Cinema 4D Mograph Tutorial - Overgrowth Transition Effect & Rendering HD

hi everyone and welcome to HCT I my name is Eugene schmira and in this tutorial we're going to create a transformation effect inside of cinema 4d so this effect is basically about transforming from one material to another inside a single model with this kind of spikes like think mystique from x-men kind of effect this effect is pretty versatile and it can be applied to basically any object will use a sphere for demonstration purposes but you can go ahead and apply it to anything you want we'll be using a bit of expresso here but it's nothing complicated so I hope you find this informative and without further ado let's start alright so here we are in cinema 4d interface let's start away with going the project tab setting ps2 25 instead of 30 just prefer to work in 25 and I am will start with with the sphere so our deformation will be happening on a sphere so let's create it and then hide it right away and then let's go in and create a platonic object make it editable and then change it scale and y-axes just like this long stretched kind of crystal shape subdivide it and now let's go and add a displacer here let's drag it down here under the Platonic go into shader and create some noise now one tweak any parameters here in the shader itself just increase hate just to create the see regularities in shape and then I'm going to add a taper the former and edit on the platonic it has to be after the displacer click fit to parent and then just taper it a bit I'm just going after this crystal like shape here all right so it's them it's going to match my new axe Center click this exit Center tool and drag this Y slider all the way to the left click execute and right away you'll see that our axis Center is now snaps to the lower part of the bounding box and that will come in handy once we start cloning this object over onto the surface of the sphere so let's now duplicate this plutonic call this one crystal small crystal small and this one crystals large or crystal large ok so it's high this small one almost weak the large one let's go into this player here no wait a minute go into crystal select all the pulleys subdivide we have them just a bit more geometry to work with now this place was ok let's just change tapered parameters here a bit make it like more than alright these are crystals basically let's select right-click current state to object and each one of them and delete the originals we don't need them in alarm now we can have we have these two crystals we can start closing them so here's our sphere make it visible let's go into Margraff menu now create a cloner here here's our cloner call it : or small drag our small crystal underneath it now in a cloner menu let's change mode to object and drag our sphere into object down here ok so here we have this weird-looking shape but you can see these being on the surface which is good already so it's going to transform and first make it smaller because the guys are too big for now let's go with 0.01 scale okay 0.01 then change distribution to surface you can see it kind of gets distributed across the surface crank it up to maybe 5,000 okay all right okay that's pretty nice distribution I guess maybe change to see to something like my random I know not okay scroll it down okay so now let's duplicate this cloner and call this long color large and drive our large crystal underneath it and delete the small a small one so clone a large let's change the seed so they don't overlap go to transform make a bit bigger 0.05 0.05 here get an object maybe decrease their count to half what we have in small crystals maybe mm okay so let's go into effector is now among effectors and add random effector and it looks crazy now with this not what we're after really go into parameter D select position and naval scale and rotation okay so let's add some more organic arrangement rotation cure like 10 degrees 13 gesture you know stay within low numbers just to kind of tilt them a bit yeah random way but not too crazy maybe 25 here and scale will select uniform scale and type in something like 0.7 here so what we'll do we'll just scale all of them up to 0.7 of their original scale all right so now let's go ahead and create some more effectors it's going to mul graph here I affect or an ad shader effector now the way it works is it only changes the parameters of the Clones where the certain shader is on your original model something like this so let's enable the rotation for now rotated minus 180 and set scale to minus one it's not where where it's quiet basically we'll make it invisible so let's select our clones go to the effectors tab and drag our shader effect around there so right now you can see that the lower corners disappear that's because we wouldn't have shader assign here so let's go in here and assign a gradient here click it let's change couple parameters here you can see kind of started having effect right away that's not what we're after so let's change this type to 3d linear uncheck cycle add a bit of turbulence maybe like 45 here okay nice and turbulent here now you can see we have start and end here but it's sort of kind of hard to tell where the start and ads are in 3d space so okay you can tweak it and you can see that the effector changes live but we would kind of be would kind of be good to have a visual representation of that so we'll create a new null object code expression yeah we'll be using a bit of expresso here it's not nothing hard so um duplicate a couple of times and call this one and and this one start and this one will be controller so let's go in this right click this expression symbol for d2x ad expresso tag here so here is our expresso editor so as drag this and and start guys here and in our shader drag the gradient itself here let's click this blue button in the grade again go to shader properties and you can see end and start shader properties start so these these are RS and the start parameters that we discussed earlier so go within entire nulls here red button coordinates global coordinates global position for both of them and just connect them respectively to end and to start alright so now let's close this for now let's test it so if we drag our start now you can see now it controls the gradient gradient and and gradient start respectively ok so here is a bit of simple expression here but well obviously that's not really happens to have this controller and we can bind all these to the single controller so let's drag let's see first we need to change the display of this circle orientation x z radius okay so it would be just a bit larger than this for yourself and now it's dragging enter expresso editor here in the controller can press the red button global position and then global position Y okay so the idea is that we need to start to be a bit offset so it is controlled by the controller but it's offset so let's first in the end now create input node with global position connect controller to the input in the end and know okay so now let's test it let's we change the controller and the end follows along where the controller goes that's nice okay so but we now maybe want to tweak a bit of sets see maybe we should rotate it all the way around let's test it no not exactly okay let's go back to shader so it's still minus 180 okay okay so so let's distant couple of what time so as you can see kind of start it's kind of start growing where the controller moves so now we have this position Y and we'll create a new node Express so calculate map so we need to offset our start so we'll connect this position Y to the first input going to map node second input to before T and the function will be subtract so now we will subtract 40 units from the position add global position to our start null object connect them and now it should offset 40 it should be offset for the units from where the controller is okay let's test it and it doesn't look right actually it's like it's good why is that oh okay that's because our start null is offset on all axes we only need it to be offset on y axis so let's see and let's delete this connection go into select start here go into coordinates 0 out X and Z ok and then we'll delete this port by right-clicking it and selecting delete pores in this blue box again coordinate global position position y now we can connect it here and it will be offset only on y-axis okay so let's test it all right now this looks this looks good all right so maybe tweak a bit of this shader here yeah make it like more harsh no just play with the softness of it okay all right now let's add another factor plane we need to these crystals to partially disappear so we'll add this plane to both the far corners disable position and enable scale make it minus one so basically where the effector takes takes place it will disappear select fall-off linear orientation minus y and change this canyon here a bit to make it like more sort of squashed and invert it okay so now now we can see the crystals only appear where the plane effector takes place you can see all these things are being all the effectors and expressions are stacked upon each other so let's add our plane to our expression here drag it here click create nodes coordinates global position and connect our start to a global position here so now for a controller you can see everything is being dragged in this crystals sort of climbed or descent along the surface of the sphere okay which is a already neat but this is not the an effete okay we still have a couple of things to do here so let's check our clonus parameters might crank up the count of those guys to maybe act like six thousand for small and three thousand for large all right okay let's drag it around a bit record control around a bit okay and the cool thing about this the entire thing is live and we can control it we can change it whenever one so let's create new material here for the sake of demonstration we'll just sign some crazy red saturated red color call it original color here duplicated call this one cone this one something like new color make it two balloon or anything else is just for contrast purposes so we'll assign the new color okay so first we'll assign original color to the sphere and assign the new color to the sphere as well so now it the new color is to the right of the original color in the in the palette here so with the new color let's go into alpha and add gradient here okay so here's our gradient let's go in there and change some parameters change the type of 3d linear as well disable cycle interpolation to none now maybe a bit of turbulence 45 will do just play with this kala be here how does that look okay so let's sum drag our okay now not texture it's important you have to go into the material itself here and drag the gradient not the texture not the material gradient itself now same thing shader properties and treat appropriate start and we'll just connect these with our end and start controllers so now our brig controls not only the the shader effector about the shader itself the shader alpha that is - let's invert this one here okay so now it controls the shader alpha let's give it a quick test so you can see now these guys are stacking up another of each other a standard manner here now they're stuck on top of each other and we're start kind of moves and where the end kind of also define the growth of the new material onto the old one the cool thing about these expressions that you can you know change all the parameters on the go if you don't like some of them and this is like nonlinear wife kind of way of doing this so let's go back here to the shader kind of notice is not correct so let's move this white pin to 50% so it will be halfway between start and end and in 3d space okay so let's duplicate this new a new color and we want to call the code like new color crystals this will apply to crystals disabled alpha and just apply this new one to crystals this one has no control just like playing color that basically same as the the overgrowing color just like the illusion alright so let's just kind of see maybe change c2 here a bit so I don't really like the way they're distributed here maybe play this eyes small maybe 0.15 about now they're just a bit bigger just kind of noticed some of those crystals were too small okay so let's maybe play playback so let's animate the controller okay so let's go to the first keyframe go to the controller coordinates drag it all the way down below the sphere so it doesn't touch it all right and then click this circle here so it will create a keyframe now let's go to the last frame drag it all the way up all the way up until this crystals disappear completely okay now create a keyframe by clicking the circle again and go right click animation show F curve now with select this keyframe here press this button to up the angle and drag this to the left to create this kind of offset curve this is basically what people usually do instead in After Effects try to replicate this kind of animation here so the F curve determines how what's happening between two keyframes so it starts super slow then it accelerates and then it kind of deceleration see it's not it's not real time right now super laggy due to all the geometry that we're having here but you can see kind of starts climbing slowly here so starts fast and then it celebrates here on those crystals they kind of grow rotate and then they shrink and at the same time the material changes all right so let's let's add delay here see what it does delay basically is kind of hard to to describe what it does but to delays your animation either blance between the cloner positions or inconvenience spring mode II you know just use it and play it's hard to describe but it's easier to kind of see what it does let's to encourage you to play with it I'm just making a preview here real quick and let's wait for it to calculate all right but before then let's go into delay effector change the motor spring and strength 10% and make it kind of look like it's springy but with the strength the slope will be barely noticeable we'll just add a bit of light additional organic as to it so here is our preview and this is what our animation looks like real time now let's go back to cinema 4d interface and set up our rendering and shading all right so let's find some some big point here where as we're kind of playing back through animation and not just picking a frame that we need because we have this delay effector on so what's kind of stirred you know stay here at 25 frames okay so let's go into render settings change standard - oops - physical and here in the facts let's add global illumination right away I'll change your ratings cache setting - previewed for a faster preview rendering so now let's go with Ariel I'll clear this area light here just maybe change the color of it to something a bit more warm just a bit of it almost invisible change going to details set enable shown reflection and create fall-off inverse-square naval shadows area shadows and let's change this here now two to the left just like top top general lighting kind of scenario alright well we have it here but this will not suffice so we'll also need to create NHGRI lighting so I'm creating new material only enabling luminance channel and here in the texture I'll load my eyes dri map that I've downloaded from the internet there's a lot of HDRI maps out there free ones so I'll set the exposure to -5 and change color profile tool in your essence for working in the linear space here and then let's create the sky object and assign this material to it and then add SEMA 4d tag and compositing and disable scene by camera because I don't want this light source to be visible to camera alright so now let's also create some background here I don't want it black so I'm creating material call it something like BG that background disable reflectance and color channel I created gradient here make it vertical to DV and just set some colors to something you know some kind of aquatic sort of gradient here alright and assign it to the background and let's give it a quick render to see what we have right now so ok so this is what it looks after rendering ok I guess it's ok so ok so how about we now go maybe change luminance of this HDI map of it instead of minus 5 I'll have minus 4 for like better reflections you know better feel light kind of thing okay so now let's tweak the materials I want this to be like more glossy versus more matte material so let's start with the original color and make it more glossy and first I want to go in color channel create some noise here I like noises pick some kind of noise I don't know how about this one increase global scale is usually a good thing to do succeed to something different like 300 here and let's pick our two colors here when something like more like the cooler side of the spectrum maybe or warmer one how about this nah okay now let's copy this channel here okay so let's copy channel go to reflectance and delete this default specular here and add a new ggx 1 increase roughness just a bit here okay maybe the 50% so play with the reflection strength maybe like 83 reflection strings 25 often so case now we have this nice specular reflection here so let's go down here into layer mask and paste great layer here first create two noise shaders and turn on shaders the first one will paste our copied one here it is I just change the colors to white and black so now will correspond to the colors that we have and this is basically reflectance map maybe not make it black with gray and then the other one I kind of want to break the specular even more but uh let's say some and also I'm not sure with this pronounce new shoes lucha's maybe so let's so I want to remap this values here instead of changing caller cell just change a low clip in high clip I'll just remap those sliders and we'll have our colors inverse so the second noise let's let's find some bling loud it kind of suffice or needs how about dark in here no no not really maybe Dodger burn okay think burn burn can it works so basically now will look like color changes affect specular strength with some additional noise layered on top let's see maybe that burn marks best after all okay so let's go let's go down to for now this is one of the most important tabs here so we have conductor and dielectric and the metal surfaces have different for now curve than non conductive surfaces so I want this to be methyl II so I selected conductor and from preset I'm maybe iron maybe iron will do you can you can just set your custom IRS if you want but I'll go with preset here so I kind of want to change these colors to something cooler now this warmer are not working for me okay so now we kind of have this marbly looking thing so let's introduce some bump let's go into reflectance channel Co P this term thing and paste it into bump so now our specular breakdown will correspond to bumpiness but I want the second layer to be serve less prominent in this one okay so let's see maybe we map those back you know not bad but kind of inverse them as well okay so now our valleys will have more specularity than our piece so here we can see the changes in the viewport kind of tries to represent what we did here so now the second one right away can have some kind of breakdown some kind of color pattern regularities here with noise again you'll be knocking okay let's crank up this global scale here a bit maybe not gauge maybe some different noise you could just kind of go ahead and play with dis noses and kind of see what works for you what not and I'll just change the colors here this whole thing is just to create something ready slide the regularities in color and guys copy this channel over and plug it into bump here so I want this bump to correspond to the color change that we have change it to white and black is the bump channel on response to light and dark values then go to reflectance channel here to disable this default one AB dgx see about roughness maybe will be something extreme here okay so let's create layer mask here noise let's see nukkie will knock you work for us okay why not just come tweak this mix strength to make it a little less prominent okay kind of one more matte a kind of surface here so here we'll choose dielectric and preset I kind of let's try this asphalt here so IOR of 1.6 35 as always you can punch in your own IOR if you want but it kind of looks okay and it looks more or less what I want maybe just tweak colors a little bit here and maybe not maybe something less saturated darker okay this be something more soil like looking okay so let's now we instantly have the supply the only thing we need is to copy this over disable alpha here maybe code something different like crystals disable alpha because we don't know we don't want any growth on the crystals themselves and just to swap it that's what the original blue line with the new one and now you can go ahead and try and render it and see what we have so let's go ahead and render it and this is what we have in the end okay so now we can go ahead and render our animation here so go to render settings change preview to something like medium or high whatever whatever you want go with high here specify file that I'm going to save let's call it something like render transformation okay change it to QuickTime movie so see options here here's the default animation or h.264 you know what this one is pretty good with no compression actually but most of the times you would want to export sequence so let's hope export sequence let's export PNG in this sequence so every frame will be a separate bin do files yeah not need help the channel and no multi pause here okay so let's see output um let's set the resolution to something bigger here like Full HD I said all frames here and make sure the frame rate here corresponds to the frame rate in the project settings 9525 and we can go ahead and render now so everything is set and ready so let's kind of zoom in here a bit you can see the resolution gate has changed since we've changed the resolution at the expect crater has changed so let's save it now so this is our end result this is what our effect looks like of course you can it can be applied to any object out there not just a sphere cylinder or some custom object given something you made like for say say like made in ZBrush so it's pretty you know pretty brittle technique that can be we need maybe it's not the most elegant one but it kind of works for me and I hope it will work for you so if you found this tutorial informative I don't forget to share like and subscribe and thank you for watching at CGI I hope to see you soon bye bye

Channel: Edge-CGI 3D Tutorials and more!

Views: 274,145

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, cinema4d, mograph, tutorial, overgrowth, effect, rendering, hd, animation, transformation, dynamic, materials, transition, cloners, effectors, expressions, xpresso, paramteric, shading, r16, fresnel

Id: LH8YdF29J18

Length: 36min 39sec (2199 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/n3sutran]

Great tutorial! I like how the effect is fairly simple but looks awesome, and thanks for not only explaining which steps you do but also what they do. I'm getting tired of the "I'm adding a shader effector.. just because"- tutorials.

[u/kerbarus]

A lot of neat tricks in there! I'm thinking it would be possible to do something pretty similar with just an animated displacement as well?

[u/bbcversus]

Awesome, can't wait to dig into it tonight!

Thanks a lot!

[u/FuzyWuzy1]

If you Gents enjoyed that X-particles tutorial section has a CorrosionFX that carried a similar effect. Might be worth checking out? https://vimeo.com/111327726

[u/[deleted]]

Reminds me of Venom. Looking forward to watching this later.