Cinema 4D Tutorial - Speeding Up Soft Body Dynamics Using Mesh Deformer

hey everybody its EJ from a design calm and today we're gonna be talking all about the mesh deform er inside of cinema 4d and how it can help improve your workflow speed up your workflow when deforming high poly objects using soft body dynamics or skin objects so this is gonna be a little follow up tutorial to this inflate or deflate objects using soft body dynamics tutorial that I did a while ago had a lot of questions about issues you may run into with a higher dense a higher density mesh in your dynamic simulations kind of going all wacky and crazy and maybe exploding out so this tutorial is just for you guys that had trouble with that and just for those of you out there who want to speed up your soft body simulations using what's called a mesh deform ur alright so here is our pretty dense mesh rubber ducky that we're gonna be using to demonstrate the mesh deform ur and the very basics of what the mesh deform ur does if I go ahead and just grab my mesh deform ur here and actually I know these icons are pretty informative basically you have a sphere and then it's trapped in a cage right so the mesh deform a--basically works like that we have a cage that is then gonna form that little object inside of it so there's two things we need to do with the mesh deform ur the first thing is to actually apply this or place this underneath an object or if we want this to deform multiple objects we place them in the same level of hierarchy of all those objects so since I have the main rubber ducky geometry and then the eyes are separate I want to place this mesh deform ur in the same level of hierarchy so it'll affect each of these three objects if I just place this underneath the one object it's just gonna it's just gonna affect the rubber ducky geometry and not the I so want this to affect everything and then the next thing you need is a K you need to define a cage to be used to deform an object so if you're familiar with the ffd where is the fft there he is the ffd works very similar to the mesh deform so the way the ffd deformer basically works is you have a box right and you can subdivide it however much that you want so if I go and if I'm in my garage shading and you can't really see the lines here but if I make this editable you can then see the lines right and if I go to my cube click on x-ray we can actually see through that so this is basically like an FFD cage and let me just bring an FFD object into the scene here you can basically see this is exactly what we did it's a cube that we can then use to select points and basically manipulate these objects or deform the mesh as you can see that I'm doing now there FFT to former in the same level of hierarchy as all of our other objects what and that's kind of the basics of that you're using the Box you're using a cube with whatever grid subdivisions that you want to deform a mesh mesh deform works the very same way so I have this cube I'm gonna place this outside of the hierarchy this will be our box cage and I'll then define this as the actual cage I want to use and you want to make sure that your cage is kind of encompassing the entire mesh or you'll have some funky issues and that kind of is mitigated by using some of these external options here but let's just see if this works I'm gonna hit initialize and you'll see that our box cage went invisible and we can now move this and this is gonna work exactly like goofy exactly like the ffd object but the great part about this is is that we can use this boxy low poly cage to deform this object via either moving points or polygons or by using like soft body dynamics so what we can do is let's create a disk object and we'll just drag this down make this a little bit bigger and I'll right-click go to simulation tags Collider body so this is gonna be able to be collided into by other objects other dynamic objects and then we'll just make our box cage dynamic by going into simulation tags and clicking on soft bodies so the same way that we can use this box to you go in a point moon and deform stuff we can also use you know deform this box cage using soft body dynamics and that deformation will be passed into or through the mesh deform ur into these other objects and you can see that that kind of worked right the thing is is that we have very little geometry with this kind of box shape and that the stiffness is a little bit too high so if we drag or bring down the number of Springs through these three different structural shear and flexing on I goes over a lot of these soft body object options in previous tutorials so definitely check them out but basically what's happening is there's a spring between every point of this box and since there's so many few edges that the deformations not really gonna you know do too much now if we you know bring the pressure down like that you can see we got some funky stuff happening but we basically are shrinking down this object here so if I just decrease the pressure you can see that if we go a little too low we're gonna have some intersection of polygons in our our ducky just fly south for the winter but let's just go ahead and you can see that this box is not a very accurate representation of this of this rubber ducky we're losing a lot of the contours here and stuff like that so what you're gonna want to do unless it's just quick and dirty you just really want to make this really bouncy you'd bring the structural really low maybe that's good enough maybe this isn't colliding into anything else having this low poly box is perfect but what you typically want to do to get if this is colliding into something else and you need to recognize some of these contours of this shape what you would do is then do some you know box modeling basically so I'm gonna turn off my mesh deform or delete the Box cage and I'll just delete this box cage as well and I'm gonna turn on this cage that I already made and basically what I did was just you know create a cube right and then just made that editable turned on an x-ray so we can see through and then you just start you know modeling so we're just gonna select this this face and then hit MT for extrude and then just kind of scale this move this into place maybe do like a loop selection hitting you and then L to select these edges and it definitely helps to have a fair amount of modeling at least basic level modeling skills to be able to you know make this mesh but and I don't want to bore you with doing the whole thing here but I'll just kind of get this started we'll hit M T to extrude and there's our little beak and then we'll go ahead and maybe go down here on this bottom polygon let me turn off that disk object and just extrude down and just move this back so we're just doing a lot of extruder so MT again and kind of just scaling and the MT again and depending on how much detail you want with maybe if you want the tail to be super floppy maybe we'll add a couple subdivisions there because the more subdivisions the more Springs that you'll get in there so now maybe we can do like a loop cut so we'll hit ml or actually mk4 knife the M key is very helpful it just brings up this pop-up menu so mk4 knife and then I'll just make this a loop cut so I'll just loop cut it there and then we can you know bring in these couple of points here and make this follow the contour of the head a little bit better and maybe these points as well and then we can maybe do another loop cut mk4 knife and then just go straight down the middle here and this is just kind of really really half-assing it here but I just want it I just want you guys to understand that you don't need to be a good modeler to be able to make these little cages you just need to be somewhat close to the contours and again if you want to make sure that the mesh is kind of in totally encapsulating your original mesh so you can see that the heads kind of sticking out here so we'll just you know select this let's bring up a four up view which what we really should be doing you can see there's no point here to kind of pull this this polygon back so what we'll do is then do m'kay again do another loop cut and you can see that added a few more cuts that I can now you know adjust in here so I really really recommend doing at least learning about extruding and and loop cuts and stuff like that and loop selections so in addition to em to bring up a little shortcut key you can also do you and that'll bring up some of your selection options so I want to do a loop selection so I just hit you and then if I look down to L that's my loop selection so hit L and then I'll just select this little loop of points and make that again follow that beak a little bit more closely so again just some basic basic modeling I already have my cage already done here as you can see in your just very very boxy you can see that my eye is kind of not fully in but will be okay you can see a little bit a little bit of this but kind of poking out there a little bit of his tail but what we're gonna do is then use this cage and let's bring back our disk object here and then again just like we did with our box cage we'll just apply some soft body to this as well and let's turn back on our mesh hit initialize and again that'll then store that in the memory and you'll see that our little cage went to outline mode so we know that that's working and then we'll just hit play and you're gonna notice that we're getting these little streaks of where those little where our geometry was poking out of that mesh cage right so let's just turn on you can see right here that was not in the cage again the butt cheek the back of the neck all those things weren't included with the dynamic simulation so all we need to do is say you know external outside of our mesh cage let's actually just grow that by the surface there include it we'll go back to frame 0 hit initialize again and that should fix everything so now you'll see that even though our little you know the butt cheek in our eye were kind of outside the boundaries of our mesh cage using this external surface mode kind of grew that boundaries a little bit to take into account those little little bits and pieces that were outside ever so slightly of our mesh cage so you can see that we have this low poly cage with the soft body dynamics driving the deformations of our higher poly object through or via this mesh deform er which is really really awesome so now we can go a little bit crazy and maybe bring down these options here and have a deflating a deflating duck and again this is super fast super speedy and we're not having those issues with you know polygons colliding or exploding out or anything like that because we're using that lower poly mesh now I'm kind of hesitant to even show what this might look like if we actually weren't using a mesh deform er and just applied so body dynamics to this I don't want to crash my machine but let's just let's just give you a little taste of what this would look like if we apply it's soft body dynamics to just the duct here the high poly mesh I'm gonna hit play and I'm probably gonna get a spin ball of death and I am and you can see that that is just gonna chug through and be just a disaster to try to use this in real real world simulation it's just taking forever and you know hasn't even hit the floor yet and we are already seven frames in and it's taking it's just taking forever so this is the benefit of you know with a higher poly mesh to use a lower poly cage that you make really quickly you know using your you know in my case very limited modeling skills to you know create that outer mesh and using that to drive our ducky so the great part as well is that these eyeballs are separate and they're actually included in the simulation it's almost like they're stuck and connected to our duct main geometry using this mesh deform because it's deforming everything underneath want to show another example of this as well where I have a van with that's made up of all of these objects right tons of objects place them all under a connect object which basically fuses all of that geometry together treats it as one object and then I just have a very simple cage that's just a cube I didn't even make it editable have some soft body dynamics on this as well you can see that again I have very low values in the structure shear and flexing on basically that's the stiffness of the springs and again those Springs are connecting each of these edges and points together and you can see that using this mesh cage it's making this very of this this object this van that's made up of many many objects makes it very cohesive and makes it squishy so very very cool ways to apply I nice squishy dynamics or just regular you know regular dynamics to an object without you know blowing up your system with all the high poly calculations so just one more example of the mesh deform er here I have my little ice cream cones and you can see that each ice cream cone is actually just a sphere and then a bunch of little spheres underneath it and I just have a you know low poly cage here as you can see and I just have this you know dynamic simulation happening there as well where I have the low poly cage deforming the higher density mesh of these spheres and this is just a super super fast simulation so not only does the the mesh deform or help you with soft body dynamics and dynamics in general one way where it helped me out a lot is when I had like a a I care it character right so here's my I care it and it's using the skin to former or the skin object to deform the mesh now what happens if you know my clients like hey you know we actually don't want a smooth rubber ducky we want a low poly ducky so what I'm gonna do is you know I duplicated my duck removed all the eye case stuff I'll go into my polygon reduction to former place that as a child I'm just gonna hide all these objects underneath here let me just delete delete all the materials there we'll just bring this if we bring on the garage hitting lines you can see that we got this low poly and then to really make this nice and low poly we'll just remove the Phong tag which is the smoothing between those points you can see whoops you can see that now we have a very chunky mesh so what if we don't want to grieve rig everything using this geometry well we can use this ducky this high poly ducky to kind of working in reverse to deform this lower poly ducks so what I'll do is go in grab a mesh deform er place this underneath our ducky our little poly ducky and then that mesh or that cage will be the ducky that's all rigged the higher poly ducky that you can see right there just gonna hide that again and we'll again use surface just in case anything's kind of poking out hit initialized and now well actually if I move my joint goal you can see that I have my higher poly rigged ducky geometry deforming the lower poly mesh so we don't need to like re rig and re skin and re weight a lower poly mesh we can just use the existing you know ducky mesh with the skin to former and the joints to have it drive a lower poly lower poly version of that and this is very useful if you you know say wanted to still have that higher poly mesh but needed to make some edits maybe you wanted to you needed to make the the client says you know make the duct bill a little bit bigger well for that you need to you know turn off the skin maybe reweighed everything but what you could do is just again duplicate the ducky remove all this go and you know if they the client wants the bigger bigger bill we just Boop bet that doesn't look very good but you get the point there's this bigger bill and then again we'll use a mesh the former make a child get that higher poly ducky with the smaller bill can initialize and this should work perfectly so we got that modification to the duck bill even though that looks really weird but it's all driven by that original object so we didn't need to re weight or reskin or anything like that we're just driving this edited mesh geometry using that mesh deform er so actually while we're on the subject of using the polygon reduction to former that's actually a great way to do a quick in dirty cage without being a box model so let me just demonstrate that really so here's our cage box model that we actually made custom right and we'll just hide this well duplicate the main duckie mesh and we'll just delete all the materials and all that stuff and let's just hide our duckie group as well so here's our high poly mesh we'll grab our polygon reduction two former and we can just you know increase or decrease the strength of the reduction strength to get our lower poly mesh and you can see that you know this is pretty good we'll just make this all editable and we'll just right click with both objects selected go to current States object and what that's gonna do is basically just bake down that polygon reduction into a new object and this will be our low poly cage so now what we can do is if I turn back on all of our objects here I'll delete the custom box cage that we made and modeled precisely for the contours here and we'll see how this low poly cage works so again frame 0 and hit initialize we got that external surface turned on because we definitely want that active or because basically what the low poly cage is gonna do is not be totally following the contours accurately so definitely keep this on and we'll just copy and paste by holding command click and dragging copy and paste that soft body dynamics tag to a from our old cage to our new cage and just copy all the settings there hit play and then we can see what this looks like and you can see that we have a lot more geometry there than we did with our actual other cage the one thing you may notice though is because our low poly cage is made of tries you might get some pointy edges and stuff like that so what you can do to kind of mitigate any you know pointy stuff happening on your mesh is you can you know maybe place everything in a subdivision surface to smooth out that mesh a little bit more or you can just go ahead and grab a smoothing deform and make sure that's in the same of hierarchy as everything else and you can see that we're kind of smoothing everything out a little bit so sometimes you can get away with using this low poly cage especially if you're not you know deforming your object too too much so maybe I decrease or increase the stiffness of those Springs in the structural shear and all that stuff maybe crank this up even more so it's a little bit more stiff and you can see that bus by using that low poly cage this kind of works pretty good and we didn't have to do any modeling at all so definitely experiment if you can get away with a low poly cage to do your deformations go for it if not you know you might have to go to the manual way but definitely have fun experiment both using both methods hopefully that answers a lot of you guys's questions on you know speeding up and solving any issues you may run into when you know trying to follow any tutorials or trying to apply dynamics to any objects where things start exploding out polygons are exploding out and things are going really crazy during your dynamic simulation using a mesh deform ER with a low poly mesh cage will really prevent any of those crazy issues from popping up and it's gonna speed up your dynamic simulation so definitely use that use the mesh deform or get to know it make it be your best friend and make some squishy rubber duckies alright so hopefully we can inflate your brain with more knowledge of how you can try to get more out of your soft body dynamics by using the mesh deform to make those crazy high poly object simulations a little bit more under control so if you have any questions about anything I covered in this tutorial definitely leave them in the comments section below try to get to them as fast as I can and if you make anything using this tutorial using the mesh deform ER or using the deflation or inflation tutorial that I mentioned off the top I'd love to see you guys deflate all kinds of crazy stuff or a rubber duckie maybe so definitely shoot those my way share them with me on Facebook on Twitter on the instagrams always love to see what you guys are coming up with out there and as always really appreciate all of you out there watching the tutorials I'll see you all in the next one alright everybody bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 60,152

Keywords: mesh deformer, cinema 4d mesh deformer, mesh deformer c4d, cinema 4d deformers, soft body dynamics, softbody dynamics, soft body dynamics c4d, cinema 4d softbody dynamics, eyedesyn, mograph, motion graphics, cinema 4d, c4d, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, maxon, cinema4d, dynamics tutorial, c4d tut

Id: fibVrUBQhkA

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017