Cinema 4D Tutorial - Build An Animated Dynamic Character In Cinema 4D

in today's video you're going to make a character animation using dynamics and motion capture data stay tuned everybody it is Nick here again from grayscale guerrilla helping you make better renders in less time now if you haven't already done so please head on over to youtube and subscribe to our channel we have a lot of videos just like this and plenty more coming and we want to make sure that you see them also if you haven't seen it yet check out our intro to cinema 4d training series it's completely free it's over on our website and we think it's the best place to learn cinema 4d you can get that down in the description below or also right here on YouTube I'm going to try to add one of those cards alright let's go right into today's tutorial today is all about making a dynamic character using motion capture data now you're going to want to make sure that you've already seen part one of our motion capture series and that's where we find the data and then also import it into cinema 4d so make sure you check out that video I'll link it below before you get started but if you've already seen that one we're going to make this really cool character using dynamics and spheres and a whole bunch of cool lights and at the end I'm also going to show you how I made this specific animation using HDR I studio and also top coat so make sure you stay tuned for that one all right let's head on in to cinema 4d and let's get animating all right here we are in cinema 4d and this will be a fun one I wanted to do this one with just the skeleton and not the whole skin that's for a couple reasons in fact I'm just going to delete this for now and if you're following along with that model you could delete it too it'll make it a little bit easier a couple reasons I'm doing this one is it'll actually look better the final result will look better because we're kind of cloning on to the skeleton instead of onto the entire object and the other way the other reason I'm doing this is because I know some of you when you import your FBX sequence yours it might look more like this than with all the skin and stuff attached to it so I wanted to do a video that everybody can follow along with so here we are we got our skeleton but of course the problem is you cannot clone onto these invisible objects these are just joints they won't accept a cloner it just won't work you render there's nothing there if we try to put this in a cloner and there's nothing's gonna work so we have to make this geometry I know I did this in another video but we'll do it anyway just so everybody can follow along here's the way to make turn this into geometry I want you to right-click on the joint chain I want you to come down and say select children this is going to select every one of these objects next thing you're going to want to do is go to the character menu go to conversion and go to convert joints to polygon object that's going to create a polygon object of all these joints next thing you do is you hold down command and select the polygon this is going to allow you to select everything at once and there's one more step you got to go back up to character go to commands go to bind okay now I know I went through that fast but for you to rewind if you missed it but now we're ready the reason we did that is now when we hit play we have geometry check that out we got actual geometry now this is a whole look on its own if you're following along on these series I always encourage you to go make your own luck with this getting the FBX data and getting this stuff in the cinema is really an excuse to start to learn some other fun things so if you see something fun you want to do with this skeleton pause it go do it come back but today we're going to add some dynamic spheres all along this skeleton here and make it look like his whole body is all made of dynamic objects so how do we do that well first thing we need is what we're going to clone and of course I'm going to use a sphere for this one I'm going to grab it shrink it down and that's roughly the size I want to kind of want big chunky spheres like he's in a big sphere costume you could try it smaller you'll need more objects but somewhere around there looks pretty good next thing I'm going to do is grab a cloner object drag the sphere inside and now in our cloner object I want you to come down and go to object we want to drag our polygon object here that we just built into this little field and this will start to clone our spheres all along our skeleton now already this could be pretty cool now when we hit play nothing happens right what happened well actually something happens the skeleton starts dancing but all the spheres do not follow along now this one took me a while to figure out I'm like well what what's wrong like it should be sticking well it's only just a layer order issue for this one and layer order is a something you always want to check especially with dynamics and other systems kind of interacting but basically it's just not refreshing and if you take your cloner object and just simply drag it to the bottom of the hierarchy look at that that is all it took to have those figures follow along so layer order an object order is very important as cinema4d so I don't have an always rule for you that cloners are always at the bottom although what I would say is if you have dynamics so you have or not even dynamics if you have systems that are not working the way you think they are try changing their order in the object menu okay so now we have this which is cool on its own I mean this this could be cool we bring a bring a cube in here now we probably shrink that down a little bit but like look we got this really cool thing we there's tons of things that we could do now that we have this data in here right but what we want are the spheres to not only be on the body but also be dynamic so that they don't interact and all that stuff so first thing I want to do and make sure of is when all this stuff starts cloning I don't want it to just clone on the edges of the joints and all this stuff it's a little spaced out too far down here and it's a little too clumped up in the hand like the hands going to have a ton more because of all the extra bones and stuff like that so how do you get it to space out more evenly well go to the cloner object and instead of distributing on the vertex I want you to distribute on the surface and this is just kind of pick a random place in the surface and just start to fill it up more evenly so even just like that you can see this more of like a Michelin Man kind of style it's much more even and we're good to go okay so now what well I don't want these to interact so of course we need the dynamics tag let's go to our sphere go to our simulation tags and add a rigidbody tag this is going to keep things from touching and of course when we hit play it's all just going to explode because it just says we don't want to touch we're out of here gravity's taken over and you get dynamics but what we really want is for them to kind of try to stay where they are you've probably seen this in a few of our other tutorials but there's a common way to do that go to up your your dynamics tag go to force go to follow position and I want you to type something pretty high on this one maybe eight so now what this means is all the spheres are gonna basically try to be where they should be throughout the animation which is stuck to the skeleton however there's so many of these spheres that there's just not enough room and really it doesn't look like a human right so let's shrink these down a little bit let's see if we can get something a little bit more human-like that's a little bit better maybe a little bit larger then you can get away with something bigger that's pretty fun it's also not sticking very well like they're a little floaty so you may want to play with this follow position I'm actually just going to double I'm gonna go to 18 this makes a look this makes the human form stand out a little bit more it's a little bit more sticky so I like the looks of this better I'm gonna add a random effector because I think it looks a little bit more fun that way I'm gonna make sure a cloner selected go to mograph effector random and I don't want position random I just want scale I'm gonna go to scale and say yeah make make these different sizes okay let's back up let's kind of see what this looks like is just like a standing human I say it's a little too large still I say the overall too large now you're going to want to dial this up this is true with a lot of our tutorials and a lot of anything that you're making with clones you always going to want to just scale and then also adjust on the the size of your object but also how many of them there are so in this case I turned down the scale but now there's not enough to really fill it up so I want to turn up the amount that's feeling more like you know a good ratio remember when we started there was just too many spheres didn't look very human we're just kind of trying to find that balance okay that's looking pretty good okay next thing we need to do is add a separate head onto our our sphere man here and I wanted to do that because this was nice but I wasn't getting a real sense of like that it had a head really you know sometimes these smaller clones are going to kind of attach to the head here and I was like well what if we just take a giant sphere right let's take a sphere let's go back to frame 0 so we could kind of set them up and actually let's just go forward a frame I'm gonna hit G and that's just gonna go forward in the timeline a couple frames but what if I took this this sphere up here and moved it kind of scale that I'm just using the move and scale tools here what if I made an actual like giant head for this character I think I thought that would look kind of fun like like it's a Disney costume kind of thing well here's how you set this up I'm gonna go to my side view just so I could try to angle it onto the neck in an area right because these bones represent the neck and the face and all that so obviously we have to tilt this a little bit forward to kind of match the perspective and also match the skeleton but then how do we make it stick when it plays well what you have to do is go find the the bone or the joint I kinda I always call them bones but they're actually named joint in in cinema 4d so you can make all the jokes but if you need to for both of those words um but we're here's what I'm looking for I'm gonna go down in and find the neck okay now I don't know what yours is named remember the beginning of this tutorial not not this video but the beginning series where we import the FBX sequence I showed you tons of different plates at three different places but you have access to tons of different FBX sequences so yours may look different but what I want you to find one of these head or neck or upper sub joints here to attach the sphere to and all you have to do now is just drag it as a child and now wherever that neck goes the the sphere is going to go in fact just saw that there's something called head let's let's put it in the heads sequence here now wherever this head joint goes the sphere will follow right so check it out now we got something let's go back to our other one here now we have to make that sphere dynamic so let's grab the sphere let's go to tags and in this case we don't want the sphere to be bouncing around we want it to stick right where it is I'm just going to choose collider body that's just going to keep the other spheres the other particles whatever you choose to from from intersecting that head okay so now we're going somewhere we basically have the the animation done now I added one more thing which is a bunch of particles kind of flinging out of of our character here if you saw the example and I will show you how to do that at the very end well we'll add that but at this point I think we should start to add some textures some lighting and really get this scene going because this is cool and all but when you hit render that's not as cool as I think we can make it okay so let's uh let's go for a real basic look you know we get a lot of feedback and email on our tutorials that some people go like you know Nick some of some of this stuff looks really good what you do but our my machine can't handle it right I don't have access to a render farm and all that so what I'm going to give you is a kind of simple way to light your scene and make this character look really cool and then I'm going to go into a more more beautiful way of doing it that might take a little bit longer to render but it's actually closer to the original and then at the very end we're going to take those clones and we're going to have other particles kind of like fall off this character so let's do it enough talking let's delete these materials this is from our original character that we're not using anymore and let's just create a new material okay so this new material needs to go on the cloner and it needs to go on our spearhead now we could just drag it right up on this for your head and there we go we got some particles okay next thing we're going to do is open this up now I want you to choose what color your character is okay you go in your your color here you keep it white like this just crank it crank it up you can pick up pick a fun color here green I don't know pink blue light blue let's try light blue I want you to do you as they say alright now we're going to head into reflectance and we're going to go into the specular channel this is on by default when you make a new texture and as you know I don't use reflectance or I'm sorry I don't use specular ton but for some looks especially real simple looks it can get you pretty far so I'm just gonna make a really tall kind of specular and you could kind of mess around with these but what I want is like this real tall kind of circle here and this is just going to act like a little reflection basically fake reflection that's what specular is all about okay next thing we need is a light let's grab a light let's move it up let's move it around let's let's let's find out where our characters coming from they're a little bit a little a little reflection action let's hit render okay we got we got something something going on here what else do we need well I think we need a fill light now if you don't have light kit Pro we have a light kit Pro we have a light call let me show it show it to you you don't need to use this it just makes a little bit easier a global light if you have light kit pro I would recommend that if you don't check out this light here this gets pretty close to what that is you turn on ambient illumination and then you turn down your intensity and this is just gonna fill in the gaps right it's just gonna light your scene now you got the spheres you got you we don't have any floor we don't have any background going on so let's solve that problem here let's go ahead grab a plane for the floor here we'll scale this up whoa well went crazy with that scale alright scale it up let's create a new material let's put it on the floor let's also create a background let's put this material on the background okay so now whenever we change the floor we change the background it's all fine we got to worry about lighting and all that stuff so in fact what we're going to do is instead of use color channel for the floor I'm going to use luminance this is just going to make it all the same and that's just one of the issues with you know making sure your your background and your plane everything looks the same the seamless floor now I'm going to show you a little bit later how to get a really simple seamless floor but this uh this is a good workaround especially for these cartoony style looks okay so now what's really fun side side note what's really fun about 3d and lighting and all the stuff in general is you can go from something kind of ugly which we have into something really cool really quickly and so I just want to show you how fast that could go so let's go grab our luminance channel and we could pick another color I mean we can we could go crazy and pick like some cool like orangish like dark red thing with the blue maybe maybe it's that you know have fun with it is yours you're seen here go down to reflectance and just turn it off I don't want any specular on there I just want a flat color so now we have our flat ground we have our sphere guy here and the last thing we want to do with this background on the plane is to add some dynamics to the plane because we don't want anything to fall through the floor we don't want this this person's feet to go through and when we add those particles at the end we also don't want it so now we have our floor we have a character and now we hit render and we still really don't have any great shadows and also this the skeletons poking through I'm going to hide it so how do you hide stuff in cinema you hold down option or alt and you click these little traffic lights here and if you hold a hold down option at all you'll they'll both turn at the same time you make them both red now you don't have a skeleton um no it's what it should be oh there's a skin there I got to turn that off there we go boom okay did it okay so now what we don't have really any shadows we could use a light shadow right we can turn on soft shadows and get some shadowing over here that's not very realistic we can turn on area shadows and try to get some area shadows but it's it's none of this is really going to work so great because just of the scene and the way that it's all built what I tend to do with these looks hold on let me leave this on here none what I tend to do with these kind of looks is I'll end up using ambient occlusion this is just a huge kind of trick for this stuff ambient occlusion and you know other videos we'll get in more into ambient occlusion but look at the difference look at that instant shadows Amiga clusion is fantastic in fact I'm brain storming out I should make a whole video just aiming occlusion go through the settings show you guys exactly what it does and how it works but for now check it out instant shadows know where no need to worry about it now all you need to do is make these little reflection dots wherever you want them adjust the fill light to make it even brighter in between the gaps or darker to make it more contrast II maybe if we had a darker background this would look better but I like it a little bit brighter here that looks pretty good and now uh what like look at how fast that stuff renders right oh we have a slight issue with our clones there we turned off our skin and we don't want to do that all we want to do is just turn it off in the editor so I messed up by unchecking when I unchecked it like it no fun although the skeleton with the head also looks pretty cool like another look we could play with okay so there we go I'm actually going to go back to more of just a plain color here like a white against the background I think it looked kind of fun and so now what now that we're here um we can look at this and go this is fine we can adjust this and like I said these cartoony looks are really nice because they render super fast the problem is is it doesn't look as realistic it doesn't have as much nice reflections and all that fun stuff now you can go you know start to add those things but this is why we built the tools that we use all the time for this stuff so now let me show you how I made this scene more like the demo that you saw at the beginning of the tutorial and for that we didn't use the background in the plane didn't use these lights just to get those dots we used a couple plugins that I use in almost every one of my projects and that's HDRI studio let's go ahead and add that and also topcoat now top coats over here docked ready to go I use it so much a docket in the in the interface here an HDR studio rig is what will give us our background our our floor and also our reflections all in one it'll also give us render settings we'll get to that in a second but now that we have a floor we still do need to make a plane that is dynamic right so I should have just kept that other one but it's really easy to make you just turn on Collider body and I'm just going to turn off those traffic lights again so that nothing falls through the floor okay so now what we have is we automatically have a background we also have some reflections that are going on but we do need to add them and that's where topcoat comes in so what I'm going to do is go over to topcoat with our white texture that is our character texture we go over to modifiers and first of all we could turn off all the reflectance that includes the specular channel just basically starting from scratch right so now what we could do is we can add reflections right inside of topcoat so that we can start to see our reflections and start to get a little bit of a cooler look here so let's add a little bit of gloss texture let's hit render and you can see now we're starting to get some little highlights here let's find a more fun frame where our characters not on the floor but now you can see we're getting some nicer reflections we're getting some shadows and let's actually talk about our render presets right now let's get a nicer render preset that's a little heavy for me if we go to ant render settings HDR I studio and topcoat come with these render settings over here that just make it really easy to kind of pick what the quality and what the reflection types and all is in cinema so in this case I'm going to use ambient occlusion remember we used a mean occlusion I use it so much I made a render preset that we could dial up and down with these presets here so that we can kind of test things out in a low setting and then crank it up later down the road so a MIDI inclusion low now what's going on I thought I want that white color back well inside of our hgri studio rig we have a fill light and in again a tool I use all the time instead of grabbing it and making it all the time I just include it in a lot of our tools so now we have a fill light we could crank up that's going to add that lighting in and now look at it our shadows are our reflections everything in the scene here are going to look a little bit nicer now the grain goes away as we start cranking up our settings but I wanted to show you just how quickly we can get this stuff going and what's really fun is we could for example you know tone down this fill light and just have a darker character here and we could adjust it as we go so while we're here while it's darker let's choose a different HDR this is one of the areas that come with hgri studio there's also these collection packs that you can get and a European holiday man this might be one of my favorites Church entrance is always a good one let's see what that looks like you see the detail the blue sky the little entrant entryway here I really like this one I'm going to use this I'm going to crank up our our our color here quite a bit actually that's looking pretty good okay again the grain will go away as we turn it to final render settings but again we're just testing to see what we want and then we can crank it up for our final render okay so that looks pretty good let's add those particles that I mentioned before so we used HDR studio use top coat and I you in the middle of this tutorial i'ma show you how to add extra particles that kind of fling off the character as the character dances around and it's this easy I am going to duplicate our current cloner and the reason is is this cloner already has a lot going on it's got the random effector already on it it's already it's already got the polygon sequence inside of it so I'm just going to like literally duplicate it the only difference is this cloner I don't want to be following the object I want this series of clones to just continuously fling off and fall off and hit the floor and to do that we're going to go into this tag we're going to come down here to force and we're just going to turn that to zero so now clones that are made on the character that's a little hard to see because actually I'll just turn this off a little hard to see because it's white on white right now but all these a particles are going to fall off on the floor the problem is well I could see two problems one is our planes not big enough it's actually falling off the edges of our plane so let's scale that up second of all it all happens on the first frame and there's no more particles to fling around so how do we add particles over time in our cloner let's go to frame zero and I'll show you a real real easy way to do this I'm a closed top coat just for a second probably come back to it a second this count number if we turn this count number up over time more and more particles are going to appear you can see them appear right where we want them and they're going to fall off the character so how do we do that we just animate it let's start with literals zero zero count I'm going to click that keyframe right next to it to start animating we go to the end of our animation and I'm going to say okay let's have two thousand particles fall off this character by the end of the animation I'm going to turn on render instances that's going to make it go a little bit faster I'm going to set a keyframe and now look it's animating from 0 to 2000 now if I go back to frame 0 and I hit play check out what happens all these particles start flinging off now too big right I don't want them that big I want it small I just want like little dust and look what else is happening it's all falling off that off that object it's not following the character and remember what we needed to do I'm sure you do we need to put it at the bottom right we need to put it at the bottom so it actually comes off the skeleton and what's cool is it looks like he's kind of like like bleeding bleeding spheres here and what's nice is they all interact they're all dynamic they fall off through these other objects and they all falling all over the floor now the floor I think we need more friction let's just go in and turn up some friction here 80% that sounds a little bit better that'll just slow them down so they don't fall all over the place so let's stay a little bit closer sometimes and I think we're looking pretty good now we could go texture these other spheres a little bit differently so let's let's quickly build that one let's create a new material and I got to I just been using the variation shader a lot because it's so much fun I'm going to go to luminance and go to our variation shaders effects variation shader and this is in version r17 and up is the variation shader just for those of you who don't have it you may want to look into the random shader and stuff in the mograph menu to do something similar but the variation shader is pretty fun I'm going to do my classic rainbow look here pick that rainbow gradient I'm going to turn a random color down gradient blend up in gradient mode to replace now I know I did that fast but I do that a lot you could always rewind it but you are all set what that means is you have rainbow colors or for each one of your clones you just have to drag it now to that new cloner now when we hit render you're going to see all that all the clones are our rainbow now what happened to our HDR pseudo rig we just turned it off just turn it back on there you go yeah I tell you that that black look looks looked pretty cool too we need some reflection on our spheres here let's open topcoat back up let's grab our sphere and I think what we really want for this one is probably a gloss I'm going to shift click lacquer and that's going to bring us two layers of reflection they'll give us a little bit of Sheen it's not just going to be that pure clean reflection it's going to be a little bit of both a little bit of blurry reflection and the clean one and that just makes it look a little bit more fun a little bit more real let's kind of find a good camera angle here film and that's looking pretty good now we're going to turn down the the setting or turn up the settings get rid of some of this grain but also let's play around with that black look I mean this this is what cinema is all about is is everything is non-destructive we can go back and change things at all times if I want capsules to come out of this character instead of spheres or also with Spears I could add it into the system and now we got capsules and spheres flinging out I mean this is the fun part about about cinema is just having that flexibility you're just never locked in anything so there we go we got capsules and we got spheres classic but let's make that dark look because it was a little bit of an accident at that it looked like that but let's go ahead and turn down our fill light and this is and let's also use an interactive render regions there's just we could see what's going on a little bit that kind of makes this glassy part look kind of nice and then if we make our background dark as well which we can do with HDR studio rig really easily go to seamless floor I'm gonna make the center kind of like a real dark blue and then the edges roll real black there and now we have like kind of this dark dancer character which maybe maybes a good name it was a good band name dark dancer and then we got this this crazy neon of the particles flinging out so there we go boom boom BAM I kind of like the died oh no you tell me throw it throw it in the comments do you like the dark one better or the the white one from the demo I'm kind of taken to him maybe it will show both I like it fun okay I think we covered everything and we're ready to go thanks for watching this one today a quick question for you before we go what tutorials do you want to see on the greyscale gorilla page if you have any ideas or requests for us please put it in the comments below we always love hearing from and get great ideas from stuff that you want to build all right if you haven't already done so don't forget to check out our youtube page and subscribe and also check out our intro to cinema 4d training series it's a huge training series all about learning all the different parts of cinema 4d I'll link it up right here and also in the description below with that said we have ton more tutorials here on YouTube and on our website be sure to head on over and search for more whatever you're looking for I hope we have a video for it and again if we don't put it in the comments below I'll see you in another video really soon keep rendering everybody bye bye shoot a lot of these videos today do I still look awake do I need another coffee I'm okay I'm good stretch it out stretch it out folks

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 114,491

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, cinema 4D tutorials, Cinema 4D, motion capture, mixamo, fbx, cinema 4d motion capture, dynamic spheres, mograph cloner, mograph clones, character animation in Cinema 4D, cinema 4D Dynamics, animated character, dynamic characters in cinema 4d

Id: 7_fcZu9zuIQ

Length: 31min 59sec (1919 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2016