Cinema 4D Tutorial - How to Create a Cupcake Using the Mograph Module

hey everybody its EJ from I design comm and today I'm going to be showing you how I created a this cupcake and so I'm going to start out by showing you how I modeled it I'm going to show you how I model the the wrapper the actual cakey part of the cupcake itself and then the fun part the icing and then what I'm going to do is actually show you how I animated the cupcakes icing to actually twirl and actually animate on to the cupcake itself so this is a really fun animation that I had a lot of fun creating so let's just go ahead and we'll begin by modeling the elements of the cupcakes alright so let's make some cupcakes so what we're going to do is we're going to I'm going to start off by doing a little bit of modeling and we're going to create our wrapper and we're going to create the cupcake itself and then we'll create the frosting so let's begin by creating the wrapper so how I created the wrapper well is just by using a cylinder let me just kind of frame this up for you guys and I'm going to increase the radius by 50 to bring it to 100 centimeters and also what I'm going to do is go into my shading here so you can see all the lines so rappers are known for having those nice rigid kind of pointy edges and this might be enough for you if you want to have a more stylized look but what I found is I need to actually up the rotation segments and what I did was just multiply two by two to go to 72 and the key for this is to just make sure that whatever number you choose for rotation segments that it's actually an even number and you'll you'll see why very shortly so that looks good that looks like enough definition there that we can have enough ridges and sharp edges there what I'm going to do is make the cylinder editable so we can actually do some little polygon modeling and editing here now the first thing you need to do that's very important is you'll notice that when I made this editable if I just grab the top cap here and move up you can see that it's actually separated it's not fused together to the main or to the rest of our cylinder and to fix that I'm just going to select all of our polygons just by going command a once you have a polygon selected command a and then I'm going to right click and I'm going to go to optimize and what that's going to do is fuse those edges fuse the cap and the main base of the cylinder together so now that when I select the top cap there we it acts like it normally should I wish that that was a like by default behavior that you have to kind of go through this step anyways just a little gripe so now what we need to do to create the little ridges is going here and this is the fun part manually grab every other point here one by one and there are some plugins out there some scripts I'm I think nitro for D he has scripts for everything I think he has one modeling script where you can actually tell the the script will actually be able to grab like every other polygon or every other point or every third point you can actually set that up and it's all done in the script but by the time I could have went and downloaded that I just already did this so I selected every other point and what I'm going to do is first go to set selection so I saved that selection so I don't have to do all that fun stuff all over again it's not fun at all and what I'm going to do is then scale up these edges to about 105 percent right there and then what I'm going to do is do an inverse selection and select all the other points on the top there so I'm going to go to select and go to invert and you'll notice that inverts our selection but we also need to get rid of the bottom selection here so I'll just deselects and go to our top view again and with the other point selected I'm just going to scale these down about 5% so now we have this nice zig zaggy action going on now and it kind of looks like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup which is good because that's actually you know what a cupcake wrapper looks as well so what I'm going to do is just render this you can see how that looks you can see that we're not exactly looking all that great what we need to do is we're we need to change the Fong shading here so it's not so smooth and we have some nice breaks in our geometry and you can see that once we bring our Fong angle down enough we get nice sharp edges here so that's kind of important to get this nice sharp look to our cupcake and we actually need to bring up our cylinder up to the four level so I have this scene elements already here so I have the grayscale gorilla softboxes in studio rig that has a four so that's actually on our floor plane so we actually let's go to our side view and just make sure that our cupcake is resting another cupcake our cupcake wrapper is resting just on that floor plane there and if we render that should be right on the floor plane looking good and there we go so what we need to do to kind of make this look a lot more like a cupcake wrapper is go and select all the points on the top and just scale this up so we see we we have this nice taper as it goes down and that looks a lot more like a cupcake wrapper right so we have that nice little tapering action going on the final thing we need to do with this wrapper is get rid of this top cap here and what we can do is go to select go to fung break selection and this will just select polygons based on fung brakes and i'm just going to select that top bit that cap and just hit delete and now we have the empty a cupcake wrapper so we're good to go there let's just rename our cylinder to wrapper and now we can actually add some nice cupcake eat goodness to put into this a per so how I went about creating the actual muffin part of the cupcake is just by doing a little bit of box modeling and box modeling is basically modeling starting from a box or a cube and that's exactly what are we going to do and I'm not good at modeling at all so the modeling I'm going to show right now is nothing groundbreaking but it's just some very very simple modeling methods so what I'm going to do is I'm going to smooth out this cube by placing it into a subdivision surface and you can see that kind of smooths out and rounds off all the edges of our cube based on I believe it's a b-spline interpolation I could be wrong again I suck at modeling so I don't know if that's true or not I might be lying but that's kind of how it interpolate sand smooths everything out from edge to edge so to actually get more definition we need to create more edges so if I create more edges in the Y you can see that we're getting more of a cylinder and that's just due to adding more definition vertically so I'm just going to go ahead and make this cube editable and go to polygon mode and you can see that these are all of our polygons we have here and if I go ahead and just kind of let's just scale everything up a little bit just so it fills out our wrapper a little bit better and move this down and maybe scale this up a little bit what I need to do is go and just select let's go to a side view here so we can actually see everything so what I'm going to do is just shrink the bottom scale down the bottom of our muffiny cupcake so it fits inside of the bottom of the wrapper I am then going to grab the top of our muffin and scale this up a little bit and move this up a little you can see we have a little bit of intersection here so I'm just going to grab the polygon loop selection and just select those and just scale those down and then what we need to do is add a little bit more definition so we have this nice muffin top and everyone's the faith the best part of the cupcake no one cares about this crap down there and might as well just throw that out we want the muffin tops so let's make this muffin top look really good and what we're going to do is we're going to go and create a knife selection we're going to go to our knife tool we're going to set it to loop mode and we're going to go to edge mode and just add a little bit of definition to help create a muffin top so we have some more selections here I'm going to do some more loop selections actually let's go to edge selection so we have a little bit more control from edge to edge I'm just going to scale up this edge so you can see we're getting a little bit more definition of where our muffin top is and I'll select this edge right here maybe move this down slightly let's do an edge selection here just so this is all nice and arcs organically so that looks really good let's say let's just grab the top of our muffin top and just push this up a little bit give that a little bit more bit of weight on the top and then just one more minor tweak you just go into this loop selection and just kind of make it a little bit big we like big muffin tops there because again that is the best part so you can see that adjusting this with the subdivision surface if I turn this off we're just looking at blocky just blocky geometry but the subdivision surface is just smoothing everything out really nice and neatly and the more our edges are close together the sharper our geometry gets so keep that in mind but I think this is looking pretty darn good and looking pretty tasty so I'm just gonna I could tweak this a lot more but think this is good this is looking pretty good you can add more subdivisions and stuff if you'd like but I am just gonna just kind of stop right there that's that's good I think that's good we got our nice cakey muffin top right there and yeah that's looking nice and I'm just gonna throw a cupcake material on that so that's looking nice you'll see that intently rendered in the top view but you can see we have a not so smooth edges and this is due to the fact that our subdivision surface subdivision editor is set to 2 but if we move it to 3 you can see that smooths everything out and that's actually how this will render but just to keep our viewport speed quick and optimized we're just going to leave that at 2 so if it looks chunky just keep in mind that it's going to render out nice and smooth so just remember that we're just keeping our viewport nice and light so let's rename this cube a cupcake and rename the subdivision surface cupcake SS for subdivision surface and cool so now we're ready to go to the fun part we're going to create some frosting so how I created the frosting is by first going and creating a helix materi non-material helix spline and what we're going to do is just adjust the orientation so our helix is facing up and down and then we're just going to adjust the the actual helix here so it looks a little bit more like a sub like a frosting swirl so to do this I'm going to first thing I'm going to do is go to my helix object options here and just turn the end radius all the way down to zero so you can see already we have this nice tapering spiral going up and that's looking pretty good but we have no geometry yet and so we really can't get a sense of if this looks good or not and so we actually apply some geometry and actually get the bait the actual geometry of our swirl in our viewport to see how that looks so how I created the actual geometry of the spiral is by using a sweep object so I'll get a sweep object in here and I use two as a profile to sweep along that helix I used a flower spline and now you can use whatever spline you want but I found that the flower spiral gave me a nice really nice spiral II frosting look so it's like when you squeeze frosting out of a tube this it has those little nice edges depending on what kind of like cap you put on the spiral edge or you know soft-serve ice cream or anything like that so let's go ahead and just put these in our sweep and you can see that our flower spline is way too big that's a lot of frosting not that I'm you know I love frosting that's a little bit much I'll get you a stomachache so let's just scale down the flower object here and I think this looks pretty good let's adjust our helix a little bit more here just so this looks a lot mo bettah and we'll just adjust the start radius so it kind of tapers to the edge of our cupcake so that's looking good and basically these the settings that you choose for Bost your your flower spline and your helix are really going to sell how well this the frosting looks and as well as the sweep actually itself so this this element it's they're all very very important to really selling this looking realistic so let's keep adjusting our helix here and I'll just go through the options one by one here but you want to make sure that okay this is our camera view and we want to make sure that our start angle so you can see our start angles right here we want to make sure that that start angle actually is like somewhere behind where our camera's not going to see that little tapered edge because that's not really a good attractive part right there so we want to just make sure that's out of the view of the camera that you're going to be using or the camera view you're going to be looking from and then we can increase the end angle here just to give it a little bit more a nice swirl action going let's actually move our helix down so it kind of just rests on top of our cupcake muffin thing and yeah that's looking pretty good um the one thing we want to do now and these are actually really good options to play around with depending on how you want your cupcake frosting to look is the radial bias and the height bias so what the radio bias does is kind of tapers the radius depending on these settings you can see that the radial bias kind of shrinks and tapers towards the end of our helix and if we bring this down it kind of like fattens everything up so if it's at 50 it's just kind of like a linear looks like a Christmas tree kind of thing but if we bring the height or actually if we bring the radial bias down we get this nice kind of ball G more organic looking cupcake frosting thing that looks pretty good so I set my radial bias to about twenty or like 25 something like that whatever whatever you think looks good but somewhere around there's like the sweet spot literally I guess because this is frosting so what we want to do now is we'll do the same thing with and you can adjust the height if you want to the next thing I want to do is just the height bias so this is exactly like the radial bias only this is where most of the spirals are going to be kind of situated is going to be towards the bottom or is it going to be towards the end part of our helix and for this height bias I just kind of adjusted it very slightly to give everything a little bit of weight to give it a sense of gravity acting on these little spiral turns and stuff like that so I just gave it a high bias of about 45 and then the final thing I did was just bring my subdivision down to from 100 to 50 just to again speed up the viewport and I found that 50 subdivisions was was good we still had a nice definition here so I'm just gonna throw a frosting material on here and you can see that I use the gradient set the 2d you to create this nice kind of two-tone a little spiral here so we have some of a white some of it this teal color so that's looking good and another big part of the the look of your frosting is just adjusting again the inner outer radius so you can get some pretty cool looks and types of frosting depending on how you adjust your your flower profile here another big thing is just how many petals you have on your flower objects so I actually found that just having about six petals and maybe 20 for the inner radius and 40 for the outer and you can actually go in your right view and you can actually see that's the profile you can see how this kind of changes everything you can actually overdo it to get these big spirals on the outside I actually change the shading up here so you can actually see what's going on but have fun with this I had a lot of fun going bringing the outer radius down a lot so you get these nice kind of curves like that so experiment see what you like I like the 2040 combination here but yeah that that's a big part of how that's going to look is just that flower profile as it swept along here so what let's move on to the sweep options and you'll see that we actually need to add some tapering to the top and bottom of our frosting here because right now it just kind of just stops very abruptly at the top and the bottom so what we'll do let me go and actually find a point where like here you can see the top and the the start and the end of our sweep or helix spline and what I'm going to do is just create a couple I'm just holding down command and clicking creating more points on our spline editor and what I'm going to do is bring the the first point in the last point I'm just going to bring these all the way down to zero scale so you can see that that adds this nice taper to the start and the end of our helix spline here and I'm going to adjust these curves so they don't kind of have this taper this extreme taper we want it to kind of scale up fairly fast and have a sharp curve so you can see at the bottom there that looks good and let's go and adjust the top II or the end of our sweep or spiral and just give that a little bit more thickness up at the top so you can see that's looking good actually I want to see where's my camera view my camera view is here what I want to do is just go and adjust this end angle so we get to a point where we get this nice little curl and you know how Dairy Queen when they do their soft serve they have this nice little spiral of time I think that's a really nice accent element so I want to make sure that I adjust my n angle so I get a sense of that so we get this nice little spiral II a bit at the very top there looks pretty nice so again we can adjust this so you can see that when this is fat we're getting a little bit of overlapping going on with our geometry so if we scale this down just a little bit that kind of helps prevent a little bit of overlapping action going on there and can bring this down a little bit as well but again you can control a lot of how this looks and you want to make sure that this looks nice the how it tapers at the top and all that good stuff because you don't want any gaps and you can't exactly see it from I mean if you're from a top view you really need to adjust and probably make the helix editable and kind of cut all that up but from our view that's looking go we the only thing really needed to do is fill in probably that part we can adjust just adjust this scale a little bit more just to kind of cover that up so we're kind of cheating a little bit by going in this side view but I think that looks good and I think if we go from our camera view again so that's going to be the view of our camera I think that looks pretty pretty dang good so we don't have any gaps visible at our camera view we can move up this helix a little bit so we don't have this intersecting the actual cupcake so I think that's looking good I think our sweep a frosting is looking good so let's just rename this frosting and now is the actual fun part where we can animate our cupcake actually getting frosted and how I went about this was kind of similar to my tutorial on how to morph through splines more from one spline to another and if you actually link to that tutorial in the comments section but basically how that setup worked was I use a combination of matrix objects and a tracer to kind of move my matrix objects from one spline to the other and then morph between them using a variety of methods and actually the method I'm going to be using is very similar but it's a little bit different but let me just go ahead and show you how my solution for this instance so what the whole thing is morphing from one spline to the other so we need two splines so we have our end state which is this helix that we already made so I'll just rename this end and then we need a start state or a start spline where our objects kind of more from and we'll just rename this duplicated spline and just rename that start I'm going to push this start spline all the way up so it's out of the view the camera view of our of our composition here so it's up there can't see it and we're going to adjust the spiral so it's no longer a spiral and we're just going to turn down the start radius here and get rid of the and start and end angles and you can adjust the the height if you want to so maybe 250 or so but that essentially creates a straight line so now that we have our two splines we actually need some way to morph between the two and what I want the way I figured this out is what I'm going to do is actually create an intermediary object that can morph between these two states and how I did this was by creating a matrix object to clone matrices on one spline use an effector to morph between this spline position in the N spline position and I used a tracer to just connect those matrices as they kind of morph between each spline so let's actually let me actually show you how how this works so the first thing I'm going to do is create a matrix object and the matrix object is going to create matrices in a grid array and what I need to do is actually change this grid array or the mode from grid array to object and when a clone matrices onto my start position here my start spline and what I want to do is turn off loop I don't want to loop that and I'm just going to bring up the count to say about 50 just so it matches the subdivision they're just like to keep it kind of consistent so this this will be our main morph kind of main morph kind of it's really going to help create this morphing animation luzon loosen my words here so to be able to create this morph between this start position and this end start position what we're going to do is use an effector and the effector I'm going to use is a spline effector now what if splatter factor is going to do is take clones or matrices and it's going to move them from their starting point to a spline of position on a spline so we need to move these matrices from its start decision to the end position of our matrix here or of our helix so what I'm going to do is drag and drop that end spline into the end or the spline field in our spline effector and you'll see if I turn off the frosting you'll see all of our matrices just jumped from the starting position where they were on the first line and jump down to the bottom spline and you'll see that when I go to my spline effector and I just be strength we're in basically creating this morph moving our matrices on to the spline that we chose this end spline so that's well and good what you'll notice that one thing you'll notice is that our matrices aren't exactly going to the very end of our spline but they're starting at the at the start of our spline and to fix that we just need to go into our spline effector and make sure we have clamp enabled and what do that'll do is actually clamp the end or the very last matrix or a matrices or clone to the very end point of our spline so that fixes that so what we need to do now is create a new object to create a tracer that'll actually trace and create a new morphing kind of spline based off of these matrix the movements of these matrices so what I'm going to do just to help illustrate this is turn off the view of both of our start and end helix this here I'm actually going to remove that helix from our sweep object so what I'm going to do is with the matrix object selected I'm going to go to mograph and create a tracer now what we're going to do with that is it's gonna we're going to trace the matrices and we're going to turn off the vertices we don't need to trace vertices we're actually going to connect all those objects and you can see immediately when I did that notice notice once I do that I just had a my viewport there's no spline at all but once I turn turn the tracing mode from trace path to connect all objects and I update the viewport you'll see that we now have a spline that was generated from our tracer so our tracer is tracing and connecting all of our matrices and in effect creating a brand new spline but guess what now we can actually have this spline morph between those two states the start and end splines via the spline effector so that's key there so we just created a new spline that morphs by tracing the positions of the matrices so the first thing you'll notice is that we have if i zoom in here especially here we have very chunky linear interpolation between all of our matrices here and that is because our tracer object is set to linear interpolation so we can smooth this out by changing this to be spline or bezzie a and by changing the intermediate points to adaptive and just bring the angle down you can see that that kind of smooths everything out right there and that looks pretty good so now what we need to do is use this tracer to replace a to actually use be used for the sweep objects so now we're using the tracer to sweep the profile of the flower along so if I turn the sweep object back on you can see that we're now tracing or we're now sweeping the flower along that tracer spline so now when I adjust and animate the strength here we now have our frosting or our sweep moving from one point to the other so now what we have to do to finish this is just go to our fall-off change our shape from infinite and change it to linear and adjust the orientation here and as I move this up you can see I'm actually go or Ian tation positive Y you can see that we now have as the spline effectors affecting the the matrices that are on that start position and as this passes through here we're now getting this nice soft serve ice cream kind of animation here and that's looking really good making me hungry so now basically all you have to do is then a just keyframe the spline effectors fall off so let's go ahead and at frame 0 we'll just set a keyframe and that excuse me at frame 55 well just oh actually I did that the wrong way so this is going to be the star position we're not sucking up we're not doing that we need to start from right here we'll set a keyframe go to frame 55 and just go and move our spline effector all our spline effector fall-off all the way up so it clears everything and just set another keyframe and if I hit play you'll see that now we have this nice animation going on you'll notice there's a little bit of janking us going on a little bit of movement and how I got rid of that is just by going and just smoothing everything out I like to call it the like automatic sexy animation effector but what I did was go and with the matrix object selected I just used a delay effect or just to smooth everything out so the delay effect or set the blend just going to bring this up to about a strength of 65 and make sure that that is applied to the matrix object and so that's going to smooth everything out it's going to smooth out all the animation that we had from that spline effector and so now when we hit play you'll see that we know how it longer have that kind of like fidgety mist that was going on without it we also let's see yeah so I think that's pretty good the one thing I did just to let me bring in the timeline here so the one thing I did to kind of make this more interesting is you can see that it's a little smooth at the end or smooth at the beginning smooth at the end what I wanted to do was have the frosting start slow and kind of speed up towards the end so I just want to do a little animation tweak Oh animation curve tweak so I wanted the frosting to start slow let's see here and then finish fast let me just adjust the handles here so you can see that the frosting starts slow and then kind of speeds up and I think that still needs a little bit of tweaking there let's see how this looks that's a little too fast that looks a lot better so basically what I did was make these animation curve tweaks so the frosting kind of starts slow and then it speeds up so it will adds a little bit more interesting movement to this whole animation so you as designers we're always used to constant like we we see movement all the time we see objects moving in reality and if something has a constant movement that looks fake because nothing moves constantly there's always friction or inertia affecting those objects always some kind of force affecting those objects so if we just see a stock ease-in ease-out that kind of looks fake as well to our eye because you know that's just very generic robotic default ease-in ease-out but just a slight animation tweak just like I did right there it kind of helps to add a little bit more interesting movement and make it more appealing to our eyes so just remember that when you're doing animation curves sometimes just the smallest week can make the biggest difference so one one final thing that you can do and I actually didn't add its this to my final animation but I had a lot of fun with it I thought it looked kind of cool is a by adding another delay effector so I'm just going to duplicate this and what I'm going to do is use this delay effector and I'm going to set it to spring and I'm going to apply that before my smooth out delay effect oh right here and you can see that that adds a nice really cool kind of like springy animation to it that's probably a little bit too much but you can see if you play around with this that kind of adds a nice little springy bouncy effect and that you know if you're if that's what you're going for if you think that looks nice I definitely go for it I think it adds a nice little bit of dynamic movement it looks a little bit more like almost like the frosting is a little bit more rubbery actually doesn't look it doesn't look all that the appetizing but you know it could be a kind of fun stylized kind of movement so if you like that that's kind of how you can go about this by adding the spring and then a little bit of delay just to smooth out that spring a little bit so that is basically it so we created and did a little bit of modeling to create our rapper or a cupcake and then used a sweep object with with a flower spline to create our frosting and then we used a matrix object combination with a tracer to morph between different states of our splines by using the spline effector to kind of do all that and then use they delay effector to smooth out all of our animation and created our cupcake so as always if you have any questions hit me in the comments I'll try to answer them as best I can and thank you guys so much for watching really appreciate all the views and if you'll excuse me I think I need to get some cupcakes I've been this is making me really hungry I'll see you guys in the next tutorial bye guys

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 37,804

Keywords: cupcake, dessert, cake, frosting, c4d, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, motion graphics, mograph, spline effector, tracer object, Cinema 4D (Brand), cinema 4d cupcake, create a cupcake in cinema 4d, cinema 4d mograph, cinema 4d mogrpah module, cinema 4d delay effector, c4d cupcake, cinema 4d animation, make a cupcake, cinema 4d tracer object

Id: DkPlaYXE55w

Length: 37min 42sec (2262 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2015