Cinema 4d 2023.1: Pyro First Look

all right well now that pyro is out for Cinema 4D and we can create smoke and fire without plug-ins I've really been spending a lot of time experimenting with it uh and seeing what we can do and so I wanted to show you just kind of what I've gathered so far and really kind of just take a quick look at pyro and maybe set up a couple of examples so let's go ahead and get started alright so one of the things we're going to be doing today is creating this explosion one of the great things about pyro is that it works with all of the other aspects of Cinema 4D so you can use vertex tags you can use forces you can you know it works with Dynamics all of it plays well together and that's what's really great to see about this and what makes it so powerful so let's go ahead and dive in here to a new scene and uh it's important to point out that pyro uses the graphics card in your computer so if you go to Project settings here and then you go to simulation you will see that it's going to by default use your graphics card and you can't choose which graphics card if you do happen to have multiple so it is going to use the one that your display is plugged into you'll see there's a separate section for pyro these are just some of the basic settings um that you will also have access to in the Pyro object that gets created so I wanted to point that out we'll be talking about some of these settings as well um but to get started all you really have to do is create a cube okay or any shape really go to simulation tags and as I mentioned all this stuff works together and add a pyrotech pyro fuel is something different perhaps we'll get into that but I will add the Pyro tag and if I just go ahead and hit play what do you know I have fire okay smoke and fire um now it's important to point out at this point um this won't render uh this is all volume um objects and it will only render using redshift okay not standard or physical it will only render in redshift or any other renderer that can support vdbs which are industry standard for creating smoke fire liquids that type of thing we can either use it without caching it directly in Cinema 4D or we can cash it out and then if you wanted to load it in you would have to use oh shoot where is it um oh I have it under my redshift menu which I enabled in my preferences but our RS volume I believe is where we would load in our perhaps it's called volume loader let's see yep no right here um you would just load a cached VDB right in there and other renderers would have something similar okay I know octane does for instance so if you click on our pyro tab um you will see that by default in the object properties we have certain things turned on and these properties can be used um for other purposes as we'll see but on export means you have to Cache this in order for it to be visible in your renderer so if I don't want to Cache things and I just want to see things in my renderer in redshift without that then I would just switch this to on density is going to be smoke temperature is going to be fire and what we'll see is velocity can actually be used for um for uh simulations so there are obviously other things in here like color if we wanted to drive color we could use temperature to drive color you can do all that stuff inside the Pyro material but the three big ones are density temperature and velocity and so that's that's what we will be focusing on today the cache tab is where you can cash out pyro to disk keep in mind um you know if you're using redshift uh that these you know caches can get pretty large and it helps if the Cache can fit inside the video memory you have on your GPU so that will be important here shortly when we talk about resolution but um I run into quite a few problems where I've created cash caches that are really really large and my GPU uh 3090 in this case will not render them okay the Pyro tab here is very much like the Pyro tab in um the project settings voxel size here is one of the most important um settings as it does determine kind of the quality the resolution but if we go too low too quickly just like I was saying we'll end up with a video file or a cache file um that is just way too large so we have to be a bit careful with that some of these other settings honestly the help file is really really good and definitely worth the read which you can always just right click and go show help on but sub steps can help kind of blend and smooth out give you something that's a bit more realistic um in the extra forces section here we have buoyancy which is how fast this is going to go up um and so you can make adjustments there vortices strength can be useful if you want to um have this you know move a lot more be a lot more um detailed okay and you can choose where that vorta that strength is coming from we also have turbulence okay so once again if we're trying to break this up add more detail um change the shape of it turbulence is a great way to do this right inside of our properties here as I mentioned previously though you can use a lot of these other forces like the rotation we'll be using Field Force I think there's a turbulence as well not all of these work but quite a few of them do okay um combustion deals with our combustion settings what's important to point out here is the um ignition temperature is when the temperature things will catch fire now that is in Celsius density per fuel is also important that is how much smoke we're going to get for each unit of fuel as well as the temperature per fuel so there's a lot of almost science physics behind this that while you don't have to have a Mastery of it the more you know the better off you'll be dissipation obviously deals with how quickly things are going to disappear or go away um and smoothing is also really important what I found here is that um you get a lot of detail from this really more detail than you would want and it can throw off the scale of your simulation because the amount of detail you have is just way too much for a small little Cube one of the ways you can get rid of that is by starting to smooth out your simulation to make it look like it's a lot larger okay if that makes sense the scale of the the turbulence or the vortice or whatever other forces you might add here um you know smooth them out so we don't end up with all the super fine detail and smoothing is one way you can do that okay a couple of other things in the advanced section here um I found the advection mode can also determine how much detail you're getting with it really kind of being like lower detail to higher detail so once again if I'm doing something kind of very large that we're we're pretty far away from I may want to go with one of our other options not that there's anything wrong with this one it gives us an incredible amount of detail but it's too much detail for um you know when you're really close up to something and honestly think that's a good thing I would rather have too much detail and need to dial it back than rather have to add more detail because that was something I struggled with um in other applications like X particles when it came to this stuff and really that's about all I got you can also exclude forces okay so that is a look there and let's actually start kind of just messing around with this stuff a little bit so let's say if I want to smooth things out a little bit because like I said um you know we would want to get something maybe a little bit simpler I can increase my smoothing and that just kind of smooth things out quite a bit and so I really really like that for something like this all right so that's looking pretty good to me um when we did add the Pyro tag okay we also have certain options now on our object once again we have voxel settings so you can do different voxel settings say per objecting so that could be helpful if you have something closer you want to have one voxel size whereas you may want to have a different voxel size for the overall settings okay but I'm gonna actually set those to five because um it can also affect the playback because of the amount of detail um sub steps that was a setting I mentioned previously that we've seen in on there um this is a Surface emitter so it's only going to emit on the surface of the object okay with that checked on now the properties we have here density temperature and fuel uh all correspond to our smoke and fire so density is smoke if you want smoke have density turned on if you don't want smoke have density turned off you'll see we just get fire okay now both of these have a set in add and same with temperature as well as fuel velocity is a little bit different we'll talk about that but um so you can have an initial value which is what set will do and then a value to add over time so that can be important if you're trying to create just a single explosion a single kind of flash or if you want this to be continuous and that's really where set versus add come into play notice we have density Maps under temperature under um density and fuel now these can be used vertex Maps um I think that's about it there the only thing you can use but within those vertex maps you can you know use different techniques to create them which we'll actually do here um in a second uh you can change the color of the um smoke although there are different ways to do that I don't know if we'll get that in get into that with this particular video but that is just a simple way to change the base color okay so that's smoke when it comes to fire you have two really ways of creating it we have our temperature which um is just saying all right well we have this so hot of course it's going to combust of course it's going to turn on into fire and then we're going to add more heat over time so that this is continuously burning another way of creating fire though is by adding fuel all right think of like adding gas to a fire so if I set the ad here to zero and set this um really low okay you can see we lose a lot of that fire and then we just have our smoke well we can now add Fuel and fuel is what gives us more of that explosion all right because we are having a build up of whatever in this case the gas or fuel as it converts and gets burned in to fire this has that same set in add you'll notice though that it is continuous though you could just do a frame range and so this is going to give you more of that flash okay so you can see that goes away and then we're left with just something kind of smoldering on fire okay so that is really how fuel works is it allows us to create more of an explosion okay now velocity is important if you are going to have animated elements okay so in order to do that you would need to do add to Velocity if this object here was going to move set to movement or these others are a bit more specific but um at the velocity is what you want to work with if you're going to animate this now one of the things that can be a bit tricky here is uh you may see two different things between what you see in your perspective View and what you see when you render because of just the way this system works at the moment and I would always trust what you see rendering wise and that's where it can be a bit confusing if you don't change this I'm sorry where is it the velocity section down here and it looks like it's doing one thing but when you render it's doing something different if so if my emitter here was animated this would be the first place I would look so there was one other tag let's see let's turn off fuel here and so I'll just create maybe another object another Cube maybe scale it down and on this tag I'm just going to add fuel so remember now we just have fuel on this object I could add fuel to the fire and if I move this over we get our explosion okay so that can be another way of controlling this a little bit you know almost like using a match to light a fire now both of these things are on fire okay um and it's another way to control and interact with our simulation okay we can get rid of that and honestly that's kind of the basics there now there's a lot of other little intricacies of course but we're going to go ahead and try and make an explosion here uh to end this video and just to start I will um actually let's just create a new scene going to start by creating a sphere and on this sphere I will add my pyrotech okay so if we hit play we get our yep there's the explosion which uh I just never get sick of looking at I think it's just awesome that we can do this so easily and so fast and that it's using our GPU okay now in the Pyro section here in the object properties what I'm going to do is turn off density turn off temperature but leave velocity on and actually just switch it to on in general and so now what we're doing is creating a field a field we are going to use to drive our simulation so let's call this um simulation field okay and I can hide this I'm going to duplicate it so that way our settings will be the same and I will make sure this one's visible and I'll just set velocity off on this one now if I was going to render this I would want to turn um density and temperature back on okay but for right now since I'm really not going to be rendering this we can just do our simulation like this and let's call this one we would just call this like render okay all right so we have our two setups here what we need to do now uh that we have our simulation part ready to go is create what it is we want to explode and so we'll just create a cube ah actually yeah let's keep it simple we'll create a cube and I'm also going to create a ground plane so I'll lower that ground plane so that our cube is sitting on it scale this up how large this needs to be I don't know that should be fine I'm going to turn off my work plane as well so that's annoying and our Cube we are going to put in a voronoi fracture object right so I held down alt or option to put it immediately inside and on the voronoi fracture in the sources section I'm going to choose point generator and increase the point amount to something like I don't know 120. now with a lot of this stuff you do need to be a bit careful uh depending on how powerful your computer is um you know things can crash things can you know freeze up uh you can do too much for your computer to handle so if you're running on a little bit of a you know a modest laptop or desktop something that's a few years old um by all means you know start simple start to feel out what your computer is capable of before going too crazy and crashing it uh because it you know not a good time so we have our Sim our warnoy fracture here the objects that are going to explode and now we can start adding our simulation tags to this and funny enough we are going to be using our just regular um bullet tags for this so on our plane I'm going to add a collider body on our voronoi fracture I'm going to add a rigid body tag and so that is going to give us this very very awesome animation so not quite an explosion yet okay uh what we need to do now that we have a simulation is create a field Force which we can create by going to simulate forces Field Force and that will allow us to use our smoke and fire in the velocities and and all everything that it's doing um to drive our um rigid body simulation here so in the field Force I'm going to drag in our simulation field okay we want to set the strength to 200 here all right we also want to select the simulation field go into re-napping remapping check enable okay and in the direction property we need to switch the length here to normalize and that's going to let it use each Vector that's a part of our field it's going to give it a lot more strength and we also want to uncheck invert directions so it pushes things out and so now we should start to see something oh wait we don't there's one other thing we need to do in our project settings okay we need to go to scene and turn on simulate before generators okay and now we have our explosion okay and that is quite an explosion perhaps too much of an explosion uh and it's because of that normalize it's really making things probably a bit stronger than I would like and what we can do to help control this is use a spherical field okay and we can scale this spherical field as far out as we want but this is going to limit the effect of our explosion okay now honestly this is a heck of a lot more than what I was seeing previously um so I'm a bit surprised by that but no matter we can keep on going here and so if we wanted to we could always come into the field Force turn down the strength a little bit so maybe we can get something there we go a little bit a little bit better there okay maybe even lower man so crazy that the values here would be so different from one scene to the next and see I'm actually not liking that oh maybe that's because it was at 500 instead of 50. all right well okay that's definitely interesting different not quite what I was looking for we'll stick with 200 for right now um what we can do though um is well with this is we can also make these voronoi fracture pieces catch on fire be a part of this as well by just adding a pyro tag to this okay so adding a pyro tag to our voronoi fracture that already has our rigid body tag and now we're going to get these pieces that are going to be on fire as well and not only that they are going to be affected um by because look how much it just kind of changed things so now we're getting something that's a lot more interesting actually it looks like a person not a person but got some arms and almost like a group uh what I would do here though is I would turn off the ad on the temperature because really these would just be on fire from the initial explosion and then burn what they have so that will kind of tone things down a little bit um but you know it is important to kind of point out here things are starting to slow down and that is really where you know voxel size cashing things out can be important though um as I'm still kind of working with this uh it's something you want to be mindful of having to cash every time you make a change now there is one thing I forgot to cover so let's kind of take a step back that was using vertex maps to control temperature density all of that stuff so another scene here I'll just add a pyro tag we'll keep it simple here with our basic explosion and I'm going to add some segments to this so actually I don't need that many that way we can have something to work with I'll make our Cube editable rewind it I actually don't want to see that for right now um and just right click on our object go to other tags and choose vertex map now vertex map allows us to save kind of strength information uh directly to a Vertex so whether a Vertex is selected not selected or anything in between right 0 to 100 kind of um strength there and red means no strength yellow means 100. now the the different values don't always kind of make the most sense in terms of being able to see zero to 100 but that isn't terribly important for what we're going to be doing here with our vertex tag selected what we can do is use Fields so that way all of our different fields that we've seen and used before we can create and use to control the strength of our vertex map and whether or not a Vertex is selected or not selected and I'm going to just use a linear field for this find that linear field where you at linear field there it is move it up off to the side here because it really only matters going this direction right but I'm going to rotate this I'm going to need it to go up and down and let's just keep it in the middle so we have something to visualize but now you can see 100 you can see Zero and notice you know visually this isn't a great representation yellow to Red isn't you know there isn't that much of a difference in color and in value there so that can be tricky to see but in our pyro tag now we can start dragging in that vertex map into the density map into the temperature map and as I do that okay and then hit play notice that now only the bottom is Catching Fire And if I pull this down nothing is Catching Fire and so I can pull this up and it will slowly start to catch everything on fire right so that this is another way we can kind of art direct the explosion starting or a fire starting now this linear field is very well linear right so that's why you know the line we're seeing is perfectly smooth and if you wanted to break this up well there are a number of different ways you could do this I find adding a random field on top of this can help but we don't want a random field with this normal blending mode instead we would want to do subtract so that way it's only going to work on the places where our linear field is active and so you can see we're able to get something a little bit more natural and organic we're not going to get something where it's perfectly uniform has that straight line going across now I will say um you know the amount of detail we get with this right this map is dependent on the number of points you have on your object that's why I wanted to add more initially so you know we have to have something here in order to drive this and the more points the more detail you're going to get and just to show that I will subdivide this maybe a couple more times there we go and notice how much finer that detail is that noise pattern is from the random and we could have a second field here that kind of eventually cleans everything up and brings it to 100 percent but honestly this works pretty good right at least I would think so okay now let's talk about the Pyro material to finish things off here rendering this I am just going to add a dome light so let's make sure my renderer here is set to redshift and because I'm not going to cash this out I want to make sure density temperature and velocity are on so what we should see now that I start my IPR is some rendering of our smoke and fire huh wasn't really seeing anything even though it looked not great to begin with so let's try opening up our render View and maybe we'll just cash things out to play it safe right so yep nothing there so we will go ahead and cash things out I could have swore that was working maybe there's something I'm missing but we'll just cash this out I will shorten up my frame range here to say something like 30 so this does not take a lot of time and just going to create a folder on my desktop call this cash give our file a name and hit actually hit cache scene and then that will work instead of just cash if you just click um on the file it's going to browse and want you to load something in which is not what we want to do in this particular case so I'll hit save we can see it's going through and caching and so that can take a bit of time depending on the complexity of your simulation the speed of your computer all of that good stuff so now when this is done caching is going to do a couple of things help us render of course but also what happened also allow us to um play back things a little bit quicker so I'm really confused because I did hit cache and it did cache it but it doesn't appear to be using it so let me just tell this to load the cache which I just saved perfect so we have that and so now as I scrub through I should get smoother faster playback which is great now when I hit render we should oh I know why I wasn't getting anything before I did not add my pyro material to this so from redshift we need to go to materials and choose Pyro and this is a pre-made volume material meant to work with our pyro thing here and it gets applied to the Pyro object not your geometry but the Pyro um so yeah that's why that wasn't rendering previously my mistake um and yeah we can see our our fire now now part of the reason it looks a little bit flat is the lighting if I was to add an hdri that's an interesting place for that to pop up we can just drag one in hopefully it doesn't take too long to download and of course it's going to take a little a second here somehow I also apparently ended up in kind of customization mode for my user interface so that's interesting um but it works straight out of the box and I'll show you why that is but it as I mentioned it's a volume material that is connected um the two properties that we need those properties at I pointed out earlier in the Pyro option in the object properties those two that we had set to on or on Expert export those are the properties that are being piped directly into um our volume here and so I don't know what happened um so let's clean things up a little bit because this is getting out of hand there we go um we can bring our um oh so now we're rendering here instead of nope that's just the hdri uh volume material back and we can select our pyro volume and it loaded in the density into our scatter property here and it loaded in temperature into emission okay now what would happen if you created a normal pyro or a volume material and want to use it if you've clicked on presets and I know this is probably a little bit chopped off um but notice pyro here um let's see if we can't just move this a little bit maybe maybe um has the those properties right here for you to pull from and the properties you see here are going to be properties that you've turned on I'm going to turn that off uh in our pyro object here right so that's why I was seeing those three and so this is the end result with um all that stuff and because they've done a good job kind of setting it up we really shouldn't have to do a whole lot here but if you want to kind of work with the clouds a little bit that's going to be the scatter section adjusting the scatter coefficient here will change how light or dark they are how dense they are lighter values are going to Bright or higher values are going to allow more scattering so make things brighter okay you can change the color here as well right and temperature you can do the same thing but really like I said they they do a pretty good job of getting this to work right away without having to make any adjustments which is great because the the previous volume material um you know could be a little bit tricky to set up now what I want to do in the future is um dive more into working with the different colors using the temperature to drive color um of the smoke and and other things but for this video I think that is going to just about do it uh so hopefully you enjoyed this video if there's anything else you would like to see please let me know I would appreciate it if you liked this video left a comment with maybe something you wanted to see like I mentioned and even subscribe if you found it helpful until next time take care

Channel: Behind the Button

Views: 13,658

Keywords: Cinema 4d, C4d, Tutorial, Mograph, Effector, Field, Animation, F-curve, 3d, timeline, keyframe, redshift, compositing, aftereffects, rendering, AOV, modeling, deformer, hierarchy, pyro, simulation, smoke, fire, dynamics, caching

Id: CmICcBy7niY

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022