Cinema 4D R20 Tutorial - Mograph Fields Overview

hey everybody its EJ from IV's I'm calm and today I'm gonna give you a nice little overview of fields what they are what's new what's changed and some of my favorite fields features it's the greatest hits of fields coming right at you alright so here's our little flippy Hemisphere steam man I'm gonna be using to break down what fields are and really just some of my favorite fields features just because to cover all the fields features is gonna take a very very many many tutorials so this is gonna be more of a greatest hits like some of my favourite fields features so let's just get to making the scene and getting these little hemispheres doing a little twirly doodle so here's our the basic of a basic parts of our scene we have this holdout cube my holy cube with this little spheres cut out and then I have my hemispheres to fill it in and then I just clone both of those little objects into a grid or way so I have a whole bunch of these little holy spheres with the little hemispheres and what I want to do is grab my hemisphere cloner and for starts grab a plane effector and use this plane effector do not adjust the position but the rotation to have these kind of flip one on 180 degrees on the pitch okay so now I got the colorful side of my little hemispheres showing and now we can use fall-off to control how this plane effect is affecting all of our clones right now this is where everything completely changes is most the effector system is basically intact but where everything changes is the fall-off and you're gonna see we have fall offs are now called fields you know if I twirl down my field objects you can see that okay this looks familiar here we have all of our little fall-off shapes like box capsule cones linear we have a few new fields like sound and group and radio and actually radio I want to just take a moment just to talk about and radio is really cool because it uses almost like a pie chart kind of thing to adjust how your clones are being affected so I'm moving my start angle here and effectively what we can do is have like a little slice of an effector in you could do this before using a cylinder fall off and then just adjusting the the slice but the one thing where it was limited was you would not able to have a nice smooth transition and here's where you have this nice smooth start transition in in transition that totally changes how this works now so now we can have this really cool kind of pie slice kind of deal if I just zoom out here and maybe move this something down like that and you can have an offset and have this kind of like almost like a radar type effect you got the blue blue kind of thing affecting all of your clones so I thought that's really cool the new radial field is really cool and I'm there's been a lot of instances and in projects I've done where I wish I had that now we do so yay thanks max on and I'm just gonna delete that and you notice that when you do you gotta be careful when you delete things because sometimes they delete the plane effector so I'm just gonna select that radial field and just delete that versus the plane effector so now what I'm gonna do is let's just grab a cylindrical field and just scale this up in the height in the radius here in the field tab and you're gonna notice that we can you're on a surface level what's changed is fields can now be used as a bunch of layers so we can stack a bunch of fields together each layer has an opacity each one has a blending mode just like in Photoshop or After Effects and we have two little icons here that will make a lot more sense if I just go ahead and for the time being just delete all of my materials that were applied to my corner so now if I go back to my plane effector okay you're gonna see that we have these two icons now this icon if you uncheck it disables the plane effect or at least this fall-off field from affecting the cloners position skill rotation so any of the values or parameters okay so if I toggle that on and off that's affecting or parameters being changed now this other fee a little option here this little color wheel changes whether or not this field is changing the color of the Clones and you know when you can change the color of the Clones you can also use like a color shader to then use it in material so you can pump in this the colors being used and through these fields to you know actually make a material so that's really cool and you can see in the color remap you can actually choose what color you want now before i felt this was always like a kind of weird option to understand in the old system but feel like now with this new layer system and it's just so easy to be able to visually see what's going on that makes a lot more sense at least to me but again because we have these layers we can stack a bunch of these fields together so I can grab another cylindrical field here I can scale this on up I can also adjust these handles just like you could adjust the handles before and I can move this new cylindrical field out of the way and you can see that now I have two fields affecting the same same corner which is really awesome and again if I go into the cylindrical field go to the coloring map I can change this as well and the cool thing is is that because we have these blending modes and the color modes active we are actually blending these colors together kind of like a Venn diagram II kind of thing but that's where this was where the blending modes come in handy and if you're gonna make sense of fields you have to just understand that fields are like black and white matte layers now okay and you can add you can you can subtract them you can blend them together in different ways and all these blending modes will sound very familiar from blending modes in Photoshop or After Effects you can subtract from a field so you can see as the second field is kind of passing through it's actually eating away at the other or subtracting influence from the the first cylindrical field here but the two new or might be new blending modes to you are Max and min now Max is like the light and blending mode you can see that it's actually lightening the greenish color of some of the clones that are being influenced by the first cylindrical field and then min is like a darkened blending mode and you can see by these colors of changing that it's just darkening all those colors okay so this this is kind of like a big thing to get used to is fields and in just putting fields together and using these blending modes it's like putting together and adjusting a mat and again I can have an opacity of on each layer as well determining how much of that cylindrical field is actually affecting that layer and one easy way to kind of visualize what's going on with the field system is just use a your just plain black and white matrix here and then the linear field and you can see that we have this gradients and I just have a linear field with this plane effector just moving everything up in the Y position but this linear field you can see that whatever is white is fully affected by the the plane effector and whatever is black is not affected at all or that plane effector has zero influence and then we have this gradient from white to black where that influence is slowly kind of tapering off okay and where if this becomes very powerful and makes a lot of senses if you start you know again if I just change this color remap to white just to keep things consistent you can see there's that max blending mode and again max is lightened so it's just gonna lighten everything up but you're gonna see it's not gonna have any effect to the the fully whites are fully affected matrices on this side because it's already 100% white right you can't lighten it more than that but on the darker side you can see that we're actually darkening that and conversely if we use the min you can see that it's actually just subtracting okay so very important stuff we even have an over lay where the overlay mode it's not affecting the fully white or fully black clones it's it's just affecting all the little gray values in the middle and where this really comes in handy is when you want to say break up organically break up a transition from you know from a linear field and remember before you would use a no random weighting to randomize this plane effectors effect on a bunch of clones to kind of break up the monotony of a linear fall-off well with this new layer system this field layer system it's a lot easier and more straightforward in that to get that same effect we don't have to mess around with weights or anything like mograph weights all we need to do is again if you think of each of these layers as a black and white mat all we need to do is get a random field that effectively what a random few it is is like a fractal noise layer in after-effects and then if we know how our blending modes work all we need to do is set this to overlay right and now you can see it's only affecting the clones that are from you know it's some kind of gray value that isn't a hundred percent white or one hundred percent black and here we can go into our remapping tab and kind of you know just the the inner offset here or basically you're crunching the levels of that black and white layer you can even see visually represented what's happening in our little noise layer as we're kind of crushing the levels of that noise we can also go into the field and change this to a instead of random mode go to noise and this is really awesome is that we have the access to the actual noise shader system in our random field so here we can you know adjust the size of our noise the type of our noise and this is something that comparing this to the old random effector system where you'd have these couple random modes but you did not have access to the noise shader the noise random mode is very limited in the random effector versus the random field so that's that could be confusing because the random field in the random fector work different ways okay so this is like this replaces the old weighting system it doesn't fully replace it you can still weight things but this is how you do it now okay so let's just go back into our original composition here and got our two cylinder a cylindrical fields let me go and just undo a whole bunch of times to get back my materials that were here and going back in time there we go there's our materials so we got our cylindrical field let's go ahead and go on our plane effector go to the fall-off tab and let's go ahead and add that nice random field set this to overlay so we have this nice broken up type of effect and again we can adjust this based on the you know the scale of that noise and now as we move this around it's a little bit more you know random right it's not so circular or cylindrical as before and we can adjust the inner offset using the inner offset here so just whatever's in this darker cylinder is being fully affected and everything from that point on is slowly tapering off and getting less and less influence okay so you can see that we have this nice visual system of how the fall-off remapping is occurring we also have a contour where we can actually use a curve and you can see how that will be affecting our fall-off a lot of control there we can also have quantized which is like a stepped mode you can see here quadratic also is you know allows for very interesting type of fall-off effects I'm just gonna stick this with none and you're just gonna get that normal linear fall-off okay so that is fields on a very base level and one other thing you're gonna notice is fields are their own layers and own objects and this allows it to be more useful and not just be limited to being applied to cloners but also to other type of objects like deformers think of displace two formers and stuff like that you can actually control the fall-off of a display sir using these fields as separate objects you can also you use this to adjust mograph weights or vertex maps or even polygon selections there's a lot you can do with fields now that they're broken off into their own objects one feel it can control all those different things versus a singular field would be tied to a single object okay so this is kind of unlocks and more unifies the whole fall-off system so alright we got our little fall-off and you know if we if we animated this we can make you know our nice mograph e type of animation but where some of the more powerful things you can do now is using things called these modifier layers and think of modifier layers as adjustment layers and After Effects or Photoshop where whatever you have below it it's going to you kind of edit or adjust or enhance okay so you're gonna see that in a modifier layer we actually have a delay layer we also have you we still have our delay effector which works the exact same way but here we can use a delay on an actual field system field layer system okay so we can have something like a smoothing or cur and if I hit play and just go and move this around you can see that we have a nice little smooth kind of smoothing going on with our cylinder moving around and affecting our clones and turning them to their side so that's kind of nice you know one other thing that is really cool I'm just gonna delete that and I think one of the coolest new things you can do is using this brand-new decay modifier layer and again it's the topmost layer it's gonna affect everything below it so all the motion and everything that happens below it this is going to affect it now if I just have my delay layer there and I move this around you can see that basically what this decay layer is doing is kind of having a nice little trail system trailing my initial fall-off in it's kind of like it's almost like the delay but it it doesn't have that like nice smoothing it just kind of snaps so this is super super core it's almost like you're painting with a fall-off in that paintbrush kind of like dries up you know we have this paint stroke that kind of dries up behind it and this is just a super cool effect and one of the coolest things you can do with the decay layer as you can see this effect strength if I bring this up to say you know 87 you can see that what that's gonna do is slow down that effector that that clone to go back to its original state okay so you see all this delay happening basically or decay of the strength on each of those clones which is really cool let me just make sure my cylinder didn't go too far or above I think I've moved it accidentally moved it down let me just make sure it's intersecting there but let me just actually let's just go to the above view here we can actually see the color remap you can see exactly what's happening and actually let's go to this not gonna see it because I don't have to delay colors on but if I have the cylinder filled now you can see the color as it kind of fades and let me choose a different color because make it a lighter color there okay cool and now you can better see what's happening as this is passing through that color is kind of going through and the effect of that plane effectors passing through and it's slowly decaying over time okay so this is this is super cool I love love playing around the decay and one other thing that I can do is if you push this affect strength all the way up to 100 and I move this cylindrical field around you can see that what's happening is it's painting over and it's staying it's that that clone effect strength is staying the same okay so it's almost like it's triggering this cloner effect and it's keeping it that way so again this is like painting okay I'm just like coloring this in and as this fall-off passes through it's affecting and then keeping that full strength effect of that effector to that clone so we can like trigger basically trigger a lot of cool things using this new decay fee a modifier layer where things just you know once it passes through a fall-off passes through it it stays affected okay and you can see that some of these values have bright green some have dark green so you know if you wanted to be fully affected you just have to go over it a few times it's I swear it's like coloring with mograph it's almost like a crayon or a marker where your coloring in and coloring in the near the effectors effect on those clones and this is super super powerful the decay effect here again if it's anything less than 100 it's going to just decay back to its original state of the original cloner state okay so one thing that's really cool is we can start to like combine all these things together and so I can combine a delay effect and if I just place this delay effect right below I just turn off the delay for now but if I put this delay effect right on top of the cylinder fields in the random fields and say change this to spring and let's just change this to like sixty five to increase the strength basically what's gonna do is apply a nice springy movement to our clones so as this passes through we got this really nice springy movement and you can see it's almost like a wave effect where I make a circle and then you can see like an echo of that circle happen which is really really cool you're gonna see that as the clones swing back and forth they kind of don't swing the other way like a seesaw or like a swing it would swing you know this way and then backwards but this is like swinging one way and then just this way again and why it's not actually swinging backwards and you know going negative is because of the fact that we have clamping turned on and this does is clamps any negative values from happening so that means that if we have rotation in one direction it's not gonna swing back to a negative rotation from a positive rotation okay so watch what happens if I uncheck that and if I hit play and move this around again now you can see the negative rotation swinging back and forth okay now compare that with the clamping and if I move this around watch what happens is it kind of just rotates one direction and then goes back and doesn't rotate the other way so clamping is very very important when it comes to these type of effects so I'm just gonna leave this on clamp for now because now we have this cool a triggering of this effect and then it kind of swings like a swing back and forth using that spring delay effect now what we can do is just like with you know stacking up delay effectors we can stack up multiple delay layers and have this maybe set to smooth so it's using the movement or the rotation from the cylinder and actually a somehow I got the cylinder filled strength down from a hundred percent so let me put that back up I have this delay spring and let's actually rename this just double click and be able to rename these layers of delay smooth get the smoothness and so now we can have the cylindrical field move around and we'll have this spring and then we have the unclamp and then we have that smoothing so it kind of slows down and smooths out that movement coming from our spring and just the rotation of our plane effector so man there's just so much cool stuff you can do you know stacking the delay and the decay and stuff like that there's so many cool things you can do you can stack you know decay with smoothing so we can have some decay but then smooth that on out okay and we can even just you know maybe have all these three combined together we have these cool effects like that as well but this just totally opens up a whole new world of using fields to trigger animation and again if I have this delay or the keep keep screwing up the cane delay but if you have this decay again you can actually trigger those clones to you know be fully turned using that decay so a lot of combinations can do some really cool effects and just experience parenting with all these different types of modifier layers and I haven't even covered even a few of them there's a lot here but there's just so much more to play with now and this new system is it's kind of intimidating because there's so many new features and it's so stinking deep that it can it can get kind of crazy kind of quickly okay so I'm liking this cylinder field here as its passing through basically what I would do at this point is you know just keyframe this cylindrical field so I can have this kind of pass through this way and go forward and pass through this way or you know if I just want full control and actually want to do like some kind of writing like I was doing before where I'm just moving my mouse around the screen I can actually record my mouse movement kind of like motion trace from After Effects I can just have my cylindrical field out here I'm just gonna go and use something called cappuccino which captures your mouse movement and converts it to keyframes so I can say you know what record my position of this object as I'm dragging it through my scene and let's just start at the current time I'm gonna start real-time okay now watch what happens as I move this through you're gonna see my playhead is moving and it's recording keyframes as I'm moving this cylindrical field through my little grid system here my little clone or grid and you can see that when I you know stop this I'm just slowly moving through here just have this pass through the bottom here and maybe it ends right maybe it exits right up here okay so that exits again you can see all those keyframe that it recorded now I can go to let's go to my top view and maybe turn off all the clones and stuff but you can see there's my motion path that I just recorded recorded my keyframe or my mouse movement converted it to keyframes so that's a cool way especially with this you know the decay effector and you can actually record you know move your effector around the screen or around your scene and trigger things like you know playing effects and effectors and stuff like that you know if I play this back you can see that you know playing back all nice now if you'll notice I had in my in my main render here I had two levels of these cubes and I did that very easily by grabbing both the hemisphere grid in the whole cube cloner and just grabbed a new plane effector and this is just going it's always helpful to name things so this is plane dot R for plane rotation and this is plane P for position position why specifically because I'm just gonna use this plane effector to move things up 200 centimeters in the Y and again this is affecting all of our clones so what I'm gonna do is use a random field and now you're gonna see that that's going to then randomize the strength of that plane effector as it's being applied to all our clones now because of the fact that the random field is your black and white noise layer and you have all different types of gray values it's unless you go and you know go to our random field and you adjust the inner offset here like or you know just adjust things this way you really can't get like two levels and this is where utilizing some of the brand-new you know modifier layers is really cool and one of the ones that I feel like is is super cool to use is the quantize now what quantize does is just like quantizing a gradient or quantized in color it brings you know if you have 256 color values and you quantize it down to four it's gonna only choose it's gonna take all that color from distill it down to four values now this is the same thing where I can distill that random field and the grayscale values that are being brought into by that random field and randomizing the position from our plane effector I can bring this down to a step of one and now I randomly have this this working where it's either this random field is either on or off on that layer okay so you can see it's either affecting it a hundred percent like these topmost cubes or 0% so it's at its original position and here's where I can adjust like the random seed and get all kind of cool kind of orientations and in two different levels here as well again I know this that 200 for the plane position works because my cube is 200 by 200 by 200 so that's why this is working so now instead of having my fall-off kind of passed through I now have it affecting two levels of these little cubes here now another thing that's really cool and I'm gonna go just because the scenes getting a little bit nutty is going to my little test scene here and let's just make sure we have a matrix object on my plane effector here one thing that's really cool too let me just bring this up to 500 centimeters so it's just moving everything up one thing that's really cool and new is all these field layers so we have you know our effectors but we also have our field layers and one of the field layers that I love using a lot is really powerful is the time field and it works a lot like the time effector where it just kind of automates animation and where this animation is coming from right now so if I go to the layer tab of this time effector you can see there is a sine wave which basically you know goes back and forth up and down on a sine wave and you can adjust this right here and that's basically how long does it take for this time effect to kind of push this object up the five hundred centimeters that was set in the parameter and then the sine wave will just make it go up and then go back again but if I turn this to none basically what this rate is doing if I set this to 90 frames is that from frame zero to frame 90 this this all these matrices are gonna move from its original position to being fully affected by the plane effect at frame 90 so in our case that plane effectors effect is gonna push it all the way up to 500 centimeters at the end of 90 frames okay we also have like a frame offset here we can offset at a negative value and have that the actual animation trigger you know 35 frames after or 12 frames or 19 or whatever but where this is really cool is combining this with a bunch of different modifiers so we're getting like field inception because what you can do is use subfields to control how this time field or this time layer is affecting all of our objects here let's just go change this why is it yeah there we go let's just turn this color on so you can actually see the effect happening over time so now you can see that's like from black to white it's slowly being influenced by that plane effector and moving upwards but where this gets really powerful is if I say let me just move this on up so you can see if I grab a random field to offset that time you can see that it's actually offsetting everything randomly and offsetting that time as it's affecting all of these clones which is really really cool so I can go into this field change this from random noise again I have the full control of adjusting that noise and this is just super super cool stuff now one thing that's even cooler is when you use the quantize here as well because what this allows you to do is kind of break that up and stagger this in different ways now you can use the quantize either here or you can quantize it's up in the actual field not in the sub field so if I use this quantize here you can see you get this really really cool effect if I adjust the level of quantizes we get this really kind of cool stepped animation like very 8-bit II kind of 8-bit the thing 8-bit type of staggered effect using the quantize with the randomly offset at time field here it's just there's so many possibilities like combining all these things together or maybe we use in this layer let's use like a sign so we have this going back and forth it almost looks like you know cut some kind of like cloud or smoke or something like that but this this is something that is just you know playing around with looks really really cool and the fields within the fields the fields inception is like once I knew you could do that it just totally blew my mind and again it's it's pretty overwhelming right I feel like after you like just knowing all the possibilities and all the new features it's gonna take I feel like it's gonna take a few years - for very talented artists to do cool things with all the new features and then actually show that hey this is possible - it's gonna be one of those things like this is totally revolution revolutionizes the old fall-off system so there's a lot that can be done but again this is like my favorite new features I've only started using this but it's pretty powerful I feel like if you just solely use you know the the delay and the decay I think the decay is probably one of the things I'm going to be using the most to kind of trigger these effects from effectors and stuff like that I think it's just at a surface level those kind of things are huge so greatest hits of fields my favorite fields hopefully you found your favorite in this video and have fun frolicking through the fields alright so that's my greatest hits of some of my favorite fields features I'd love to know what your favorite features are that you saw and what you're excited about with the new field system so be sure to leave those comments in the comment section below as well as any questions you have about fields it's it's pretty deep it's it's pretty crazy for me to even try to understand at this point and I've been using it for a few months now so ask away if you have questions cuz I'm sure you do it's it's a pretty deep news but if you make anything cool based off of this tutorial I would love to see that as well so be sure to share it with me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram I love to see what my viewers are doing so be sure to share it with me and if you like this video please hit the like button I'd really appreciate that if you like what I'm doing on my channel please hit the subscribe so you can get the latest and greatest content coming from me or David area with this octane hotness but appreciate all the support you've given throughout all this time and appreciate any continued support so appreciate your views and I'll see you in the next one bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 85,257

Keywords: cinema 4d r20, cinema 4d fields, c4d r20, c4d fields, c4d mograph, cinema 4d mograph, cinema 4d effectors, c4d effectors, cinema 4d r20 tutorial, c4d r20 tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, motion graphics, mograph tutorial, mograph, learn c4d, eyedesyn, fields, mograph fields, cinema 4d r20 features, mograph animation, animation, mograph module, mograph effectors

Id: 9kD7rBaFnvk

Length: 33min 47sec (2027 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018