Cinema 4D Tutorial - Using Soft Body Dynamics to Create an Elastic Ribbon

hey everybody its EJ from iodine calm and today we're going to have some fun making some ribbons using soft body dynamics let's learn how all right so this is an example of what we're going to be creating today using some cool ribbon dynamics using soft body dynamics inside of cinema 4d this is set up without any keyframes whatsoever so it's a really really cool workflow to maybe help you guys out with some of your mograph projects in the future so let's jump in and find out how I did this so first thing we're going to do is just create a little scene here you can call it a scene and I'm just going to make some cylinders here and make them kind of small and I'm just going to these are just going to be kind of like rollers that will have the ribbon fall on top of and be pulled across kind of like like a conveyor belt kind of thing so there's our cylinders we can apply some happy wood textures on these something like that so there we go we got some happy wood textures and then I'll just create a simple plane object one for the four because we want this to actually collide into a floor and then one plane that's going to be the rivet now for the ribbon what I'm going to do is I want this to be fairly linear in that I don't want the ribbon to kind of go to the left of the right I kind of just want this to shoot across one plane which is the Z plane to just go straight across and not kind of fold and flop on over so let me just demonstrate what I'm getting after here so let's set this scene up for dynamics right now no dynamics is applied all of these objects right here are cylinders in our four we just renamed this for we know what the heck that is all these are just going to be colliders meaning that this ribbon is going to be collided into everything else in the scene but those objects these cylinders are not going to have forces act upon it so gravity won't be applied to it or anything like that they're just going to be bumps on a log going to get collided into by this ribbon so I'm going to right click go to simulation tags Collider body now this is very aptly named as once you apply this to objects they are just going to be collided into and for the ribbon we're actually going to use soft body dynamics now soft body dynamics is very aptly named as well where it allows the object that you apply the soft body dynamics to apply a texture real quick it's just going to calm it it's just going to kind of flop down and what controls all the soft bodies options are in here and all these Springs you're going to see that because these cylinders and all this good stuff have glider bodies on them before these cylinders you're going to see that hey our ribbon collided into those objects so this is this soft body tab of our dynamics body tag right here on this ribbon is where all the happy good stuff although all the nitty-gritty really we gooey soft body stuff happens so I have another tutorial that goes in-depth on what all these Springs are and all this good stuff so definitely check that out if you want to learn more about the soft bodies that that that phrase just sound a little bit dirty but let's go ahead and just cover really quick what we're going to be dealing with so these are Springs and we have structural shear inflection Springs structural are the springs that kind of connect the edges and then we have dampening which basically dampens the should be dampening though but it basically dampens the oscillation of those soft body Springs on each of these types of Springs here so sheer it prevents the the connections between like the angles like loop the vertical or the diagonal angles here from kind of folding over one another so those are the two type of strings Springs we're going to be dealing with today and you're going to notice that the more Springs we have the stiffer our object is so if I just put five on these and we just have this play you're going to see this a little bit especially with the flexi on down it's going to be more like a wet paper bag kind of thing it's going to give away and the other thing that controls a lot of this too as well are the segments here so if I up the segments especially on the height and then let this go you're going to see a lot more detail a lot more crazy stuff happening you're going to see our our stuff just fall to the floor and things are dancing around and this is perfect set it off the client take a vacation now this is this looks like hot garbage so what we're going to do to fix this and we want this more ribbon like and you can see what I'm talking about as far as the movement back and forth where we just want to you it's kind of like sliding off the side we don't want that kind of movement and that movement is basically being done by that flexion the flex Ian is point based and allows our object to go from side to side I'm actually going to just get rid of all the width segments altogether so we just have height segments so we're just going to get a nice straight ribbon so we can make this go again you're going to see that it's also going to fall through the floor let's uh we need to stiffen this up a little bit and give it more Springs to define the shape of this ribbon here so what I'm going to do is kind of crank up the structural and the shear to a to a bigger number like two hundred and two hundred and you're going to see that we have a little bit more detail we still have a lot of funky stuff going on and this is due to the fact that if I hit command-d and go to my project settings here there's this dynamics tag by default in the expert tab of the dynamics tag we have these steps for frame and the maximum solver iterations per step now basically this increases the calculations and helps create a more accurate dynamics calculation so when you're seeing stuff like hey this objects just falling through my floor and all this stuff it's a good bet that you need to up these two options here so this just means that there's more calculations per frame more accurate dynamic simulations so let's just go ahead and let's just crank this up to like thirty and thirty and see what happens and you're now going to see that hey we no longer have our ribbon falling through the floor and we actually get a little bit more of an accurate simulation we can definitely see the form of the cylinders a lot better as well and it's behaving like we would expect this thing to right so one thing I want to go over you can see a lot of stuff move around a lot of flailing that could be helped by opening the damping on both the structural and the shear Springs you can see that just with the structural and this year we're not actually moving side-to-side which is really great let me just let me just bring up the flexion and you're going to see what's going to happen you're going to see a lot of folding from side to side and this is the kind of thing especially right here that we don't want so when we remove the flexion it's going to stay a little bit straighter and a little bit stiffer not going to fall from side to side because that flexion is what actually enables that kind of movement so we just want straight across and actually one of my cylinders a little bit too far to the right there okay so we have some stretching going on here as you can tell is that here's our original subdivision of our plane object to our ribbon but it's getting stretched out right so let's go ahead and we need to do a little bit more tweaking here the first thing I want to do again is go back to the damping and try to get rid of all this oscillation and we can crank this up to a huge number like 2000 2000 and let this simulation go again and you're going to see that it kind of more gradually Falls and it dampens all that springy movement and kind of tightens things up a bit let's go ahead and up the structural here to like 200 you're going to see that those those little stretching you know how everything kind of sags adding more Springs to the structural will tighten that up and make everything look more like a ribbon now you can crank this up to a crap-ton percentage which is the official scientific definition of a number that high you can see that the oscillations are a bit less cool so now we can actually like start to animate this and animate it by having these rollers these cylinders just move so let's apply some animation without any keyframes using a time effector so to have objects be affected by effectors in this effector menu we actually need to place them in a fracture object that will then allow all that effector information and movement to pass on to its children objects so I'll just place these cylinders underneath the fracture and I'll just make this cylinder fracture object and then I'll go ahead and grab a time effector now time effector is super super useful I cover the time effector in a in another tutorial that if you want to check that out definitely tip that up but the time effector basically applies animation that is just kind of constant so you can see the end of this Lu little twirling around and that's all controlled by the value that you put in either rotation or position or whatever but you can see that this is just applying a constant rotation in that heading rotation so it's kind of like you're used to After Effects and that time multiplied by expression same kind of thing like this just automates animation constant animation without requiring any keyframes whatsoever so these are actually spinning in the wrong direction so let's uh well let's have these spin in the pitch and you can see that now we have these kind of rollers rolling in a direction actually going backwards so we'll go like negative to 50 you can see they're all rolling forward now you can see that nothing's really happening there's no traction for these rollers to affect the ribbon here and we can add some traction by going into our collision tab and upping the friction let's actually go into all of these and just get rid of the bounce we don't want much bounce at all we want this to act like almost like a like a like receipt ribbon of paper or something like that so what we're going to do is crank up the friction amount to like 90 you're going to see that just adding that friction is kind of creating this nice conveyor belt effect and let's actually crank this up even more and now you can really see that being passed along it's almost like you know a tank tread or something like that these little wheels are spinning and moving along our ribbon which is awesome so one thing you're going to notice is that this looks like crap if you render it it's all chunky right so the one thing we can do to help that out is go into our cloth or simulate menu go to cloth and go to cloth surface and place that ribbon underneath that cloth and going to see it's going to try to smooth that out a little bit especially if we like up these subdivisions here you can see that's going to smooth everything out really nicely we can even add a little bit of thickness if we want thick and picking that little ribbon there you go we can up the subdivision you really see that's a really dense mesh now and when we render looks fairly nice and smooth so we can start you know playing around with a lot of stuff here let's just bring the subdivisions down just for tutorial purposes and you know get this looking nice so we can I really encourage you to play around with a lot of stuff in here even aerodynamics can maybe help out something like this if it's double sided it kind of helps with how a like a flat piece of paper reacts to dynamics in the scene so you can see that adds a little bit more of a difference as its having like drag and lift forces effect this the single sided or two-sided um a little plain ribbon here so you can get some cool little effects like this we can even you know let's maybe go up here looks shorten this and maybe angle it up like that and have this fall you can see that it kind of gracefully falls gracefully gracefully Falls and you can see that what happens when I take off the aerodynamics it just kind of falls flat but this aerodynamics actually does quite a bit and it makes it more like a sheet almost so keep that in mind close the aerodynamics let's create some cool cloth ribbon effects like that and then also going into the springs here and maybe experimenting with maybe a crap-ton more sheer and structural spring something like that so you can see that the more Springs you add the more the more Springs the more information the more oscillation we get the more detail we get on soft bodies versus like 50 springs something like that so this is kind of cool just to get like a folding ribbon and again if the ribbon is not quite going fast enough we can also you really crank up the friction here a lot and you can see that's going to be pulling along you can see this ribbon slowly move in here so let's take this a little bit further so that's just like acting upon a plane here let's go ahead and do something more like this so you can see this is like the same kind of setup I have a ribbon made out of a spline with a sweep object that is just a spline with a rectangle no width so this is effectively like a flat plane going through here I'm not going to bore you with how this was set up but you can see here's my spline we all know how to make splines right and basically what I did was just kind of set up my cylinders the way I want them to I have my time effector here you can actually see that I have some cylinders going one direction and some go in the other and I also have a random effector kind of moving these around ever so slightly so what's going to happen is we're going to have this cool effect of the cylinders kind of pushing and pulling and stretching this what it will eventually be this ribbon so you can see that I put a number two where the spline is let me just put spline back in there and you can see that basically what I did was just try to keep this spline as close as possible to this the cylinders without getting too too close because if you get too close things are going to go nutty with the dynamics there's going to be some really weird collisions and stuff like that another thing I want to point out and this is very very important very important the how this is set up how the spline set up so it's set up with bezzie a and then we need enough point or enough information here let me just go to my shading lines and by default you're the spline is set to adaptive intermediate points and what's going to happen if you just leave it like that you can see all this uneven subdivisions are subdividing of our sweep object here and that is going to cause some very funky soft body dynamic regions we want to try to make this as evenly subdivided as possible so what I've kind of played around with and what I've discovered is the best intermediate point method is subdivided and then bringing the angle and the maximum length both to about five so you can see we have this nicely subdivided a little ribbon set up here and that should lessen any kind of issues so we have our wheels turning a wheel return and all we need to do now is again apply all those soft body or all those dynamic tags to all of our objects and our scenes so let's just select all of our cylinders here right click go to simulation collider body and again get rid of the bounce maybe adjust the size increment here just to give it a little bit of padding what the size increment does is gives a little bit of space for the dynamics to kind of act as a buffer so you don't have any geometry intersection or anything like that so usually like a value of like point five or even like one like some small value gives just a big enough buffer so you won't have this ribbon intersecting with the cylinders here so let's go ahead and just like we did with the other example crank up the friction to a fairly high amount and let's see everything else is good here and then we'll just go ahead and on the ribbon on the sweep object ribbon we'll just go ahead and apply a Collider body or not a Collider body testing yeah that was wrong okay we're going to go and get a soft body there we go and again we'll use the more accurate shape so moving mesh and we can do a sizing come in here as well but I don't think we'll really need that we'll just bring the bounce to zero no bouncing allowed and then friction to fifty as well so here again is where is where we make the bacon right here is all in the soft body settings here now remember in our last example we had a no flexion get out of here flexion and we have very high values a scientific crap-ton of springs and some dampening so let's just go back and just check to see what those values were so we can start with those so we had it was higher than that but two hundred two hundred and let's give that a go so we'll just do two hundred and the structual two hundred and the shear and then for the dampening crap-ton crap-ton little too much crap fun okay so now let's see what happens here you're going to see that okay we got some stuff happening we have a lot of so right here let's stop it right there you can see that all of our subdivisions that were evenly spaced out kind of falls apart and the reason for this is is we need more structural springs to stiffen all of that up because we have quite a few subdivisions we need to up our structural amount so let's craft on a note 6,000 boom you get six thousand everyone you get six thousand so let's go ahead and do this again you're going to see that by upping those spring values we now have a more consistent well a little bit more consistent type of thing going on and one thing I'm seeing is this bunching up of our ribbon so let's go ahead and maybe maybe that friction amount was a little bit too much so let's go ahead let's go 150 and actually just like we did pre obviously let's go into our dynamics project settings so again that's command D and or just go into this mode project settings and go into the dynamics tag go into the expert and again let's up these steps per frame and maximum solver iterations for frame and we're going to crank both of those both of those up to 30 and 30 now let's see what happens you know see this is going to slow it down a little bit but you're not seeing those polygons stretching or anything like that we're getting a more accurate type of thing going on here so still kind of very loose and we would expect this to be very tight around these cylinders now there's one really really cool function inside of soft body dynamics and that is this rest length right here so what this means is that the rest length of all of our Springs is a hundred percent of what they start out with if we make this bigger we're going to have wait for it a lot of stretching because what's actually happening is it's making the rest length of each of those Springs twice it's normal size so you can see all this explosion and expansion because we're basically doubling the size of those Springs now conversely if we bring the rest length to like 25 it's actually going to shrink those Springs and you're going to see it's going to would like suck in we just gave liposuction to our soft body dynamics here and you can see that this is actually really awesome this tread kind of kind of suctioned itself to this shape because we shrunk the the initial size of those Springs by using this rest length one other thing I want to cover that's very important is this elastic limit it's kind of like the rest length where this elastic limit basically tells what's the limit of these structural Springs like how much times the original size can those Springs stretch and by default it's set to a thousand percent what I actually want to do is make that zero I don't want any kind of stretching kind of like this happening here and this actually would have helped out in our original example as well if we bring this elastic limit to zero you'll get way less stretching and it'll be a lot stiffer you can see that right there all right so let's go back to our ribbon version two and one thing you're going to notice let's bring that elastic limit down to zero one thing you notice is that once it stretches down we have a there's any ribbon and we don't want a very skinny ribbon we want a fairly large ribbon so what we want to do with that is one thing I think I'm going to do is let's just test with not so much of a crap-ton of damping there so maybe something like that okay so let's go ahead and again experimenting will help a lot with this and I keep seeing right here this big gap and sometimes that's due to the original spline in maybe some of the Bezier handles so if you see something like that crop up maybe adjust some of these handles the angles something like that I've after experimenting quite a bit with this technique I've kind of troubleshooted this effect a little bit and sometimes you just need to give a little bit of love to the handles to try to iron out some of those weird issues and now you can kind of see okay we don't have that big gap here anymore but we have this big gap right down there with those wider polygons so maybe we have to adjust something in here as well so just so you know that if you see those issues pop up where you have those very wide gaps between polygons or the subdivisions just mess around with the Bezier handles you can see looks like we fix that pretty well cool so that's just a little bit of troubleshooting so let's go back to the task at hand one last thing we got to do is we need to stretch out this ribbon a little bit more so as we shrunk it using the rest length here so what we're going to do is we'll just overcompensate for the shrinking that the shrinking value which is just we shrink it by a quarter right so 25 percent of the hundred percent so what we'll do is we'll add on a quarter of the size in the Z so let's actually just you know double it and see what happens there so this is going to shrink down you can see that we made it a little bit wider so maybe let's try like 2.75 let this go and that looks a lot better that looks like almost to where our original width was of our ribbon you can see as these exist I'm expecting the best part about this milky frames you can see that this is moving along like a tank tread or something like that and it's all due to this friction on these cylinders the soft body dynamics with the with the rest length set down to 25 to suction and shrink that ribbon into place so it's almost like you know like a this would be really really nice for like a it makes me think immediately of like a timing belt on a car or something like that some kind of conveyor belt system and you don't need to do any kind of complex you know all this stuff up here where's all this to like the the connectors and the springs and force and motors and does it uh no sir and no ma'am we are just using soft body dynamics time effector some mograph and a little bit of love so one last thing you might be asking is hey EJ what the heck I can't just render out an animation from this point to that point how do I get this to just have this dynamic simulation just suction itself from the get-go to this point well I'll tell you the only thing we have to do to have that actually maintain this shape and then proceed to do the soft by a dynamic simulation from this state is by simply going over to the main dynamics a tab and just saying set initial state in what this will do is allow this current state to be the starting state you can see that everything's a little off because I still have that time effect you're going and stuff like that but you're going to see but that actually snaps back fairly quickly and now we have we don't have that big suctioning that we had previously and we have a little bit of overlap right at the top but again you can always edit that out once you go ahead and render alright so now it's your turn to create some fun soft body dynamic web ins inside of cinema 4d if you make anything based off this tutorial I would love to see what you come up with leave them in the comment section or tweet them at me Instagram and that mean Facebook me right in my face with everything that you guys are making after you watch this tutorial if you have any questions leave them in the comments section I'll get to them as quickly as I can and if you have any other questions about anything this tutorial maybe you want to see how I made that wood texture definitely leave those comments in the the OL comment section down below and if you liked this tutorial I'd really appreciate if you liked it and subscribe if you want to see more from me I would really really appreciate that so I'll see all of you guys in the next video thanks for watching everybody

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 80,557

Rating: 4.9508104 out of 5

Keywords: softbody dynamics, soft body dynamics, softbody settings tests for cinema 4d, soft body cinema 4d, softbody c4d, softbody physics, soft body dynamics tutorial, soft body dynamics cinema 4d, softbody dynamics cinema 4d, softbody dynamics tutorial, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, eyedesyn, softbody in cinema 4d, learn softbody dynamics, soft body dynamics in cinema 4d, soft body dynamics in c4d, dynamic ribbons, cinema 4d ribbons, elastic ribbons, cinema 4d tut, cinema 4d

Id: tZt6OPb8GQk

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017