Cinema 4D Tutorial - Using Constraints & Deformers to Place and Deform Objects Along a Surface

hey everybody its EJ from Aya's I'm calm and today we are going to be learning how to position objects along a surface of an object conform splines to an object surface or have an object to form along the surface of another object so a lot of fun stuff we're going to be covering we're gonna even decorate a sugar skull it's gonna be a lot of fun let's dive right in alright so we're going to get to decorating our little sugar skull here we're gonna put some little cutesy flowers and hearts and all this kind of stuff on them and basically what I'm going to be demonstrating is three different ways that we can align these objects along the surface of the skull and not only just objects but how to conform splines to a shape like this little eyebrow as well as how to actually conform and Bend an object along a surface like this little cross so the first thing I'm going to do is just show you how we can constrain this flower and this heart element to the surface so typically if you wanted to put this flower on this guy you would have to physically you know or manually put this in and hope it works okay and that's just a real pain in the buttocks so what we're going to do is a way better in way easier route and that is using the constraint tag so I'm going to right click and this is my little flower nul that has everything in it all the flower petals all the other stuff and the one thing I want to keep in mind is when I'm setting this up is where that access center is because where I'm going to clamp this on to is gonna and where it's going to rotate the center of rotation is all dependent on the axis Center so we want to make sure it's in the center not like off to the side or anything like that because then our rotation when we actually clamp this on to the surface will look correctly so let's go ahead and go and get a constraint tag and the function that we want to use in the constraint tag is this clamp function and I'm going to click on clamp and then that's going to enable our clamp options and we're going to go over all these little options here but the first thing we need to set up is the actual object we want to clamp this flower on to and that as our skull so how my skull is built is we have the subdivision surface we have a symmetry object as you can see and then we have our low poly mesh here and we the the main thing I want to cover is that we don't want to use this base low poly skull mesh as the target we actually want to use the smooth Val subdivision surface version of this object for the clamp so we're actually recognized that smooth out surface versus a low poly one so we're going to drag the skull subdivision surface as the target and you're gonna see that nothing really happens aside from our distant changes and as I move that you can see that our object kind of just went away and if I turn off the cemetry you can see that our flowers inside our head what the heck so by default what's going on with why our just popped into where our brain area is is because this is set by default to the origin of our object and you can see the origins basically just the Anchor Point or the axis center of our object or a skull subdivision surface so we actually want to use a different method of what to clamp on to and if we go to the drop down we can see that we have this surface so we want to have this flower constrain to the surface so it can glide along the surface of this goal so we can actually position it correctly and if you see now we actually have our our flower in our eyeball in our eye socket and that's not good but now if I move this out you can see that as I'm moving this I'm kind of just moving this all willy-nilly like and you can see that this is clamped to the surface of our skull the subdiv surface so I'm moving this around you can see this is a lot easier than trying to manually place this but we actually have to first kind of adjust a few options so you can see that this is not aligned correctly at all this is you know lined up along the wrong axis so what we need to do is go a little bit deeper in the options here and the first thing I want to go over is this as so what we want to do it's really not taking into account the surface or the angle of Phong angles of our geometry as unless we actually turn that on and the constraint X so if we choose something like be fun normal it's going to then recognize the curved surface and now you can see that our flower is kind of bending and rotating along that surface is recognizing the curvature of our object now as well but we still have a problem and that problem is that our alignment is not set up correctly we don't want this to a-line and the y axis we actually want to align this in the z axis because that's where our anchor point is kind of pointing in if I just turn that to positive Z that's actually the wrong way so let's go to negative Z and then just move this and that'll update sometimes the constraint tag can be kind of laggy especially when using subdivision surface and generator objects and all that kind of stuff and the reason for that is is because we actually need to go into our basic tab here and we can up the priority here so right now using this base priority things can get kind of glitchy sometimes this can get moved and knocked out of place so what we want to do is kind of prevent that and since we're using generators we want to make sure that we have generators set as the priority then we just want to crank this number up you know usually 100 and something's pretty safe to do and basically what we're saying is we want the generators in this scene to do its thing and then calculate this constraint tag and the reason for that is is everything that's green that has a green icon here so the subdivision surface or the symmetry object here those things are generators and they need to calculate and kind of calculate the surface so number one smoothing out that skull and in then creating that symmetry on the other side before we actually clamp activate this clam functionality so that kind of just saves us some headaches and stuff like that so once we put this flower in the right position we can then prevent us from we can save ourselves from ourselves by like accident you know preventing us from accidentally moving that by going into the clamp options and saying lock position lock position and now we can no longer move it it's locked and so we're all good to go so now we can actually do the same thing with the heart and this has the subdivision surface as well so I'm going to go ahead and get our drink tagged blue turn on clamp again we want to make sure priority is set the generators and just crank that up and let's go ahead to our clamp options we want this to go along the surface we want this in the negative Z as well I believe and we're going to use that Fon normal again and now if we move up forgot something we need a target what ding dong so let's go ahead and get our skull subdivision surface in there now there we go and the one thing you're going to notice and this is kind of helpful depending on how thick your object is is we have this distance here so as I move this heart into place you can see that we're kind of we got some intersecting going that actually doesn't look all that bad but say you want to do it just this and actually let's let's do the positive z there we go let's say we're going in the wrong direction here so let's actually let's do negative Z again let's adjust this distance and there we go I actually move this let's rotate that now we got our heart again and we can move this forward so I think what happened was we just needed reset in and again the constraint tag is kind of finicky and a lot of that has to do with the generators and the priority and all that stuff and technically you know everything is calculated in our object manager from top to bottom so technically we should actually have both the flower and the subdivision surface actually bought at the bottom of our list and actually happening after and be below in the priority order of our skull and all that stuff but the nice thing is we have this let's go back to the heart there we go we can then offset this and have the distance change and you can see that's kind of moving it out in z space and that just gives us a little bit of pad so we don't have any intersecting going on or anything like that so that's looking good we can move this heart in a place that's looking good another thing is is a you know typically a good workflow is having this all on a null and just to kind of demonstrate let's just pretend our subdivision surface is a null and we have that clamp so if we wanted to manually kind of move this forward or going to rotate it a certain way we can have the freedom to do that independently of our clamped axis of our subdivision surface so that's just another workflow kind of handy tip that you can just have the null like group everything in a null so then you have the freedom to move this and tweak it a little bit more if you - without adjusting the the access center on your clamped object so we got that in the position we want so we're going to turn on lock position so we don't mess with it anymore there we go you're going to see that you can move it a little bit and that's just kind of constrained to the distance but we have distance zero we can't really move it so there's that so now I want to go over so that's using the the constraint tag to clamp things and position things along the surface so think of like you know if you had a tree or something that you wanted a position on a landscape or something like that this is very really handy for that the next thing I want to go over is how you can actually conform a spline to a shape so we're going to try to recreate this little eyebrow element here so there's our eyebrow spline and for this we're going to use a projection technique and how you set up projection is let's just go ahead and first let's change our color of this to something way obnoxious so we can actually see it in our scene there we go so we can see it on our over a white skull and basically we just want to move this into position so let's just uh let's first turn off this little element here so those out ix sense we're going to turn off that eyebrow and we kind of just wanna you can see how we have it just floating above our object here let's actually turn off the skull so I'm just going to put X in that selection just negate that for a while and then when we're done we can just zero out that X so we just turned off that material and basically we want to just set this up like this we want this view to look like yeah we want this if we were going to just have this be like a dynamic object and wrap along this from this camera view that would actually happen correctly so we're going to go and actually have a a function in cinema4d that allows you to do just that where it's almost like a dynamic like spline I dynamics will just let this flop in conform and just be conformed to the shape of the object underneath it using this view and we're going to go and go to mesh and spline and we're going to project this spline onto the surface of the object underneath and this works for this instance because we don't have any other objects other than that skull if there was multiple objects it would be projected on that as well because our mode is our current view and we can have different modes here we can have just certain axises axes that we can use but I just want to use this of this camera view wearing right now I'm going to hit apply and from this view you're actually not going to see anything but if I kind of rotate around you can see that it's almost like we just plastered that from this camera view and just projected it onto the surface of our skull which is really cool so then what we can do is just use a sweep and I'm just going to delete that spline that's currently there and we'll turn this on so we're going to use a sweep object and you can see that with the circle as the sweep profile we just swept a sphere or a circle along our object here and we just created this cool little eyebrow element that is now an accent piece for our little skull our spline conform to the shape of our skull and that's pretty handy so the final thing I want to do is show you how to actually have an object Bend or conform to the surface of an object so just like we did with the spline but with an actual piece of geometry here so this is going to be different from the heart and the flower because we're just using this to position this objects or these objects along the surface but it's not actually bending or conforming to the profile or the surface of the object so let's just go in to a different composition here so there's my little cross element and the key here is that we have this this is a extrude object we have a bunch of subdivisions in here due to turning on the regular grid on this and we can kind of get enough small subdivisions here set to quadrangles we also have a lot of intermediate points using the natural versus the adaptive subdivision here so we got a whole bunch of points making our geometry a little bit of a denser mesh so we have way more to geometry so when this actually does conform to the spherical surface it's going to look nice and smooth so what we're going to use for this is a deform and we have this aptly named surface to former here so to be able to get our surface de forma to work with this extrude object we can't just apply this as a child of any of these because we actually need this to be a group but I like to keep things editable so I don't want to make that editable so what we can do instead is instead of making the surface 2 former a child of an object we if we just place both objects under a null and have them in the same hierarchy here this deform will then affect this cross or this this extrude object there so this is our cross group and just like with the constraint tag on our surface deform we need to define a surface and that's going to be our sphere here and right now if I hit initialize it's it's set to projection nothing's going to happen and typically I never use projection usually it's just mapping and these mapping methods use the UVs of another object and you're going to see that right away we got some really funky stuff happening but once we go to UV mapping we can adjust the addition of U and V we can also adjust the scale and if I adjust the scale enough you can kind of see you kind of make out the it's almost like our cross got rotated and squashed vertically so what that means is that we need to then go ahead and adjust the axis rotation to get this lined up correctly so I'm going to so right now it's like laying flat we need to adjust this so it's standing upwards so I just went to axis Center mode adjust the axis rotation so it's now standing upwards and you can see that fixed our cross so now it's actually it's flat but at least it's it's laying in the right direction and not being squashed vertically so now we can go back into our options here and adjust the scale and kind of get that form and get that cross looking the way it should this also has an offset option just like our constraint tag here and you see we have a few little gaps in here and that's because we need to go into our cross and say create single object and that'll then bind the caps and the rounding and make it act as one single piece of geometry and that will get rid of our little gaps there versus the caps being treated as a entirely separate object so you can see V the the point I was trying to make with having enough subdivisions so that our our deformation our surface deformation was smooth but the problem here is you can see it's still chunky but the problem isn't with our cross object our problem actually is with the main object the surface that we're using the sphere it just doesn't have as many segments as it should be to make this object smooth you can see this is very low poly you can see the bends are happening right at each polygon edge so to just smooth everything out we simply just need to crank up the segments here you can see now with that happening we now have a nice smooth object here being deformed or conformed along the surface of our sphere so that's very handy and again if we didn't have enough geometry here as I'm like cranking up the values you can start to see that we have some Fung issues and some and some issues here as well so it's very important that we just go back to end Gonz again then we have this set up correctly and have enough subdivisions all right so we are done decorating our little sugar skull we learn a few techniques on how to actually position objects along the skull surface or any object surface one being the constraint tag set the clamp mode to be able to move objects along the surface of objects then we learned how to use the spline projection method to actually have a spline project onto the surface of an object and conform to the surface of the object and then we learned how to use the surface deform or to do that same thing and deform objects into forma to the surface of another object using the surface to former so that equips you with a lot of ways to be able to put saw objects on top of other object surfaces and create some fun stuff so if you make anything fun using these techniques be sure to tweet them at me send them to me I'd love to see what you're doing if you have any questions be sure to throw them in the comment section thanks again for watching and remember if you liked this tutorial be sure to like it smash that like button and be sure to subscribe so you can keep up to date with all the latest cinema4d training and tutorials that I pump out thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next tutorial bye everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 103,796

Rating: 4.9650145 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Graphics, Cinema 4d, Mograph, Tutorials, eyedesyn, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, cinema4d, mograph, cinema 4d constraint tag, c4d constraint tag, cinema 4d deform along surface, constraint tag tutorial, surface deformer tutorial, cinema 4d surface deformer, surface deformer, spline projection, constraint tag, cinema 4d tut, deform along a surface, c4d deformer, cinema 4d deformer

Id: q0k9X_eFWwU

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2016