Cinema 4D 2023's Cloth system got a MASSIVE upgrade!!! | How to get started with Cloth

ah yes look at these beautiful Houdini cloth Sims we all love them they're just so satisfying to watch I mean the software should be called Houdini because this is just magical uh hold on a second I'm just being told that uh that wasn't Houdini that was Cinema 4D cloth no don't you worry you're not the first person to get fooled into thinking that a Cinema 4D render was made inside of Houdini now you might be asking how hard is it to get these types of renders inside of Cinema 4D using Cinema 4D cloth do I need to Bone up on my vops and my Sops and also try to think back to when I took that rocket science class in college but I never actually showed up to it because it was scheduled at 8am and seriously why do they schedule classes in college that early I mean no one's showing up to that anyways the short answer is no you don't need to have a masters in rocket science to use Cinema 4D class nor do I recommend you go to college and spend an exorbitant amount of money to learn 3D but that is a subject for another video no my friends getting beautiful looking cloth simulations inside of Cinema 4D can be achieved in just a matter of a few clicks of your mouse alright so let's just get a very simple cloth setup going here and you can see I have a plain object with my width and height set up in my segments if I hit NB you can see that it's fairly lightly subdivided not too crazy I'll hit n a to go back to my garage hitting without lines and let's go ahead and add a cloth tag to this so just like the old cloth system you're going to right click instead of going the bullet tags and go to the old system we're going to go to the new simulation system here go to cloth and I'm just going to go ahead and hit play and you're going to see everything just drops so let's go in let's add a collider object let's grab let's grab a donut because uh they're free in some applications so let me go and I'm just going to move this down and just like the old dynamic system to have an object act as a collider with another object we are going to simply just add a collider tag to that object so I'm just going to right click go to simulation tag go to collider okay and that's all we need to do so we just need to make sure we're not intersecting because if you're intersecting right when the simulation happens things are going to kind of stick so everything's separated here I'm just going to hit play and there you go we got this nice cloth Sim draping on this donut you can see the subdivisions the low subdivisions of our Taurus objects here so let's just up the ring segments here Hit N A and now you won't see any of that underlying chunky geometry and this is looking pretty nice you can see getting a little Fong shading breaking there we can mitigate that by upping the Fong angle there to smooth things out we can also just you know add a subdivision surface if we wanted to to smooth everything out as well I'm just going to turn off the subdivision surface for now and you can see that this is looking really nice I can rotate the little donut here and you can see that this is not exploding all over the place with the old dynamic system you would do stuff like this and you'd have a polygon explode out and poke your uh eyeball out from your monitor it just it would just it was violent it was a violent violent thing but we don't have that anymore because this is such a much more stable system okay and why that is if I go to my scene settings here my Dynamic scene settings by hitting Ctrl or command D and you'll see the project settings here you can see the old bull attack that's where your expert tab was and all the different settings for the old dynamic system where the new simulation system here is all your settings for that your your project wide settings so you can see all these different sub steps and stuff which I'll get into a little bit later but here is where you can turn off your gravity and stuff like that and also in here you can choose whether you're using your CPU or your GPU so this whole new simulation system is particle based and why it's so fast is because you can run it on your GPO as well it's actually programmed to be a system that can run as fast or even faster than Houdini which is actually pretty dang cool now when you do run it on a GPU it could be a little less stable and that's just kind of the nature of running on a GPU versus CPU but this is just so much faster like if I have CPU going and we look at this this is like all right we're just kind of waiting forever for this to go changes to CPU boom that fast right so this is really awesome and nice and while we're in here let's go ahead and turn off the gravity and let's actually get rid of our little donut here because instead of using a collider object to kind of move our cloth around what we can do is use particle forces so as I mentioned before this new simulation system is particle based and if you've been paying attention to the interwebs lately you might have seen a little cryptic tweet from the CEO of Max on showing some pretty cool looking fire simulations and all say about that is because the new simulation system is particle based we shouldn't be surprised to see fire simulations and if the system can do fire simulations well why not smoke and if you can do smoke why not water or liquid so it's only a matter of time before Cinema 4D can do all of these different types of simulation and be able to call upon the powers of Captain Planet with water Earth and wind and fire not heart though that was a really weak skill let's go to our simulate menu go to force sources and let's grab a turbulence force and I'm just going to hit play and let's just tweak these values so let's get a strength of about you know we're doing this and we're not really seeing much but let's up the scale here and you can see that basically as I'm upping the scale I'm almost upping like a a noise that is affecting these particles and affecting this cloth simulation here so the strength is how much this is getting pushed the frequency is how fast that like noise is undulating and animating so if I move the frequency fairly low you can see it's a little bit uh slower undulation there but let's just bring this down a little bit because the one thing I like to do is I like to have different fidelities of turbulent objects in here so if I hit play and let's bring the scale down super low you can see that if I bring the strength up we have this like tiny tiny noise undulating this almost looks like Rippling water or something like that so what I like to do is layer up details so one turbulent object with a small scale and then one if I command click and drag with a little bit of a bigger scale so if I play this again and make my skill a little bit bigger bring the strength down let's rewind that so you can see we're combining these noises or these turbulences together to get a unique type of look there we're getting this really nice wrinkly cloth looking really nice of course to smooth this out we can always turn on that subdivision surface and if we wanted to add thickness to this cloth we would just go and add a cloth surface I'm just going to hold the commander control key Down release my mouse and that will add that object as a parent and instead of having subdivisions I'm just going to add a little bit of thickness here let's go like 0.25 centimeters to give a little bit of thickness there let me go NB to get garage with lines and then to smooth out that edge what I'm going to do is grab yet another subdivision surface holding down the commander control key to add that as a parent of the cloth surface and let's just bring down the subdivision surface to one and one and what that's going to do is just round out that thickness that is coming from our cloth surface here so really nice if we didn't have that you can see it's a little chunky subdividing that Smooths everything out really nicely we've got this really nice smooth cloth now when we're adding thickness to cloth It's always important to think of real world values like how thick is an actual piece of cloth well usually like a piece of paper that's like super super thin so that's like .01 centimeters or something like that now one working mistake I always see in 3d applications doesn't matter which one you use is that artists don't pay attention to the scale in which they're modeling something or even pay attention to the importance that scale has on an object or your scene now to demonstrate how big pun intended scale is when it comes to simulations here are two different sets of objects the only thing that is different is the scale of these objects if I select both these cloth objects you can see all the settings same not actually getting these settings very very shortly but let's go ahead and let's hit play and you can see that one simulation looks completely different from the other and like I said the only difference between these two objects are the sizes of these two objects so now what I like to do to get a sense of scale of my objects in my scene is grabbing our figure object I name them Bob so there's Bob the figure object he is built to real world scale of like a six foot tall person so if we go and compare the size of these two plane objects to Bob here you can see that this smaller plane object is like the size of like a handkerchief or something like that and this object here is more the size of like a giant king-size comforter for your bed so a big bed sheet and that is exactly why these simulations look so different so if you are using a giant plane object and you're finding that you know I really need to crank up my turbulence object or my particle forces to make this thing move it might be because you have a massive massive plane object that you're trying to you know manipulate versus a small plane object that will get blown away by the smallest strength of a turbulence object or a wind object okay so if I grab a bob figure here you can see that okay this is about the size of if I rewind here like a comforter okay so that's type of results that we'll get in this scene now let's just go and of course you don't want to run the simulation with your subdivision surface and your cloth objects so you want to keep it nice and light and then once you like cache the simulation that's when you've thrown all the subdivisions stuff like that but you can see that scene scale is very very important if I shrink this down and hit play you can see that we get a totally different simulation those giant turbulent scales we will need to scale down even further so this doesn't get blown away like a you know like a newspaper so let me command Z to undo that scheme scale let's get rid of you Bob sorry thank you and there we go so scene scale very very important when it comes to simulation now let's go to these class settings here they're fairly self-explanatory here bendiness is just the amount of bendiness that your cloth will do so if your bendiness value is super high like let's go to 500 you're going to see that this is going to want to bend and fold upon itself and look really really nice and detailed here stretchiness just allows these particles of the cloth to kind of stretch out a little bit more and relax bounciness it's aptly named it allows the particles to bounce more off of each other so if you have this object this cloth object falling on something you're going to get some bounciness there friction same thing it's gonna actually have the have the cloth kind of Clump nicer there instead of the friction here I like to actually just grab a friction Force here so I don't have to dive into each of my cloth tags to adjust the friction so let's just grab a friction object here and you can see there's 10. now the the friction values and the values of some of these particle forces are a little bit weird so sometimes you have to up them fairly high like value of 250 to get things going I think that's looking pretty good we got all this wrinkly cloth here let's go back to stickiness stickiness is the aptitude of this to kind of stick on other Dynamic objects now thickness kind of creates a little force field barrier around your different uh edges and polygons here so they don't intersect with anything else so uh Target length is really interesting it allows your your cloth and your polygons and the points to kind of grow beyond their initial State you can get some really cool effects and I'll show this a little later so if we bring this down below 100 this will kind of shrink amongst itself and if we grow this out just think of keyframing this we got this nice cool growing cloth effect there mass is just the overall Mass uh if we want this to be a little bit lighter like some paper you'd probably want to bring down the mass there this will allow it to get blown a little bit harder by all your particle forces here like your friction your your turbulence there and uh this is looking uh pretty nice here let's go ahead and let's get even crazier Dynamic simulations here so I showed you the turbulence forces the friction Force let's grab in our simulate menu eight rotation Force because this rotation force can do some pretty cool stuff so let me just go ahead and hit play you can see that everything is rotating and everything's rotating around the z-axis of this rotation object so if I rotate this upward so the z-axis is facing upwards you can see we're getting this cool rotation there and this is something you see a lot in like X particles where you got this nice little twist and one thing we can do is utilize fields to control where that rotation force is being applied to our object so right now this is just adding a rotation force and it's affecting our entire scene here but if I limit this rotational Force to let's just say if I go to the fields here let's grab a spherical field and hit play you can see that now it's just kind of rotating on the inside we get this really cool spinny cloth that's kind of rotating together you can see that little popping there this is a perfect time to cover some of those Dynamic settings here so I'm going to go to my simulation project settings by hitting Ctrl or command D again and in the simulation tab we have some of these settings here so you're noticing all the little popping going on the one thing that's going to get rid of that is this smoothing iteration so your sub steps is just going to create more accurate simulations iterations is going to be an amplifier on that or a multiplier on top of these sub steps the smoothing iterations is something that you want to up it's going to make your simulation much more accurate and it should hopefully get rid of that little popping cloth that we have going on here another thing you can do is turn on the damping and damping is just going to remove particle energy faster so it makes an object kind of look like it's underwater and it's also going to help with those little popping bits there as well now we're going to get into some of these other settings here collisions we really don't need to up these passes because I'm not really seeing any cloth intersecting right now but this is looking really nice let's go to the rotation here it's maybe up the angle speed to like 150 maybe even 300 and we can get this really going like so another thing we can do with this spherical field is you make the inner part there a little smaller maybe make the spherical feel smaller altogether so now we've got this nice little rotation in the center looking good now another thing I'd like to do is add a little bit of variation to the strength of that rotation inside the spherical field so one thing we can do is go into our Field properties here and just apply a random field and if I go to my random field here go to view settings turn on that viewport plane you can see that basically we're using some noise and what I'm going to do is just like a black and white mask I want to have this noise kind of adjust the strength of the underlying layer so if I go to my random field change this blending mode to multiply and if I increase the scale what this is going to do is it's going to have varying amounts of strength of this rotation field as it's applied to this object here so if I go and let's go to my Fields let's go to remapping and let's bring up this inner offset so we're going to really sharpen this let's actually add in a random field let's add some speed so we're going to have some speed animation speed on our noise if we get this going again you can see that now we have this uniform rotation that's happening and this is looking a lot more realistic and not so kind of rigid as far as that rotation going on there so this is looking good let's go to the view settings let's turn off that view plane let's just turn off the stop lights here for that random field and the one thing I found that's really fun to do is to get even more interesting kind of cloth wrinkling and stuff like that is you know this is just you know rotating around the center which in itself looks pretty cool but what if we wanted to have this look like it's kind of billowing in the wind or something like that well what we could do is on this rotation object here we can right click go to animation tags and go to vibrate what this is going to do is like a wiggle expression where you can add some random rotation values and let's really crank these up and let's hit play and you can see that the rotation that this rotation force is going all over the place now remember this rotational Force's axis of rotation is the Z okay so the Z axis there and if we are constantly moving that z-axis we're going to get all of this kind of weird rotation but let's bring the frequency down to say 0.1 and now you can see that the rotational axis is always changing so we're getting these really cool nice rotating cloth and what we can do that makes this even cooler is if we offset this spherical field off to the side here so we're going to still rotate around the center of this rotation object but our spherical field that's controlling the strength of that rotation force on our object is going to be offset so you can see now that we have rotation happening over here and as this is kind of rotating this way we get this really cool kind of look if we increase the size of this you can get a little bit of that going on and this just looks uh pretty nice and just something that I thought was pretty cool and like we're not using any keyframes whatsoever here as well either so we can kind of shrink this down a little bit maybe move this in a little bit more but that's pretty cool right like that's pretty awesome if we just like pause this like here I'm just gonna hit Escape turn on our subdivision surfaces and cloth surface let's hit n and then a and you know do a nice little daily render where we zoom in apply some really cool textures add some cool lighting and voila we have your render for the day you mint it you make 500 if and you retire and it's all thanks to uh cloth all right so far I've shown you some particle forces but one thing that is really really cool and something that you can really go into a rabbit hole in is using a field Force now field forces can do a ton of things you can basically use Fields as forces it's very aptly named but something that is super cool that you can do is I'm just going to load up a spherical field now you're going to see all these little Vector lines here and if I increase the strength you can see those lines are pointing inwards basically what we're using the spherical field as is an attractor so if I hit play here you're going to see that everything is just crunching in and getting attracted to the center of our spherical field which is really cool we got this really cool clumping together and you can see that if I move this spherical field I can almost be like the Pied Piper of cloth where I am allowing this cloth to follow my spherical field here so you can art Direct cloth animation by just having a Field Force and just moving it around you can use a cappuccino to record your mouse movements into keyframes so whatever your mouse is doing on the screen it'll actually be recorded into keyframes and I'll show that a little bit later but this is pretty awesome here and you can see that I can even do cool effects where I can like pull it up and move it down let's go back to the beginning here push it up and go down and get this like cool pulsing wave which is pretty awesome now in the field Force we can have this attract or we can have this repel so if I bring a negative strength in here let's go back to frame zero you can see that now this is acting as a repellent type of force you can see how it can kind of like art direct this cloth here as well it's almost like a cloth brush or something like that which is super cool and again we can go and you know make this cool like billowing cloth like move this upwards it's almost like a jellyfish kind of deal now the one thing you will notice with field forces at this point at least if I go and bring this up to 250 the turbulent objects are are not really working here and it's a thing that I hope will get fixed but in the meantime what you can do to add that little bit of turbulence is just throw in a random field in here that's going to add all this Randomness to all of these vectors and the way that they're pointing and what we can do is on the field Force let's go and let's bring this to Overlay and let's just bring down the opacity here and I think actually let's use multiply instead and what we should be able to get is a little bit more random turbulence going in there and let's actually have this animate there so you can see the vectors are animating there a little bit so this is kind of cool so we have this like a tractor and it's also undulating the cloth here and we can actually set this to overlay and now you can actually see like the the moving vectors from that random field are kind of undulating our cloth which looks really nice but if we want to have that undulation all over our cloth to act more like a turbulence Force you can see that changing this to Max will just totally do that now we got this real cool undulating cloth which is super awesome like this is just such an awesome thing and again just kind of like scratching the surface of what can be done with field forces and I'm excited to play more with uh field forces here okay now I was mentioning uh cappuccino where you can actually record this mouse movement into keyframes so to do that we're just going to go to this cappuccino menu here and let me just move this up we're just going to hit start real time and I'm just going to move this around here to see as I move my mouse cursor all those keyframes so it's recording my mouse movement two keyframes here which is really cool let me just move it up here we'll stop let me rewind and if I hit play there is a recorded Mouse movement two keyframes so this is a pretty incredible workflow right here always love cappuccino and how you can use it with all these new features that Maxon is adding to Cinema 4D okay okay I can sense a little bit of skepticism here you're not impressed I mean I can sense it coming through the monitor you're really laying it on thick you're not an easy person to please are you that's okay I just want to make sure that you know I've barely shown you what's possible with the new claw system but before I show you more we would really appreciate if you would hit me Smash the like And subscribe buttons doing so really helps us and allows you to get alerted anytime we come out with new contents so if you're digging our videos so far consider subscribing please and thank you wink so let's go ahead let's clone a lot more of these plane objects here so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn off these subdivision surfaces and cloth surface what I'm going to do is just grab a cloner and let's throw this plain object in this cloner let's hit n b to get garage shading with lines and let's change this to linear and so we have three clones let's up this to nine and let's bring this down a little bit here be something like so so we got a little bit of space between our plane objects and to make the cloth work on all the clones and not just the single plane object what we need to do is just simply drag and drop the cloth object onto the cloner and if we go ahead and we hit play we will now have not just one piece of cloth but a couple pieces actually not a couple nine pieces of cloth and we're going to have our rotation Force going we're going to have our friction going as well a couple turbulences here and if we just pause this here it doesn't look like we're having actually we are having a little bit of intersections there so what we can do is command and control D to go to our simulation scene settings and this is where these Collision passes come in handy so let me just bring these smoothing iterations down the more you up these the slower your simulation is going to get so just a fair warning so if you up the collisions this is going to be uh creating more accurate simulations and is going to try to prevent collisions but it's going to slow the simulation down a little bit let's go and zoom in here and let's see if that did the trick so I'll use a little bit of like push and pull but again you can see that uh if I try this with the old simulation system again you're going to have polygons exploding uh out of your monitor into your eyeballs uh and you're blind for life and you just see if this is looking super super good maybe we increase the scale of this spherical field that's kind of determining where that rotational force is being applied to our cloth here so let's let this play a little bit more so this is looking pretty nice we've got some nice wrinkles doesn't look like we have any intersections so far looking really nice and again we hit Escape we zoom in we turn on our subdivision surfaces and cloth surfaces and a apply some cool materials and tell your friends you uh learned Houdini in just a couple minutes and this is what you did in it JK this is Cinema 40 cloth and this is what it can do right stop stop stop I can sense that you're gonna go into the comments and you're gonna troll on the C40 cloth because it doesn't look uh liquidy enough it doesn't look houdini-ish enough all right let me just show you really quickly how you can get more detailed liquidy beautiful looking cloth with C40 cloth here I have a scene where I upped four of the things that actually control the amount of wrinkles that you can get number one is the amount of segments you have so I upped the segments here in the width and height to a 200 and 275 the segments were 75 and 100 so we more than doubled our segments the other thing that controls how much wrinkles you get is just by this bendiness value here so if we really crank up the bendiness that will allow for way more bendiness of our cloth and weigh more wrinkles now another thing that controls stiffness which you wouldn't think would actually do that is if I go to control D to get my project simulation settings one thing that controls stiffness of your object are the sub steps the iterations and the smoothing iterations the more you up these values the more accurate assimilation you'll get and these stiffer your object will actually look it's a weird side effect of having a little bit more of a accurate simulation so if you want things to be a little more wrinkly be sure to bring your sub steps down so I believe the sub steps default is 20. you bring that down to 15 and make sure your iterations and your smoothing iterations are as low as they can go you can see that you can only go one on either you can't turn either of them to zero also I want to remind you if you do have that jittering that happens on your object the smoothing iterations will be the thing that you'll want to up it's just a different type of calculation method for the cloth simulation in here so I have my turbulence here I got my rotation and I got some friction here and I'll provide this scene file for you to go and pick apart as well so let's go ahead and let's hit play here and let's see what kind of simulation we can get here so we upped the segments we have a much denser mesh we have a much more bendy cloth because we up the bendiness all the way to 9999 and we also remove some of those sub steps so here is what we have now so you can see a lot more wrinkles looking a little bit more fluidy if you would uh say and uh we got these really nice wrinkles Happening Here is the rotation with the vibrate tag doing its thing being controlled by the spherical field so the rotations only being applied to inside of the spherical field area we can let this run a little bit longer here but this is looking pretty good now one other setting I want to cover is damping so if I hit Ctrl D if you want to have things look a little bit more fluid like it's under water damping is going to do just that so if I bring up this damping value what this is going to do it's going to remove particle energy faster so it's going to kind of prevent particles from moving way too fast and it's going to look like your cloth is a little bit more fluid and again look like it's kind of floating underwater so if we up that just a little bit and let this play again I'm just going to pause it right there because what I'm going to do is kind of look here and see if there's any intersections anything like that and I'd say this is looking pretty dang good and again I'm going to go and let's just up the falling angle here to smooth everything out and let's turn on our subdivision surface cloth surface and our other subject reading surface here and Hit N A to get our garage sitting without lines and you could just see how detailed this cloth looks and again if we tried this with the old cloth system uh again eyeballs getting poked out by polygons but this just looks so nice and fluid it literally took a couple minutes of setup like all you needed to do is add your turbulence your rotation no maths involved at all which is uh really awesome but you can see just how great of a result that you can get by again just understanding what causes more wrinkles and allows for this more type of high detail folded cloth now this is just scratching the surface of the new simulation system I didn't even get in a rope the new soft body Dynamics and I'm sure rigid body Dynamics is right around the corner what do you think about the new cloth system inside of Cinema 4D are you impressed does it need a cool name like Houdini Vellum maybe cloth I sounds like a cool Harry Potter spell actually if you want to download the project files that I've been using in this whole demo be sure to check the description for that download link and while you're down there go and leave a comment and let us know what you think about the new cloth system and if you've been using it what are your thoughts on it so far and be sure to head on over to schoolofmotion.com to check out all of our awesome online courses especially our Cinema 4D courses like Cinema 4D Ascent Top by Yours Truly where we'll dive into more advanced animation topics just like these so simulations rigging even all skills that'll help you take your work to the next level and make your clients think that you are a 3D Houdini 3D knee anyways I'm out of here thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 133,969

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, cinema 4d, cloth, houdini, vellum

Id: dHQWVXWbsEM

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022