Cinema 4D Tutorial - Controlling Cloth Simulations Using Mograph Fields

hey everybody its EJ from I design calm and today I have a really fun tutorial for you on how you can trigger cloth using fields in cinema 4d r20 now this is gonna create like kind of Houdini ash type of stuff so it's really fun really quick tip for you can't wait to see what you guys do with it let's check it out alright so let's first create our object that we want to classify and for just simplicity's case I'm just gonna use a trusty cube here okay cubes are always fun and let's make this nice in shiny gold so I'll just apply that material there as well now the first thing you need to know about you know using cloth or if you use soft body dynamics you need to have a lot more subdivisions now if I go to the garage shading lines a lot more subdivisions than just the six polygons we have right now and that's where we're gonna amp up these segments here of our cube so I'm just gonna go ahead and do that say 20 by 20 by 20 I think that should be pretty good and that's basically it now one thing that you can do is you can have this have like an inner shell so the cloth will then collide into like a smaller cube so you can still see the outward form of this cube so we can go ahead and do that so I'm just gonna command click and drag duplicate the cube and I'm just going to rename this cube Collider and just make it a little bit smaller okay now you might not be using a primitive so using a primitive you would just you know kind of scale these options down and that would look good but what if you have a more complex object what I want to do is show you how you can kind of offset the surface boundaries like kind of shrink the surface of your polygons shrink it all inwards by using a really simple technique which is just going up in grabbing a where is it where is it a displacer making it a child of your object and let me just go and let's just make this a little bit bigger because we can actually see it on the outside so that's the outer cube Collider now if I go into the shading tab of the displacer and just load up a simple color channel you're gonna see that's just beefed up our our cube and actually pushed out the edges of the polygons and this is because we're displacing all the polygons by a height of ten centimeters now we don't need to push it out we need to push the the polygons inward so I'll give it a height of like negative three and if I turn off the cube you can see yet there's our inner cube Collider there so that's basically it if you have a more complex object you want to push in the polygons and have them shrink a little bit inwards just add a displacer at a negative height and for this I'm just gonna go ahead and actually for this cube Collider I don't need all these subdivisions so I'm just gonna keep it low we still see it's just slightly smaller than my cube and let's just make it a little bit smaller just so we don't have any like intersections of the cloth and the collider that can cause some issues okay so with that done I'm just gonna right click go to current state to object and there's my cube Collider I can keep this as a copy or just delete it but there's my cubicle add or you can see it right under there okay now to apply cloth to an object you actually need to make it editable first so very important step I'm gonna hit C to make this cube editable I'm just gonna name this cube cloth okay and then I'm just going to right click and let's add some cloth so good simulation cloth there we go and then for the cloth Collider I'm gonna right click go to simulation tags and go to cloth Collider very aptly named so now we can go to our cloth and let's just hit play see what we got so right now we just have this kind of sag and bound nothing too interesting there and I have a camera move already built in but you can see it's just kind of falling down now what we can do is just kind of go into the forces get rid of the gravity and maybe we just have the size percentage increase a little bit to maybe you know 145 or something like that and what this allows the polygons to do is stretch and grow to a size of one hundred and forty-five percent of the original those polygons so you can see that we just have this really nice explosion kind of thing happening now where you can go ahead and like adjust some of these stiffness values and inflection values and the rubber values and you know you can find out more about cloth in general in some of my older tutorials that I will link in the description here but I don't want to get too caught up in that because what I want to do is show you how you can trigger this animation okay now first thing you're gonna see is that you know this looks fairly chunky so let's go ahead and add a subdivision surface I'm gonna hold the alt or option key down when I let go just to make that a child of the that's the collider whoops selected the wrong thing but if you hold the alt or option key down and with the object selected it'll actually add it on top of that so that's just smooths everything out really nice also slows things down as well and let's see looks like something was happening with the collider we're seeing a little bit I think just switching the the subdivision surface screwed something up so this is looking really nice now nice and smooth and pillowy and really really good stuff so what we can start to do now is set this up for being triggered now the problem with just normal cloth is when you hit play it just automatically starts right so what we need to do is we need to figure out a way we can hold these points of all the vertices of the of this object to not be affected by cloth and then drive the drive the cloth simulation and trigger the cloth simulation by using a field like a linear field or something like that now what we need to do is make it so this object this cloth does not move until we tell it to and the thing we're gonna use for that is called the belt of the cloth belt okay so what you're gonna do is you're gonna select the cloth that you want to belt down we're gonna tie it down so it can't move we're gonna right click go to simulation tags cloth belt and what you're gonna do is need to define what object you want to belt this on to and I can belt this onto the cube Collider if you're not using a Collider you can just simply just create a random object make it editable and just hide it and do that but for right now I'm just gonna hide cloth collider and just use that as the belt okay so I'm gonna drag and drop the cloth collider into this belt on field and then what I need to do is set the point so since this works by points I need to go into point mode and just hit command a to select all the points on this cloth cube go back into my belt and then hit set and what will happen is all those vertices will change from that orange to this bright yellow that will let us know that this is actually working okay so what happens when you belt something on well you're gonna hit play and nothing's going to move none of these vertices none of these points are gonna move and you can actually see all those points still there so I'm just gonna go to my belt tag uncheck draw so I don't see that cluttering up my viewport but you can see that my cloth is not doing anything at all because all the vertices are locked and belted on to this cube Collider so what's controlling the influence of this belt this belt tag is this influence of like decrease the percentage of influence you can see that I'm slowly bringing back and releasing those vertices to be impacted by the cloth so what I need to do is figure out how I can control this influence using fields and with R 20 you have the ability to affect vertex maps and this is exactly how you can control this we have this map field we need to create a vertex map and what we can do with that is then use fields to control the vertex map okay so to create a vertex map it's super easy I'm just gonna click on this cloth cube I'm going to go over to the character menu go to the paint tool and I'm just simply going to paint click right on to our cube cloth and you can see that created my weight or my vertex map okay and what I'm gonna do is check on this use fields it's gonna have this freeze layer I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that and what I'm gonna do is just creates like a linear field and what you're gonna notice is when I go to my move tool I can now control the vertex map using this linear field which is really awesome now what we can do with this vertex map is control the influence of the belt tag here so basically whatever is let me just hit play so whatever is yellow is gonna have a hundred percent influence of that belt now as I pass this through you see this red gradient kind of passing through and it's removing the influence of the belt so we are controlling the cloth simply with this linear field which is so cool and so powerful like I can go backwards and forwards I can use different types of fields just really amazing control that was not possible at least very easily without like any scripting or Python to be able to control this with just mograph effectors and fields and all this good stuff and it's like this is real time like this is not very slow at all I can control this this cloth kind of taking shape and you know I can have multiple fields affecting this and in triggering the different parts of this cube cloth and all this good stuff so just extremely extremely powerful and flexible stuff to be able to control cloth like this and cloth again I feel like it's not used very often because now you have Houdini and stuff like that but this is just incredibly cool and very powerful so one thing you can do is you can see that one of the problems with this is we're just when we pass this through let's not have this play again you can see that it inflates nicely but when I pass this back through it kind of just snaps so what I'm gonna do is add a Geo to form or to this okay so I can actually just remove this linear field from being a child of the cue cloth and then what I'm gonna do is go to my deformers menu and just grab let's grab a smoothing first okay so we can just smooth everything out I'm just gonna crank this up so we're just smoothing out some of those details just ever so slightly just maybe a stiffness of 95 and then what I'm gonna do is go back into my deformers menu and let's grab one of my favorite deformers duds you go to former and I'm gonna place that right underneath the cloth because I want the jiggle to happen first and then the smoothing to smooth out all of the action that's coming from the jiggle so if I go ahead and hit play now you can see we have this rule nice jiggly property to our cloth and now when I snap this back you can see it's a lot more jiggly and not so stiff when we remove the cloth simulation there now this cloth or the jiggle is a little bit too jiggly so let's go ahead and maybe remove some of the structural and this will kind of create less of those oscillations and maybe increase the drag a little bit to dampen and have those springs that make up the jiggle the jiggles kind of come to a rest quicker so maybe a structural of 55 and a stiffness of 50 should be good and let's just see what this looks like and let's just have this pass-through looking good as far as getting triggered it's getting triggered folks and then once we push this back in and remove the cloth it has this really nice gradual graceful if I do say so myself graceful return to not having that cloth simulation happening so really great stuff and again maybe we can you know adjust the structural a little bit more and just really get this looking the way we want to okay so you can see with the structural pretty much all the way down we're getting we're not getting much ripples but if I bring the structural up check out what happens get more of these nice little kind of waves and stuff like that nice little ripples so maybe we just leave the structural at a hundred percent so it always helps to kind of understand what's going on with with the deform or again I have juvett of former tutorials all over the place I'll link to them in the description as well but hopefully this really helps you open your eyes to the possibility of resurrecting and giving a little bit more love to the cloth tag and being able to trigger this kind of like you know people might think like oh is this Houdini you're like no this is og cloth and c4 do so a have fun with this and enjoy all right so how's thinking easy is that to be able to control cloth trigger cloth with fields and vertex map now all those additions to our twenty like fields and just that unification of all the things you can now control with fields and mograph effectors is just so crazy powerful and I feel like this just kind of scratches the surface of what is possible even with using this technique you can add up a bunch of different effectors or fields you can add random fields on top of it to make it a little bit more organic looking there's a lot to do with this technique so be sure to explore experiment if you make anything please share it with me always love seeing what everyone is doing out there using these tutorial techniques tag me on instagram tag me on instagram stories i love sharing them to my own story if you're on myspace do that myspace is cool right that's what the kids are up to but share with me wherever you want to again love seeing what you're all doing if you have any questions about anything i've covered in this tutorial please leave them in the comment section below if you just want to say hi or thanks leave that in the comments section - love seeing that i'll respond to all of those comments so appreciate you guys watching as always if you like this tutorial please hit the like button if you like what i'm doing here please subscribe I'd really appreciate that and always so grateful for you taking the time out to watch and learn with me so I'll see you in the next one bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 88,821

Keywords: mograph fields, c4d fields, cinema 4d r20, cinema 4d r20 tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, cloth simulations, cloth dynamics, c4d cloth, cinema 4d cloth, 3d cloth, c4d cloth tutorial, cinema 4d cloth tutorial, mograph, eyedesyn, learn c4d, cinema 4d fields, vertex maps, c4d vertex maps, cinema 4d vertex maps, motion graphics tutorials, mograph tutorial, c4d r20, c4d r20 tutorial, cinema 4d tut, c4d tutorial, c4d tut

Id: lViEd9rBCT8

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019