Cinema 4D Tutorial - Creating Soft Body Dynamic Strings

hey everybody its EJ from I design comm and today we're gonna make some silly string using a little overlooked feature in soft body dynamics let's learn how so this is what I was trying to describe and I'm just gonna I'm just decided I'm gonna call this spaghetti from the sky and what I use to create this is a probably very underused option in the soft body engine and that is called made of clones so let me just break down what that key feature does so let's just go ahead and what I'm going to do is create a cloner I'm going to create a sphere and I'm going to clone this sphere in a grid array let's just make this sphere a little bit smaller say 27 I don't know why I chose 27 I'm just feeling 27 today so what I'm going to do is just make this sphere or this grid array 10 by 10 and just increase the size here so that none of our spheres are overlapping all right so what we're going to do now is apply a soft body dynamics tag to this cloner object now typically in soft bodies you normally don't even mess with clones or anything you typically just apply it to a sphere or something like that and turn it into more of like a soft pillowy a jello like object and that's via making the springs that basically make the soft body dynamics work made up of polygons and lines now if you're not familiar with soft body dynamics please check out my intro to soft body dynamics to get a better feel for what this tutorial is going over because we're kind of building upon that knowledge of just general soft body dynamics so with soft body dynamics we have these Springs and basically these Springs are what control the gelatinous nature or the soft nature of the of your geometry and all these Springs are connected by polygons and lines but there's also another option where you can actually make clones and build Springs between those clones so what does that mean well if I change this to native clones what I can then do is let me just move this up and what I need to do to kind of just demonstrate what's going to happen is create a Collider object so what I'm going to do is just create a sphere and for this to be a Collider body I actually need to refer it to be recognized in the dynamic simulation I have to go to simulation tags and just apply a glider body to this so this is going to just be collided into it's just going to stay stationary and if I hit play so I got my soft body dynamics AG on my cloner it's made of clones I'm going to hit play and you're gonna see it just acts like a stiff rigid board and that's because we need to go a few more steps to actually prepare this soft body dynamics tag to kind of fully use this made of clones options so we need to go into our collider tag or a collision tab right here and first thing I need to do is actually say I need this soft body dynamics to be applied to the children which is basically all these spherical clones so what I'm going to do is just turn that on to apply tag the children I need to do one other step to make this made of clones work and that is to tell this that I need to use the top level of the cloner basically all those spheres as individual or to be treated as individual elements because right now it's just being treated as one stiff board and not individual spheres so I'm going to change this to top level and you can immediately see it's way more wobbly and looks pretty dang cool now right now so what's happening with this is again instead of using polygons and lines to create those soft body Springs it's actually making Springs between and connecting all these clones together which is really cool so what we can do to make this a little bit more viscous like fluid like I showed right off the top is by removing a lot of these structural Springs so basically these three types of Springs here the structural shear and flexing on a go a little bit over them in the intruder intro to soft body dynamics tutorial I did previously but basically the more Springs the more stiff the objects are going to be so if I remove Springs say I just remove Springs in the shear and flexing on you're going to see this is going to have a lot more give and this is going to act more like cloth and this is pretty much what we're going for here so we have a lot of structural Springs with no shear and no flexing and we got this really nice fluid cloth type of effect so this is kind of getting close to what I wanted the feel that I want for like fluid so let's just go ahead and what I need to do instead of using a grid array I actually need some things that's going to emit these spheres and create more like a like water from water faucet or something like that so what I'm going to do is create an emitter and actually emit these spheres so what I'm going to do is go from a grid array to object in clone spheres these soft body spheres onto the emitter so what you're going to see now I can get rid of my clewd collider sphere here so I got my emitter right here and you're going to see it's going to emit all these clones that are connect did buy those soft body Springs right so what I'm going to do is to create my spaghetti from this guy I'm just going to rotate my emitter move it up and now these Spears are just going to drop and since they're connected by those Springs they're going to kind of go all over the place because you can see that all these all these spheres are all over the place there's a lot of points being emitted a lot of particles being emitted and what I'm going to do is just bring this emitter above the cloner because in the hierarchy in the hierarchy we actually need stuff to be emitted and then we can actually clone onto it later just the level of priority here and what I want to do so this is a nice steady stream is go to my emitter options and make the emitter size way smaller so now everything's just kind of being emitted from a tiny tiny emitter right there and you can see that things are still looking kinda goofy and that's because we have too many particles being emitted at once so what I need to do is bring that down and I think what I need to do even further is remove more of those Springs because right now there's too many Springs and this these spheres are kind of bunching up together so what I'm going to do is just bring the structural down to one and you're going to see that this is way more viscous and I can actually go up to my emitter here and try to up this a little bit so as long as these fears aren't bumping into each other I can up this as much as I want you can see that if I bring the birthrate up too much you're going to see spheres kind of bump into each other right from the get-go and it creates this kind of wavy kind of look which actually you know for liquid you might be wanting that but I'm just going to make sure that this is low enough that none of these spheres are getting emitted and colliding into one another so now it's a nice except for that little first bit we have this nice stream of spheres and let's just up the speed speed a little bit to just to try to prevent any spheres from getting collided into right off the bat that's looking good let's see if I can get away with upping this one more particle per second I think that's looking good so we have a steady stream of spheres let's go ahead and create our disk to act as a floor so we can have all these spheres that are connected by this the soft body springs collide into the ground so let's go to simulation collider body and you can see right away that all these spheres are connected by a single spring so they're basically creating like a bead necklace or something like that where they're all connected together and as they fall on the floor they still maintain that springy connection so this is exactly what we want now the only thing is is that we need to create a dynamic spline from this that we can then sweep geometry on to to create our little spaghetti piece so these spheres are going to be a very important part because they have the dynamics applied to them they have the springs connected and they're going to help us generate a dynamic spline based off this so what I'm going to do is to connect all these spheres together and try to create a spline off of them I'm going to go ahead and create a tracer object now what I'm going to do is I need to place the cloner in that trace link and if I turn off my my cloner there the visibility you can see that it's actually tracing the path of all these spheres so we're getting all this pretty cool like generative almost looks like tree branches or something like that but I actually don't want to do that I just want to connect those objects so just like the cloner is connected by those soft body Springs I want to connect those objects together and create one uniform spline you can see that we're generating this kind of chunky rigid a spline and that's because I need to add some intermediate points to smooth that out so I'm just going to go and choose adaptive and let's just choose a cubic to kind of smooth that out and then I can bring the angle down you can see as I bring the angle of this down it's going to create more points and smooth out that spline so now we have one strand of spaghetti and it's got all the soft body Springs created by all these clones being connected by these Springs I want to cover one important thing because this will not work if the tracer is actually below the cloner and what I'm going to show you is just turn off the cloner you're going to see that the tracer is just emitting and it's just going straight through the ground so it's just because of the order of operations here that the tracer needs to be above the cloner for this to work so very important all right so let's go ahead and we have our nice dynamics a like spaghetti spline what we're going to do to create some geometry off of this is to use a sweep object so let's go to sweep and we're going to place our tracer spline under that sweep and then all we need to do is define a profile spline that we can sleep sweep along this tracer and I'm just going to use a circle for that so how the sweep object works is the you need to have the profile spline first and then the object to sweep it along so the circle is way big so I'm just going to shrink this down a little bit you can see now we have our nice little spaghetti now the key to trying to prevent the this geometry from intersecting with one another is to make sure that the radius is the same size of the radius of the sphere that we use to clone on so let's just do like 24 and you can see we still have a lot of intersecting so what we can do is go into let's just turn off the sweep there let's try to prevent the sphere is from kind of overlapping and creating this overlapping spaghetti string there so what we can do in our options is number one what I want to do is kind of dampen the spring movement so I don't want it so springy so I'm just going to bring up the dampening fairly high to say 500 and you can see that now it looks a little bit less viscous and what I can do to even help that a little bit more so it's not spreading out so much is by upping the friction values on both the clones so they more stick to each other so it's a little bit more sticky than fluid and viscous II and sliding all out of place and I can also up the friction on my floor object here so I'll just up that to say 90 and maybe just get rid of bounce all together so there will be no bouncing and you can see that with the friction increased on both the spheres and the floor you can see this is a little bit more piling up and if we turn on our sweep object and turn off hide our cloner you can see this is looking a lot more like what we want we still have a lot of intersecting going on so we need to work a little bit more to help prevent that and the one thing we can do to prevent that is to use and utilize this size increment on our shape field here so typically it tries to create a nice little barrier or shape collision shape and we can actually grow that to create kind of like a buffer to grow the shape of those clatter object so we can up this size increment if I crank this up very high you can see that our clones are going to stay 24 centimeters going to give a 24 centimeter buffer to each other and you can see that's way too much so maybe just the value of 5 so these these all these spheres that are being emitted will have a a buffer of 5 centimeters a little force field kind of thing around it to prevent clones from getting too close to each other and therefore preventing our object geometry from overlapping each other as well so what we can do to make this a little bit more accurate and try to help prevent more intersecting is by going and I'm going to hit command D and that's going to go into our project settings I'm just going to navigate to my dynamics options here and I'm going to go to the expert tab what I'm going to do is up these steps for frame basically this is going to make a more accurate simulation but it's also going to increase the the calculation time so I'm just going to change this from 15 to 30 and what that's going to do is help prevent intersecting and just be a more accurate simulation so I think that's looking a lot better we're having less and less intersections let me just create a make this composition longer say 300 frames and really let this the spaghetti fall from the sky here and you can you're going to see that our spaghetti just stopped and that's because our emitter by default has a stop emission at 150 so I can just make this emit throughout our whole time 1 hour project length of 300 and this will just keep emitting here alright so one more thing I want to do to help tamper down or just move this up a little bit more so it falls a little bit more so we get this piled high get that spaghetti pout high I want to dampen the the movement here even more and I can use this linear dampening to do this as well so it'll be a little bit more you'll feel a little bit more heavy and it's all about the type of dynamics you want if you want this more viscous you would definitely want to lower the friction the friction values and all that stuff but if you want it more just a little bit more like toothpaste where it's very sticky feels very sticky you would wanna up the friction on the owner and also deuce a little bit of linear dampening but not too too much so say 45 and you can see that really Tampa is down you can really feel the sticky weight of our spaghetti here so that's looking really good one other thing I want to cover is in the tracer we have a few different ways to a few different types of spline interpolation so I chose cubic and I just want to kind of go through what all of these look like because they totally change the way these are the splines represented so I choose cubic just because it's a little bit smoother some people may think that bezzie a looks a little bit better you can do a kheema or you can do a b-spline which really smooths everything out but you can really tell the difference I mean the b-spline and the bezzie a is completely different and cubic just kind of smooth things out a bit but let's just stick with bezier for the heck of it so we got this going on what i want to do is you can see what this this emits we just have a look just the chopped-off little noodle i guess you would say but let's just round this out and we can do this by creating a Phillip cap and you can see that's given a nice little bevel let's constrain and just round out the edges here by upping the steps and just increase the radius a little bit so like 23 and I'll just do the same on the via top cap there you can see and just give it enough rounding that we have nice rounded edges you can do a create single object and you'll see that that'll get rid of that UV little hitch right there and so now we have a nice rounded noodle looking good so what we can do is uh let's just this is kind of going slow what we can do is jump back into our dynamics project settings by hitting command D and we can actually go to the general tab and up the timescale and what that's going to do is speed up our simulation so this is going to move a lot faster can even do like 300 but you can see that because these spheres are being emitted there's a large gap between them as they're being emitted so if you up the time scale you're gonna want to go to the emitter and emit more of these spheres as time goes on so maybe change this to 15 let's see what that looks like so now we have a lot of spheres being emitted to connect and make that nice smooth spline we really have some spaghetti piling up really fast here now you can keep like going further with this and maybe create a Collider body maybe you want to fill up like some brain geometry so you'd go and you create a sphere just go back to frame 0 create a sphere let's do a hemisphere and just turn this upside down so we're gonna fill a bowl spaghetti and we're just going to go ahead and so this can collide into this we're gonna go and create a glider body on this as well let's go and just so it recognizes this as a hollow shape we need to change the shape from automatic which is the fastest but least accurate and it does not take into account holes or concave shapes so we need to just change that to a more accurate shape and that is static mesh that'll actually take into account this little hole this little concave shape and let's see what this looks like so we're going to fill up this bowl let's hide the visibility here there we go so now we're like filling up this bowl let's actually turn on let's go to our sphere turn on x-ray so we can see inside and we can adjust this sphere to be a little bit smaller so fill up a little bit faster so there we go we got a bowl of spaghetti getting filled up and hopefully this helps you make some really fun compositions with this some fun animations using the spaghetti from the sky and have a lot of fun with this alright so that's how you can create some silly string or spaghetti from the sky using some soft body dynamics using the clones option so if you have any questions on anything I covered in this tutorial be sure to leave them in the comment sections and if you make anything any kind of silly string or whatever you want to call it be sure to share it with me on Twitter on my website I use a comm I'd love to see what you guys are making out there and if you like this tutorial please hit the like button I'd really appreciate that and I really appreciate all of you out there watching this tutorial I'll see you all in the next one alright everybody bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 334,296

Keywords: cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, maxon, learn c4d, eyedesyn, c4d tut, mograph, motion graphics, tutorial, softbody dynamics, soft body dynamics, cinema 4d softbody dynamics, cinema 4d soft body dynamics tutorial, dynamics tutorial, c4d soft body dynamics, c4d soft body dynamics tutorial, rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics made of clones, soft body dynamics tutorial, dynamic strings, cinema 4d dynamic strings

Id: owIjKJU-jsw

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2017