Cinema 4D: The Volume Builder

[Music] hey guys it's out for digital meat and in this cinema4d tutorial we are going to be looking at volume modeling volume building is new to cinema 4d r20 so if you have a version lower than this then I'm afraid you're gonna be out of luck so with that in mind let's begin if you have a look at the menu across the top here we now have a new edition this is the volume menu in this menu we have a few items but I'm gonna start with the volume builder so now we have this volume builder object in our object manager like most generators in cinema 4d the volume builder works with the parent-child heart hierarchy so we need to feed something into this object as a child so I'm just gonna create a torus and we're gonna put that inside our volume builder as you can see our torus object has been box elated it's at this point I want to explain what voxel is and explain what is actually happening here a voxel can be thought of as a 3-dimensional pixel just like a pixel of voxels coordinates and I explicitly defined but rather inferred from its position relative to other voxels within a grid this is unlike polygon objects which are defined by explicit vertex coordinates I don't want to get too bogged down in the technical details of voxel grids but I can actually demonstrate what he's going on with the volume build up with a cloner so I'm just going to turn off this volume builder for a minute and I'm gonna create a mograph cloner I'm also gonna create a cube and let's say that this is 20 by 20 by 20 let's put our cubit our cloner inside it and in the clone I'm gonna change it to a grid array and lest I think 10 should do it yet 10 10 10 okay and let's change this to per step and then I can actually change this to 15 in it would just add the blocks on there we go lovely so this is representing our voxel grid if you like and it will be a another polygon object or another shape we'll define the values of our voxels so if I create a sphere that's actually sat inside of our voxel grid so let's grab that again so you can see it's there and it's a it's kind of sat inside of it and then I'm gonna select the cloner go to my graph effector volume and then it's asking for a volume object and that's our sphere so I'm gonna pop that in there and in this I'm just gonna go to the parameters and turn the scale off and turn the visibility on and I can also hide a sphere now so that's basically what's happening in our volume builder the our sphere is defining a value for the voxels that is sort of thing that this shape encompasses so it's basically saying that yeah there's a value of one this voxel is on and if I grab the sphere and enlarge it it encompasses more of the voxels and so there the value of those voxels changes so yeah okay so that's that's just a quick explanation of that let's get rid of all of that stuff it's important to note that why I'm just showing you with the cloner is just a visual aid what the volume builder is actually doing in comparison is far far more efficient so let's move on to the volume builder let's turn these back on so if we zoom into our voxel Eyes torus and move around a little bit you'll see that it appears that these these so-called voxels well in our voxels aren't displayed as three-dimensional objects they actually look like small planes that are always facing the camera now I highly suspect this is to keep cinema 4d viewport optimized and moving quickly and I thought it was worth mentioning as some of you may be wondering why these voxels aren't being represented as a 3d object okay so let's select our volume builder in the object tab our first option is the volume type we have the choice of signed distance field or fog the help documentation actually has some great imagery that depicts the difference between these two options so let's take a look right click on the volume type go to show help and there we go this is a really good example of the signed distance field so the signed distance field volume type is typically used for modeling it works by placing voxels within a range on the exterior side of polygons shown here so these are front facing normals and it also does the same thing for the interior range here which is the back facing normals so it kind of puts voxels on either side of the polygons the funk volume type differs in the fact that it entirely fills a polygon object with voxels this method is typically suited for rendering fluids fire and smoke that kind of thing so since we're going to be modeling we will stick to the signed distance field method I just wanted to show you the difference between those two okay so next on our list we've got our voxel size this can be thought of as resolution really so if I make the voxel size bigger so let's put this up to 20 it actually makes the resolution lower and if I put this lower if I make the voxel size lower or smaller it actually increases our resolution so just think of this as a as a resolution saying underneath our voxel size we up the objects list this list contains all the objects that are being Vox elated by the volume builder as we saw earlier by making our torus a child of the volume builder it has been automatically added or included in this list and if we look at the input type here we can say it says child this is not the only way that an object can be included in this list so if I pull the torus out and select the volume builder there's nothing in there now we can actually grab this torus and just drag it in so now this torus is included in this list and it's been Vox elated but you can see now the input type isn't child anymore it's actually linked an upshot of this is that the volume builder and the torus are now independent of each other so if I move the volume builder we can still see that it references this but it can be moved independently so I'm just going to undo that and I'm gonna change our input type for this back to child to keep things nice and simple okay so we're back to the way we had it okay the real power of the volume builder is realized when we start adding mobile objects so let's do that I'm gonna create a cube and I'm gonna change your size let's go for 150 I think yeah that should do it and the more I'm gonna do is make this editable go to polygon mode and press ctrl-a so I select all the faces then I'm going to unselect the top and the bottom and then I'm going to go into our extrude tool so right click extrude and then extrude this out like this and then I'm gonna click the preserve group so I'm gonna uncheck that so we get this kind of thing in fact I might even extrude a little bit more than that here we go cool ok then let's go back into object mode and scale I'm just gonna scale this down a little bit and let's pull this up ok so we've got this kind of thing is intersecting there and now what I'm going to do is add this to our volume builder so like before I'm gonna grab our cube and drag it in and you can see that the cube object is now been box alized so I'm gonna be knowing this cross that's what it is now it's not cube and let's have a looking at volume build us so now you can see this cross has been added into our list with the exception the wealth white differs from the torus is it under mode it's now got this drop down menu that says Union subtract and intersect so you may be thinking well why is this got that and the torus hasn't the best way I can explain this is to imagine these um objects in this list here as layers kind of like in Photoshop so they stack on top of each other so the cross being on top of the torus means that you could kind of see this this mode drop down as like a blending mode in Photoshop so obviously the torus is the base layer so it's got nothing to lend with if you like although this isn't a blend blend mode and if I swap these over you'll find that the cross would have wouldn't have that option anymore so it's because the torus is the base layer so let's get the torus back as a base layer and the cross is now on top of the stack it's kind of like when you stack materials up in cinema 4d you'll have the material tag furthest to the left being you know at the bottom of the stack and as we move right those materials are stacked up on top of each other it's kind of like that so now we got a cross on top of our torus let's have a look at what these options actually mean we've got we got Union here so this is kind of like how the boolean functions now we've got a union and it'll probably be better to see this if I actually make this a mesh in the volume builder when you put objects in there they get Vox alized but voxels aren't renderable so if I click the render button now they won't be in the render so we've got to now convert these back to a mesh so if we go to the volume menu we've got this er volume measure and just like the parent-child relationship with these objects in the Builder we can grab the Builder and put them in the measure and now our voxels become a mesh and if I press NB you can see the topology of this mesh so it's pretty good I'm going to press na against just so we're back to where we were and then go back to the volume builder okay so at the moment this cross is set to Union and as you can see you know it's actually created a union between these two objects and if I look at the mesh again you can see that you know these two things connect also to mention about the mesh you can see there's a regular grid on this cross and not so regular here on our torus and that is because it's using the voxels as a way to determine the mesh but even though this looks very regular here if we zoom in you can see that each one of these polygons is actually quad so we got diamond polygons here and it's a quad it's got four sides same here so even though it may look a regular by putting the volume builder in the mesh ah it only creates some quad polygons which is absolutely fantastic because that means that this mesh would be suitable for defamation and that kind of thing okay so back to our builder and I'm gonna change our view back to our shaded mode we can see that there's a union between these two objects now you've also got the option of subtract so if I subtract it is now subtracted this Cross from this torus so you can use it to cut chunks out of objects now this is amazing really because we all know that the boolean object isn't the best at creating meshes the are great to be honest and obviously the mesh for for this is all quads that's fantastic the other thing on our list we've got intersect again like the brilliant tool so where this sort of cross intersects this torus it will actually get rid of everything else and keep the intersection so we'll have a look at that and you can see there's kind of created these wedges here I'm gonna switch this back to subtraction so or subtract even so we've got these reusing our cross almost like a mask really to cut out of this object here now if we look at this you'll notice that it looks quite faceted it's so much like you can see the facets of the sort of underlying polygons that are generate generating these the voxels and there's something we can do about that well there's several things we can do about that like I said this voxel size here is kind of like resolution so if I actually lower this to maybe something like 2.5 or something like that we get a lot more resolution and you can actually see the facets now of this polygon object so what we gonna do about that well we've got some we've got some filter layers in fact if you go up to the volume menu you can see that we've got this smooth fill and reshaped filter so let's have a look at these two let's start with the smooth filter so with my cross selected I'll select my smooth filter and the this smooth layer gets put on top of what's selected and as you can see in the viewport they has actually smoothed out this but we've which is what we wanted for this torus but we've kind of lost some definition here so what can we do about that well we can actually use folders to to segregate the smooth layer and objects so I'm gonna deal with the torus first like I said it's kind of like layers kind of like a stack so this smooth layer is on top and is smoothing everything underneath it if I move this smooth layer down in between the cross and the torus now this smooth layer is only smoothing the torus because that's what's underneath it so let's have a look at the smooth layer itself and it's option so here we've got a strength which is a hundred percent and if I slide this down you can see that it's gained less smooth all the way down to zero is like the smooth layer isn't there and if I go up you can see it getting smooth now we saw we've also got the filter types as well so we've got a Gaussian filter type we got mean median and we've got a mean curvature so all of these are kind of algorithms that do different things for my torus I'm not actually gonna keep it Gaussian we've got a voxel distance here so the range in which it affects if I put this up you can see what I've gone too far there you can actually start seeing them the kind of voxels the underlying voxels and if I go back to two it's a lot better and if I go down obviously it's gonna be the distance is gonna be lower so I think twos gonna be okay for now and then underneath this we've got iteration so how many times this smooth filter has been iterated if you like so this is the result of 1 and if I crank this up to say three you can see there is run the smooth multiple times down well three times so I'm actually quite happy with the quality of the smooth on the torus now so what about the intersecting cross it's not being smoothed at all so if I select the cross and then put a smooth layer on it we're gonna have problems because this smooth layer that is now top of the stack is not only gonna be smoothing the cross but it's also gonna be adding to the smooth layer here and again on the torus so if I turn this on and off you can see the result of that it's just moving everything so how could I guess so this smooth layer is just affecting this cross well I suppose I could move all of this down to the bottom of the stack but now we've got another problem that this cross is not being subtracted from the torus because it's below it so let's just undo that so they're back where they were and you can see this little button here it looks like a folder and that's because it is and it says create folder so let's create a folder move it to the top of the stack and now we can use this folder to segregate these two things so let's put our smooth layer in there and our cross layer in there and now how you see that the cross has reappeared and that's because it hasn't got a its mode drop-down has disappeared because now it's in a folder so now we have to go to the folder and say subtract there and then we're back to where we were now we can actually affect this smooth layer which is only affecting this cross separate of what's happening outside this folder so I'm going to choose mean curvature because I want to maintain these sort of sharp edges and maybe two iterations see how that goes and now we've got these sharp edges and a smooth torus brilliant the other thing that we've got here is a reshape layer I'm actually going to open up a new scene for this and again like before let's create a volume measure of volume builder and in the volume builder I'm just going to create a couple of shapes really simple shapes maybe two cubes that'll do and let's select both of these cubes and maybe fill it then maybe get them to be a bit more interesting and I'm gonna drop both of those in our volume builder as you can see that being oxidized and we'll put the volume builder in our measure and there we go there's our cubes great in the volume build of what I'm going to do is add a reshape layer because I just want to show you what this layer does so now that I put this in we can select the reshape layer and then see its attributes underneath now we've got a strength just like we did with our smooth and we've got a filter type so we've got delay or a road or closed and open so let's start with dilate in a road we've got this offset value so positive numbers actually dilate so if we move this up we can see that they dilate and when they hit each other they actually merge which is lovely and negative numbers of road so if we were to go back to the beginning in fact if we turn this shape layer off you can see that the value of zero is the same as it being off and if we go into negative numbers you can see that these shapes get eroded and if we keep going down I keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller great so that's pretty easy to understand and obviously the iterations again how many times that a road or Die light function is iterated obviously in iterations of three but with an offset of zero it doesn't really mean anything so if you put five in there and then we change the iterations we got three there and one there so it just repeats the process if you like okay the other thing that we've got is closed-open so if I switch to this I don't actually know if it's gonna work with these two objects but um basically this try this attempts to close holes in the mesh basically so if we round this up yeah you can see that is detected there's a gap between our two cubes and it's trying to solve you know getting them together if you like so as we increase this it tries to bridge that gap between them so that's basically what the reshape layer does and I can now close this window and get back to our other scene okay so now we've got this William what next well it's not just polygon objects or premiums that you can dump him the volume builder you can pretty much throw anything you like area so let's grab a mograph planer and I'm gonna create a another cube and I'm gonna make this cube I don't know let's say 50 by 50 by 50 that looks good to me unless make it tall on the Y yeah that's good to me and let's whack this cube in our cloner and in the clone I'm gonna go to the object tab and change it to a radial and change its radial plane to XZ unless some change the radius so our objects actually come out there and let's bring this down to four okay so now we can actually use this cloner as a as a mask so let's dump the cloner in our volume builder jobs are Goodin and by default you can see that it's actually a union and I'm gonna actually change this to a subtract so we can cut some holes out in our object here it's very good and yeah again that could probably do with a bit smoothing or something like that so let's have a look at this so that's the smooth in there and again I could create a folder this appeared at the bottom drag it all the way to the top put our cloner in it and then create a smooth in there as well change this back to subtract and you can see that these have been smoothed out a lot more when we change this smooth layer maybe a mean curvature to try and retain some of that detail there and also let's drop this down to maybe a 1.5 do we get bit sharper detail and that's looking good so that's just an example of one of the generators you can lob in there we've got a cloner in there and it works just as well as a polygon object so what else can we do splines you can also do spline so let's go into our splines and create a circle spline yes just leave your like that for now let's lob it in our volume builder and as you can see it looks like it's been sampled along the spline and you know create balls at points even points around the spline so let's have a look at the settings for that in the volume builder so clicking the volume builder we can select our circle and we've got some options here we've got a radius so obviously that controls how thick is so if I put it up to 50 you get this kind of result so let's put it down to something manageable 20 is good I don't know let's say 10 something like that yeah you can really see that these are sort of samples around there now if you wanted this to be a smooth spline we can use this density set in here and it's kind of the density of the samples that are being used around this circle so if I crank this up by 0.1 you can see that it kind of gets smoothed out I want to put this up to 0.5 and then we get a really nice smooth result and that's from really really really good let's have a look at the mesh for this I'm just imagining it's pretty heavy now yeah it is but it's a very very clean mesh so yeah that's splines okay something else that we could do we could even use a symmetry object as a kind of mask if you wanted to so let's put let's create symmetry object we'll create a cube put that inside of our symmetry and make sure our cemeteries on the XY plane and then let's resize this cube because it is a little bit big let's make it 100 that's fine and then we can actually move this cube out like this and maybe just have it sort of connected to the edge then we could even fill it the edges of this cube not that much okay and then we can put this symmetry inside our volume builder and that too becomes part of the mesh is connected beautifully that so I mean if we look at the mesh for this again it's quite dense we could we could change that by effect in this voxel size here we can actually put this up to three or something like that it wouldn't be so dense but two polygons model this would take a fair bit of time and by using this method we can get really really organic shapes very very quickly so you know this thing's a lifesaver really if you had to iterate something you know on the fly you needed to get it made quickly you could use objects as masks to cut bits out of other objects you could get a result very very quickly so I think we're done with this scene file now I'm actually going to create a new one so let's close this and we'll use this one something else that you can do in the volume builder which i think is absolutely incredible let's grab the volume builder and actually let's go to simulate and get in a mirror because even particles can be used inside the volume builder let's grab our emitter and rotate it upwards like this 90 degrees that's good and let's just hit play and see what's going on with these particles well first of all let's put some more time in our clock five seconds should be good and let's make our particle life time the same I suppose and the speeds okay we could probably make our remit of bigger so these particles are a little bit more spread out and I think has that scaled the speed as well yeah how so let's slow this down to maybe 200 okay great so we've got these particles coming out of this let's put our meter in our volume builder and you know you can see that our particles have been box alized so let's have a look in the volume builder and you can see here let's let's bring this down to maybe five something like that so we got bit better resolution there so this emitter is in here now and if we click on the emitter you can see the radius is set to 15 centimeters so if I lowered that it just means the radius that voxels are created around these particles is now lower so let's put this back up to 15 the velocity scale I'm not actually sure what this does so unless we're just put that to five okay let's have a quick look at this flossy scale larger values would create correspondingly longer tapered volume trails behind each particle a value of zero would disable the effect this is an excellent method for creating self-closing elements such as an open wound or a tunnel etc well well well that's very interesting so maybe not five let's put it down to one and see what happens and then go back to the beginning okay so the trail was actually follow as well that is very very cool okay so maybe I'll leave that at that but the interesting thing about using particles is we can still use this with other stuff so if I create a cube and let's make this flatter and just pull this out so you've got kind of like a flat plane like this and then pull it up so it's like this what we can now do is drag our cube into our volume builder underneath the emitter actually or do we need it over it yeah actually we want to reorder this the cube is the base layer and then what we can say is with the emitter instead of it being a union and although that look could look pretty cool so look what that looks like okay so they're going up and they're kind of just merging with it I wonder what it would look like if we put a smooth layer on top of both of these things slow down quite a bit and now the smooth it looks like it's disappeared and it's because this smooth layer has smoothed out these particles to my to the point where yet voxels have been sought you know disappeared if you like so if we go to the smooth layer I think we can adjust the volume distance maybe there we go so we can affect that volume distance lesser turn of the voxel size as well maybe or in fact let's go to the emitter sorry in the volume builder and make this philosophy scale zero just so we can keep things nice and quick there maybe the voxel size yeah again by increasing the voxel size I've actually managed to disappear the the particles there so let's just keep it like that for now but you can see they're merging in but something that we could do with this is actually just bring this down a little bit so maybe seven yeah that's good we could actually make this emitter be subtractive so now when the particles hit this they've been subtracted from that mesh and you can get some pretty cool strange effects like this and if I was to now put this in ie volume measure this has a that's very cool this actually has a property called the click on that the Vox will range threshold so if we rein this in you can see what effect that has and you can see that those blobs now a more prominent and if we increase it they probably disappear so let's just wait for it again yes they have disappeared so there by default this is set to 50% it's also important to note that this voxel range is associated with in the volume builder the voxel size you can see there's a little arrow here so if we drop this down you can see that we've got the interior voxel range and the exterior so if we increase this and I see what effect this has so by increasing that it looks like are things more prominent so let's increase that even further but yeah just like you know that these are associated with this thing in the volume they show you kind of is this is kind of like a bias of suppose so yeah that's something else that you can do with them the volume builder as far as that I've got anyway I've been experimented with hair yeah so that could be something to do but this looks like it could be really really useful an incredible tool in cinema 4d so that's just scratching the surface for the moment and obviously as I work through using the volume builder and the new fields as well and I think in conjunction those two things could be absolutely amazing so that'll probably be my next tutorial the fields in the new fields in cinema 4d are twenty ok guys thanks for watching my viewers on youtube please like and subscribe and don't forget to hit that Bell to be notified of new tutorials you can check out content at digital meet UK where you can filter my tutorials by category and vote in the poll for upcoming tutorials you can also follow me on social media links in the description and the footer of my website if you'd like to help support digital me this can be done via patreon all the support page on the website but if you want to help digital me keep going and back yourself some extra in-depth tutorial content the Prime membership is available for purchase in the store this will grant you access to the Prime membership area of the website I also have a second youtube channel called beef doctor which is a bit of a dumping ground for non 3d content and where I'm streaming games there's a link in the description and the footer of Digital meat UK I hope see you guys in the chat thanks for watching guys bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DIGITAL MEAT

Views: 27,375

Keywords: Digitalmeat.uk, Cinema 4D, C4D, Cinema4D, Digitalmeat, Greyscale Gorilla, GreyscaleGorilla, 3D, Workflow, Cinema 4D Workflow, C4D Workflow, Tutorial, Tutorials, Cinema 4D Tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, C4D Tutorial, C4D Tutorials, Mograph, Volume Builder, Volume Mesher, Voxel, Voxels, Voxel Grid, OpenVDB, Volume Modelling, Volume Modeling, Smooth Filter

Id: SYhFMjQVl9E

Length: 32min 27sec (1947 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 10 2018