Cinema 4D Tutorial - The Cluster Effect

my motion graphics what's up guys welcome back to another my motion graphics tutorial my name is claude maya and today i'm going to show you how to make this cluster effect now I made this video when I was trying out the Illuminati and if you don't know what it is I suggest you go into Maya motion graphics dot TV and go and check it out it's in the download section and it's basically an illumination setup okay it will give you great results fast renders and it's very useful but I'm not gonna waste too much time on dealing an actor right now I'm just going to show you how to make this effect now this effect is nothing new and if you're thinking ads in Traktor yeah it is an attractor but it has some more stuff and during this video I'm going to talk about some other stuff not specifically related to the attractor but some dynamics as well and who knows you learn something out of it if you already know how to work with the attractor if you don't well I guess this tutorial is made just for you so in the end we want to get the same exact result but the principles will be the same okay I'll try not to worry that much about the look and the colors and all that stuff I'll try not to focus that much on that particular part I'll try instead to explain you how to make this effect and explain you a little bit more about dynamics in cinema 4d so I hope you're ready let's stop with the chitchat and let's get started okay so here we are inside cinema4d I'm using R 15 and also using a Mac and first things first let's start by editing our render settings and preparing our project I want full HD so 1920 by 1080 Full HD like a boss and I'm going to lock ratio very useful usually I'm leaving frame range for now to current frame I'll change that later on uncheck save go into anti-aliasing and from geometry good best and filter let's go for Goss good for animation and that's it for now let's close this and let's before getting started as well increase the length of our animation to something around 600 frames okay probably too much but you know okay and well starts by creating a sphere and change the display type from gourd shading to something that has lines doesn't really matter right now so we're adding lines will be okay and I wanted I wanted to see the lines because there are more segments that I need so just decrease this value and 1212 it looks in it will work and if I press render over here the sphere will actually be spherical be rounded that's because of our render perfect is checked on by and check this and render it again then you see this low poly edges over here but we don't want that thing so make sure to check or leave this as it was I'll get this is fear with a small amount of segments and the last segments you have the easier it will be for you to for the software and for your machine to calculate the dynamics that we're going to be working later on right so be sure that we have that in mind now that's create a cube and let's resize a cube to things like 50 by 50 by 50 and I forgot to resize the sphere so let's change the radius of the sphere just something like 25 so it kinda has a little bit the same same size and let's create let's create one let's create a pyramid and again change the size to 50 by 50 by 50 and and this is okay I'm going to stick with this now what we're going to do is we're going to create copies of this object so I'm going to have for sorry for pyramids for cubes and for spheres this is like a fast way to create clones that have different colors there are other ways but this is probably the simplest and the easiest one okay so now let's create our materials so double click on here and now that we have one material let's rename this to let's call it one and the basic color I would live like a live it right there but I'll change the specular and I want to reduce the specular of bits like so so it kinda has this soft like glowing specular but really soft not very glowing actually really soft I can barely see it actually but it's Larry now if I check it and uncheck it I can see that it's there but it's really soft and who knows probably I'll change that later okay now that we have or all of our objects let's create a cloner let's create the color and bring every single object inside the corner alright now we have this over here you don't really not really what you want but no problem that's going to linear make sure you have your clutter selected and change the mode from linear to great array alright and let's change the number of the clones so from 3 let's go I don't know maybe 7 by 7 by 7 and let's increase the size of our cloner until all of the objects kind of have this spacing between them so they don't overlap basically and this seems to be enough okay and oh forget about the materials just create one Oh silly me so we have one material let's just make some three more materials ok so just click and drag with your command pressed or control parameters and let's rename these two two and edit this material over here let's edit this material by going into color and picking another one I'm going to start with pink I'm not filling that mainly today so that was job of course okay pink and notice that I'm not going over here this is way too saturated and I want this pastel not sure if this is the way to pronounce it but anyway I think you get the idea some soft colors kind of bright soft colors not very intense and alright I have one too let's create another one let's create our third color let's go for blue blue for boys so nobody gets mad and let's create another one and call it so 4 and let's take some other colors so sure why'd you say maybe grinned when I was green really looks good for now and what I'm going to do is I'll bring each of the colors the materials to each of each copy of a single object so we have four pyramids with four different colors and four cubes with four different colors and so on and so forth now instead of going from here to there from the materials to over here I can actually just duplicate the tags the color tags material tags over here by clicking and dragging with the command key or the control key and witness but video be careful because this might happen okay so make sure you only have what you are copying selected like for instance I'm copying the green so I have only two been selected and now I select the white in then I'll make the copy then I'll select the pink and then I'll make the copy and so on and so forth and voila we have clones with a bunch of colors yay looking good all right now let's make these clones fall so it's not two tags cinema 4d tags or sorry no no no what is it simulation tags rigidbody ok rigidbody let's press play and see if something is happy yes we have some gravity that's good news and let's bring this a little bit up or so i'm i'm moving my cloner upwards around don't all of your objects inside once really make any difference just bring your clone your corner little bit upwards and now we have objects that fall not very interesting again but it's something and what I'm about to do now is I'm creating um I would say a random effector to to make the objects kind of not have the same size you know to make some little bit more interests to give a little bit more interest to our scene so with the cloner selected create click random and the random what's doing now is it's actually moving the objects in the position value only so it's moving the objects 50 centimeters in the X 50 and Y 50 on the Z and this is these are the maximum values and he's like making this randomness between these values but we don't want this we actually just want the scale we want an uniform scale and we'll just increase this a bit like so we'll just tweak it a little bit like so and this will look okay let's press play again good now we're we need to have a Collider body so let's create our object that's going to collide now I've seen a lot of people doing this for this effect is the create a sphere which is not wrong you can obviously create whatever you want but for this particular effect I'm going to use a pyramid and I'm going to tell you why because the pyramid has a size is this more sharpen edges over here and there and it will help us to drag all of these objects around as it moves and rotates and scales so if I have a sphere and the sphere rotates it's basically the same that then nothing but that's it anyway we have pyramids I'm changing the size to not sure but hundred by hundred by hundreds maybe living more but I'll just scrape it up over here it's way easier this way and let's press play see what happens nothing happens so far obviously before I forget let's bring the material over here so our tournament I'm not sure if I want to see this pyramid in the end but anyway we have a material if we forget and sorry about this renderer wasn't supposed to do it but whatever now we can see that the the clones are falling but they don't touch they don't even interact with this pyramid and that's because we need to add another tag like this one not exactly like this one but very similar let's select pyramid to go into text and search for simulation tags instead of rigidbody let's go and create a Collider body okay it's working pretty cool right I know it sucks and this is because our cloner is acting as one single object so dynamics are ignoring all of these objects inside the corner and they are treating the cloner object as one single object and that's by far what we want so we need to tweak a little bit the dynamics of this object and so select the corner go into the dynamic stay and somewhere where it says individual elements set it to top level and now let's see what happens great something's happening and this already looks really cool right can actually what could actually make a snapshot of this out of this and make it like a really cool wallpaper and keep it as a gift to my mother or my mother-in-law or if you'd look like crap I could give it to something or to someone that I hate not sure anyway um things are going great so far but the objects are actually falling and I want them to stick over here and to do that I will actually need another thing that I can find over here in the simulate where is it is particles that set particles attractor sorry I kind of got a blank somewhere anyway here we have our tractor and let's press play and we can barely see any result and it's because our strength is way low and we need to increase this a lot like it's by 10 it was at 10 I'm going to try 10,000 let's check how it looks now great it looks good but you can see that are these pieces that kind of spit once in a while and we've change that we can really change that by just setting our speed limits instead of I'm not sure what's in here to two hundred thousand let's try two hundred and press play again and better way better right but you can see that some of our clothes kind of fall and that's because the strength is probably not enough so let's increase the strength from 10,000 to 50,000 like a chant and let's press play and stuff is going really good right perfect okay bring it to the top and now what we need to do is to move this pyramid around now make sure that you have your attractor inside the pyramid because right now if I'm you move the pyramid around the attractor will follow right here is their track the tracker over here and as you can see it follows the position of the pyramid and it's really really important so I'm gonna just undo this all right and we're going to create a tag and put it in here in our pyramid and this time will actually make the pyramid move around roadsides and scale randomly without adding a scenic a single keyframe and that's really cool and it saves a lot of work so a lot of time so go into text make sure they have your pyramid selected go into text and look for symbol 40 tags vibrate okay once you have your vibrates nothing really happens and let me just uncheck the cloner for a minutes nothing really happens okay so I'm pressing play and nothing's nothing there no problem we actually need to make some adjustments to this tag we do to enable position and let's press play okay so now our pyramid is moving in the X direction in the x axis in an amplitude of a hundred centimeters maximum with a frequency of 2 and this is basically the speed so the higher the value the faster it will actually go now obviously this is too fast so I just undo it enable position again and go for I don't know maybe 200 by 200 X 100 and reduce the frequency to maybe 1 not really sure I guess we'll try it that way and let's level scale as well and make sure uniform scale is on it's not really important it can actually make like so actually it will probably look interesting this way but let's check uniform scale and probably probably the frequency is too high so let's just just decreased it that a little bit and enable rotation now 30 degrees it's too too low so let's increase this value to 316 and 316 this is a lot 360 360 if there is 16 and decrease the frequency this one may be 0.5 okay and now back to the top now we can try again press play and see how it works great and was it time that we will probably want to change some stuff like maybe the size of the pyramid is too big or maybe the determine may not appear in our a nurse we may want to hide from the render our pyramid but first of all and change the size just decrease it a little bit like so we're actually sure what I did but probably will work and there you go maybe increase the strength of our tractor so going to a tractor in from 50000 let's go to 60,000 push it backwards and maybe our spin limit is set to this value because it's like it's slightly smaller than what we chose because we actually scaled the pyramid down and therefore this value also changed because our tractor is inside the pyramid anyway let's go to 200 once again and maybe the pyramid is moving way too fast so go back into the vibrating expression or vibrate tag and probably reduce the rotation to frequency to from 0.5 to 0.3 and the position on the position to maybe point 5 not really sure okay lots of stuff happening lots of stuff maybe reduce the rotation 2.25 and increase the position to 0.8 and I'm just guessing you know just change the values and see what's happening see if you like maybe increase even further the strength of our tractor to from 60,000 to 80,000 and bring this way back ok and check how it looks okay not bad I'll probably just change one or two things on the position to be bigger longer I mean so 400 by 400 by 400 and let me just take this this one good so sorry vibrates that's 40 but 400 yeah and reduce the frequency to the point four five five not sure from the top and now we have something cool went on and this is pretty cool I think and you know this kind of stuff is actually changing values and just trying out for yourself but it's important to understand that the vibrant egg will determine the the position of this pyramid okay so the position of rotation in the scale and how far does it go and how fast does it go and all that stuff and you tractor leads mainly the force that's bringing all of these objects closer to the to the determine so really need to try out and this field limit is basically something that limits the speed of the objects right so if they're moving too slow and if you want them to this looks good this looks good this looks even better than the first version I did think I'm going to live it this way now one thing I want to do I actually don't like to see in the pyramid running around I want to make it look like magic you know there's no object it's kind of you know attracting everything so let's hide our permit from the viewports and from our renders you don't have anything great running good this is looking good a bit awkward I guess all right now some other stuff what can we do to improve this now I don't want our animation to start from this like objects falling from the sky right it reminds me of a movie where a bottle of coke fell from the sky there was this guy down there that you know found the bottle or it was hit in the head with the bottle and then he thought it was the gods what's the name of the movie gods must be crazy or something like that anyway I want this so I'm going to choose the very first frame and then I want for my animation and this would be something like this the 41st frame looks good I want to start my emission from here so we're going into our dynamics body and when it says set initial state and this is under dynamics so dynamics set initial state let's click on that and once we go back into our first frame we now start our animation from here and not let's press play and there you have it let's take a look at it for a little bit longer and stuff is working good looking good I could actually have some more objects flying around yeah maybe so but it looks good for me for now okay some other stuff I like the animation I like everything I want to make the animation the dynamics I want to catch them and what does this mean it means that I can record all of this animation all of this movement into somewhere or in my a hard drive and this means that the software wants need to calculate everything every single thing every single position every time I press play which means basically it will work faster right so if I'm happy with the animation I can just make like what to print on paper right because if you see I can scroll these backwards into the front and it kind of gives us this weird effect because he has to calculate the dynamics right and for that I need to come over here to the dynamics tag again going to cash and bake object okay now one little thing before I do this there might be times where some objects overlap with some other objects and that can be fixed if you have this issue that can be fixed click command D or control different here if you're in Windows and you'll get the project settings okay go into dynamics inside dynamics you have several tanks four of them I guess going to experts and increase the steps per frame I'm going to increase this from 5 to 15 okay don't pick a huge number over here if you don't have to if objects don't overlap and if you enjoyed that you know the final outcome just don't move that this will make our animation move slower and in the final render actually it will look the same in terms of speed but the calculations will be better okay it will take longer to calculate because it's more precise and precise ease a little bit I guess it's the right words or the right yeah the right expression for it and I'm going to I'm going to do this right now just before I cash just before I records all of this animation because again it slows the process a little bit and therefore I just want to make that way before I bake the object so that's big object hope that it works there's this bar it will grow and we'll wait a second probably one sick more than 30 seconds think I'll just fast-forward this okay so it is baked okay one thing I notice is that our first frame kind of disappears I'm not really sure why there are other ways of making objects and baking these solutions but actually I'm going to stick with this and it's okay for our first frame is empty no problem we just render it from our first frame on no problem at all and now you can see that I can scrub my timeline back and forth and I have no issue of you know getting stuck somewhere because it's not calculating continuously so every single animation that's in here it's already recorded somewhere okay great now what can I do over here to make this look better let's create a camera so let's go into target cam target camera alright and I'm going to rename this camera to something a little bit more obvious like John and the camera target - John target right this is pretty obvious and let's go ahead and pick our four views and on the top left corner I want to use the camera and use John and John is the guy that's actually shooting the scene right he's the cameraman so I want to see what John is actually seeing and that's why I chose John for this job you know because John's a big guy um all right now let's on our top view move John around and try to pick a good spot for him to shoot you know can't be too close because John can be hit with some of these cubes and it might get injured and we don't want that program so probably here it will be enough let's press play and let's base a little closer I guess closer than he should might be risky yeah let's bring John a little bit farther away just a little bit like so and press play and just check how this is going pretty awkward but I kind of like the result although there's a lot of empty space on its operator and to correct that I'm going to move John and John targets little bit a bit lower like so and let's press play once again make sure you click on the view that you actually want to render or actually want to see the animation and this looks gorgeous I don't know about yourself but I really like this it was really not what I was going for in the beginning exactly but I kind of like this I'm going to stick with this right and I has this tail around it and it looks good looks really good I like that a lot I like this a lot all right now let's make a quick render out of this and here is my picture viewer on my other screen and this will probably look really awkward right great looks terrible let's just drink this down to 50% and this is a full HD but you know has no lights so it renders really fast on my machine and I'm running laps up so six seconds or maybe less than that I'm not sure six seconds yeah it looks less than that anyway it looks terrible let's create some lighting okay let's wipe the objects and I'm going to use the Illuminati for this purpose no I hope that you have installed the Illuminati already if you didn't just pause the video go to my motion graphics dot TV go into download section and you'll find the Illuminati there make sure you install the Illuminati you'll have some information right next to the file and obviously before you do everything everything everything before you do before you actually download make sure you leave a small donation you know I have ten kids and you know they they are not going to school because I'm making tutorials for free and plugins and tools and all that stuff and you know they asked one of them dad can I have um can I have can I have a soda I said no that's wrong you can't drink that and he asked why and I told him you know I don't have the money and he said yeah but I smoke cigarettes until him we haven't that's important and he said why in whatever anyway I hope you get the point so please me finally I hope you are I'm sure you are friendly make a donation and install the Illuminati and you'll find it over here in presets under presets presets over here you'll find the folder called MMG guild nazi just double click on that and drag it into our scene or right right let's go over here objects and get a little bit of space wrong yeah that's it and let's just make a quick render out of this and it looks really good I guess but we can change themselves so select Illuminati and let's change this viewport over here to go to camera let's use camera not John the fault camera is good so forget about this camera go into perspective that's what I want and change the display to something like gold chillin lines now I'm sorry if I'm going too fast but you know you can always possibly wish this little bit backwards and watch it again so start if I'm going too fast all right now I'm going over here in this viewport because I want to run around and don't touch my camera right and what I want to do is to scale it a little bit this Illuminati so make sure you select the velocity going to the Illuminati tab and just bring this over here so we have a little bit more room and what we want probably to scale a little bit our Illuminati maybe bring it a little bit down and just make a quick render over here see how it looks not bad not bad at all over here let's see how it looks from our from John say John was going oh by the way if you feel called John leave a comment that would be fun the comment and say something like hey I'm John um that would be cool right now stuff that we can change in do immunity to make this look a little bit better or a little bit different I don't want to spend too much time working on with with loominatee but you have a tutorial on that in my motion graphics dot TV you'll find it tutorial down there but we can decrease a little bit the ultra angle and the inner angle just the tiny bit and our image will be we'll get a bit darker and you can also increase the complexity like so and now it will be brighter therefore we'll need to reduce the intensity so that's the way you work with it so a little bit of this a little less than that and that's the way we do it the crease a little bit the intensity rather again by the way the Illuminati doesn't work with the interactive render region if you thank something's wrong with your machine it's not it's actually the software itself the Illuminati doesn't work with their interactive render agent okay but it can render it like this it still renders pretty fast and I think it's still good okay pretty awesome let's create a background it's kind of hard to understand our view ports without of backgrounds right it's a kind of hard to understand what's going on so let's create another material let's call it BG just because the like sting like ah it's kind of better than being dead I guess and go over into floor and pick backgrounds all right let's bring the backgrounds over the backgrounds or the BG's go to the backgrounds whatever and let's edit this material so this is the material for our backgrounds inside color let's pick gradients in our textures over to texture gradients and gradients okay now we can see how this is looking and it will look pretty awful pretty pretty awful but we can change some stuff like I'm not really sure I'm going to try it out let's go from 2d you to 2d V and now we have a vertical gradient from direct right and obviously I want I want I want this color so let's just change a little bit this I'm going to take something I'm not really sure but try to be creative you know try to create your own stuff I mean try to gather knowledge and then recreate something that looks cool or better than this now I'll try not to spend too much time on details over here I think most of our effect is already accomplished and that was the purpose of this tutorial but anyway I don't like to leave things unfinished so this looks not that bad at all and now let's just press play and try to look um for another frame like so and oh my god we could do so many things with this add some depth fields and some motion blur and I don't know what more and some speculate bloom and this and that but you know that would probably be a huge tutorial so maybe next time just tweaking these impacts and again this would be a good timing for you to to just stuff like but just a little bit the colors just a little bit them maybe the movement is already good but if you didn't like it you could change it why not right now and if I was if I was not making a tutorial how probably waste um or invest more time just to get stuff rights even do or not you could be changed a little bit it could be you know this corner over here it could be a little bit brighter and is dark Reds brownish color could be some water color and we could try that but again I'll leave all of those decisions to you so I guess that's it if you enjoy this video make sure to click the like button share it subscribe if you haven't already keep those comments flowing and all that good stuff my name is chop Maia for my motion graphics lab TV I'll see you in another video until then bye bye

Channel: mymotiongraphics

Views: 169,719

Keywords: Cinema 4D, tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, motion graphics, motion, graphics, the, cluster, effect, learn, how, to, how-to, the illuminati, mymotiongraphics, plugin, preset, Plug-in (Software Genre), how to, dinamics, attractor, works, 3D, animation

Id: jl6JZSfkLwk

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 21 2014