Cinema 4D Tutorial - Create Wax Type Using Collision Deformer

hey everybody its EJ from amazon.com in today we are going to learn how to create some fun waxy text inside of cinema 4d let's learn how alright so this is what we're gonna be making today this waxy little type kind of thingamadoodles so let's go ahead and make it so we're going to create a new project here and let's start off by creating a letter and let's just choose the letter A we'll just do one for now let's adjust the alignment to middle and let's choose a more interesting font here you can choose whatever font you like but I'm going to choose where are you culture is our culture ista I just like the nice little appendages here nice little blocky appendages think that's what you call them and let's just make this a little bit deeper yeah that's good so now what we're going to do how we're going to create this waxy type is by allowing this letter to actually push through and deform a plane so let's first create a plane and we'll just switch the orientation of negative Z so it's actually facing this is the front face there and that's looking good and let's just make this a little bit bigger 800 by 800 and looking nice and let's just move our a down so what I want to do is allow this letter to push through and almost look like it's pushing through a curtain or cloth and kind of moving and distorting this plane and kind of imprinting the profile of this letter into and stamping it into this plane object so what we can do for that is using a handy to form a call to collision deformer and I love these little icons because they try to give you a hint as what the heck each of these do and the collision to form or the icon for word is a sphere that looks like it's Clyde into a plane and kind of creating some ripples so let's go ahead and let's explore come on with me as we explore the collision deformer so just as any other de former to actually have an effect in object we need to make it a child of said object and that's going to be our plane object here and the first thing we need to do is how this deform works you need to define an object that you want this collision to former to interact with so what object you want to collide into this plane well that's going to be our mode text object so we're just going to go ahead drag and drop our mo text object under the objects field here and there is this thing called a solver and basically what a solver does is the type of collision that you want to do do you want to have an object intersect and collide with another object or something else and right now for what we want to do we actually want this object to be look like it's inside of an object and as we push it forward looks like it's trying to you know come out from behind a curtain or you know if you raise your foot and lift the bedsheet or something you can kind of make out your foot your toes something like that so we're going to do is make this a the B inside of the object and then when it passes through stretch the object out so once I do inside stretch you can see that as I move the letter A it is stretching and looking like it's bulging the plane from the inside it's almost like an alien where the aliens trying to bulge through the stomach that just got gruesome really quick alright no more references to that so what we're going to do is you can see that if I turn off the visibility here and I rotate you can see we got a little ball G doodle right there but that does not look like an A so what we need to do is if I go to my display you can see that we have very little geometry very little polygons to actually define the shape of the a so what we can do is just crank up the width and height segments like 110 to 110 and with that uh without that added geometry we can now see a well more well-defined profile or shape of our letter A and right now it's actually still pretty chunky as you can see so we can do two things to smooth this out one being bringing in a subdivision surface and then just placing or playing underneath that note that's going to do is smooth things out by subdividing everything hence the name subdivision service and then we can do one other thing and that is by using what's called the smoothing to former it's very aptly named and basically what this moving to former does is if I place this underneath the plane and below the collision deformer so we want the collision of former to happen and then the smoothing to former so it's very important the smoothing comes second after the collision and what that does you can see immediately boom just moves everything out and then we have this stiffness value that we can adjust to adjust that level of smoothness so about you know 88 something like that we get some nice smooth edges get a little bit of rippling happing so maybe bring that down a little bit more and now you can see we have a really nice smooth letter A and we can adjust how far this gets pushed through and this is you know this could be good for like embossed text and stuff like that but we're not doing that but you can kind of see how that this collision former can do just that so what we're going to do is try to bring back some of the details on this object so what we're going to do is one thing that's actually really neat and that is using under the object tab here in the collision to former is this fall-off tab and what this does is allows you to choose fall-off based on a few different methods the one I like to use is the Collider and it basically you define the fall-off of this collision deformer based on a distance from the collider object to our letter a so I'm just going to do that choose that and immediately you're not going to see anything change we have the fall-off distance this is again the distance from our Collider shape we also have strength and you can see as I'm just in this stuff nothing's happening and the reason why that is is we have this curve editor here and this curve editor basically drives and anything that happens in this clot this fall-off and the typical use for Collider or the the fall-off is for making kind of like ripples or you're really manipulating how this collision shape is distorted across this the object or your plane so what I'm going to do is you know we can click this little point in our curve editor or arse planet ER and you see that just kind of rounds things out and what you're really going to get to see especially if I turn up the strength is we have this we have our Collider shape and then we have this bulge and that is created from this curve editor so I'm gonna just hold command or control and click and create another point control click again create another point and another point and you can see exactly what's happening is you can see this is basically the profile of what's happening here or of our fall-off distance so we can now adjust and more clearly see what all this stuff does you can see the distance this is like some ripples some ripple action happening and as this goes off we can adjust the strength you can see that this can add some nice like if you wanted to really have full control over like ripple action if you actually animated this letter a colliding in and then creating these ripples you can fully animate this it's very art directive all kind of ripples but what I'm going to use this for is I'm going to choose a very small distance and bring the strength that a little bit I'm just going to reset this curve editor default and what I want to do is actually introduce a negative value here and what this is going to do is kind of like push in and you can't really see but it's kind of dimpling along the edges of our object here you can see that that's just adding a little bit of detail bringing back a little detail of that little a bit right there and our little appendages there so what I want to do is just right click and I'll actually want to see what I'm doing and I'm going to go show in two separate editor now I can hold the two key and kind of zoom hold the 1 key in pan so zoom in pin and just adjust this even further so you can see we got that curve a little bit down there so now all I can do is just bring this slider distance in and you can kind of see the difference between no fall-off and some fall-off you can see that with that Collider we get a little bit more of that dimpling action happening on our object and you can really get a sense of the form of our object a bit more so that's just one thing that the the fall-off is good for I'm just going to choose a level of strength of 15 a distance of 15 and strength of 3035 for now and you can see again off and with fall-off get those dimples back there so let's just go and go a little bit further with the options here on our collider or our collision deformer and the next tab we're going to go over is this Advanced tab and a lot of these things we're not really going to be utilizing in this because this is not this is not going to be animated so a lot of these things come in handy when you're animating or if you don't want very smooth out edges or anything like that so I'm going to skip over a few things so the one thing that we're really not going to use is this size and typically the size kind of is you as you increase this it creates a kind of buffer so it tries to create a buffer between the quizzing collision shape collision object and the object that is being collided with just to prevent like geometry from intersecting and again we don't need that because we don't even need to see our original Collider object or the object colliding into our plane the next thing is steps and again this is something that also comes in handy with more animated compositions or projects and this is basically increases the step calculation of the collision deformer so if you have fast-moving objects or a lot of stuff happening this just increases the detail increases the calculation step for each frame and again this really doesn't help us out much with this you can see that it tightens it up a little bit it's a little bit more of an accurate collision calculation so we want to keep that fairly low because we don't want to increase a calculation time or render time or anything like that stretch is basically defines how the fall-off is like how far this stretches out and affects and distorts the object that you're getting collided into so it's how much across the surface this plane is stretching out so we actually don't want this to stretch out too much we don't want this to look like a cloth we want this to more look like like more like saran wrap or something like that relax other than being an awesome song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood relax allows the polygons or the collision deformer to kind of relax relax the polygons or the springs that's creating the deformation so you can see that we're getting less definition here because all those Springs are relaxing so we'll just leave it at 20 for now and let's go into these three last options here one being the stiffness and stiffness basically just controls the overall elasticity of the collision shape so if we bring this down we're going to start reintroducing a lot more of our profile shape we get those dimples back in there so I'm just going to keep this fairly low say 20 and then the struct is short for structural and it's basically controls how distorted the mesh becomes with this and the lesser the values the more this object is more like a cloth like a very soft cloth again the lower the value you can see a lot more of our details coming in there so again I'm going to keep this struct value fairly low it's going to stop trying to maintain its structural integrity of being that flat plane or that stiff plane and again flex is another one of those things that we're really not going to see a lot of difference between zero and 100% and that's because of a lot of the options that we already have and again we're not animating but basically flex controls the flexibility of all these different polygons and could create wrinkles and stuff like that with with compositions that aren't smoothed out or anything like that so those are the options in the Advanced tab and this is looking fairly good the one thing that we can do to really up the detail of the object and really sense get a sense of the form that this is a letter A is our last resort and that is by just adding more geometry and while this slows down the calculation slows down our viewport you can see as I jack up this with segments and the height segments to 200 that you can really see that we're really getting hey you know the sense of the shape we can definitely tell that that is a letter A right so what I'm going to do is go to display go to garage shading and you can see that even with one letter I'm still zooming around my viewport fairly nicely here but I think that's looking fairly good and we can adjust how far that letter a is pushed in you can see as I'm like adjusting this my viewports kind of getting bogged down here so what I'm going to do is add those other two letters so the W and the X to create that original composition of wax and what I'm going to do is go to my level of detail here under options and just work at a low level of detail actually let's go to medium and what that's going to do is help speed up my scene and just limit the quality of some of the deformers and stuff here so now I can work much faster so I'm going to do is just duplicate this and I'll make this at W and let's just turn on the visibility here by just turning off those stoplights and what I'm going to do is just rotate this a little bit and scale this down and the main thing is that you want these far enough from the back that's pushing enough in making enough of an indentation that you'll still be able to make out this letter and actually for this a let's just rotate this a little bit as well have a little bit of like a tumbling action something like that so we have W there and then we'll duplicate the W and this will be the X and we'll just switch that text to X and then just move this guy over here and maybe I'll make this W a little bit bigger something like that and then you can create any word you want move these around as much as you want the one thing to look out for is you want these letters to be far enough away that they're not kind of bleeding or melting into the other letter because you want to be able to make out each of these shapes you want to give enough buffer there so right now we have our letters but we need to still include them in the collider the collision to form our calculation so under the colliders tag where we have our letter a we just need to add our X and our W and we can just turn off the stop lights on these guys then and right now you can't really tell and again that's because our options level of detail is low on medium let's crank this to high and see what this actually will look like and this is looking pretty good you can kind of tell that that's an X so I might need to make that letter a little bit bigger this W I can probably move a little bit over the to the left let's go ahead and do that go back down to the medium level of detail let's move the W over a little bit let's just turn the collision to foam or off a little bit so there's our a and then there's our X and we'll make this X a little bit bigger you push a little bit forward something like that alright and that's I think that looks pretty good let's turn our collision to former back on let's hide these guys click on the stop lights and again let's go back to a high level of detail and see if we can make all this stuff out alright cool this is actually looking really nice good make out the double you can make out the a we can make out the X looking really nice again we can you know if we wanted to stiffen this up a little bit make it less smooth we can adjust the smoothing de former here so that's looking really nice too you can make it let's see what 89 looks nice so a little less smooth a little bit more of bumpy again the one really cool thing about these dimples is now that we have all these letters in here you're really going to see that fall off that Collider fall off as we go from none to that Collider fall off with that negative curve really get in that detail again it really helps create this nice little waxy feel and look at this so I'm liking how this is looking let's go ahead and let's finish this off let's add some lighting and some textures so let's go ahead and what I'm going to do for this as you can see that you know my composition is already going pretty slow my viewports going to kind of slow so let's go to a medium medium level of detail so I can start freely moving around here a little bit speed here I'll create some dramatic lighting here maybe put a light up here and let's add some fall-off so inverse squared and move this up a little bit and let's give some color to this light just a little bit of yellow color add some area shadows to that some high quality area shadows and maybe bring down the intensity a little bit and let's duplicate this light and just create another weight over here this kind of be overhead light over here something like that and see what that looks like so that's good like the lights where we can get some nice shadows and these little nooks and crannies here and again since we're at a medium level of detail once we go to high you're going to be able to see those nice little details there anyways and actually with the lights here you can see that we're probably going to need to bring down the stiffness value of that smoothing to form a little bit to remove those little jagged edges much better all right so I got some lights let's create some textures shall we let's go ahead double click here and double click our new material and we'll just name this wax and let's go ahead and give like this yellow light yellow tannish kind of color let's apply that to our subdivision surface there there you go let's go back to medium level of detail just for now and let's go to reflectance let's go to our specular let's just add a little bit more specularity to this maybe increase the width a little bit more to make this looks a little bit more waxy maybe introduce a little bit of color into this maybe some orangish reddish specular something like that and let's just add a tiny tiny smidge of reflection so I'm just going to choose a Beckmann type reflection I'm just going to change the specular string just to move that down to zero we don't need any specular in this Beckman channel change the attenuation to additive so it's going to apply this as an add blending mode on top of our color Channel and we're just going to get a very low reflection value say three percent and then just give it a little bit of roughness to kind of blur out that reflection and right away we're not really going to see all that much because we don't have any in our scene to really reflect so you're not going to see much reflection action happening or occurring right now so just go ahead give a little bit more specular something like that and let's add some stuff to reflect to the scene so nice thing about area lights specifically area lights is in the tails tab let me actually go to my for up view you can see that with area lights we got these little rectangles here with these little handles that you can adjust the size of these little rectangles what these rectangles are is basically the area shape and while they show up in specular they do not show up in reflection and what we want to do is actually have these act as soft boxes and show up in reflection so I'm going to turn that on in each of these let me just select both of these lights and this is going to be a very faint thing that won't will barely show up we just render this corner and you're not going to see anything but if I change this visibility multiplier it's going to crank up the brightness of those little rectangles it's going to treat them as like a luminance solid or illuminant plane and if I render this again with that upped visibility multiplier now you're going to see those lights little soft boxes being reflected on our shape so that's looking really nice we can also adjust the size of these as we please all that good stuff looking good let's see what this looks like cool so we get a little bit of reflection just a little bit and got a little bit of blurring action going on and just adjust the lights a little bit more something like that look a little bit dramatic son like that let's go to our general tab let's just bring this light on the right down a little smidge cool all right so this is what we got right now it's looking fairly blah and that's because you know to get this nice waxy look we need some kind of subsurface scattering or light transmission that happens on our material so it allows some light to penetrate the surface or the volume of our object and make it look like it's kind of like a little bit glowy or waxing like a candle right so what we're going to do is use some like I said subsurface scattering and what you do is subsurface scattering you load that into our luminance channel so I'm just going to try a little luminance channel go to effects it's going to be cut off but it's down here subsurface scattering and what that's going to do is you can definitely see in this little material preview let me right click on this and change it to change it to a not and you get a little bit more of a sense of what's going on here let's go and we can go into our settings here and change the color to something more yellowish and I'm not going to go over a bunch a ton of these options but the main thing being the color you can change the color of what this looks like or the color of the inner transmission of the light we can change the path length which basically is how deep into your object does that light transmission go so I want it to go to too deep so maybe seven and then again we can adjust the strength of how four or how bright that light that penetrates into our object surface how far out bright that is so I'm going to use a strength of like 250 and then the only thing I'm really going to go over is in the multiple tab the only thing I'm going to do is turn on fast evaluation just so this renders a little bit faster let's just see what this looks like now so you can definitely see that adding that sub that subsurface scattering allows that light to penetrate into the surface of the volume of our object and this definitely looks a lot more like candle now remember this is not looking very defined because we're still at our medium level of detail but right now I'm just working on making sure this this candle a waxy look is looking good and the only thing I'm going to change now is index of refraction I looked up and I saw that the physical index of refraction of wax is 1.5 and basically what that does is basically makes the darker parts of the object darker so you can see that definitely if I remove this tattoo you can definitely see this kind of makes everything a little bit darker so 1.5 is a the value that I found on the interwebs and this is looking pretty good what's going let's go to our high level of detail and see what this texture looks like with our full subdivision surface stuff happening and all that good stuff so you definitely tell that we got some light transmission I think we get away with maybe brightening the the light in our scene just get a little bit more light this is looking kind of waxy I think maybe our reflection is a little bit too sharp so let's just go into a reflection maybe bring that down the two and maybe increase the roughness a little bit more let's a go to our color maybe beefed up yeah maybe make it just a little bit more and maybe make the brightness a little less and let's go to our main light here and crank up the intensity just a little bit again do another render see if our lighting is all good and with that brighter light you can definitely see that light transmission looks a lot more candidly we kind of blurred out our reflection a little bit and I think that's looking a lot nicer because you're only getting little hits right there nice little subtle hits right there but this is looking really nice the last thing I want to do is add some noise and little imperfections to make this look a little bit more organic and we can do that by going into our bump channel turning on bump going to our texture and just adding some noise and I'm going to go into our noise shader and make this noise fairly big so maybe 1000 and maybe crank up the strength to 30 and then what I want to do is with this overall big noise it's going to create little our little but big waves of bumps and noise tor object to give it a little bit more imperfection is by going and adding another level of noise that has smaller noise so we get like some little tiny tiny dents and stuff like that so I'm going to do to combine a couple of noise shaders together is by creating a layer shader and when I create a layer share I'm going to go into here and this is where I can start stacking different effects and different noises so it's almost like working in Photoshop we got multiple layers so I can go in to do that I can go into this noise shader and make some very small noise like point one and then change the seat a little bit so it's a little bit different from the original one go back into our layer shader here and choose a different blending mode so again it's like working in Photoshop with different layers and all that good stuff so we can change this to overlay we can adjust the opacity of this layer on top of the other layer and let's just see what that looks like so we added some subsurface scattering got some noise in our bump channel so you can see a little bit it's just very very subtle details but those little subtle details definitely add up and help with the realism there and speaking of realism we just let this finish up rendering here what I want to do is go and switch over from our standard renderer to our physical renderer and just make this a little bit more physically accurate over render so let me go ahead and do that actually I think one thing I could probably do is push this X forward a little bit cuz you're kind of losing that but for now I think I'm just going to leave it let's go let's go to our renderer go to physical renderer and let's just crank up these values here to say like medium that's good and I think everything else looks fairly nice and let's just go ahead and maybe add some ambient occlusion that's going to add some shading where objects touch together so I'm just going to add just a tiny tiny bit and let's go ahead and render this to our picture viewer render and the one thing I like to do is when I'm rendering something and you can tell that how faint some of the details were in in our picture viewer or in our viewport and one thing I like to do is go into the filter and let me just go ahead and reset this filter but what you can do is actually like color correct inside of your picture viewer so while you're waiting for this stuff to render you actually go in here and adjust the curves in you again I really like those dark areas to be darker so I can go ahead and see what that looks like creating a little S curve there go into individual color curves and adjust like a red and again this is a you know something keep you busy while you're rendering here can you do a little pre color correcting as this is going and you know maybe if you can't make something look good with the color correction then maybe got adjust the lighting in your scene and stuff like that if you can't try to make it look better with color correction stuff so I'm just kind of adjusting all these values maybe there's a little bit too stats too much saturation I can bring that back a little bit maybe a little bit more contrast really get more of those darker shadows in here so we're definitely get a lot more detail and we can see what this looks like before and after you can see that really pops more with the contrast than the s-curve they're just looking pretty pretty nice so just let this render a little bit so just to recap we used a combination of a plain some letters in a collision deformer to kind of push through and create the this nice little waxy type by having our letters push through our plane and use a smooth deform and create some subsurface scattering textures to create this really nice waxy composition we render this out with physical renderer did some color correcting in the picture viewer and bam we got our waxy type alright so that is how you create waxy texture really waxing anything using the collision deformer in cinema 4d so again the collision deform was the heavy lifter here we used it to have other objects pushing and indent into and deform another object so all about the collision deformer in this one we also learned how to create some waxy materials by using subsurface scattering to allow some light transmission into our material give that nice waxy candle kind of look so if you have any questions on anything I covered in this tutorial ask in the comment sections below and if you make anything using this technique I'd love to see all your waxy creations be sure to send them at me on Twitter or Facebook or in the comment section as well if you like this tutorial I'd really appreciate it if you hit the like button and as always I really appreciate all you guys out there watching and I'll see you all in the next one alright see you there bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 173,144

Keywords: Motion Graphics, Cinema 4d, Mograph, Tutorials, eyedesyn, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, cinema4d, mograph, motion graphics, c4d tut, cinema 4d collision deformer, cinema 4d wax material, cinema 4d wax, cinema 4d collision deformer tutorial, c4d collision deformer tutorial, cinema 4d smoothing deformer, smoothing deformer, collision deformer, creating wax type in cinema 4d, how to create wax type in cinema 4d, wax texture, subsurface scattering

Id: RJl7s1XwlEE

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2017