Cinema 4d Vertex Map Infection growth animation and baking with fields

hi guys welcome to pigs Lafayette it's Kobe here in today's video we are going to talk about vertex maps in Cinema 4D and you are going to talk about how you will use fields to actually grow it or animate it so that it grows on and also how to bake it so that you can actually use the scrub through the timeline for it to play in real time and even how we can actually freeze it at some point whilst it's growing and all of that with keyframes so let's get into Cinema 4D and see how we do this now this is actually necessary because I think I use this technique most of the time in my tutorials and I feel all the time like there's a need for me to explain because you don't know who's watching um how the whole process is done so I think this video will be helpful so that like anytime I do something of that sort I can actually redirect somebody to watch it if you want to get the entire explanation or understanding of how the whole thing worked so that I don't keep repeating it most of the time in every video right so if you know about the vertex map and the fills I might you might not necessarily need this but maybe there are one of few things you can learn in this process this is going to be I hope this one will be a short one so let's get into Cinema 4D so I'm missing my 40 and I'm using Cinema 4D 2023.1 so in Cinema 4D 2023.1 I think you can simply right click on any generator object right you don't have to make your object editable you can simply right click on in generate object come to other tags and apply a Vertex map to your the objects and you can see it starts working and by the way you need quite a few segments in your object so that the vertex map if you want to grow it or paint it will look look good so what I've done is just a Crockery which I've actually extruded it and I've placed it in a real measure to get WhatsApp divided polygons so now you can simply see it's giving us this red shape that's a Vertex map basically right but if you are using an older version you can do this you can do it on a um generator objects so you need editable objects so to make any object editable you simply select the object and you press C it will be editable or you can click on this object here make editable and you make it editable so you can see now it's 10 to a polygon a polygon model now still a Vertex map is working but let me actually delete it so if you are using an older version which does it doesn't give you the option to add the other tags here right you can't find the vertex map what you can simply do is that come to any of this mode like let's say the point mode right and select some points oh I mean I mistakenly pin so let's select a move to to select list any of the points and come to select this select um tab here and let's see suite two set Advantage Suite you can set it to any either zero or one and you can see we have the point that we selected is set to a hundred but we don't necessarily um care because we are going to use fields to grow it but you can see now it has given us the vertex map so if you are using an older version of Cinema 40 that's how you actually do to apply the vertex map now to grow a Vertex um make it grow can simply select the vertex map and since I think it's before the R20 you can actually use fields to affect your vertex map so that's what you are going to do so I'll select the vertex map come to use Fields down here check use fields and you can see we have this freeze layer in here we can choose to let it in or we can delete it but in this case let me delete it so that I do everything from scratch so we have our vertex map and what we want to do is that we want to make like it grow so when it's red it's basically zero and when it's yellow it's basically one so we want to make it start somewhere wherever I want and grow to fill the whole um object so I can use either of these fields so I can come in here and I'll choose a spherical field right so you can see wherever the car flow touches it turns yellow so let's see we want it to start growing from this side and now grow eventually to fill the whole thing so I can move my spherical field here right and that's basically it but for it to grow on its own we have to bring in the freeze layer again so to do that I'll come into my modify layers here and I'll choose a freeze layer I'll make what I'll do is I'll bring the freeze layer usually I want it down so that my um Fields will be on top of the freeze layer so the freeze layer now because I when I brought the freeze layer in the spherical field had this selected if I even disable this aircraft you can see still the freeze layer remembers um how it was when it came in right but we we can do simply click click on this one clear and now it will clear everything so it's forgotten how the whole thing was looking like right let's go back to the model mode so that you don't see the points so now with the freeze layer if there's something we can simply click on clear so that it clears everything and everything starts affreshed so now let's bring back asteroid car field and now this working so for the um spherical field to recognize the freeze layer which is below it we need to actually change the blending mode from normal to either of this one Max auto screen let's set it to Max in this case and now let's select our freeze layer and come down to the you can see we have the layer tab here selected right and now the mode is setting on you can simply change it from none to grow and now if we hit play you can see it's growing to fill our objects so this basically it's it's nothing complicated right you can see it's growing to fill our objects now it's looking at a radius of 10 cents so you can see the radius is set to 10. it's looking at a radius of 10 centimeters and find the next polygon that it finds then it extends to it basically it sort of infected and the speed is also determined by the strength so if I reduce the strength to efficient to like 30 it will basically slow down the speed and it will take some time to grow so that's basically it so if you have a very small object a very very tiny object and a lot of polygons you probably might have to check your radius if you have a huge object with big polygons you have to check your radius right so that's basically all about the vertex map now once you are done with your vertex map um usually you can't for instance you see I can't scrub through and especially when I use the freeze you can't actually scrub through like that so to actually be able to do that one way I usually do when I'm actually cool with my vertex map and I like the animation and everything because you can't go back after um the unless you you probably save it or something so you basically have to bake your vertex map so that you can scrub through the timeline and to do that it's as simple as just right clicking on your object and you have to actually break the whole object and you bake it as Alum back right and now I'll choose okay and now take a second to bake it and now the baking is done so you can see it's created another copy of our original um um object for us so this is the first one you can hide it and this is the alembic one right and now you can see with the alembic the vertex map has been baked as well so now if I select it and move you can see we can scrub through the time so that's basically how if I want to make my vertex map I pick my object as alembic so that it stores the vertex animation in it and while even though you can see it's big dates and everything but it still can be used in other ways so for instance even though these are Alan back I can right click again and come in here and I'll add another vertex map on top of it all right and now this one is completely a new vertex everything completely new vertex map let's actually select it and rename it like vertex map to and now let's this vertex map comes to the fields Tab and you can drag in the first vertex map that we created with the alembic which is this one and now we can select um use all of these like say average to get it smoother let's see do average to smooth in our vertex animation or we can let me set it back to nearest and we can set it we can add like a cave to it so I can come in here and I'll add um a curve to on top of the vertex map right and with that I can hold Ctrl click here to create another point and I'll move this one down and I'll move this point up right and you can see now we've created some Edge of our um vertex map and you can use this to drive a lot of things so you can see this is the original one from the Olympic and this is the tip of it and you can use this and because it's being it's based on this alembic vertex map it's actually um scrubbable so I can scrub through the timeline and we can use it to do a lot of things interactively so this basically the tip of it but what if let's go back to the original one um what if I have this alembic this vertex map animated right you can see and let's see when it gets to Let's actually increase the strength to like say 70 and it gets to Maybe after it's gotten to pass this the center like this I wanted to stop here right how do I do that and it's as simple as just I'm keyframing the effect strength so let's say at frame 60 I'll set a keyframe in that frame maybe 65 um 64. our big bring the face Trends just straight back to zero and now it should stop and not go again so basically you can see a Vertex map is growing when past the middle now it gets to this point and now it freezes it stops so that's as simple as as that it's nothing complicated and after this is done you can actually use it to drive several parameters you can use it directly for a mess you can use it to drive materials you can use it to drive a lot of almost every parameter can find a way to use the vertex map to drive something so that's this something I usually do or comes up in most of tutorials I do so I feel like this one should be a special so that like if somebody doesn't understand how like things work like how to grow vertex smart like this using filter and stuff like that and you can watch this particular video or this video can be recommended so that you can actually understand how to do something like this there's so much in fact there's a lot that we can actually talk about when it comes to vertex map and that will probably take us hours to explain almost everything but this this is the basic of growing vertex map using fields and I hope this video will be useful this same technique as well can be used in other ways so not just even with the vertex map it can be used with them like let's say normal even um effectors right so far as the fields I mean you can use fields to grow everything right and even if you right click you can even do it with something like the polygons right so you can see the vertex map you have polygon selections you can actually do the same thing with it so I hope this video has been useful and this like I actually wanted this to be shorter but then it's longer than I expected but still I hope this was educated um informative and we learn something from it thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: PixelAffair

Views: 12,456

Keywords: cache, bake, alembic

Id: qpXIcOeJYo0

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023