Cinema 4D R20 tutorial - Transforming effect

hey guys Sean Duffy back with another cinema4d quick tip a little while ago one of you guys sent me this great animation made by a studio called moose tank and asked how could we go about creating a similar animation in their clip we see this called morph transform effect between different pieces of technology and the whole thing is really impressive to help myself understand exactly how moose tank went about creating this animation I ended up going frame by frame during one of those morph states to see if I could get any clues so something that I think I noticed as I was looking at this morph state was that the next pose that we're heading into almost seems to scale up in pieces as the previous one scales down and then you play this back in real time and that transformation looks seamless now of course this is oversimplifying what they've done but it will be the basis for how we start to attack it ourselves so of course I was excited to put this technique to the test and see exactly what sort of results we could get we used some of the mocha 4 factors of course play with some dynamics I'm excited let's jump in guys all right let's jump straight into cinema and we'll start having a bit of a play now to create this transform effect I want to find two objects that were a similar life-sized scale I wanted I want to be able to transform the two objects and make it feel real for example if I were transforming between the shoe and a car the car would have to be miniature size to fit within the same parameters of the shoe and it and it's not gonna look as realistic so demonstrate this technique I thought would ever play around morphing between this Nike shoe model and this football helmet the other reason I think this works quite well is there a similar life-sized scale and so we're able to accept the transform a bit more realistically so I'm gonna load up this Nike Air Max model I'm gonna leave a link down below so I made I'm not gonna be able to pronounce your name there but this is a great model and and he's got it up there for free downloads so guys make sure you go and check this out he's an absolutely amazing job go and give him a like alright so let's load this into cinema and just gonna clean this up a little bit we don't need that text on the ground yes that's our main shoe and these are our stitches what we're actually going to do will remove the stitching for this we're just gonna focus on the shoe itself I'm gonna remove all these texture tags as well for now we'll do some of our own texturing at the end that's what I'd like to do is just drop a cube into our scene to get a bit of a sense of the scale that this shoe is coming up and if i zoom out we can see that that shoe is actually quite small in our scene so I'm gonna do is hit T and just scale this up a little bit and I'm not being too precise I just want to be working at a similar scale that I'm used to about there is gonna work nicely and we can delete that cube all right great so this is our first model here the next one we wanted to morph into was that football helmet and the great thing is we've actually got one builds into cinema here so I'm going to come into our content browser interprets into a default browser 3d objects when I come down to sports items and then in here we've got the football helmet so let's load that up and jump back into our objects and you can see if I curl down this football helmet null we've got a few objects in here as well building up the helmet close that back up now if I scale this at the moment we can see that access is a bit funky so it's gonna realign that hit T and start scaling this up all trying to do here you get a similar orientation with our shoe this doesn't have to be perfect but something like this seems to be working quite nicely we might want to scale it up a little bit more great I'm happy with that we've got a helmet and our shoe set in place at about this scale that we're happy with now what I want to do is collapse this helmet into just one piece of geometry so quick quick and easy way to do that is to grab a connect and then we'll place all those objects within that connect now essentially what this connect is doing is welding it all together I'm just gonna change our on mode to highest and then by simply hitting C on that we've collapsed all that mesh into the one piece let's just clean up a scene a little bit here this is our helmet this is a shoe and I'm just gonna come along and delete all these textures and the selection tags off from our helmet they're great I'm also gonna hide that helmet just for a moment and we're just going to focus on the shoe now for this technique what I found is we want this shoe to be able to break off into separate pieces and they're gonna scale down as the helmet begins to scale up now like with our helmet our shoe was already collapsed into one piece of geometry so we need to essentially break this up now a great way to do that let's select a shoe hold down alt come up to mograph and we're going to place this into a fracture within our fracture let's come over to our object tab and the mode we're going to change this to explode segments and connect now nothing happens at the moment but just to demonstrate what we've got now I'm going to come up to my graph effector and I'm going to apply a push apart effect on our fractures are still selected so this is automatically going to be applied I'll change with my iterations just to one I'll pull this radius in and you can see what we've got here now is that shoe has been broken apart into all the separate pieces that were initially made to build it so this is great we've got all these separate fractures we've got all these separate fractures of our shoe I'm gonna delete the push apart cuz we're not going to be using that for this all right so let's select a fracture let's come up to my graph come to effectors and to do this I think let's just we're just gonna use a plane effector now instantly gonna say everything gets pushed up and that's because our parameters have this Y value of 100 centimeters so let's uncheck the position because we're not going to be using that lets however turn on scale I'm gonna turn on absolute and uniform scale and let's set this scale to negative one and they're going to notice everything is disappeared on us so let's come over to our for loft tab so to control these fractures scaling back into our scene we're gonna be using the fall-off tab and just using a linear fall-off I'm gonna hit easy for my move tool and you can see this is currently on and now this is currently on our X plane you can see when I move this linear field through our scene here those pieces start to scale back on so I'm gonna scale down our field a little bit something like 50 centimeters should be fine so this is great boy I actually want is rather than the pieces scaling up from the back I want to scale them in from the front here so let's change our direction to minus X and now as we come through the front of our scene here you can see those pieces scale in from the front and that's what I'm and that's exactly what I'm after so I'm going to pull our linear field so everything's disappeared now we're gonna scale into this shoe so let's cut them forward about ten frames and we'll add a keyframe to our linear field position I'm gonna come to frame forty give us I'm working at 30 frames a second here so that'll be one second in our timeline and we'll move this linear field so everything's scaled back into our scene let's add another keyframe there and great as I scrub through the timeline now you're gonna see those pieces scale in all right let's look at all right but we want to make these a bit more dynamic it's just feeling a little bit it's not feeling as exciting as we could make it so real quick way we can add a bit more interest as they scale back in is to add a delay effector so with our fracture selected cuts let's come up to my graph over to a factor and let's add a delay effector it's come over to the effector tab and we'll change our mode to spring and we'll just increase this a little bit let's try maybe somewhere about 70% now let's play through that and already that starts to look a little bit more interesting those pieces have a little bit more wobble before they finally rest in that final position now playing that through that felt a little bit quick so let's grab a linear field and I'm just gonna grab that key frame we set at frame 40 and pull it ten frames further away let's let's add a little bit more time to that animation now before we got too much further we're gonna get a few extra pieces happening in a sense let's just slide this up a little bit so this is our shoe fracture this is our plain shoe scale up and this is our delay shoe great so in our linear field at the moment all this is doing so in our plane effect up at the moment all we're doing is scaling these pieces up if we go come over to our parameter let's actually enable position now rather than 100 in the Y let's just go something like 30 so essentially now these pieces are a little bit in the air before they come flying back down let's add a little bit more to make that a bit more obvious there we go you can see the pieces are coming from the sky now but as they scale up and it's a little bit too much for me let's go back to something like 40 great just a little bit goes a long way there I want to make this shoe feel a little bit more dynamic in our scene so I'm gonna grab a disc and this disc is gonna form a bit of a ground for us let's jump into our four views and we've already sort of been animating our shoot where it is so what I'm gonna do is just grab this disc just make sure our animation is completely played out there looks like a shoe is static I'm gonna pull this disc and just create a slight intersection with our shoe let's jump back into our perspective view I'm just gonna scale this disc up great and this is our ground so with our ground selected let's go tags simulation tags and we'll just add a Collider body and what that's gonna do is just make our ground static and it's going to make that nice and rigid for us there now let's do the same thing with our shoe fracture let's come up to tags simulation tags and I'm going to apply a rigidbody to this one now let's rewind and see what we've got at the moment now as I play that through you can see that we no longer have that in our scene and the reason for this is if I'm just gonna set a camera so we can come back to this spot if i zoom out yeah our shoe has fallen away on us so let's rewind jump back into our camera and under the forces tab of our dynamics tag on our shoe fracture I'm just gonna add a little bit of follow position and follow rotation I might even add just a little bit of drag now let's have a look at that nicely that's starting to look a bit that's starting to look a little bit more interesting as it scales into our scene here I'm just gonna get rid of all these textures so what they're not distracting us we can come back to creating some of our own a little bit later all right nice oh nice that was looking pretty good those pieces we're scaling scaling up quite nicely under a linear field we'll just getting a little bit of that color showing through so I'm just gonna make sure we've got no remapping happening from the color now let's have another playthrough happy with that that shoes looking pretty good as it scales in that's what we have now got our shoe pretty much set and ready to go so now we need to start having to think about that helmet but before we do what I'm gonna do is on the dynamics tag I'm gonna come over to the cache tab and what we're gonna do is bake our object so let's do that and the reason we're doing this is we're also going to be using dynamics to scale down the helmet but we don't want them to be interfering with the dynamics that we've just set for our shoot now we can go and tweak these a little bit later but at least for now that animations now set so we can scrub through our timeline and get that dynamic effect and that was all gone a bit funky flashes turn off that delay effector and now as I scale this through you can see that that dynamic has been baked in alright great so now let's start having a bit of a play with the helmet let's toggle that back on in our scene now with it selected let's hold down alt and we're also gonna put this into a fracture object now just like before when we did this with our shoe the fracture objects gonna recognize all those separate pieces that we welded together before with the connect object what we need to do is come over to the object tab and make sure we change this to explode segments and connect now the good thing is we've already sort of got that animation that we're happy with it's set in that previous plane effector so let's grab that I'm gonna make a copy of that one and then let's rename this plane helmet scale down into our fracture that is our helmet come over to the effectors tab and let's just drag and drop that plane effector into our effectors now if we go to frame zero what you're going to notice is that plane effector is actually already scaled down our helmet but what we want is for it to be the opposite so what we need to do is come over to our linear field and change the direction from minus x2 plus X now the keyframe for this one is on frame ten slices grab that we'll pull it back to frame 0 I'm also gonna hit E on my keyboard and we just need to pull this plane effector a little bit further away you can see it's already started to scale down some of those from pieces let's just pull this back a little bit and reset that keyframe now as we play through we're gonna get the helmet scaling down as the shoe scales up alright that wasn't too bad but there's still a bit more we can do to improve this helmet I'm just gonna hide our shoe for now just so we can focus on this helmet alright so we got we've got that animation scaling it down what I'm gonna do is grab that keyframe and just pull it maybe maybe pull it to about frame five all right so let's have another look at this we've got the moving through and those pieces are also scaling up into the air I don't necessarily want that so let's grab our helmet plane and we'll just remove any of that position so now all they're doing is just scaling down on the spot great let's grab our helmet gotcha all right so we're scaling down let's make one let's make one more copy of this plane effector what this is going to be is a helmet scale-up so what's what we're gonna do here is use this in our effectors of the helmet fracture let's drag and drop that in there what we're going to be using this one to do is scale the pieces slightly up before our other plane effector erases them so let's come into that plane effector and rather than negative one let's make this two and we'll see what that does come over to the linear field make sure that keyframe is set to frame zero now as I scrub through the timeline you can see those pieces start to scale up before the other effector starts to scale on the way again and it's a nice little way to just add a bit more emphasis to that scaled down effect rather than it just been so jarring to the eye we're now got a little bit of we've now got this a little bit of overshoot when we understand what's potentially about to happen so that was fun so we're at the moment we're scaling these up far too much let's try something like one here we go just a little bit can go a long way there all right what we also might want to do is this scaled down is just pull it back maybe ten frames so it's going to be completely gone by frame forty all right great now as we were animating here as those pieces scaled up what you might have noticed is that helmet intersected with the ground a little bit so we don't want that so let's grab our helmet fracture let's come over to tags simulation tags and let's add a rigidbody again let's come over to the force tab and we'll just add a value of ten in both the follow position and follow rotation now for a moment I'm just gonna disable the plane effect is affecting our helmet and the reason for this is I just want to play it a little bit one second you so as I hit play then let me show you that again our helmet starts to spaz out and this is because although our shoe is invisible in our scene the dynamics are still taking effect so it's gonna select the dynamics tag on our shoe fracture I'm just gonna disable them for now so let's come back to a shoe so let's come back to our helmet hit play again and great what all we wanted to have that all we want to have happen there was for it to pop up onto the ground and now we can say set initial state it's come back to frame 0 and now it's fixed on the ground there we've got it in a perfect position we've got none of that intersection its enable all of our plane effectors and let's hit play I feel like we lost all this scale there so we might need to go I think scale the scale of one hasn't done anything for us so let's try 1.5 change the end frame of our scale down our scale up is happening too late for the pieces to even be visible so let's grab this key frame that we've got set on frame 50 at the moment to finish the scale down I'm gonna pull this to about frame 35 that way it's definitely gonna be ahead of our scaled down and now I'm thinking all right so after watching that now I'm thinking that maybe a value of one could be plenty here let's have a look that's not looking too bad that's not looking too bad I'm thinking I'm thinking that's probably plenty for us there last thing I might do is just grab that last key frame pull it to frame 40 so both the scale up and scale down are going to be finishing at the same point all right let's take one more look at that so the plain effective scales up those pieces but before it scales them down and what I think I've just noticed there is we're actually not scaling these pieces down far enough so it's gonna grab our scaled-down plain linear field just push that along just a little bit looks like about 20 centimeters is more than enough and reset that keyframe now I'm not using a delay effector scaling down our helmet because I think we've got enough because I think we've been able to create enough interest with that scale up and the dynamics over it's sitting on the ground there you know now to be able get at least to play back with the helmet and the shoe we're gonna have to come over to our dynamics tag on our helmet and let's just bake that in the cache tag nice great let's turn back on our shoe fracture re-enable those dynamics and they should still remain bagged for us let's hit play and see what we get now it's all it all looks pretty crazy when you're watching it back at this speed but you've got to remember where the all this animation is happening within two seconds so it's all very quick what I sometimes like to do in these cases where we're not getting we're not getting real-time playback in our scene a good way to test how quickly your animation is playing out and if you're getting and if you're getting the results you really after let's come into our render settings unless just do a hardware render let's make sure our output is set to all frames here we don't need to save this is we're just having a bit of a look to see how this animation is starting to form let's send that to the picture viewer and by doing a hardware render we're essentially just rendering out the viewport so it's a great way to see exactly what's going on and it'll allow us to them watch it back in real time so now when I hit play so now when I hit play we're actually getting some pretty good results there now it's jumping around a little bit as we as it's rendering these frames still but because that morph happens so quickly you don't your eye doesn't get a chance to really recognize those those individual pieces scaling down and we start to create this great morphing effect and see as I scrub just through this timeline now we can see those helmet pieces scaling up before they start to scale back down and about frame 20 we start to see the front of the shoe coming in before it sort of just rests on the ground there because of that dynamics alright great this is looking pretty cool I said sir take this a little bit further wherever centrally got the animation set there it was a nice nice quick a little setup nice quick little setup just using a handful of those plane effectors and the real key thing I found was to just break out those dynamics separately and then we're able to incorporate multiple dynamic simulations without them affecting one another okay so I said I wanted to touch briefly also on the texturing over that final little piece that we saw this is the actual scene that I used to create that animation I thought so I thought would break it down quickly and see how it came together now this was built the exact same way using a couple of those plane effectors and that delay effect on the shoe to create a bit more of that bounce as it hits the ground we can see this is done with just two simple textures and I think that's it's really the key with this technique like in the original example we saw that the whole thing was done with what seems to be just the one texture it was really simply done and what that's gonna do is help mask any potential jarring artifacts that will take place during the morph if we had real complex texturing on both of the models and they were completely different the whole morph isn't gonna feel as natural it's not gonna it's really not gonna work as well so I think the key is to keep it simple and so we're just gonna use two textures in this case so I applied the white to the overall transform that's gonna apply to everything and then I've just got these gold highlights on certain aspects of the actual model so you can see on the helmet I've just applied to the mask and some of those bolts if we jump forward in the timeline to get a shoe back in frame here you can see I've just got that white covering the full shoot and just got that gold nike tick coming in just a little bit more interest between the actual morph we we follow those textures across both of the models and I think that's really the key here so these textures were very simple you can see I've got a white material that is applied to the whole thing and if I jump into here you can see I've just got that default specular our colors cranked to 100% white and that's it keeping it nice and simple for that one and our gold material here if you guys have our 20 you can come up to your no materials and there's some great presets in here that I've been playing around with and in this case I described the gold material and that's what we've applied to the face mask and that Nike tick now now in hindsight texturing at the start might have made this a bit easier particularly for the helmet because we already had these pieces separated so what we could have done is applied the texture to the face mask and to those bolts and then merged it into the one mesh and that will and that way we've already got a textured bit so in our case today we actually flattened and merge that mesh right at the beginning but we can still go in there and make selections and apply the texture so let's just do that quickly because our shoe example that Nike tick was was already baked into the mesh so we would have had to have made that selection so I'm gonna jump forward in my timeline to get my shoe in frame here if I grab the shoe I'm actually just gonna delete that gold texture tag off our shoes just so we get that white base mesh I'll show you how easy it is we can dive in there and make a selection to apply our texture so I'm gonna jump out of our camera and just frame my bare shoe here just so I got my Nike tick in view so what we want to do is make a polygon selection of just this tick so I'm going to zoom in nice and close and what I'm gonna do is look for the very outside edge and it looks like it's so intersecting and wrapping around here so what I want to do is hit u L to bring up my loop selection and I'm gonna make sure I select the loop that's wrapping around the entire frame and then spin out I'm gonna hit you F to fill that selection hold down shift and select let's zoom out I'm gonna come up to select come down to set selection then we can apply that gold material to our shoe and you can see that's going to turn our entire shoe into that gold material so we need to do is grab that texture and just feed in that selection tag into the selection field and easy just like that our Nike tick has got that gold texture applied and jump back into my camera here so it's a real simple way and you can do the exact same thing on your helmet because we merge that you'd go in there grab a loop selection fill it and you might find you need to do it a couple of times on complicated meshes like that like that face guard but it's pretty quick to move through and make those selections alright great so in my little test example I lit this real quickly with a HDR Studio read from greyscale gorilla but I thought let's have a quick look at making our own studio lighting just in case you guys don't have the rig so I'm gonna delete that from our scene so I've already got our grounds plane in here so I'm gonna turn that back on alright so let's jump up into our render settings and what do we need to do here so because we're going to be using HDR lighting we're going to need to enable global illumination and I've actually got a little preset down here for when I do use GI and you can see here I'm just using the qmc for both the primary and the secondary method here if I jump into the ambient occlusion you can see I've got that and they were just for some contact shadows I'll jump into my physical renderer I'm just using a fixed sampler you can see these are the numbers of just just fell in tend to work for me and you guys can feed them in as well if you'd like alright so let's first let's grab ourselves a sky let's make a new material disable the color and the reflectance and let's enable the luminance and jump into my luminance here and instead I'm going to feed in a HDR image of just this little studio setup and I'll make it available for download if you guys want to have a play using the same one so I'm going to open that up close that down and just apply that to a sky let's grab our sky cuz we don't want to see this in our render we're purely wanted to light a scene so let's come up to tags cinema 4d tags and go to compositing and we just want to composite this from the background alright so we've got our ground here I'm just going to apply the same white material that we've got on our helmet to the ground and then we just need to come in and apply a background and we can copy that same material onto our background now at the moment if I hit render we're still seeing the sky slits if I hit render at the moment you can see we're still seeing the sky so let's come back into our composing tag and I'm gonna composite the background for HDR maps as well let's hit render again let's make sure I guess I've so got I haven't enabled that render setting that we just went through before so I'm gonna tick that on and let's hit render again let's have another look this should it should be start and look a bit nicer for us now alright so it's taken a little bit to render I'm just gonna jump into my physical render it I'm just gonna jump back into our render settings and in the physical tab so we've got these settings this is ten to what I used to have that nice nice high-quality finish but there's a few things we can do with these numbers to speed up the render time while we're just testing at our scene here so with our sample subdivisions I'm gonna bring that down to something like two and then with each of these and I'm just gonna knock out blur in a subdivision down to at for a shadow subdivision to two and maybe our subsurface scattering to one let's hit render and just see if that's managed to speed up our scene a little bit here all right let's certainly coming through much quicker we can see some nice contact shadows thanks that ambient occlusion we are getting a little bit more noise because we have lowered the quality of the render but you can see it's spitting it out far quicker for us and we're getting some great feedback as to exactly what the render is gonna look like it looks like at the moment we can see we're still getting we're still getting a sky actually showing in the scene we can see our ground is ending and then we're getting this darkness which is actually our sky in the background I'm gonna jump back into our sky into our compositing tag and just also untaek seen by camera I'm just gonna enable our interactive render region this should make it render a bit quicker for us and we don't need to render the whole mask we're just gonna try and we're just setting up the we're just setting up that back and sky at the moment nice now we're no longer seeing the sky but we're still getting all the great reflections thanks to that image that's actually on it but at the moment where we're getting a bit of disconnect between our background and the actual floor so let's come into it ground come come up the tags and we're also going to apply a compositing tag to this on this one let's just enable compositing background and our interactive render agent should start to fix this up here we go and just like that we've got this nice clean blend between the background and the floor alright great I hope this was a bit of fun guys something to take away from it like I love to do well mainly focusing today on the actual creation of the animation but hope we could take something away from really briefly touching on the textures and a quick way to set up some lighting to get some great feedback over actual scenes alright thanks again guys see you again soon Cheers what something join us on the flipside mother like what you saw ring the bell click that subscribe button come join us [Music]

Channel: Sean Dove

Views: 348,708

Rating: 4.9463181 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4D, C4D, tutorial, morph, transform, nike, 3D, animation, Render

Id: brkgt0d_vY4

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/znerual19k]

Maybe this can help: https://youtu.be/zlCgVlA6hw4