Cinema 4D Tutorial - Balloons: PART 1

hello everybody we are going to do another tutorial today this one's gonna be a little tricky you might want to get your notepad out because this one's even stumped me I'm gonna create a cluster of balloons and I want to have a bunch of strings attached to the balloons and everything I've tried has kind of ended in failure I tried spline dynamics I've tried tracing a plane with a matrix object and a tracer and all that stuff works great as a single individual string attached to a single balloon but the second I put all that stuff into a cloner it all just falls apart so the approach I'm gonna do I'm gonna just use a plane I'm gonna put it as a soft body dynamic in a cloner with the balloon and we'll run some simulations and it's all gonna fall apart it's the best I can come up with if you guys have a better idea solution please contact me or put it in the notes below a comment section below I would love to find out a better way of doing this but for now let's just kind of fly through this and do the best we can so I'm gonna create a balloon I like to build everything in as close to actual size as possible so a balloon with a 20 centimeter radius that's gonna get us in a decent place for doing dynamics what I want to do if I go to my hidden line mode I want to change this from 20 for segments down to 12 the reason why I'm gonna be creating 200 balloons in a cloner so we want to keep the poly count pretty low because it's gonna really bog down the system otherwise the other thing I want to do I want to change this from a standard polar coordinate here I want to change this to an icosahedron and that's gonna give us equal size triangles all around the sphere and when I put this sphere with a taper modifier if our spear is 20 centimeters I want our taper cage to be 40 20 centimeter radius sphere with a 40 centimeter housing here I'm gonna make it 85 but what's happening is our teardrop is upside down our balloon shape is upside down but I don't want to change the coordinates of our sphere because I don't want to mess up the coordinates of it I'm gonna rotate the taper cage and you can see that sphere is staying put and it's just the taper modifier that's changing so we're gonna rotate that taper modifier 180 degrees and now we're done looking at it so I want to hide it don't turn off the check box because that I'll actually turn off the taper just turn off the traffic light in the editor and that's gonna hide that taper modifier so now we could put our sphere into a hypernurb that's going to subdivide it but that's going to be way too much subdivision for our cloner so under hypernurb objects i'm gonna change the subdivision just down to one subdivision in both the editor and the renderer so even at close up like this you'll see some blockiness but we're going to be zoomed pretty far out for the end product and that'll speed up our render times of course at any point we can come back and and step up the the subdivisions if we need a higher quality render but for the purposes of this tutorial in the speed we're gonna keep it low let's rename that hypernurb to balloon and i also want to switch to our front view and zoom up in it I want to move this point the bottom of the balloon I want to move that up on our zero axis here so just with the balloon selected in coordinates let's slide this up you know what I will also want to do I want this balloon to not be so perfectly right I want it a little taller like a like you see balloons they feel a little more stretched so let's change the scale to 1.25 in the y-axis and then let's just slide that up to that point right about there let's make it two point one two point seven five and that should be close enough to get that tip of that balloon on our zero point let's go back to our perspective view so next that string I'm talking about I'm going to create a plane and in the object I want to change the width segment I just need one segment wide but I want our length segments so they can there's some geometry so it can flop around let's bump that up to 24 segments and let's change this in the z-axis so it's up and down and we change the width from 400 to something like 2 now keep in mind the because this is still a parametric object the access point is in the center so there's if it's 400 tall there's 200 below and 200 centimeters above so we want to change its coordinates to minus 200 and that should drop the top of that right to where our zero zero point is and everybody should be kind of joined together so speaking of joining together we need to connect the balloon to the sphere but you know I'm getting ahead of myself before I do that let's just name this string let's slide the string below the balloon and I'm gonna put the balloon let's ignore the string for now let's just turn that off let's go to the balloon I'm gonna create a mograph cloner I'm gonna put the balloon in the cloner and I want the cloner object to be a grid and I'm gonna change the number I want there to be a lot of these balloons so in the horizontal direction I want there to be five wide and five deep but I want there to be eight tall and I don't want these touching so I'm gonna spread them apart maybe 300 tall let's go back to our quick shade here now we've got this army of balloons I want to randomize them a little bit so with the cloner selected if I go to mograph effector random it's gonna add this parameter this random position I want to cluster them a little tighter so I'm gonna make the X and Z and the horizontal just like ten I want the why the height I want it to be spread apart a little bit taller so we'll go 60 high but 10 wide and deep I also want to change the scale of the balloons so they're not all exactly the same scale so I'm gonna grab the scale but I want a uniform scale and I want an absolute which means I don't want them to go smaller I don't want the random to affect it's smaller and bigger I just want it to affect it bigger so I'm gonna turn on absolute scale and just go 0.3 and that just means the balloon has gotten a random effect or scaling at Point 3 taller interestingly enough it looks like it's overriding our height here so let's set that back to 1 what if I go to the sphere there we go so I changed the scale of the sphere to 0.125 because it overrode the scale of the cloner overrode the scale of the hypernurb so now we've got these random balloons kind of scattered some of them are intersecting with each other but they're kind of all thrown out randomly now they don't look like they're in such a perfect grid what I also want to do I want all these balloons to kind of try to cluster together like they're being all the strings are kind of holding them from flying apart from each other so we could do that by creating a circle in the middle of our scene let's turn off our cloner for a second and I want this circle I want the circle to be laying flat so our object I'm going to change the coordinate to Z so it's laying down with our cloner selected if I go to mograph effector spline I can tell the cloner to be affected by a spline and I want that spline to be the circle we just created so if I go to the spline effector and I drag that circle into the spline section here and I turn our cloner on it's going to take all those random balloons and it's going to try to attract them to that circle now Circle even though I've laid it flat it's upside down so what I need to do is grab that circle go to its coordinates and I need to rotate it 180 degrees around its 180 so our balloons are oriented in the right direction but that spline strength that effectors a little too strong I don't want it to go from this grid to this circle a hundred percent I want to back that off a little bit so we can keep some random feeling in there I think that circle is also too big so I want to scale that circle down maybe we bring it all the way down to like 20 so it's happening as all these balloons are kind of intersecting each other and balloons can't exist in the same space they are solid objects so what we are gonna do is on our hypernurb object we're going to add a rigidbody tag so what this is telling cinema is as soon as we hit play it's going to calculate dynamics and it's gonna say these objects are solid and they can't pass through each other so it's going to try to push them all away and when we hit play that's going to explode and they're gonna fly off the screen here like this real explosive violent so what we need to do is we want to tell that balloon as soon as you push yourself away from each other and you can now exist next to each other and you won't pass through each other instead of flying off into space at least try to come back to that circle that we created so in that balloon tag under force we want to put a strength of two in that follow position so now if we hit play it's gonna explode off the screen but then they're all gonna try to come back to that to that ring but now you notice they're all facing in different crazy directions so if we put a rotation strength in there of 20 now you're gonna see they're gonna try and rotate back to that original position and rotation that they were born in now another thing I want to do I want to change the center of rotation so currently if there is an access point it's in the center of this balloon I want to here at the tip where a string would be tied so you come under the mass section do a custom Center and here I could set it at minus 10 centimeters because we created a 20 centimeter radius sphere I want to offset that axis by 10 centimeters now you can see you could put a crazy number in here something like 200 positive and now let's change our frame count here to something like 500 it does this really crazy it looks almost like a school of fish so that's this really awesome acrobatic thing here which we could probably use for another project but for here we want that Center to be just minus 10 will hit stop rewind when we hit play the balloons kind of explode and then they try and settle back into place now maybe those maybe that angle is a little bit too much maybe they're trying to rotate a little bit too much toward that Center so if I change the rotational mass to a higher number something like 300 it's gonna give that ball a little more density it's gonna be a little heavier and then it just looks like the strings are kind of anchored in the center and all the balloons are kind of falling in the middle there so that's looking pretty cool now let's see if we can't get that string to work along with it so let's turn off our cloner again let's look at our string it's tarnished string back on let's rewind and let's find out what's going on why is our balloon moved here zoom in Cologne owner we've got messed up so let's read set our cloner to zero zero zero now everybody's back where you need it to be so on our string let's add a soft body tag to the string so we've got a rigid body on the balloon and we've got a soft body on the string but the string needs to be attached to the balloon otherwise when we hit play the string is just going to fall away so we do that with a connector and that's found under simulation so if you go under dynamics connector now keep in mind we have the balloon we pushed it up so the tip was at zero and we brought our string down so the top was at zero so when we bring in a connector it comes in at zero zero zero it's right where we want it to be right between our two objects here so I'm gonna drag it just to keep track of everything that's happening I'm gonna drag our connector between the balloon and the string you don't have to do this in the in the list it's just helping me keep track of what's going on here under the connector under object I want to tell the object a connect the balloon to object B the string but I don't want to use a hinge I want to use a ball and socket that way it feels like the two objects can kind of swing around in 360 degrees but we have to be aware that the ball and socket by default tries to connect the center of mass of the two objects a and B so what it's trying to do is make an attachment from the center of the balloon to the center of the string and we don't want that we want the connection to happen right here at zero zero so on our string instead of center of mass we want to do a polygon point and we want that point if you change this index number you can see it's going to grow and shrink we want that point to be zero because that's right the very first point of that string and same with the balloon you could do a poly point and this one's a little tricky I think it's probably because I made the sphere the icosahedron instead of leaving that polar coordinate so I'm gonna have to kind of mess around with this point system here until I find the right number there's eleven twelve twelve looks like that might be the right now oh no twelve is up here brother good luck right change of plan let's make that this sphere instead of the balloon because the balloon is the is the hypernurb with much more subdivision so if we turn off the subdivision we have less points to deal with and now we could change that there we go looks like minus fifteen might be the right one let's zoom in here there we go minus fifteen that's the winter point right there okay so let's turn our hypernurb back on let's zoom back out so now what we've done is we've created a ball and socket connection between the balloon and the string at the zero zero point so if we create a null object we put the balloon the connector and the string all in that null object and then put that null object in the cloner turn our cloner on we should get all of our objects working together and this is where the simulation kind of starts to fall apart so with any luck I'm going to hit play the balloons are gonna fly out the strings are going to be connected to the balloons and this is where the chaos starts so let's just hit play and see what happens and maybe we'll get lucky that's just fantastic I tried this several times practicing and it didn't even go that smoothly so we got pretty lucky for our recorded tutorial so now we've got some balloons attached to some strings now if I hit render that's looking pretty good of course there aren't strings attached to every balloon but this is just a quick tutorial and like I said I haven't quite solved this if you guys can figure it out that'd be great I see a little bit of a string that's distorted here so let's let's just spin around and see if we can't hide that get a better angle hit render again that's looking pretty good that's as good as I could ask for for this tutorial so let's texture and light our balloons and add some shading and see if we can't make these look fun and exciting let's put these off to the side here first thing I want to do is I want to add our background I want to add a sky to our scene so under the environment tab I'm gonna add the sky dome and that's gonna put this big giant sphere around the scene if I hit render you'll see now it's grey back here instead of black but we want to add a texture to this and we also want to turn this sky into a light source itself so let's go just double click in our material editor here create a new material turn off the color and go into luminance and turn on luminance and in the texture tab if we select a gradient and touch this little square here you can see the gradient is going left to right and we want it to go from the bottom to the top so we're gonna change the U direction to V so our gradients going bottom to top we want to change our bottom color which is gonna be our horizon if you ever look at a real sky the horizons light and then if you look up it gets darker blue so we're just gonna change our color here to a nice pale blue little horizon the atmosphere smog whatever hit OK and then if you look straight up in the sky get a nice rich blue with a you're looking through less atmosphere so you're seeing more of the sky through there and hit okay now this is a good start but think about what we're looking at we're just looking at a slice through the middle of this dome that's around our scene we're just looking at our balloons right here so we want to kind of force those two colors together so let me drag that onto the sky so we can actually watch it happen here you can see you barely see that transition happening so what we can do in the gradation is we can slide those handles around so let's just pinch these gradation handles until we can start to see the transition happening within our frame a little bit more darkness there we go so that looks pretty cool if I hit render now we've got a bunch of gray balloons on somewhat cool looking sky so the next step is let's light these balloons with that sky and you do that under your render settings if you go to effect and add global illumination and what I'm gonna do for this tutorial I'm gonna change the sampling from medium down to low and the cache from medium to low and the smoothing down to weak and that's just gonna speed up to our render time while we're playing around here and what that's gonna do is it's gonna use the light from that globe and it's gonna project it back into this scene so you'll see when I hit render it's doing some calculation but look at that's lighter powder blue is kind of being cast up on the underside and this darker blue from the top of that globe is creating the light that you see on the top now that gives you a really cool lighting effect but we also want a light source in the scene so we want like a Sun so let's create a light and by default it's gonna come in at zero zero zero so that's right in the center of our bundle of balloons here so I'm gonna move it off to the side temporarily and I'm gonna hit render again and now you can see we've got some gray blue n--'s on a blue background let's take our light we want to add some shadows to it so add some shadow we want to make it a little warm like the Sun Sun isn't a grey light it's got a little bit of warmth to it and the sun's pretty powerful so I'm gonna bump this number up to like 110 just a little bit more intense than regular so you can see I'm adding a little bit of warmth so now when I hit render we got a little warm Sun with our blue sky so this light is coming from the atmosphere this light is coming from the Sun of course these look like pieces of clay right now they don't look like balloons and the quickest way to add color to these random balloons the whole point of doing this with a cloner is you can come into that random effector where we were changing the spacing and the scale of this under this parameter here now this is really great see this color mode here we're gonna turn color mode to on and it's automatically just randomly assigns colors to those balloons by default this blending mode default is kind of dark if I change it from default to additive ad it blends the the colors a little bit lighter and now if I hit render you can see we've got some colored balloons and we didn't have to assign anything to that balloon material at all we still don't even have a material attached to our cloner how cool is that so let's create because this random color cloner isn't enough this doesn't look real enough so we need to start adding our own flavor to it but if we create a texture and we drag that onto our cloner and we hit render all of a sudden it overrides that random color tag and it just puts our white texture on there so what we need to do in that material editor is go into the color Channel and under texture mograph we tell it go look for that color shader that random color shader under mograph and assign it into the color slot and now it comes back now we can hit render and we'll see it's back here I'm going to turn on the interactive render region so we can kind of work on our material without having to hit render all the time so the next step in the color slot I want to kind of fake a rim light on these balloons and the best way to do that is to use our friend the finale but I don't want to override this color shader that we just put in here so I want to stack it as a layer so if I select layer it's gonna convert our color shader into a layer inside of here so now when I hit this square we see our color shader now I can add another shader above it so I'm gonna grab shader and I'm gonna add fernell now Fornell you're used to seeing as a mask that we use in the reflection tab or in other places where we want to to minimize the effect of the light that's coming straight out at the camera and as the angle of the light bends away we see more of that effect it's basically just a gradation that tells cinema when these photons are facing the camera being visible and when they're going around the edge be more visible and you can control that with that gradient so if we click in here twirl this little thing open I'm gonna turn there's not in the center I'm gonna bring it down to smooth out that gradation so it's not so harsh and not so strong here let's pull up this quality render here so we can see what's happening let's bring that all the way up for now we might have to turn that off in a bit so what's that's doing is it's minimizing the fall-off because in the middle it's keeping a nice strong fall-off between black and white well we want more black than white we just want to bring this down so I'm going to change that position to 5% on that side and I'm gonna bring the white up to maybe maybe 10% here so I'm pinching the white so it's a little bit stronger on the edge but I'm quickly making the fall-off drop off now you can see what's happening is the fernell is affected by the light source so if I move our Sun if I grab our light take our coordinates here and I go the opposite direction let's go minus 500 watch what happens that Fornell light over here now that RIM light shows up here and we're getting the fall off of the the global illumination on this side so I can make the camera go up or the light up a little bit higher in the scene and bring it toward the camera just changing the coordinates on the light and you can see we're getting kind of a fake rim light from the Freneau from where our son is can't even bring that a little bit closer to the camera a little more front lip there the next thing we want to do let's go back into that material shader slide it over to the side we don't want to see this black we want to see those colored balloons that are underneath there so we go back into our layer and if you turn off the Fornell the colors are hiding underneath there still but you turn the fernell on and they're set to normal and it's black getting it out so what we do is just change the blend mode so the black disappears and the white shows and we do that by changing it to additive so ad shows the white but the black becomes invisible showing the color through but we still get our little fernell see if I turn off the eyeball we don't have that RIM light it looks kind of flat and dull we turn the Fornell on and now we've got this little cheated fake rim light on here now these kind of look like they're made out of velvet and that's because there's they don't look shiny and we get shiny from a specular and from reflections so if I turn on specular this kind of gives us a cheat it kind of looks okay we could get away with this it looks a little soft but what I like to do is come under the luminance channel turn on luminance and by default it's on 100% is bright I'm gonna add a texture slot in here and under effects I'm gonna add Loomis and Loomis acts as though it's the same thing as a specular it sees where the light is in the scene Loomis looks at where the light source is and it creates kind of a hot specular for you but it gives you control it gives you three specular zhun like just this regular specular which just gives you one setting and it kind of does a quick trick to it Loomis gives you three slots of specular at different sizes and it gives it an overall shader which I don't know why that's on by default I'm gonna turn that off because we just want the highlight to show through and not that that gray shader that's in there but you can already see here you get control over your specular so you get a really tight one a softer one and then an even bigger one in the background here so I'm gonna turn that big one in the background I'm gonna bring the value up more like 50 so it's a little bit brighter and we start getting a nice soft spill off there and then our front specular I think it's a little too strong I'm gonna knock that way down doing like an intensity of 5 but I want to bring that size way up from that point 5 I want to get a nice dull reflection on there because balloons are made out of rubber and they're not made out of glass so they're not gonna be you're not gonna get a really sharp specular on there you're gonna get a nice diffused specular but I think the Loomis overall does a better job than just using the default specular and you don't take a hit at render time so it's totally worth the effort to get in there and play around with it if you've never used it before now I know what you're thinking this whole time you're watching here going well that random effector made all your strings color too you don't want the color strings to match your balloons you want white strings so let's create a new texture and it's just a blank default white material here and if we open our cloner in that null and we drag that white texture right onto the string it's gonna override the parent settings and then the string takes on the color that's assigned to it so that's how you override that so now our strings aren't colored just our balloons are getting the effector so let's go back to the balloon texture and we want to add a little bit of reflection by default when you turn on reflection it's gonna be a hundred percent like a mirror ball so all this is just gonna be reflecting the sky and the other balloons around it so let's just knock that brightness all the way down on that reflection and then we're gonna add our pal for nill and Fornell is gonna give us remember it's that white to black so we're getting a ton of reflection on the edges and then as it reaches the center it's not showing any reflection at all but we want to have a little bit of reflection show through so we're gonna bring our fernell down maybe forty-five so it's not as super strong cuz this is it is rubber it's not gonna be super super shiny but the phrenology locking our reflection out of the center here so we're gonna bring this setting up maybe 25 and now we've got some nice shiny balloons now the only thing missing is the transparency that transparency is going to take a huge hit on the system and one setting before you do any type of transparency and I can already see it's happening here with the reflection we want to go into our render settings under anti-alias and we want to change it from geometry to best but we can change this max level from 4 by 4 down to 2 by 2 especially for the small screen here and what that's gonna do is chicken gonna give us a nicer smoother anti-alias you can see it's already taking a little bit longer to render but the detail is a little bit cleaner in here and that's also gonna help us when we go to add some transparency and you're seeing shapes coming through now I'm not kidding here this is gonna take a huge hit on the system so let's come in here I'm just gonna close this window up just to a small area we can test and I'm gonna bring this quality down I'm gonna turn on transparency not just like reflection by default when you turn transparency on it comes in at a hundred percent and it makes everything invisible and now you can see those strings and all the imperfections of those strings are going to be showing through so we want to do the higher the number the more transparent the balloon is so if we can bring it down to maybe somewhere in the middle like 50 percent let's do a little test render and no joke you can see how long it's taking a render here and the trick here is we want the balloons to look a little transparent but hide our imperfections of our strings until we can figure that out in the future the idea is just make the render look good and get the client happy get the deadlines done and then worry about doing it right later so I think we can afford to put a little more transparency in here but this is gonna increase the render time the more transparent the balloons get let's go up to 65% we'll see how that turns out because he just that little bit going from 50 to 65 it's really taking a lot longer and I think this is gonna look good I'm not even gonna wait for this interactive render to finish that looks great so let's close our material editor turn off interactive render and let's just hit render on this thing while we talk it out you would go ctrl tab bring that up to full screen and 100% now I can sit here and watch this transparency really kills the render time so I'm actually gonna speed up the video while I'm talking here so you can see the end result without having to wait real time for it and another thing I didn't mention in that random effector if you're not happy with the colors that it's generating you can change the seed and just keep moving those numbers around until the colors pop up in the order that you like if anybody can figure out how to do this string in a cloner or if you already know how to do it please leave a comment below or send me an email I would love to know how to do that because I completely exhausted my resources trying to figure it out doing it multiple ways like I say I've tried the spline dynamics I've tried cloth simulations I've tried the matrix and tracer on the poly edge and I just can't get that stuff to replicate in a cloner I can't get it to attach to the balloon and as you saw during the dynamic simulation things were just kind of flying all over the place so if somebody can figure that out please share it with the rest of us that would be really really awesome and I can't wait to learn how to do it in the meantime I hope you guys were able to follow along with this I know I got a little tricky with the connection object and the dynamics but hopefully you found it pretty entertaining and kind of fun when you can see how easily you can create multiple objects and using that random effector to bring some color in there not only in scale and position but we can even like simply add a bunch of color to those balloons without having to do it by hand and I was actually ready to put this tutorial up without even doing the strings until a friend of mine said you know everyone's gonna watch this and I'm gonna say yeah but where are the strings so here's your strings it's the best I could do hopefully we'll figure it out and we'll catch you next time thanks for watching again everybody we'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: SioPio

Views: 138,692

Keywords: 3D, balloon, balloons, C4D, cinema4d, global illumination, modeling, mograph, mograph effector, rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics, spline effector, tutorial

Id: 3QYxuNyVeBE

Length: 36min 57sec (2217 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2013