Cinema 4D Fractured Logo Tutorial with EJ Hassenfratz

cinema 4d is the easiest way to get up and running in the world of 3d i'm ej haasenfratz creative director at school of motion and i'll show you how easy cinema 4d is to use i'm going to show you how you can quickly create this cool dynamic fractured logo animation with very minimal effort that's right physics without all the maths that's something i can get behind let's go ahead and dive right in all right so here we have our client logo that we need to bring into 3d make it look 3d and then basically blast it to smithereens so how can we get this 2d logo and its path and bring it into cinema 4d to 3d if i well it's very easy to be able to import paths from illustrator into cinema 4d you only have to make one step and that is going to file save as and we're just going to save wherever we want so i'll just save right here and i'll just replace the file i have there already now there's one very important step you have to take and that is saving this as a specific version that is compatible with cinema 4d and that version is all the way back to illustrator 8. that's all you need to do is just make sure your version's illustrator 8 hit ok and this will just warn you that hey this is a old as dirt format that's fine that's exactly what we need so i'll click ok and i'm going to hop into cinema 4d and here is my scene already set up here with a floor okay and to import that illustrator file as 3d splines which is basically the equivalent of illustrator paths i'm just going to go to my file menu and say merge project so i'm going to bring another project into this current project right here so i'll click merge project there is my illustrator file i'll click open and you're going to be prompted with this adobe illustrator import option now typically this connect splines could be either on or off but since this is just a single logo i'm just going to connect all of the paths or splines together to form one logo so i'll click ok and you'll see there is our logo represented as cinema 4d splines and what i can do to center this in the middle of my composition you can see here's the center of my scene this is a little bit offset all i need to do is go and hit this reset position scale and rotation psr button and that will bring this smack dab in the middle of my scene i can use these navigation arrows to pan i can use this up and down arrow to dolly in or out and then i can orbit around my scene using this button here with the circular arrows but all i need to do is just kind of center up this logo maybe zoom out a little bit and what i can do is scale this up quite a bit so i'll hit t for scale or just hit this little scale button right here and i can just scale up by clicking and dragging and let's scale this up fairly large and i'll zoom out and you can see that we're actually intersecting my floor so i'll just scale this down just a little bit so it's just hovering over my floor and you can see if i orbit around there's my floor and my logo is kind of hovering over it now if i go ahead and try to render this this is not going to render at all because it's basically just invisible lines okay just like in illustrator if you have a path with no fill or stroke it's not going to actually show anything at all right so we need to make geometry based off of this spline logo and to do that we're going to go into our generator menu and this is a menu that basically generates geometry based off splines so what we can do is just simply extrude this spline to create some geometry so i'm gonna just release my mouse button there's the extrude now how generator objects work they're all color-coded green you can see quite a few of these generator objects what they need is another object to be fed into it so it can generate geometry based off it so for the extrude to work and act upon this logo here i just need to simply click and drag and make sure that this arrow is pointing down and when i release my mouse button you'll see that this logo is now a child of this extrude object in this hierarchy here and now this extrude object can act upon and create geometry based off this spline as you can see in our viewport here now if i render this view by clicking this little render view clapper up here with the little rectangle you'll see now we actually have some 3d geometry so just by extruding our logo spline that came in from illustrator we already have a 3d object we can play around with now i'm going to stop my render by just clicking anywhere else in my interface here and if i click on the extrude i can reveal all of the attributes in the attributes manager down here so one thing we can do if we go into the object tab is we can control the object properties of this extrude and we can actually offset the extrude which is basically how big how much is that extrude length so if i bring this down to say 28 centimeters you can see that this is looking pretty good if i rotate orbit around this you can see how thick that is maybe that's a little too thick i can always adjust these up and down arrows by clicking and dragging here and maybe get that down to 20. i can also enter in any number i want to say 22 and get a precise amount of offset for my extrude now in the caps we have the ability to add a bevel now 3d objects are created with very sharp edges like perfectly sharp edges so you always want to add a little bit of roundness to add to the realism of your object so to add a little bit of bevel all you have to do is just crank the size up to something other than zero so if i just click on this up or down arrow by clicking and dragging you can see that we're getting a little bit of this like really nice specular highlight here you can see i have all these materials down here in the material manager i can just go ahead and quickly apply this white material to my extrude by either dragging and dropping this directly on my extruded logo here in the viewport or i can drag this onto the object in the object manager here where all the objects that are in your scene live so i'll just go ahead and just drag and drop this over this logo here and you can see that my logo turned white it's got a little bit of shiny reflection on it and it also applied to the object here in the object manager you can see there is my little icon with my material applied to it so i know that that white material is on this extrude okay now one thing i want to show you that's really really awesome is if you're into sports graphics or anything like that chiseled text is like all the rage and to do that in cinema 4d it is extremely easy so what i'm going to do is just drag this slider so you can either adjust the size by clicking on the up and down arrows or by clicking and dragging on the slider and if i bring this all the way to about you know seven centimeters or so you'll see we get this really nice bevel but if i bring the shape depth and i drag this slider down and i change this to say zero percent just go down or i could just enter in zero and hit enter you can see we have this really beautiful chiseled edge right there and this is just like it's so simple to make this really cool chiseled text so if chiseled text is what you need you literally only have to like change a few options in here i'm just going to bring this chiseled edge down to maybe like point three and then just add a little bit of depth or basically just a little bit of rounding on that edge there so we have a nice little highlight around the edge here and i would say we're looking pretty good at this point i think the extrude is looking nice what we can now do is let's smash this thing let's break this thing into pieces and to do that is also extremely easy so chisels bevels very easy same thing with breaking things into pieces and to do that we are going to go and create yet another generator so if i go to this icon here this menu with the cube with all of the dots on it and click and hold you'll see we have something called vronui fracture sounds very fancy it is kind of fancy but if you go ahead and release your mouse button you're going to see that that is now added to our object manager and you can see that it's also color-coded green the icon's green which means that you need to feed this another object for it to act upon it so what we want to do is we need to feed in this extrude and we can actually double click on this name and just name this e logo okay and now we can click and drag and just like we made the spline object a child of the extrude we can make this extrude a child of the voronoi fracture so just make sure that that arrow is pointing down and i'll release my mouse and you'll see if i click on my verona fracture object you'll see in the viewport we have all of these little fractures now this is fracturing our object in a vronoy pattern okay and if i click on my object tab here you'll see that we have this option of colorizing the fragments if i turn this off you can see that that is basically just a visualization for you to see the fragments this actually does not render with these colors but for now i'm going to leave the colorized fragments just to visualize what our fracturing will look like for the time being now there's this really cool option called offset fragments where if you bring this up you can basically just make like cracks in your logo which is really nice i'm just going to go ahead and zero that out because i don't want to show the cracks right now and if i move over to the sources tab you can see that here is the source of all of our fracturing if i click on this point generator object here you'll see that all of these little green dots show up now everywhere there is a dot is where a fractured piece is going to be you can see that in my sources options here you can up the amount of points that are distributed along your objects so you can really bring this up and the more points you have the more fractured pieces you will also get so one other thing you can do is go down to this transformation and just twirl down this menu here by clicking on it and if i scroll down to reveal the transformation options what you can do is basically scale down or move or rotate the dots all the points within this little bounding box here so you can actually have a lot more clustering of points like say in the middle if i adjust the scale in the y and even the z so you can see what's going on there so you can actually have full art direct ability as far as where the fracturing on your objects gonna be and this is really really cool you can move this wherever you want like say you really want a ton of fracturing the middle but maybe less on the outside you can totally do that with adjusting these options here so i'll have this so all of the points are kind of right here towards the top of my logo and maybe play around with how many points we have there how many little fractured pieces we have and i think this is looking good now if i hit render i just want to reiterate that these colors are not going to show up on our render which is good that's just for visualization but what you'll also see is like we we can't actually see the fracturing at all what can we do to have this object this logo be kind of smashed into and break into all these pieces and what we're going to use to do that is something called dynamics and dynamics is probably one of the most fun things to play around with in cinema 4d it basically replace video games for me and what it allows you to do is apply real world physics simulations to your objects in your scene so what i can do to apply physics to say this voronoi fracture object is i'm just going to right click on it and i'm going to go all the way down to simulation tags and choose rigid body now all this is going to do is say hey we're going to apply physics to this object and this object is going to be treated as a rigid body or a stiff object okay so think of like this would be made of rocks or something like that so i'm going to add that and if i just go ahead and make sure i'm at frame zero in my timeline here by just clicking this go to the start of the animation button and if i hit play you'll see that this just kind of falls okay now what we need to do is we have gravity being applied in physics being applied to our logo but right now it's passing through our floor now the reason why it's doing that is because we added this rigid body tag to this object so it's taken into account in our dynamic simulation but there's no dynamics tag on this floor so it will not be included in the dynamic simulation now what we want this floor to do is not have gravity applied to it we just need it to be taken into account in the simulation and have this volanoy fracture logo just collide into it so if i right click on this floor go back into my simulation tags there is this option called collider body and basically if you apply a collider body to an object it means hey this object's not going to fall but it can be collided into by other dynamic objects in your scene namely our verona fracture logo now if i go ahead and hit play you'll see that our logo still falls and kind of looks like it explodes downwards and the reason for that is by default cinema 4d is applying its best guesstimate as far as what your object looks like and how it's calculated in a dynamics calculation and on this floor i just want to zoom out here and you'll see that this is actually a big huge curved surface and what this dynamics tag is doing if i go into the collision tab here are all the settings that determine the collision shape and how this object is taken into account as far as colliding into other objects and you can see the shape here is set to automatic and what automatic tries to do is make the fastest simulation with the least amount of calculation so it's not a very accurate shape it's just it's best guesstimate and for concave shapes like our floor here it is kind of like shrink wrapping this in plastic so it's not taking into account all of the nooks and crannies and the concave nature of this object so all i need to do is change this shape to static mesh and basically this is the most accurate type of shape that you can use for a static object that just needs to get collided into now if i go and zoom in to this object to this logo go back to frame 0 and hit play you'll see that everything works as expected and our logo just kind of crumbles and it was really that easy right you just had to add a dynamics tag to our voronoi fracture we just had to then add a collider body to this floor just change the shape to a more accurate type of collision shape and there we go we got this really cool uh exploding logo now what if we wanted something to smash into our logo we just didn't want it to just fall and collapse into pieces well if i hit the escape key to pause my playback in my timeline here go back to frame 0 by clicking this button here what i can do is go into the dynamics tag of my voronoi fracture by clicking on it and then going into the dynamics tab in here you can set whether the dynamics triggers immediately like right at frame one or if you want to trigger it when it gets collided into by another object so here we can choose on collision trigger the dynamics on this object so i'm going to choose that and now all we have to do is just create an object that can smash into this object this logo and for that why not get a wrecking ball so let's go into our primitives menu where we have all of our primitive 3d shapes all of our basic 3d shapes and let's get a sphere and you can see on the sphere attributes here we can adjust the radius by just clicking and dragging up or down on this little option here and i'll just shrink that down you can also adjust the radius by clicking and dragging on this yellow dot here so you can do that either way and what i can do is let's move this back into z space so for that i'm going to go and grab my move tool and i'm just going to move this back by hovering over this x axis and if i click and drag while that axis arrow is highlighted i can move this just back on the z plane okay and i can move this up on the y plane if i hover over this arrow as well now what i want to do is animate this sphere let me just orbit around here i want to animate this sphere kind of going forward in z space and running into this logo so for that i'm just going to simply set some keyframes on this object and to do that i'm going to select my sphere go into the coordinate tab where we can actually change and adjust and set keyframes for the position skill and rotation of this object and you'll see these little dots if i click on one of these dots it is going to set a keyframe okay and you can see in my timeline here there's a little rectangle that means there's currently a keyframe on this frame and i'm just going to set a keyframe for the position y and z so we just stored the position in xyz on frame 0. now let's go about 15 frames forward by clicking and dragging on this playhead and just bringing this to frame 15 and let's move this sphere by hovering over the z axis in clicking and dragging you can see we're again constraining this in the z-axis and maybe we can move this up a little as well and i'm just going to go ahead and record the keyframes here record this position change so i'll click these circles fill them in we got all these red dots you can see the animation path in my viewport and if i scrub by clicking and dragging on this playhead we have most beautiful animation we've ever made and if i hit play you're not going to see this fear smash into our object at all it's just going right through it and again that's the same thing that happened with our floor where it's not taken into account in our dynamic simulation because we don't have a dynamics tag applied to it so let's go and right click on the sphere go to simulation tags and make this a clyder body as well because remember we don't need this to have gravity applied to it we just need this to be a wrecking ball that can collide into other objects so i'll choose collider body the actual collision shape for this set to automatic is going to be perfect and now if i go back to frame 0 and hit play boom you can see that our sphere just smashed right through our logo and did a did a good amount of damage here okay now what i'm doing right now is i am orbiting in my scene by using some shortcut keys so instead of having to you orbit around up here or zoom in using these keys here pan zoom or orbit i can actually use the one key to pan the two key to dolly in or out and hold the three key down and click and drag to orbit around so that's exactly what i did and if i hit the escape key to pause the playback if i hover over an object and hit the three key and click and drag i'm actually orbiting around that object that that yellow crosshairs was at and so i can go over here hold the three key down click and drag and you'll see that i'm orbiting around that uh pile of rubble now so easier to navigate by using the one two and three keys than you know having to navigate up there okay so if i go back and hit play this is looking pretty nice right let's go ahead and go to our voronoi fracture here go to the object tab and let's uncheck the colorize fragments so we can actually see what this will look like and another thing we can do is maybe we want to have a different material on the inside of this fractured object so we have a white material on the outside let's make like this yellow material to be applied to the inside of the fractured pieces so what we can do is on our fractured logo we can go to selections and here we can add selections of the inside faces the outside faces and actually apply different materials to each of those aspects of our varroanoid fractured objects so if i click on both the inside and outside faces and check them on you can see here are some polygon selection tags and basically what i can do is if i move this material that i applied to that logo and click and drag and place this onto my front fracture object what i can now do is use this selection area in this material tag and drag and drop either one of these polygon selections to apply a material this material to whatever selection i want so if i click on here okay that's the inside faces here's the outside faces let's keep the white material on the outside faces so what i can do is just click and drag this outside faces selection and let go and you'll see that that white material is applied to the outside and if i click and drag this bamboo yellow material and apply this to my voronoi fracture you'll see that this is going to kind of overwrite this if i click and drag this inside faces polygon selection into this selection tag this will only be applied to the inside of the voronoi fracture here so if i go ahead hit the one key to pan to center up the rubble and hit this render current active view you can see exactly what is going on you can see the yellow materials applied to the inside of our object and the white material is applied to the outside faces so really easy to be able to add different materials to different parts of your fractured object and i'm just going to hit the escape key to stop that render and i think this is looking really really nice now what if we decide that you know what these pieces are flying out way too fast what if we wanted to slow that down well what i can do is go into my project settings by going into mode and going to project and here i can navigate over to this dynamics tab and go to general and this is where the project wide dynamic settings live now if i wanted to slow this down all i need to do is adjust this time scale to say let's change this to like 50 percent and you'll see this will slow down the dynamic simulation by 50 percent if i change this to 10 let's let this go around again you can see that these objects are kind of floating in midair and that looks really cool too so again all of this art direct ability here here we have even gravity so if i change this to like 30 time scale so it's playing at 30 percent of like the real speed that we're seeing there if i adjust this gravity to let's say 200 what you'll see is we just removed a lot of gravity and all these things are kind of floating around now if we just totally remove gravity all together by changing the gravity value to zero watch what happens everything just kind of floats off into space and if i zoom out you can see what's going on there and this looks really cool like such a cool effect and really can be done with very minimal effort and this is looking really great now what i want to do is maybe hide this sphere so it doesn't actually render in our view when we actually go to render let me actually just bring this sphere in the middle and you'll see that this will actually render in our viewport and we want this to be like invisible we don't want this to show up in our render view so what i can do to solve that is go on my sphere are these two dots if i double click on the top dot and change it from green to red you'll see this will hide it from my viewport view but if i click on the circle below it and fill that with red this will mean that it won't show up in the render either so the top dot is if it shows up in the viewport bottom dot is if it shows up in render and now if i render this again you'll see that the sphere does not render now i can even have this show up in the viewport and just not show up in the render because again the render view is turned off okay just the viewport view is at its default so now we can have this object kind of explode and you can see that if i render this now you'll see the pieces you'll see the fractured pieces but you will not see the actual object that is causing all of this calamity here okay so i would say this is looking really good let's go into our layers here and i have a bunch of objects hidden from view and hidden from the hierarchy i'm just going to click these two buttons i have a camera that's already animated here that i'm going to look through and we can just go to frame 0 and hit play and this is our really awesome fractured logo animation that we can go ahead and render now to render this animation we're just going to simply go to our render menu and go to render to picture viewer and i'll just write over this other file and now we can watch our render render frame by frame and with that we imported our illustrator paths into cinema 4d extruded it to make 3d geometry based off of it we then fractured that logo using voronoi fracture and then we used dynamics to apply real world physics simulations to all of our objects to make our exploding logo it's pretty crazy how easy it is to create a dynamic simulation like we just did and like i said it's like video games for me it's so much fun to play around with and that's what i love about cinema 4d it's not super technical it's very artist friendly it gets out of your way and lets an artist or a creator be a creator right it just allows you to get stuff done now if you want to learn about cinema 4d from the ground up definitely head over on to school of motion and check out my course called cinema 4d basecamp this course is going to get you comfortable and up and running in 3d with all of the basic foundational principles that you'll have to learn to be a successful 3d motion artist thanks for watching i hope to see you at base camp

Channel: Maxon

Views: 16,370

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, mograph, s22, release 22, subscription

Id: D4PvyezzEns

Length: 27min 47sec (1667 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020