Chris Schmidt @ The 3D and Motion Design Show

hello everyone i am chris schmidt and i will be tackling a whole bunch of new features in r23 today a big thank you to everybody watching live and to watching on the internet later and of course i thank you to maxon for having me present again there's a lot to cover so let's move into cinema 4d r23 my company rocket lasso focuses on live streams tutorials and plugins all focused around cinema 4d and motion graphics so if you haven't gotten a chance to check out any of those tutorials or the live streams or the plugins then i would encourage you to go check those out there is a ton of it and i tend to get pretty deep and go pretty advanced with a lot of it however today we will be focusing on r23 animation tools and scene nodes now there are a lot of features inside of r23 and there is not time to cover all of them so we will not be talking about the great new uv enhancements and we will not be talking about the remesher even though i really love it i put a poll out on twitter and people mostly wanted me to focus on character stuff and the new scene nodes and that is the plan one thing i wanted to sneak in though is the new magic bullet looks and the screen space reflections here is a lovely scene file that you can find in the content browser if you were not aware there is a lot of new things included in the object browser including example scenes covering tons of the new features inside of r23 so i highly recommend checking it out now this scene file i think has actually been here for a while i made a couple tweaks just to make it demo a little bit nicer but i want to talk about the viewport in cinema 4d and how much it's improved over time so some things we've had for a little bit are things like screen space ambient occlusion turn that on and then we get this nice contact shadow everywhere next up something like shadows here's a shadow outside the window and man that really brings a lot of drama to the scene overall and being able to see that in the viewport and not in a render that is just a really great addition that we've had next up let's do some depth of field which is going to pull the focus onto around the bed it's subtle here and in this case i would like to turn on one more thing which is reflections now we've had reflections and what this is going to do is really make all the metals pop all over the entire scene and if you're doing an entire physically based workflow like a reflectance workflow then this will just make everything look amazing however it's just reflecting the sky so if you put an hdr on a sky object that's what we're seeing but now there's another setting and we can see it by well first i'm going to turn off depth of field so we see this little bit better and under options go to configure the shortcut is shift v and under configure if you twirl down the reflections there is now something called screen space local reflections turning this on is going to give us object to object reflections now it's pretty subtle everything's got fresnels on it so we're not going to see it pop too much however if i increase the distance a bunch and zoom around you can see that this window is reflecting in the floor this table is reflecting in the floor everything is reflecting everything else you really see if i turn it off and on you just you can just see how much more it's placing the objects in the scene when you turn that on so that is a wonderful little addition next up is something i was pretty surprised at and that is the inclusion of magic bullet looks from red giant directly into r23 hitting control or command b will pop open the render settings and inside here you will see by default in the settings magicbullet looks turning on the checkbox for that and clicking the magic bullet looks button will pop open its interface and here is a completely separate application that will apply post effects on top of your scene on top of anything that you render so there is a lot you can do here twirling out tools there are tools for the subject for the matte object let's pull in something let's grab a luts which is a lookup table under match we'll do something crazy like star filter haven't really used that before under lens um chromatic aberration and you can just keep on adding more and more effects twirling this back you can select any one of those and change the settings underneath lut select a bunch of different presets or import them from other places so clicking on that should change the overall color clicking on the star filter which i haven't used i can pull back the boost yeah make that a little bit more subtle change the size so those aren't blowing out too much chromatic aberration separate out our colors so you can really go nuts here separating out the different color channels but nice and subtle might be nice if you don't want to play with those or if you're not familiar with this piece of software there are over 200 different presets built in here so selecting these we can get nice subtle different changes or playing with some other ones some not so subtle changes and just by mousing over it immediately you'll see it get applied and they just make your scene look completely different if you want you can click the nice star in the corner adding it to your favorites folder selecting that i grabbed a whole bunch of high contrast ones just so you can see it here's sodium night here's a day for night a nice black and white with heavy contrast if you like one of these and you tweak it or if you make your own you can of course save it as a custom one and save the preset in this case i saved this one and there's nothing subtle about it but who wants to be subtle in a demo presentation so let's keep this one hit the check box to essentially apply it and anything you render that will get applied to it but here's where things get really crazy oh i guess one thing to mention is you can pull the slider back to make it a little more subtle but like i said why be subtle closing that window you can go into options and turn on magic bullet looks in the viewport and the crazy thing here is that this works in real time i can zoom around my camera and with no delay see that effect applied everywhere this completely changes the feel of the viewport it makes me feel like i'm in a different piece of software and it's just completely changing the way i think about setting up my scenes so you should definitely check that out next up is something about character animation and it is motion transfer i've got a character model here modeled and designed by jess herrera if you are not familiar with jess she somewhat recently went freelance and she is an awesome character designer modeler rigger animator so if you have any work along those lines you should definitely contact her i did not have any new organic characters modeled and i didn't want to use another one from the content browser because i did that in my original r23 video so jess was very generous to allow me to use her character the plan here is to do the motion transfer and the easiest way to do that is to rig this character from scratch using the character tool let's do that character character tool right here clicking on that we've had this for a while and inside here very specifically we want to go to the object tab the object properties of build and then the template of miximo control rig it has to be the miximo control rig as soon as you click on that it'll change the mode we can click the root and then the pelvis holding down control i can create both arms click on hand go back to the pelvis hold down control and click on leg which will create both legs at the same time and now that we've got all the body parts that this character would have go to the adjust tab and now you get all these nice big circles and those circles are what you should move you're going to want to start from the center of the character and work your way out so starting here at the pelvis i would scoot this down grab the stomach area pull that down the chest pull that down this upper chest area pull that these are those shoulders move those into position move the arm i don't have time to place all of these perfectly you just want to make sure that you move each component exactly where you want to but i've already prepped a file that just moves all these dots everywhere so i'll jump to that one closing this file here is exactly that process i've just moved all the dots to where i want them to go having done that clicking on the character tool i can move to the next step which is binding i want to bind this character to this new rig clicking binding it has a slot to put in all of the objects i want to lock this so this interface doesn't disappear collapse down character and i want to control all these different components so i'll select every single piece of the mesh here drag it into the binding and there we go this is now a rigged character clicking unlock selecting the character tool i can jump into animate and we are now ready to animate this character if i were to select this hand control and move it around you can see this character has now been rigged just from moving those dots around and dragging in the different meshes if you're going to be doing some character animation this is a perfect place to stop you have control over your character but this is all about the motion transfer and in order to do that i would like to make this character object editable so clicking the letter c while it's selected will explode it into all of its components it has a bunch of hidden layers so inside of layers i'll expose those and now we get all these different areas inside the rig so here is a retarget hierarchy i want to minimize that here's the controls i don't need those the bind hierarchy that's what i want this is what the characters actually bound to and just fyi this is the official process from maxon of the best way to do this selecting the bind hierarchy i'll just pull that entirely out of the character collapse it for a moment so i can delete everything else we don't need that re-expand the hierarchy and we've got all these psr tags which typically would be important but they're not doing anything anymore we deleted everything they were linked to so selecting all those psr tags these constraint tags i can delete them and now we've just got a skeleton exactly on the character and already bound and set up the next step here is to actually start using the motion transfer tool right clicking on the bind hierarchy going into rigging tags and finding the character definition tag selecting that will give us a very simple interface and all i would like to do is open the manager pops up on my other screen inside here you can see there's a root and a whole bunch of different categories we're not going to get too specific yet but you can see inside of the torso it's trying to find the hips it's trying to find the spine it's trying to find the neck this rig this bind hierarchy is already perfectly set up to work with the system so without clicking or thinking about this at all all i have to do is select our bind hierarchy click extract skeleton and immediately you can see 66 joints have been added in and this is now ready to be transferred closing that interface that is now completely done and this can be collapsed as well selecting the character definition tag there's another button create solver which will just automatically create a handy motion solver tag for us you can see inside here there's a source character and our current character which already has this character definition dragged in well we want to give it a source and where's that source going to come from well that could come from a lot of different places it could come from any miximo character you might have downloaded from adobe miximo but inside of cinema 40 r23 in the content browser there is a bunch of brand new motion capture inside of there inside of motion capture here is a bunch of new motion capture presets captured originally by maxon and we can drag any of these in that we want specifically i'm going to grab a running jump drag that in and here is a skeleton a joint rig all set up and if i play you can see it is running along and it does a nice little jump so it's working pretty nicely i'll zoom out a bit to see it you'll see that all of the motion data coming in from the content browser already has a character definition tag meaning if i click on this character solver tag all i have to do is drag in that character definition tag as the source and immediately our new character will jump into this new pose rewinding and hitting play we should see our character running but she will be running in place we can fix that really easily by finding out that the motion from here we've got that skeleton but the skeleton's kind of running in place so there's this motion offset and here you can see that this is where the keyframes are that is what is moving forward so that's what we want to tell to move forward really easy to do by right clicking on our bind hierarchy adding a rigging tag and a brand new constraint tag which will take the psr the position scale and rotation of the motion offset just drag that in that should now be linked for motion as well visually i would like to hide that motion offset and now hitting play now our brand new rigged character is running along getting that motion transfer and even the hair is staying stuck to the head and traveling along with the entire thing it is really quick to set this up and as long as you follow that very specific process it is trivial to get a character rigged up in the most basic way and then get it animating across the screen the new tune rig and delta mush deformer here is jess's character again and i would like to apply a brand new character rig to it we can find that under character character object under the character object there is now a new template called toon rig i have to say i didn't typically use the cinema 4d character object very often because i i like a lot of very advanced controls in my rigs so i would typically make it myself with this rig we can do the same things holding down control to create the arm and now that those arms are selected i could go into the spine back to the spine and create some legs holding ctrl to get both again now that's been created there's also a going back to the spine we could also create a face rig from this and you can see there's a lot of different controls here there's a lot to do to set this up and i have to say it's fairly involved there's a lot of very specific steps and there's an amazing video set up on cineversity all about the tune rig made by sebastian pfeiffer who made the tune rig i highly recommend checking that out it's a must watch especially for the face rig having said that we can go to the adjust tab it's going to look very similar to what we had before we can move all these components in fact as far as the body is concerned this is a lot more simple than the one we were dealing with earlier all of it will automatically adapt and be symmetry set up there's a very specific order to move these and really the only way to know is to check out that cineversity video maybe there's help files but i didn't check so all these different controls can be moved all over the place i'm going to skip over all that because we don't have time and you should check out those cineversity videos because it is very very detailed and you can get access to this entire rig having said that i can close this file i went through the same process we went through earlier moved all the correct pieces to where they need to go and here is that final character i've even already applied the binding to the character so all the different components have been dragged in so under the animate tab this is now set up and ready to go just to show off a couple of the cool features in the tune rig if i were to grab this arm and start moving around i can stretch it immediately but hitting t for scale if i'm in the object mode here not model but object i can actually scale up these components and scale the different parts of the rig larger and smaller you get some really cool scaling on the arm get some popeye type things going scale up every component it's really bendy really wiggly it looks great and this is just what came out of the box i didn't do any extra weighting on at least the parts i'm showing you so far and i can pull this leg up and stretch it and everything just looks really nice right away but not everything is perfect when it comes to auto binding and this has nothing to do with the new tune rig it just has to do with cinemas doing the best they can to try and figure out what should be weighted but you can't automatically get it working all great right out of the box you'll see that this knee is bending a little bit strangely as i bend this up you see it's not looking so hot right there and then these are actually keyframed if i pull this in you see the arms will bend into this new position i'll turn off the hair so it's not getting in the way you can see that this weighting is not amazing it looks a little bit janky around the hand that these legs and the hips pinch really badly now what i did do is this arm i spent some time and i repainted the weights very manually you see everything's been cleaned up quite a bit it looks a lot smoother than it was if we turned on the subdivision surface it probably looked all right it's going to get smooth as it goes around that's not too bad put a few more so that gets nice and smoothed out not not not bad however we have a new tool here and that is the delta mush deformer going into the deformers you can find delta mush this is a deformer that it can work on other things but specifically where it's most useful is after a skin deformer so these arms are calculating and they're getting deformed and this delta mush can be dropped inside and is going to automatically try and smooth everything out now check check out the one that i spent a bunch of time smoothing out and now check out the one that is just the out of the box weighting this is so much closer to all the weight painting i did and instead of like the i don't know how long it took on this but the 10 minutes to repaint the weights on that i'm now getting almost exactly the same result from this automatically let's copy that same delta mush to the legs so i'll just make a copy of that and find the mesh pants there drop it after the skin and the instant i drop it check it out look at those knees look at how this knee has smoothed out turning this off and on it is doing an amazing job of redefining that shape without fixing the weights if you have if you have a job you have to do really quick and there's one point that's escaping because it's linked to let's say the elbow is somehow linked to where the stomach is and it's bending really weird this will go really really long way to fixing that right out of the box i'm actually really impressed with how basic how easy it is to use like the default settings that it comes with look really great you can add a little bit of smoothing if you want to really get that nice and rounded you can add additional iterations but if you push it too far it can get it can get weird so the default out of the box 10 looks really nice a way of thinking about this is like a smart smooth deformer it's not just smoothing it's actually detecting how much these points have moved and what their relative distance to their neighbors were so there's a lot more intelligence behind it automatically and man it can really clean things up uh i suggest checking out some of the macson examples as well it is really cool in fact there's some inside the content browser but hey this is supposed to be new original stuff so that is the very very basics of the tune mesh and the delta mush pose library i'm actually a lot more excited about this feature than i thought i would be it is really neat to use but having said that it is very specific in the way that you should set it up now we're back to jess's character here you can see why i want to have something neat to look at because we were going to be working with this character a lot no matter what it was so in this case let's talk about a couple different things here is a face rig it's pretty much the tune face rig but i have to say i made a couple of tweaks because i'm very specific in what i like so i modified the rig a little bit that's not the point whatever the mouth rig you've got set up and there are characters inside the content browser if you want to just have one to play with i've got these controls set up something to note really quickly is you can make selection objects and that's very very handy so if i were to select a couple of controls here let's just grab these four i would want to maybe create a selection object if you're not familiar say select selection filter i want to create selection object and now this object right here if i ever double click on it it will select those four objects i had selected when it was created that's very handy to have i've actually created two of those already one is the lips of this character which are these just these four outer controls i can move that around and change the lips of the character and then there's mouth and if i double click on that one it'll actually be the tongue and the teeth and every single control because when we are recording the positions for these mouth shapes we want every single control if you accidentally forget one it can make it very difficult to repair anyway the new features now are under character manager pose library browser selecting that it'll open up this interface which doesn't look like too much right away for me there's already two things built in because i've already made two different sets of mouth controls we're going to ignore those for now and come back to that later selecting preferences we've got two buttons down here that we could currently select one is save don't need that yet but then there is create new library you cannot record a pose until we've created a new library in this case i will rename it demo and then with demo selected i can now make a folder this folder is a new group of some sort i will name it phonemes if you are not familiar with the concept of phonemes they are pretty neat and handy for doing character animation specifically mouth shapes so from a google image search i just searched for phonemes and here's a bunch of different images of kind of key mouth shapes to do different sounds different common sounds you can see here there's like an o e and an ah and all these different ones are great reference to go and grab although you can't get better than just grabbing a mirror and seeing what shape you make with your mouth at any given sound and those become phonemes and it sort of becomes a template that you can jump between to quickly build dialogue from your character so having said that why don't we make one right now we just need to make some sort of mouth pose so now we've got a library and a folder we now have the ability to create a pose let's make that pose in fact before we make that pose let's make a basic pose i want this base shape so having done that i'll double click my mouth so everything's selected you could manually select the things you want but i have it pre-built there clicking that new pose it will create a new pose rename it to base that will create that base shape let's make a closed mouth shape so i'll start by closing this jaw a bit this is in my overall selection i'll pull that up as much as i have to to get it kind of closed and then selecting the different controls scoot this down i'm not going to aim to be perfect i'll push that down a bunch push this up i think mostly the lower lip is the one that moves not the upper one but it's a cartoony character that can go up and you know very meticulously you can move all these controls into all the perfect positions to be able to create that mouth shape these larger splines are making it a little bit easier for me to select although it's still not super easy pulling those down there you go good enough mouth shape it's kind of like that little cat face having done that i've got a nice new pose double click on the mouth i've got all the current controls select to add a new pose it will add it you can't add any new pose unless you've got something selected in that folder structure because otherwise it doesn't know where to put it having this new pose i could just call this um let's just say closed closed and we've now got two different mouth shapes selecting one i could click on this little blank image here and it'll jump to that mouth shape selecting closed clicking that image it'll jump to that one where it starts getting powerful is if i select one of them and drag the slider it will transition into that new shape so i don't have to go all the way i could go a little bit hit enter and it'll bake that down as that shape having said all of this i've actually already built out all of the main phonemes that i want to work from so let's check those out selecting here i actually emptied out these images intentionally i could select any one of these and select this image and jump to all these different mouth shapes and we don't have to check them all but i've pre-built them let's in fact hide the controls and you see there's an e shape and a nice huge mouth just for fun bunch different mouth shapes what i would like to do now and something i found very handy is we can create preview images of this if i were to select let's say the ah and click this empty image i can render an image and it'll save it there now if you're doing that while you're working on a character they tend to get out of sync like your camera position changes you have to remember to hide the controls so they're not in the way so what i've been finding is i don't worry about rendering the images until i've got all the shapes that i want and now that i have the shapes i want let me frame up the character a little bit better in fact the craziest one is the huge mouth so i'll frame that up a bit get nice and close cause it's gonna eat up all the space and now we can start saving the images so clicking on the ah let's go to that image this pose clicking on the image and then render it jump to the next one click on the image to set the pose render it and now very quickly i can render out the image of each one of those and create previews so that we don't need to base it off of the text but just off the visual which is always handy only three more very very quick to jump through all these phonemes and there we go so those are now all saved something to notice is that these are not currently saved yet these are all saved locally to your computer not in this scene file if you send this scene file to someone else they will not have these poses so in addition to that you can see right now that these are highlighted because they are not saved yet so you have to make sure to hit the save button and now those are saved having said all that let's go ahead and select this folder and then click the thumbnail view and this will now pop open a preview of everything we just rendered we don't need the library anymore and very quickly with my single monitor here i'll have to scale this down a bit i can just click on any one of these images and jump to that mouth shape and it starts getting really fun and you can see how these are all from the same pov so it's very handy to see it that way i can drag in a mouse shape just a small proportion like we can take the shape and start closing it a bit and hit enter to bake it in and then start dragging in another post hit enter to bake it in proportionally and drag in any of these shapes whichever amount we want and hit enter or just click the image to get 100 and hit enter to bake it in keep in mind you have to enter it tripped me up in the beginning that drag a slider and be like oh i want some of this mouth shape and watch it's going to pop when i click on let's say this s sound as soon as i click the slider it's going to suddenly pop that's because i didn't hit enter to bake it in so now i can drag this in hit enter and then start pulling in the ah a little bit and bake that in so you can imagine combining this with those auto keyframes picking new poses changing the time picking a new pose changing a time and then something i would highly recommend is as useful as this is you don't want to just stay with these poses if i were to say jump to this mouse shape hit enter i would probably want to unhide my controls and then make this not perfectly symmetrical move this off to the side a little bit make sure that i'm doing in between frames so that the mouth moves in nice directions and you can really customize everything and make it your own but very rapidly get the basic shapes built in and i think that's going to be the best use of this tool having said all that i did just create a very simple animation here i can scrub this through so you can see i get this mouth shape going i tried to get some nice overlaps going on everything making sure everything was kind of flowing in nice big arcs so just going very quickly going through some of those key mouth poses and additional ones to really control the way that that lays out maxon was gracious enough to give me the opportunity to show off rocket lasso's very first plug-in recall now we're hard at work on some new plug-ins but this one that we released not too long ago is all about saving the current state of your object and being able to bring it back again later i've got a nice simple scene file here a couple objects from the content browser but specifically i've made this bottle it's very simple it's a loft it's got a material some n sides some stars if i hit n b you can see there's a bevel sharpening up some of these edges it's all good i'm going to make some changes to this that's maybe a little bit destructive so how about right-clicking on the bottle and adding a recall tag this is the plug-in from rocket lasso by creating that and double clicking on it i have stored the current state of this object as it is now so if i were to do something like select the loft make it editable go to polygon mode select some of those polygons let's do a loop selection maybe grab a couple of stripes from it d for extrude extrude it and be like okay that's cool i like the look of that i want that and then i keep on going and working on the scene file and i make some changes over here and i do some changes over there and then a half hour later i'm like you know what i don't like this bottle that much i want to make some changes to i want to go back to what it was but i made it editable well because i stored it with recall all i have to do is double click on the recall tag and it will bring it back to the state when we stored it but things can get so much more interesting than that let's keep on making more changes this loft let's duplicate it so i've got a second loft and i just want one of these n sides so pulling that up into the air t for scale make it bigger duplicate that enzyme pull it up into the air easy now t for scale make it a little bit bigger there too many subdivisions so i'll pull that way back down and add a cork material there so now i've got a cork on the top of this bottle let's say i want to hold on to that so making a second recall tag by right clicking and making a recall or duplicating the current one i can hold down control or command and double click it will change color which means i have now made a new state i now have two different states stored double clicking on the first tag will jump me back to this one double clicking on the second will bring back the court having done this let's make some more changes selecting the star i can hit t for scale and scale up that shape select this top one t for scale make that one a little bit bigger there we go a very different shape even change the shape of the chord t for scale pull that down a bit okay excellent and how about we add change the hierarchy a bunch in addition to the cork let's create a bend or actually let's make a twist deformer yeah twist the former put that after the bevel and click fit the parent something we didn't get a chance to talk about is also in r23 is this new interface where we can see the direction of the twist in addition to the direction that it's going to twist so cranking this up we can see it will spin around the orientation on y and in that direction very very handy a bunch of the deformers now have that interface which is pretty neat now that's nice and twisted create a smoothing deformer drop that after the twist oh and another thing look at this nice highlighting that we're getting now in r23 so that you can tell exactly we're going to be placing something so this is now smoothing i want to stiffen it up a bunch because i only want a little bit of smoothing hit n a so we can see the final and there we go there's a nice third bottle create another copy of a recall tag holding down controller command double-click and now i've got a third copy i can now jump between these different states of it and make any shape that i want if i were so inclined i could go back to this center one and make a quick change to the model here let's pinch this in smaller i kind of like that nice and simple and i'll override that one so now that one's gone and i've overridden it by holding down ctrl command double clicking and now i can jump between those different ones but things get a lot more interesting when we can make a duplicate of this battle copy and pasting it scoot one off to the side now i've got duplicates of this tag which means that one could become a one of the other states of the bottle these tags actually are storing the same information so there's no replication you can make unlimited copies here and it's not making your scene file any bigger as far as what the tags are storing as long as it's stored once then if stored on all of them delete the copy i don't need that one again here's some that's kind of cool creating a new object let's say a figure t for scale just to make it a little more reasonable i could scoot this into some other position even rotate it to some different angle this will look weird but let's tilt it forward and then copy one of my recall tags onto that let's copy this one on and say okay double click that object the figure has now turned into a bottle and this has taken on its position and its scale and its rotation and now it's there in space it can get even more interesting i don't need that one so i'll delete it i've got what used to be a cloner but it was made editable so i've got all these randomly rotated cubes there in all these different orientations well if i were to take my recall tag and copy it onto each of these objects very simply i could select all of those tags and say okay recall and every single one of those has now become a copy of the bottle so there are a lot of really fun things you can do with recall and this is a very very basic demo of it i've got longer demos of recall which i would love for you to check out but i'll just sneak one more thing in here and that is the ability to combine recall with a camera inside of cinema because this is where it just is so useful on a day-to-day workflow creating a camera how often does this happen to you you create a camera and you're like okay cool here's my camera angle this is what the client wants so there's the bottle and a bunch of other ones in the background and that's exactly right there where it should be like okay cool that's that's my position and then you're working and doing some things you have to make a change to a bottle and then you're like okay let me make a fix over here do this and do this and then you're like oh no i move my camera and you try and jump back to it so i'm hitting undo view undo view undo view it's like was it here was it here was it here was it here which one of those was it and you just don't you just don't know now there's other things you could do like record some keyframes on it or put a stop a protection tag on it so it can't rotate but that stops you from moving around it'll constantly jump back to that position if i were to find the position i like here i could just add a recall tag to it double clicking on the recall tag it is now stored everything about that camera which means i am free to move around refocus model something change whatever i like and any given moment be like okay cool go back to when i stored the camera so just double clicking that tag i jump back to this position having done that let's say there's a couple different shots i could choose a new framing pull this down let's even zoom out a bit and then frame up this way create a duplicate of this recall tag hold down control to override it and now i've got two different states let's go even crazier though and create a keyframe animation of this so let's go to a top view and record the position and rotation at the time of zero record these keyframes fast forward to the end of these 90 frames and pull this down and focus let's say right around there and record that position now this has keyframes so let's create another recall tag creating a copy overriding that one i can now jump between the state of all three of these so this is a camera with keyframes but if i double click on the first recall tag you'll see that not only do we go back to that first original position but there's no keyframes on this this is not a camera with keyframes because that's not the state when that was stored let's go to the second camera position double clicking there's the second one still no keyframes double click on the third one that's the one that had keyframes so double clicking i can now hit play and now the animation is back clicking on the camera there are the keyframes so you can see how you can store all this different information on these tags and just by double clicking storing it and double clicking again and bringing it back there are so many more things it can do but we have more r23 to talk about so let's jump back into the last huge new feature to talk about and that is scene nodes now this is a tech preview from maxon this is not fully featured yet it's sort of an experiment they put it out ahead of time because they want to get feedback from users nodes are inherently kind of complicated they it's a very sophisticated process and this is the very beginnings of it and they need feedback now having said that let's jump into another scene file i've heard a couple of lights and a couple of materials i want to explain a concept before we get into the nodes creating a plane and making it editable if i were to select polygon mode and hit the letter d for extrude if i have nothing selected and i drag everything will extrude in cinema if nothing is selected then it's kind of like everything is selected also keep in mind that if i select everything control or command a and drag then it will extrude everything now it's only when some polygons are selected that they specifically get extruded so keep this technique in mind as we move into the nodes deleting this object i want to change my layout so we can actually see the nodes so layout nodes jumps to the other monitor here it is and we won't really see much because first you have to click this scene nodes button and now we can actually interact with the c notes interface maxon put most of their focus when it comes to c nodes into two main areas the main one is actually motion graphics tools things like the cloner and fields and falloffs that's where a lot of the focus ends up going however at last second they snuck in a bunch of additional tools in the world of modeling nodes so even though a lot of the effort and focus was put into the mograph nodes i actually find the modeling nodes way more appealing because we can already do tons of mograph stuff but as far as doing parametric modeling that's a little bit trickier so i think that's where we will spend our focus and specifically let's try and do a node-based city generator it won't get too crazy but i think it's something that could be a little bit more advanced and we can definitely go deeper and deeper and deeper into it if we were so inclined here is our overall interface there is a lot of categories there are so many different things that can be overwhelming large categories of things but we're going to try and step through this in a simple way but we don't have enough time to go into a lot of detail so we'll just keep on plowing ahead to begin with there's probably a lot of ways to start generating a city but i believe a good way to start is with a plane you can find that under geometry but specifically i'll just search for it type into the asset search bar the word plane and we can find a geometry plane this contains just the points and polygon information that make up a plane as well as the settings for it but it's not a real object it's not a real object until we feed it into a geometry node by searching for that i can find a geometry operator by pulling this out it can be fed a g bit of geometry specifically from the plane here and that can be output into the scene and now it's become real in the viewport hitting n b we can see the individual polygons and it's interact it's behaving just like a regular plane would although notice that it does not exist in the object manager it is only through the nodes next up we need to start modifying this somehow we want roads and a good way to do that is with an inset an inset is just like a inner extrude so dragging this onto this wire it'll actually interject it into this stream and inset every single one of these polygons but right now it's super huge changing the inset to one unit we can now see that we're getting what we might be able to use as roads that's actually working quite nicely next up we should extrude upward from this inset to create our buildings with that we want an extrude searching for extrude under geometry there's extrude interject to that one onto this wire and zoom out a bit and well it extruded but not quite the way we want to if i rotate down we can see that what's happened is every single polygon has extruded but why would that be well remember what we're talking about with a plane if nothing is selected it's as if everything is selected so let's actually set an active selection on this plane scooting it over so we have a little extra room i'll search for the word select here i want an active selection so what will be the active selection well this geometry wants an active selection and what will that active selection be made of well it wants some indices or the indexes of some polygons we can get that through a selection range the geometry will be fed in this selection range is going to select all polygons it's outputting an array of indexes which can be fed into the indices and this is now selecting all of the polygons but nothing counts when it comes to nodes until it's put into the stream and this is the final output so if it's not linked to something that gets to the final output it doesn't count so this geometry now becomes our basis and the instant i connect it we can now see that we're getting our individual extrudes because everything was selected and then those that selection was inset and then only those inner ones were selected and now that's what gets extruded if i select our polygon mode here and select one of our nodes we actually see the active selection in the viewport which is actually pretty handy so with all these getting inset we can quickly see the most basic possible city generator by turning on let's say proportional doing a lot of proportional inset with lots of variation grabbing the extrude and doing a bunch of offset with lots of variation and there we go the most basic possible city generator but obviously we want to go way further than that so no offset variation no offset at all for the extrude and on the inset let's get rid of all that variation go back to not proportional but an absolute value of 1 to give us these roads let's make a sidewalk for ourselves that can be simple by doing a quick offset of let's say 0.5 yeah that's pretty small maybe a bit big in the end and then do an inset of i'm not sure what so we'll drag in a copy of our other inset feed in the geometry output that geometry and there we go it is now doing a second inset right there so now we have a road and then a sidewalk this should probably be smaller maybe 0.5 this upward movement make it a little smaller 0.2 perhaps so it's just that little offset so we have a road and these individual plots of land my thought is is let's separate these out into separate objects not only so it's easier to work with but also so we can apply different materials saving this scene file just in case i want to split this off into two separate pieces now this extrude is actually it's after this inset this inset is yeah since that's what we want to separate out so from the inset let's delete things search for the word delete and under geometry here's a delete so cool interject this and it is deleting the active selection so that would be that plot of land in between each road so that that's actually fine that's exactly what we want how about getting a material onto this road that's pretty straightforward as well searching for the word material material there's a material operator that we can drag in after the geometry operation so that's just the order that those have to be in when it comes to a lot of these nodes it's just like expresso you're gonna have to spend some time memorizing what the individual nodes do and how they combine i'm trying to show you a pretty advanced usage of this but it's it doesn't get too complex it's a bunch of relatively simple ideas all layered on top of each other and it took me a bit of time to get to this point in any case we now have this material operator and it looks exactly like a texture tag a material tag we put on an object so if these are the roads let's drag in this road material and instantly that gets textured here's where things get interesting we only have road geometry now the plots of land are gone but these are nodes which means that any step of the way we can branch out and do something separate keep in mind at the stage of this inset we have the plot of land still there and it's actively selected so what if we invert that selection searching for the word select i could drag in an in for selection if that gets inverted and then we delete it and then we turn it into real geometry and then apply a material we should get the plots of land so grabbing all three of these holding control or command to make a duplicate of them i can link the invert selection in which then gets deleted which then creates geometry which then has a material which should be the grass here drag in this grass material and output that into the scene there we go look at that no more roads but now we have plots of land that are the grass so that's working really well except we need we can only output one thing at a time so these need to get combined somehow how can we combine that well let's search for the word children and under the operators there is a children operator dragging that in what i do is i think of this sort of like a null and this wants to be fed children so if we feed it the first object we're outputting and the second object we're outputting this is now outputting a single thing essentially a null and its children so let me click that a little bit better and there we go now a road with the road material and these lots with the grass material applied working quite nicely next up let's do a quick inset on the grass so that we can get a little bit of grass around every building after we delete we are left with the plots of land so how about sticking an inset in there steal on this cop a copy of this inset drag the geometry in output that as this geometry and we should see a new inset on top of everything which is fine but because we inverted our selection nothing is selected and that can be a little bit dangerous especially if we go to delete something so even though we're doing this inset i think before this inset we should select all of our geometry again we needed some more space so this will scoot over and we need to do that same setup of a select search for that i want a selection range which will take all the living geometry select all of the polygons and then make the active selection from that so this geometry has a selection this is updating what is selected and that output will now go to the inset and by doing this combination of things we can now see that that is indeed selected so this inset i think it could go pretty far let's say two and lots of variation and this one potentially could be proportional so this could be i don't know 25 with like maximum variation so some are larger some are smaller and now we get these different plots of land this is a good opportunity to split this into two objects again so let's copy what we already did which is this delete and let's pull a copy of that up so after we do this inset i want to split this from grass into the plots of land for the building so delete the inside selection and then if we're deleting the inside selection what's left is the grass so this should be not road but grass and that will get output and then we want the opposite of it which is the same as doing this inversion so let's select this inversion delete reselect all and i think we can copy all of those yeah that makes sense to me copy all of those and from this step we're taking that inset inverting the selection and then deleting from there and then eventually reselecting all of them and that will now be the plot of land that is the inside which we'll be building so this material i'll turn into the building material let's re-link everything up properly so that becomes that final output and that's being made a child here but we're missing the plots of grass in between and that is because this is not linked up the child operator does not have another input for one but by selecting the node we could say add input and now this can be fed through given a third child and now we have a separate plot of land so now we've just got this one set of nodes which are generating essentially concrete for us i'll move it up because it's kind of like we're keep on going further up it's just my visual organization so after everything gets selected again because that's the way we built it i think it should be well let's see what do we want to do how about getting more detail by subdividing this searching for the word sub divide there we go geometry subdivide i can drag that in between and all of those polygons because it's selecting everything are getting selected exactly what i was hoping for so it looks good however though there's still an active selection everything is selected so that is good because what i'd like to do is another subdivision but this one i don't want to apply to everything i want to apply randomly so searching for the word select there's a really cool node of random selection so it's going to i believe select from only the things that are currently selected so if i select this subdivide you see everything is selected all the subdivisions so feeding this into the random selection and if i were to take that geometry and output it hopefully we can see let's see uh i guess it's not going to show it until we do something to it so this is creating a random selection of points oh there we go if we change this to polygons now you can see that different polygons are randomly selected and we can choose the percentage chance that those are caught which is excellent because now i'll copy the subdivide a second time feed in that random selection into it and now hopefully once we feed this into our overall stream here now some of these anything that was selected is subdivided again giving us a lot more detail overall awesome so one of the last steps here is let's reselect everything i want everything selected so here is the select everything two nodes copying those over we can take this after we subdivide i want to select from that geometry everything so that gets fed into both places just like we've been doing and so now everything is selected after that that's when we do our extrude so search for extrude drop it in feed out our selected all everything output that as our final geometry and let's see we get oh look at this everything is getting selected and everything is getting extruded so after we select all let's randomly select some of these polygons so copying this random selection over again holding control or command feed in all of the geometry that gets output into the extrude so it's not everything it is now 50 of the polygons of the active selection so it's 50 of everything and we can now see 50 of the polygons are getting extruded out to be these buildings we could increase this amount and have more we could decrease it and have less and everything that's not extruded is kind of like these parking lot like concrete slabs i think something a little higher would be nice and well let's check out something if i go and look under this building we'll see that it's not quite behaving the way we want to every polygon is individually getting extruded that's not what we want but if we select the extrude there's an amazing checkbox in here under polygons is use islands turning on use islands we'll combine all of those and do a single extrude on each one which will clean up a lot of geometry and we don't have intersecting polygons then and with all those grouped up adding offset variation will give us a bunch of different heights on all of our buildings going to object mode so i can hit n a and just see our final geometry we are now getting a pretty respectable randomly generated city and at any point we could go to any of our previous nodes and modify them to get a overall different look the biggest change we'll see here is going to this random selection and changing the seed and different buildings are being selected to grow and there is oh there's just so much power here for how deep we can go on it now that is as far as i can go with the time that we have saving that i can close this scene file and here is the exact same setup we are just working from except i've modified the beginning a little bit so currently i'm just outputting the original plane it's currently five by five subdivisions because i am taking a random selection of those polygons and subdividing them which gives us this result and then randomly grabbing a selection of those and subdividing again which gives me this output which is random again finally scoot this over so i can show you that final output i am removing all of the n-guns subdividing one more time which is giving us this overall smooth bit of geometry and that becomes the basis to grow a new city by feeding that into the original inset this is where we generated the original roads all i've done is sneak in these new nodes right there to change the plane this can all get output through the entire system that we already just built identical to what we were just talking about and if i grab this final combination of children and output it then it'll generate a city again and this time it's on these curvy random roads so we're not on a perfect grid all the other rules we built in are still applying but i was able to change that base geometry and get something very different very quickly now i would love to continue and go deeper and deeper on this i'm not even sure of certain things i want to do it'd be great to figure out like a nice downtown area have more control over buildings get multiple levels extruding so that everything's not flat on the top we could put different detail on different roofs all over the place it'd be great to randomize colors on there these are things i'd like to figure out and i don't even necessarily know how to do that quite yet but i do believe that this has to wrap it up because we are out of time [Music] so let me go back to my standard layout so if you liked this tutorial and you would like to see more i've got a whole bunch of videos in fact through my live streams i've got hundreds of hours of videos on my rocket lasso youtube channel so head on over to youtube.com rocket lasso or you can follow at rocket lasso on all the different platforms and you'll find me there i hope you are as excited for the new features in r23 as i am there is so much and i did not get to cover all of it as i said i have a youtube video covering all the new features it's twice as long as this and it's covering the new uv workflow and the remesher and a bunch of other little things i did not get to get to in this i'm very excited for it now i do a lot of live streams i do tons of tutorials on youtube and of course there's that new plugin so if you'd like to support the type of stuff that i do then the best way to do that would be go check out that new recall plugin not only does it help support rocket lasso and everything that i'm doing but it can also help speed up your workflow that will wrap this one up thank you so much again everyone and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Maxon

Views: 22,003

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

Id: npsRwDlO-R4

Length: 55min 32sec (3332 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020