Cinema 4D R20 Tutorial - Create a Liquid Text Reveal Using Mograph Fields & Volumes

hey everybody its EJ from a days I'm calm and in today's tutorial we're going to be combining two of the biggest new features added to cinema 4d r20 filled in volumes we're gonna mash them together and use them to create a really cool and easy to do but complex looking little blobby liquid text reveal again using just fields and volumes and we're gonna wrap everything all up in a nice pretty bow by covering a little bit about subsurface scattering materials and how you can add a nice kind of blobby material to your little blobby text so let's check it out [Applause] [Music] so here we have just a very simple scene setup we have booze with some mo text we have the frankfurter font which is a really nice rounded kind of font but we just have some simple mo text we have a depth of like 60 and for the caps nothing too crazy just a philip cap with a step of one radius of about two centimeters and b start in the end and we're going to create some nice blobby text with this and then use volumes and fields to kind of make a really cool blobby tex review so let's first use these mo text objects to create some volume so let's grab our aptly named volume builder and we're just gonna select all of our mo text objects just drag and drop them underneath the volume builder you'll see now we have this beautiful voxel mess going on right here and right now we have a very high voxel size so we don't have much resolution so I'm just gonna lower that to about two centimeters and you know I'm kind of gonna go through the voxels like you already know it so if you don't know much about voxels definitely be sure to check out my tutorial all about the basics of voxels it's very useful for getting you to understand what is actually going on with the the new voxel and volumes workflow but you can see that with our volume builder we have all of our mo text objects under here and we can use boolean modes to add them all together and the default mode is Union so we're basically combining all of these mo text objects together and creating one voxel object so what we're gonna do now is this isn't looking too good right now it's not looking too blobby at all so for that we're just gonna grab a smooth layer now smooth layers act like an adjustment layer from Photoshop or or After Effects where it affects all of the layers underneath and you can see that immediately we're blurring everything out blurring those voxels and making everything nice and blobby and kind of just adjusting the voxel distance here which is basically how far these voxels are being blurred you can see that we're using this Gaussian filter type to blur on our boxes just as we would use gauzy and blur do you know blur out pixels so nothing too crazy there we can increase that distance and make it even more blobby if I tore blur it out but basically I mean right here right now just using the volume builder with a smooth layer you have some you know bubbly kana texts and you get it really super fast but again if you don't have our 20 you always check out how the the old way of how I created some nice bubbly text in again in an old tutorial with it but our 20 makes all of my old tutorials kinda obsolete and makes everything much much easier so it's kind of crazy how much easier our 20 makes some some of my old tutorials that had many many steps just a click of a button like it is now anyways so we have our smooth text it's not looking too blobby yet so what we can do to add to our volumes is some drips and we can do this very easily by you know kind of just manually adding some capsules to our volume builder here and just adjusting them placing them right within our mo text objects here and you're gonna see that they don't look very you know uniform or melded together and that's because I added that capsule in by default the capsule is placed above the smooth layer so again remember I said smooth layers act like adjustment layers and everything underneath is affected but not anything above that smooth layer so to have the capsule be smooth and be blended with everything underneath I just placed that capsule underneath and you see now we got this really nice-looking blobby drippy kind of thing and we can you know manually animate these capsules to create a really cool dripping but what I'm gonna do now is just kind of duplicate this capsule and just manually place all these drips to you know look really nice and droopy and drippy to get some nice drips going on here so let's just move this maybe over here nice little drip there and you know this is you know just the super manual way to do it you can definitely take a lot more time to do this but this is kind of the the benefit of volumes and how volumes can totally change old workflows where you know maybe you would do X particles before to Bill it up a whole particle field using objects and filling them in with particles but now you can do the same you know a similar thing using voxels instead natively in cinema 4d and that's all pretty cool so now I just have you know a bunch of drips here let's just go and just select all these capsules and just move them all below the smooth layer here and you can always and this is the great thing about volume builders is everything is live so I can update this after I smooth everything out maybe I want to thicken that there's some of these little capsules that are so small that they actually got totally blurred out like this one right here so I can either make the capsule bigger or I can go and go into my volume builder go to the smooth layer here and sometimes this is a weird bug sometimes you might have to click off of the smooth layer for the options that actually show up but you can also adjust just the overall strength and the voxel distance to get a little bit more of the detail back but I think I'm just gonna bring the strength down just a little bit so something like that maybe 85% and looking good okay so you can spend a lot more time on you know fine-tuning this and all that good stuff but now what we can do is we have this really nice kind of gloopy text with drips well if we wanted to review all of this stuff on well the cool part about volumes in voxels is we can utilize fields along with it and use these boolean modes to say subtract a linear field to have a nice linear wipe to wipe on all these voxels and then in effect wipe on the little blobby text that will we'll build with the volume measure at the end of this at the end of this tutorial so let's go ahead and grab our linear field so I'm just gonna go to create go to field and grab a linear field now to add this linear field to our volume I'm just gonna drag and drop it underneath our volume builder you can see now we have the linear field within our voxel volume builder list so I can go ahead and again use this place this underneath the smooth layer and use a different boolean mode so instead of just adding to this by having this Union mode I can actually subtract and what you're gonna see is nothing right away okay and that's because the creation space of this linear field is only using a box that's the size of 40 40 40 okay and what we actually want to do is say you know what the creation space or the space that I want this linear field to affect is actually all of the objects in this volume so I'm going to choose objects here I'm gonna see that something happened on the right side of our text okay so what's actually going on here well one thing to know about voxels and building a whole volume here is that we have a whole bunch of options if you just twirl down this little arrow by the voxel size we basically have a defined limit of how many voxels are in the actual like depth of the voxels inside of this volume of our text and right now the interior voxel range or how deep the voxels you can affect on this whole volume are is just to adjust the step of to and that's actually not very deep it at all but notice what happens when I start increasing the interior voxel ranges we can actually affect more of those inner voxels and again subtract those intervals by using this linear field and maybe crank this to a value of say 12 just to be safe and I'll check that out by populating the interior of this volume builder with this bigger interior voxel range we can now subtract or Bowl out those interior voxels and get this really cool kind of very simple white like a linear wipe so instead of using a directional or a direction of this linear feel in the positive x let's do positive Y or actually let's do negative Y let's flip the script flip the field and there we go and now we have this cool little reveal and you know it's okay you know this is very linear and that's kind of the thing is with linear wipes and you actually see right there it looks like we have to even increase the interior voxel range they're a little bit more so just 15 and you can see that we were now getting deep enough with our linear field and this is very boring just like any kind of linear wipe if you want to add more organic enos which is totally a word I made it up but it's officially a word now organic enos to your your linear wipe just like if you wanted to add some nice organic look to to break up the the linear nature of a linear wipe and after effects what would you do well you would combine that you know black and white wipe linear wipe with say an overlay of fractal noise to break it up and that's exactly what we're gonna do here only we're gonna use a random field to create random noise that's basically our you know after effects fractal noise and combine them together and then use that kind of broken up organic kind of wipe to then wipe this on and off so the problem is I can't just add a random field and combine it with a linear field okay because we're just kind of limited to boolean functions we don't have an overlay we don't have any blending modes here okay so what we're gonna do is actually just delete this linear field from this volume builder okay and that's actually you're just gonna delete the whole linear field altogether which is totally fine but let's go ahead and build this a different way so what I'm gonna do is first grab a group field okay and you can think of a group field as almost like a pre comp layer where you can combine different fields together so remember I had a linear field okay and let's just change that to negative Y like we had before maybe adjust this here okay now what we can do is use this group field and again I need to change some of the attributes here so if I have my group field here you can see again the creation space is just this tiny box so instead of box I'm gonna use objects and right now it's actually adding to the whole volume so again I'm gonna use subtract and so now we're back to square one where we had just our linear field but the benefit of using this group field is now we can add our random field or a shader field with some noise but I'm just gonna use a random field here and to be able to combine these two together again where you can really demystified Fields is by thinking of these fields as black and white matte layers so if we have this random noise here to combine that with the linear field we're gonna use an overlay okay so now you can see we're getting back the linear field the linear wipe and then now we can go to our random field change the random mode to noise and here we have access to all of the different noise types which is really awesome from the noise shader so we can get booyah we can get dents all the fun to say names we can we can grab here but you can see already we have this nice little organic kind of waviness I'm just gonna toggle the random field on and off you can see that already adds quite a bit of interest there so now I can you maybe increase the scale at a 180 and now you can see these really nice strips kind of will drip looking kind of things by just overlaying the random noise on top of our black-and-white Linear wipe here coming from the linear field and now we can maybe adjust the relative scale so maybe we want the this to be a little bit longer something like this so we get this really nice blobby kind of look which is really awesome so when we go to move this linear feel it up and down and maybe even do this a little bit more slowly you can see we have this really nice kind of drippy kind of thing going on and the benefit of using a random filled with the random noises we actually introduced some animation speed to the random noise so maybe a you know know speed of 1 or 5% and then when we hit play you can see that this is actually animating the noise and adding some nice animation or undulation to the noise that we're using in our random field so group fields allow you to combine different fields together using these different blending modes and again these blending modes worked exactly like they do in Photoshop or After Effects so you can always you know think back to to the blending modes there and just like you would add an overlay of a fractal noise to a linear wipe to you know make it non uniform or linear do the same thing here and so now we have this group field combined or subtracting everything underneath now to create a nice little wipe we can just key frame this linear field from being you know in the position Y 150 centimeters go let me just move this keyframe back to zero and maybe make this a you know third one second wipe so I'll just bring this on down and then just set a new keyframe and there we go we have this really nice wipe now you can you know always adjust the the random field you can also adjust say the inter offset to make this even sharper of a kind of blobby kind of wipe you can even increase the size of the linear field so we get even more drippy kind of looking things kind of like that drippy kind of looking things so there we go we got a really nice white but at the end of the day we just have some volumes at this point and if we go to render we're not gonna see anything at all but my little orange background that I already have there that's because we just have voxels and in voxels like splines don't render unless we actually create some geometry use those volumes so to transform this volume the volume builder into a volume mesh we're just gonna select the volume builder go to our volume measure and to make this volume measure a parent of the volume builder that we have selected I'm just going to hold down the alt or option key and that's a nice little handy shortcut key to be able to add that object as a parent of the selected object you have there so there's our volume measure you can see that let me just hide this random field here from view I'm just gonna double click the little stoplight so we don't get that big noise view widget in our viewport anymore kind of fudging up our view so now we can use things too to help this smooth out even more so this is kind of a thing I like to do with the volume measure is maybe grab a smoothing deform er and place that right underneath the volume measure and check out how much smoother this kind of makes the the whole mesh there so there's a distinction between smooth layers in the volume builder the smooth layer in the volume builder is blurring out the voxels whereas the smoothing deform er is actually smoothing out the resulting geometry the resulting mesh from our volume measure so it's kind of doing two different things so the the smoothing deform ER and the smoothing layer you can kind of adjust them independently but they're both editing different things so one's editing voxel smoothing out the voxels and one is smoothing out the actual geometry so another thing we can do to make this a little bit more blobby is add another deform er like a displace the former and add some noise in here and just increase the strength or increase the size I mean and maybe get a booyah can I get a booyah there we go there's a booyah actually booyah is not gonna work but it's fun to say maybe a Luka you just play around with all different types of noises here to get the kind of look that you want maybe we click this little button there get get some sparse convolution there that sounds extremely fancy-pants in like it should help a lot there so let's do that and then we can also go into this place or maybe just you know bring down the height a little bit but you can see that that adds some nice you know extra blobby nature to our text then again this displacer is acting upon the volume mesh or the actual geometry that we are building from our volume builder there okay so now when we go back and forth we're actually building on a you know actual geometry here which is really really cool so another thing you can do with the volume measure and it's it's one of the couple options in here but one is if you know what you just meshed with the volume measure if it's really like if you hit play is really bogging down your scene here one thing to do that's really handy is using this adaptive little slider here and what this is doing if I go into my garage shading lines so what the adaptive is actually doing is removing the polygon count to be able to speed this up okay in in your playback and you know just need to remember that when you're ready to render to crank that back to zero so whatever you have it I'm just gonna right click on these little arrows to get them back to default and there you go another thing we can do that's really cool is we can maybe make this thicker by adjusting this voxel range threshold so if you bring it above 50% it's gonna thicken it and if you bring it below 50% it's actually gonna shrink it back a little bit so you didn't you know play around with this little option here and just remember that the default is 50% again I'm just gonna right click these arrows to go back to 50% and there you go so now that we have our really nice-looking reveal here and we could spend a lot more time on this but it's looking pretty blobby if I'd let's add a really nice blobby texture to this so what I'm gonna do is just double click make a new material let's rename this blobby material and let's double click and open this material editor let's choose like a lime kind of thing like that let's go to our luminance and to get some really nice kind of slime type of look we're gonna add some sub surface scattering it's right there at the bottom but add some subsurface scattering and where you add subsurface scattering for it to work is in the illuminance Channel let's go and go into our subsurface scattering shader and let's just add that lime-green color back in here basically what the sub subsurface scattering say that five times fast holy crap what subsurface yeah she I mean it's not gonna do what SSS does his allows for the effect of light to pass through and illuminate the inner part of your object so we're getting much more kind of a slimy blobby type of surface than we did before if I just toggle this on and off so it's allowing light to pass through into the volume and kind of illuminate from the from the inside so what we can do is maybe make this even more pronounced and say up the strength to say 150 and then we have this path link which is basically how much light can actually penetrate through or object and you can see that we have this nice represent representation of this candle if I bring the path length to a lower level or lower length you can see that it's getting a little darker on the inside and while I'm talking about this let me actually just apply this to my volume measure and let's just close this up make this a little smaller and just render and see what that looks like right there you can see that this is looking pretty bright at this point so a lot of this is gonna depend on the lights in your scene so if I just turn on a couple of these lights here this is just a typical three-point light setup just one on the overhead one to the side one in the background kind of illuminating it from the back here so something like that and if I render this now based on the lights and they also have you know area shadows turned on it looks completely different so what you do here is going to depend a lot on what lights you have in your scene because this is an effect subsurface scattering okay I said it right that time is dependent on where the light sources are coming from okay so let's leave the path length at that and let's just pull down some of these options here there's red green and blue basically what the RGB values here allow you to do is to multiply the strength of certain colors that are represented in the inner sub part of the volume of your object so if I want this green to be really pumped up I can just increase that you can see a lot of green as being represented in that lit up inner part of our of our little surface or a little volume there okay so let me just turn on interactive render region here so we can see what this looks like when we're adjusting all of these options here so there we go we have our green really cranked up here's if it's not cranked up at all you can see that's less pronounced so let's crank up the green let's crank up the blue a little bit of red maybe even more red we get some kind of you know yellows in there and you know basically you can get some really really cool looks by just you know cranking up some of the the hue values here now to make this render even faster we can go into the multiple tab and just turn on fast evaluation and bam look how fast look how fast that evaluated it it really does what it said it fast it fastly quickly evaluates everything so now I can you know just keep adjusting these things and updates really fast but yeah that's basically all the options I really mess around with in the subsurface scattering here again if you really want this even more pronounced maybe crank up the strength to 200% and you can see this is much brighter and again upping the path length allows the light to pass through and illuminate the inner bits of our of our use as well so let's just make this some very shiny news so I'm just gonna remove these specular add some Beckmann reflection let's leave you Roughness at about 10% and let's bring the overall strength of this reflectance layer - you know maybe 60% there let's go to the layer for now because right now it looks like the shiny Terminator guy the liquid Terminator guy let's just go and change this for now to dielectric and make this look a little bit more PT or like plasticy I guess and there we go got more of that underlying color coming through and let's just give this color maybe a little bit of yellow so we have like yellowish hue to really add to our our reflection so this is looking a lot better you make this even more yellowish so there we go so again a lot of what your subsurface scattering is gonna be is dependent on all your lights if I turn off all my lights you're gonna see that this looks completely different so this is when really getting your lighting nailed in is gonna do really well this is with just like the overhead light hitting it which is that looks kind of cool and then let's maybe turn on the side light but there we go we now have this really nice reveal blobby reveal of our mo text by using a combination of fields and volumes which I would have to say is the best combination since peanut butter and jelly I mean come on alright so hopefully that gives you a really good idea of how you can start to use fields with volumes to create some really kind of complex looking animations just very super easily and I think that's just the over line power of cinema 4d r20 and is it brings all these really kind of technical looking things to your fingertips very very easily it's not very hard to do so if you have any questions about anything I covered in this tutorial be sure to leave them in the comments section below if you create anything with any of the fields and volumes workflows that I discussed in this tutorial I love to see them so be sure to share them with me on Twitter on Facebook all of the interwebs please share them with me I'd love to see what you guys are coming with in one of the best places and new places to be able to share your work ask me questions and interact with other people in the I design community is my brand new I design tutorials Facebook groups so be sure to sign up and get added to this group I hope to see you there and as always I really appreciate all of the comments all of the compliments and just everyone watching the tutorials and learning it really inspires me to keep doing this so really appreciate all the support that you give every single time I post a tutorial so keep it coming and I'll keep doing this for you guys as well so hope you guys enjoy this one I'll see you in the next tutorial bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 94,290

Rating: 4.9559956 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d r20, c4d r20, cinema4d r20, cinema 4d fields, c4d fields, c4d mograph, cinema 4d mograph, cinema 4d effectors, cinema 4d volumes, volume modeling, c4d r20 tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, text reveal, motion graphics, mograph tutorial, mograph, learn c4d, eyedesyn, fields, volumes, c4d volumes, cinema 4d volume modeling, mograph animation, mograph effectors, 3d type, 3d text, 3d logo, subsurface scattering, liquid text, cinema 4d liquid, c4d liquid

Id: qIkFinBtCaA

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018