit lower so we can grab this upper body we can grab the linear field inside of it though so scoot that down until he stops bouncing excellent alright all of that is working now it is the last step for making this character work I'm gonna collapse the entire thing down as I have been doing reexpansion see it and this is it gets a little bit weird but just follow along I'm gonna create a second object manager and the second object manager weren't make it bigger and we can expand our entire miksa mo joint structure we can make it visible as well and what I'm gonna do is start dragging the equivalent joints directly into the character now we could do fancier methods we could start matching it we can use constraints and make it fancy we don't need to do any of that let's just do the very basic version so I grab everything and make it a child of the pelvis I'm gonna be jumping back and forth between the two so don't be shy about doing that so everything is inside of there that makes sense but everything that goes up to the torso let's go to a front view here everything that goes up to the torso let's figure out where that is not that one that one that's the one that's pivoting from the same spot so that one gets moved over into the upper body and then we have our neck nope the neck is too low so it's actually the head the head joint is the one that we were snapping to so the head joint gets dropped into directly into the head and then next up we have a shoulder of the shoulders Network - from the arm is so let's go to a left arm we'll drag left arm into left upper arm and then we can grab the right arm and drag it into the right upper arm and then we start jumping back here whichever way makes it quicker we've got the forearm so that's the right forearm drag into the right lower arm is the equivalent and then down here let's grab our left forearm and drag it into the left lower arm I do believe yep and then we have what do we got we our left hand that is the equivalent so we'll drag that into our left hand and we have our right hand obviously equivalent to our right hand now there's all these fingers and everything we're not worried about though so let's collapse those down and then I let's go back into the pelvis because in here we have our upper leg excellent upper leg which should go into our right upper leg which is right here the right thigh and then we have the left lower leg which will go into the right Oh looks like I just dragged I accidentally dragged the left leg into the right leg so I can just I didn't mess anything up yet I just just I just have to drag in the right spot so I mean make sure I drag right thigh the the left leg into the left thigh there we go geez I was completely bad left thigh and then the left lower leg goes into the left shin and then the left foot goes into the left foot you'll even see the joint start kind of visually breaking there it doesn't matter it still works and now we just have the last one which is the right upper leg which will drop it to the right thigh right leg which goes into the right shin and once again you click it you see which one the equivalent is and drag it into the appropriate spot into the right foot there we go they've all been dragging in their proper places go back to our 3d view we do not need to see the character anymore or no we do want to see the character now in the rag doll we actually don't need to see the rag doll anymore we just see our final character and hit na so we do don't see polygons and with any luck we can hit play and nothing happens why does nothing happen that took me up a lot in the beginning but let me show you let's collapse our entire hierarchy and expanded the rag doll and what we need to do is select all the dynamics tags and inside of our 21 they change the defaults in the collision and it's by default applying the tag to the children but it doesn't note the joints don't know what to do with that so if we say none and set in the individual elements also to off those are now not affecting anything inside of their own little hierarchy and now if we hit play we have a fully dynamic mix omocha that all the same things we were doing to the other one we can do here we can we can make them collapse on the ground we can turn off the gravity and we can start making copies of them and have them be floating around and do whatever we want now a couple less little details are really important it really like this is a whole character this whole rig there's all this mesh stuff it can start slowing things down significantly so what I've been typically doing is I make I pull the rag doll out and I'm gonna hit alt G to put that into a null and we'll rename this character I'm going to grab the character and drag it also into there and now we're hiding these different parts so if we were to drop this into the cloner i guess here's another important detail is the kiss rigged character will not work in the cloner you cannot work him in the corner what you can do though is make a couple of clones and then make it editable now like I said this is gonna slow down a lot I'm gonna drop this down to three so we have three of them and I can make it editable as soon as editable it will completely work if I play we have three completely separate characters we turn on force they're going to be attracted first of all to themselves and then to each we turn gravity back on have them collapse it's it's just hilarious and fun and weird to mess around with but you see if there is a significant speed hit there and you have to make that editable so what I suggest is first of all only make changes at time zero make sure you save your scene file before you make it editable because very often is like oh I want to do it I'm gonna tweak the gravity or tweak some settings I can change the ragdoll a little bit and then you're like oh I didn't make Mike Lohner not editable and you have to go back and fix that so make sure you have to undo the make editable before you put it back in now having said that a couple quick little workflow things first of all you're free to you know if this character isn't in the cloner you can just copy and paste it and you can make as many of them as you want that that does just automatically work and they're completely separate they're individually dynamic like we know they'll do they completely work in this scenario but stories so that works you can just make copies and I'll delete that one and also if you want to run test simulations you can always throw the entire character in and then what I've been doing is I just pull out the geometry and then turn on the cloner and with and I have to unhide your character obviously but if I turn my character back on again I can crank this back up to pretty much the same number that we had before it might be a little slow down with all the joints inside but yeah it still pretty quick and I can see I have all these characters and I can run all the simulations and do my test and be like okay cool this looks cool with all these characters we have all of our characters we have control over them and then when you're ready then all you have to do is feel I'm gonna pause rewind and then all I have to do is drag the character the geometry back into my character null make it editable and before you do that make sure you hide the Wrangell again make it editable and now boom it's gonna be working with all of them it should be the same simulation so that is pretty much all the different details and yeah man there's a lot to cover there maybe I'll do some follow ups there was some extra information that I definitely could have gotten to that we did not get to go to here one of the things being that we could start using field forces and create extra controls where you can make like hold dance party where these are all fully dynamic and they're dancing and they're bouncing off each other and you make the hands jump independently and make the hands start do you know feet two different movements and then you know if you start going even deeper with field forces then you can do things you know these weren't fancy renders as I was doing testing but I can even do something like use field forces and crash this ball through there and make it so that anything that was hit is going to turn off for a little while so they'll actually collapse down and be dynamically stopped so maybe I'll do some follow-up so make sure you come and follow on youtube to see some additional information on that but that should wrap up the meat of this one so hopefully that was as fun to watch as it was to play around with and make on my end it's just a really fun technique and I can't wait to see what everybody puts together with it it really just ends up being another tool in the toolbox it can be applied in so many different ways dynamics in cinema 4d has always been one of the most fun things to do and applying it to characters is just like this exponential increase in like chaos and fun that you can you can have with it as I said this originated as a question on a live stream and if you'd like to come hang out on those live streams we answer cinema 4d questions alive every Wednesday on Twitch and on YouTube for at least two hours who can come more like four hours during these crazy times and it's just a lot of fun and it's fun figuring things out together and the chat helps me figure it out and we just make some fun crazy things you can follow that on YouTube and on Twitch at rocket lasso in fact you follow rocket lasso add all of the things Instagram Twitter Linkedin all the different places Facebook and if you really like this kind of stuff you know we're working on new plugins we are working on tutorials always got tutorials out and like I said the live streams but we've also got a patreon set up if you appreciate this kind of stuff you'd like to see more of it and help support the kind of stuff that I do over here and that my brothers are working on then that would be really appreciated if anything we've ever done was helpful to you in the past it's deeply appreciated all of the scene files that were created during this are going to be available on patreon as well for anybody supporting at any level in addition to that there's bonus live streams and early access to things and all the scene files from all of the live streams so it's appreciated but you know the tutorials are always gonna be out there and free and the big open live streams and you know eventually any fun technique just ends up out in the world for everybody and that's really important to me so thank you so much for any support and thank you for watching very much and I'm looking forward to seeing everybody again when everything goes back to normal and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Maxon

Views: 8,276

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, mograph, character animation

Id: KcwNSry-R9o

Length: 76min 19sec (4579 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020