Cinema 4D Big Swarm Tutorial (No Particles)

[Music] hello my name is john and today i'm going to show you how to create a little uh swarm effect inside of cinema 4d it's nothing fancy it's a really simple method and we're not going to use any kind of third-party plugins or any kind of particle systems at all so it's really simple so let's start uh we have a brand new scene here and i will create a sphere so that sphere has the typical uh sphere topology the standard topology so you can see that um our polygons are getting smaller and smaller and the distance from one vertice to another because we're going to work with the vertices is not regular to change that we're going to type inside of the sphere options and change that from standard to ecosystem and right ahead you can see that our topology is really regular we have a really regular grid here not perfectly but it's fine for our cases so the next thing uh oops sorry i will create a displacer inside of the sphere so to make the a child of the sphere it's kind of really easy uh just uh it's important that the sphere is selected and then you click on this placer by holding shift and then it will be automatically a child otherwise it will be just there and you have to put that inside manually it's not a big deal but this can save a little time if you um make this um really intuitive okay the displacer we need that to display the the surface of our sphere to do that we need a input information and for that we have the shader we will use a noise for that and right ahead you see okay we can see some deformation but not really clearly and this has to do with the amount of polygons of our sphere so when i'm going here into the settings of the noise and changing the global scale you won't really see any kind of differences right so to bother visualize that and to to actually know what we're doing and see what we're doing we will only for that reason change the segment amount and you see okay we can see our noise noise kind of clearly here and we can really precisely adapt the noise scale for our use cases okay i'm going to scale that up or maybe to 600 okay and i'm going to go i'm going back to the object settings and i can change the height here so you have a couple of options from the type of the hate they are showing here intensity centered means that we have a minus value and a plus value and they are defined by the color of the shading so white is the plus value minus is the the black is the minus value uh that means that white will go uh 46 centimeters up uh in the direction of the local normals and um black will go 46 centimeters down from the direction of the local normals another method is the intensity method yeah and you can see it here that we actually don't have any kind of minus value it's just the plus value but we need the intensity centered option for us right now okay looking good but we don't have any kind of animation here and we will change this by going into our noise shader and changing the animation speech i will say one and that's looking good okay next thing we are going to um create a time effector that's here remember just hold shift and it's a child well i have the displays are selected so that's the child of the spacer right now what is important here is the hierarchy of these elements underneath the sphere so it's important that the time effect is underneath the displacer and you will see why in a second so first why is the time effect not working so the timer factor is uh some kind of constant animation value um that is just uh running in the background and uh what i want is and what i need to change is the default mode here the deformation mode is on off and we need that to be an object and you see okay our sphere starting to rotate exactly the way i wanted to so this is fine so now the reason why it's important to put the time effector underneath the displacer uh we'll see it here when i put it put it up or over the displacer you can see we get some strange kind of behavior here and the reason for that is that the time effect is affecting everything that is above it so it's affecting only the sphere right now but not the displacer so the splicer is static and uh the time uh the sphere is rotating so we have a static displacement information on a rotating sphere and uh to avoid this just put the time effect at the end and right now the time effector is uh affecting the displacer and the sphere at the same time so the spacers actually rotating too and that's perfectly this is what we want next thing is a cloner create one we need a sphere another one too a small one uh we won't see that sphere so it doesn't matter that uh we don't have a nice topology or uh not a lot of polygons so i'm going down to the segments to 15 that's fine put the sphere underneath the cloner and tell the cloner that the mode should be object so now we have a new window here and inside of that window we can put our sphere so we have a lot a lot a lot of spheres here because i forgot to to decrease the segment amount go to 40 that's fine okay reactivate this okay so this cloner uh will clone every all the spheres um on the locations of the vertices as you can see here the distribution is vertex so this is fine i will scale it down a little bit okay looking good maybe even decrease the polygon amount a little bit of the sphere so that's fine i will scale them up a little bit okay so we get this this is okay yeah i think i like it we can work with that next thing is that our cloner needs an effect a random effector so this is working a little bit differently with the cloner actually there needs you just need to have the cloner selected and then select the random effector it doesn't matter that it's not a child here um and you see okay the random effect is activated but it's not really looking good not really organic it's just like a yeah just a simple noise so i will change this from random to noise [Music] and change the space from global to uv now you can see we get more like some kind of an organic movement here and now like this maybe i'm going to deactivate the displace and the time effector to have a really focused um visualization of the random effector here and what we're going to do here so i will change the animation speech a little bit make it slower okay and also the scale something like this don't need to be too much because we have already the displacer here and if we put too much movement inside it just don't look good it's okay that's fine now we can check the visibility of our theory because we don't need to see it anymore and even the visibility of our cloner we don't need to see it anymore really important just to clone another sphere okay now we see nothing that's fine because we just need the coordinates of uh the clones from our clone uh to create a tracer so just let your cloner select it and go to mograph and add a tracer and if i hit play now you can see that every single clone is creating its own path and this path is actually a spline okay it's really messy here so we don't want that to be too messy uh and we don't want the whole path of every clone just the last couple of frames to be traced to do that go inside of your tracing window to the limit window and check from and now there will just have one single frame and you see nothing two frames okay that's visible really short two maybe a little bit more let's say six so if it's looking fine okay so we have our tracer and then we want to give that tracer a shape for that we're taking a sweep and a circle so the circle will be the shape of every little spline here so forth is really really big and we have a lot of points in here because the intermediate points are adaptive we will change this to uniform so we can control it really well you can see when we have zero we just have four points uh one is like this let's keep two this is a nice number here because of course every single um point that is extra here will have a huge impact on your performance especially because we have like 40 clones here and then we have the splines too so for the rendering it's no problem to increase this at the end but if you want to work with this if you want to figure out how this thing is looking like and how the animation will have the best effect you need a smooth and a nice performance there so we have the the shape and uh oops no we have the shape and we have the rail and the rail is actually the tracer itself so i put the trace inside and the circle inside and the butter bomb you can see okay we have a shape here so it's getting really really heavy here with uh with the performance of my computer it's not a bad one and the reason is uh that we have our caps here the caps are actually generated in in real time it's like um a calculation that is behind every frame for every little cap from the top and the down cap so i would just deactivate the caps so maybe let's hit play to see the difference in terms of performance here okay so we'll say none and none and bomb it's liquid and we have a really fluid liquid animation here okay next thing is the shape because we have a hole on the front and the back right now and we want to close that hole by just uh making the shape to zero so this is actually you will see right now uh the shape of our spline and you see this is looking like a fish and this is looking like a fish or a really fish but something fishy like um right ahead okay maybe making a bit larger and changing the scale of the circle here okay and you already have some kind of swarm and it's not i would say not bad what we maybe could do is uh add another angle here for the time effector so it's just rotating around the h axis here on the y axis actually and uh can maybe not too high change some values here and give them more like a random direction but still the base rotation in the center i think this is okay but it's also a little bit of um of messy so it's a lot of a lot of movement and it's maybe a little bit too fast there's something uh something heavy that is missing and for that we're using the uh the dynamic functions of cinema 4d so i will re-uh enable the visibility of the cloner here see it okay and i will change um the sphere by adding a rigid body when i hit play now of course the rigid body is working and every little sphere is falling away uh it's not falling down because i did something i forgot to told you before by hitting um string plus d you get to the project settings of cinema 4d of your your project right now and inside of the dynamics settings here we have the gravity and i put it on zero it's standardly on on 1000 but uh we don't need the gravity here right now we just need the dynamics so do that put the gravity on zero and next thing to avoid uh the fact that the rigid body spheres are falling away uh and also we want them to follow our vertices from the sphere here uh we have a really really cool function inside of the dynamics and cinema 4d and this is follow position that means that we have some kind of a interpolation between the actual transform values from the cloner and the dynamics and you can create really really cool effects with that i would say follow position four you see okay they're not um indirect they're not uh intersecting into each other anymore because every little sphere is dynamic but they are not falling away also and they are dynamic right now so if i take a another sphere here for example make it smaller until that sphere to be a collider body of course they will react like you can see right so this is actually the base for an interactive and dynamic swarm i would say swarm illusion uh which you can create really cool effects with because when we hide the cloner again and uh show our swarm here of course that swarm is also reacting on our sphere here like you can see okay we're friend zero here but it's working so you have some kind of intersections here this has to do with the dynamic settings in general i will do this at the end it's not not a big deal it's just that standardly on default you have a really low settings enabled uh because it's more important you have a a feeling of the animation and the feeling of the time then have everything on on really really high settings from the beginning on but it's working so we have our sphere we have our swarm and it's interacting with objects here like this right okay so i just make a little material here for the swamp nothing it's just really really fancy to give it some kind of a porcelain effect here okay well disable the line visibility [Music] and now we can think what can we do next so what is more so it doesn't look good do we want more adaption more movement uh let's see yeah maybe make the fishes a little bit bigger to give them more weight and uh maybe changing a little bit here though this place here i will go to reach 80 because of course we have the delay of the dynamics from our clones here and to compensate this uh just increase the values to need you can also look for the random effect it's really cool almost everything in cinema 4d you can not only change the welders here but you have some kind of a general uh slider for the effects we have a random effect and we just want to have it more just increase it [Music] let's see the result so yeah it's getting really really kind of swarming right now i like this maybe a little bit no i think it's okay and the really cool thing with that is that we always have everything non-destructive and everything is dynamic so if you want more fishes it's no problem just increase the segment amount say 60 and we have a lot of fishes and you don't have to watch out for intersections or anything because we have the dynamics in the background and they will make sure that the the fishes are moving in some kind of a right way here [Music] okay i like that okay to show what we can do next i will decrease the amount and you maybe also already realize that sometimes we get some uh some some uh um not good looking glitches so you have some kind of a gear some some kind of things looking around some meshes that uh that are not really smooth uh you see better if i disable the time effector right you saw that yeah now there's like glitches and and also the fishes of course have always the length of the spline so to avoid these glitches and to make sure that your fishes have always the same length we're not using the sweep to give them a shape using another method and for that just create a cylinder okay and uh go back to the line okay also we don't need any kind of caps the rotation segments are a little bit high so let's go 10 and here maybe 5 or 6 something like this then we will add a spline wrap and this blind wrap here needs the tracer as blind looking really really messy here we can deactivate our sweep here we don't need to see it anymore okay and the reason is the axis is wrong so we need plus y okay that's better also you see the cylinder is kind of really really large so the radius is going down okay nice [Music] and inside of our spline wrap settings here uh we have the mode fit spline so we will say keep length what will create this uh because our cylinder is really really high uh so we will scale it down to the length we want and make sure that uh we have a little bit of extra space because the spline length of every little spine here is not always the same so you want to avoid uh the fact that the cylinder is higher or longer than the spline so first of all we're changing the size of our cylinder because it doesn't look good like that okay like with the sweep just change it here [Music] okay that's looking good then we will change the amount of steps of frames from the end limit inside of our tracer to make sure that every cylinder has enough space you don't go over it because when it go over or it's longer than the actual spline you have this end mode which is extend right now and we'll go straight ahead uh out of the spline and we'll create a not really nice shape here clamp is also not an option for us so what we can do now is make a little bit higher a little bit more natural let's say like this okay [Music] yeah oh forgot to [Music] activate this here okay nice okay uh we don't need to see the trace anymore we don't need the sweep anymore also so i'm going to delete the sweep just take the tracer out before and uncheck the visibility of the tracer okay now we can give that cylinder our material again here and a look okay so i want to say i want them to be a little bit larger okay it's fine but also you get this unnice looking artifacts here this has to do with the fog of the cylinder so just change that go up to the 180 degrees it's getting smoother and yeah we got the swarm here i think it's working fine maybe even a little bit more i kind of like this when it's a little bit more more heavy you get more this feeling of mass and meat okay what else um yeah the length of the tracer should be a little bit more let's say 21. and increase the height too [Music] okay so we got that i know you can do everything with this i mean if you have your own uh creature or fish shape i mean a 3d object of a fish or something you can use this method too you know just insert this object and so emerge the object inside the scene and put the spine wrap underneath it what you then maybe need extra is a a rail object so an orientation so you want to make sure that your your fishes have an up and down because right now they're rotating all the time like you can see here if you watch out so uh yeah uh the whale makes sure actually that um they will always look in the same direction okay so maybe have a little presentation here to see how this whole thing is looking like i will take a light i will make the shadows visible okay it's already uh create shadows shadow soft and maybe okay okay it's looking good and the really really cool thing about that is that you really can have all these interactions right with other objects so when i take my sphere here i can remove this whole sphere [Music] we have a certain delay plus it's normal this has to do with our spline itself because the the the our objects are at the end of every tracer spline but i think it's cool okay so we have our um our sphere here and can make some tests by moving it around you know oh okay started to zero here okay and it's really really nice like you can see we really don't have the in the section they're reacting on objects you can use this in every um way you want you can use this with text and other objects you even can use the matrix effector which is uh here uh which is really really cool of the matrix if you want to um switch or or more from one clone to the other uh it can be really cool so you can create really complex shapes even with that but of course the the possibilities are limited because we don't have real particles but i like the effect maybe testing it out with another cylinder here somewhere getting bigger and giving that cylinder little bit more high segments and also just copying uh our collision attack here and right now we can move that swarm uh maybe until sphere and we're not oh okay come on okay and we'll not intersect with the sphere so it's completely dynamical in real time and uh same thing for the cylinder you see they're really stuck in there [Music] and this is it so if you want me to do more about this uh maybe showing you how to make some interactions with uh with enemies or uh the the morphing parts to morph actually you swarm in different shapes so you have more possibilities to control it uh yeah just write it down into the comments and i hope you liked it and i hope i could help you and yeah [Music] bye this

Channel: John Hansen 3D

Views: 14,138

Keywords: Cinema 4d, Cinema 4D, Tutorial, Swarm, Mograph, Cloner, rigid body, dynamics, particles, easy

Id: 6txm0n-c_lM

Length: 30min 52sec (1852 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020