Cinema 4d Volume Builder/Mesher

okay well in this video we're going to take a quick look at the volume builder object uh the volume builder volume mesher is a much more powerful version of the bool so whenever you might consider using a bool object you could also consider using the volume builder and volume measure and then there are some things that the volume builder and mesher do that you just cannot do with a bool so let's get started we're going to be taking a look at four different examples the first one is going to use a cube and a sphere i want to point out that both of these are primitive objects and we're going to start here by coming up to our volume objects and note that we have the builder and the measure so we're going to start with the builder here and i'll drag that inside my null and the volume builder can work in a couple different ways we'll be primarily sticking with the signed distance field all right and note that in order for this to work we need to either drag objects into this list or make them a child of the volume builder so either way works so we'll just put both of them in here you'll notice these look a little kind of almost pixelated and that's because the volume builder works with voxels and voxels really are just kind of the 3d equivalent of pixels so what we want to do is to adjust our voxel size this will give us more detail just like having more pixels will give us more detail now we do need to be careful with this value going too low can cause cinema 4d to crash thankfully we do get a warning when cinema 4d does think that could happen but it's not perfect so you do want to be careful all right so i can start by maybe turning this down to say five and we can see that's helping quite a bit with the resolution i could even go as low as say one and that's going to give us even more resolution okay moving on down here you'll notice that with these objects and the way they're in here we have different modes of working with them just like we do with a bool so we have union we have subtract and we have intersect okay and note that the order does matter here because if i put the sphere on top and do subtract we get something very very different okay now i'm going to put this back up here and now i want to point out that the sphere itself looks very low resolution the the number of edges and segments that make up the sphere are still quite low and really that's what the vil the volume builder is working on here the exact number of polygons we have so because this is a primitive we have two different ways of working with this one you could increase the number of segments here if i increase the segments to say 40 notice how that does improve this okay you also can select the object in the list here and depending on the type of object it is we will have different options here but with a sphere one of the options is perfect primitive and that will make it perfectly smooth for us okay and so now we have the shape and in fact let's actually do go back and subtract the sphere from it because that might be a more typical use case okay now at the moment if we render this we'll see that we don't have anything and that's because at the moment this is still voxels it's not geometry so in order to create geometry we want to place our volume builder in the volume measure okay just like that now we have our geometry if i turn on my shading mode with lines here we can see that we in fact have a lot of geometry a whole bunch okay and if we just toggle that back off you'll notice though that our edge is still a little bit yeah still has some issues still have some weird shading it's not quite as smooth as we may want and this is typical of what we get with the volume builder now there are a couple different ways we could fix this we could just keep turning down the voxel size that can also be problematic another option is our smooth we have some modifier layers here if you're used to kind of working with fields it's a very similar workflow but we have a smooth and that can help smooth things out for us now note that it is going to smooth everything since these do kind of work like adjustment layers and that it will smooth whatever is below it so for instance if i duplicated this cube and moved it up all right also note that the volume builder and measure can be quite cpu intensive so do need to think about that as well as we're working with this all right so i have something like this now and notice in my list here that the small cube i just created is above the smooth so it is not getting smooth but everything below it is including our sphere and our larger cube okay so that can be helpful depending on what we're trying to do now once we do have that smooth on here we can adjust it you could adjust the strength the iterations or say voxel distance along with the type of smoothing we have maybe that's a little bit too much so i could turn it down and that's going to give me something that is a little bit cleaner okay now this has a lot of polygons still and i really don't need all these polygons on these flat surfaces so we have a couple different ways we can work with that the first being adaptive the higher we turn this up the lower the polygon count cinema 4d is going to get and it's very similar to kind of the adaptive intermediate points type in a spline where it's only going to try and put more points where necessary and so you can see it's really cleaned up some of these flat surfaces while still keeping more detail along the curved edges all right we could adjust this as much or little as we want the problem with this is we do end up with some pretty ugly geometry okay so rather than use adaptive another option we have is we could use our remesh object now really i would want to collapse the volume measure into its own polygon object you know make editable current state to object whatever rather than drop this directly in here but now we can use the remesh to also lower the polygon count and the fact that i'm doing all of these means cinema 4d will have to update them um you know as i make little changes here there that can really slow down my system but this can also be a good way of lowering our polygon count and still preserving you know a little bit better edge flow here okay so that is our first example our second example right moving along here is going to involve using splines we can use multiple different types of objects in a volume really any kind of object you can think of as you'll see but with this one we're going to be working with a spline as well as a couple of kind of drops here and you know maybe we want to turn this into a much smoother organic looking text so we'll just start with the volume builder again drag it into our null make both of these three three objects a child of it and we can see once again really low resolution can adjust the voxel size here okay and see what we have drop in a smooth and you can see that now you have something that's a little bit smoother okay a little bit more organic natural and you know just like with a bool we could animate any of the the shapes or parts inside our volume builder so with this i could very easily animate the drops coming down a little bit if i really wanted to you know keyframe them keyframe the position that would be a great way to do it i could also maybe um animate the points as well for this but we can animate inside a volume builder along with that now another thing i want to point out with um these objects you know as i mentioned um different objects have different options here so instead of using the extrude which you know doesn't always put lines where we want them is the case with the the l notice how there's a lot fewer segments going around the letter as compared to say the o um or even the different sides of the p here uh you can have it use mesh points or in fact we don't necessarily need the extrude at all we can have our text in here okay and because this is a spline we can come in and maybe it needs to be editable there we go so i was looking for the radius and density did i were those there previously and i just missed them no they were not so definitely has to be a editable object here we have our radius we have our density turn the volume builder back on you can see nothing's really showing up so turn up the radius we can see we have our outline there which can also be helpful density can increase this as well all right is going to come down to the radius here so let's put that at 10 we're starting to fill this in now i'm concerned is as we fill this in a little bit too much we're going to lose the openings in some of our letters like i'm already seeing here but the point is we can use splines themselves directly in the volume builder even though in this case didn't quite work out as well as the extrude did okay so there is option or really example number two when it comes to the volume builder all right let's turn this all off make cinema 4ds life a little bit easier hide everything now see number three now in this one what we're going to do is going to take a look at a field inside of a volume builder because yes we can use fields inside here as well right another volume builder can drop the random field in here just so we can see what we have okay also put our sphere in there and let's see what we have i'm gonna lower the voxel field size a little bit here maybe to like two and at the moment i'm really just seeing the sphere so let's just move the random field uh above it and aha there it is so it's actually ending up ending up where our volume builder is this is our random field here it's essentially a 3d noise that has been turned into geometry so we can use any of the different options for noise types we might have right we could animate this as well and hit play and you'll see i'm not getting the best playback speed but it is in fact animating which is nice now because these are not the same spot i am going to want to fix that so let's take these guys out move the volume builder right there put everything back in there we go because we can do some really interesting things with this now that we have both of these items in here for the random field we can do subtract and now we are subtracting that random field from our sphere and getting a really interesting piece of geometry here our voxel size still relatively large before i try turning that down though maybe i do want to smooth this out a little bit okay so that's looking pretty cool maybe i will turn the voxel size down just a bit more all right and now this is what we have and we can hit play all right getting absolutely no frames per second which is fine because we can also cache any of our volume creations so i can create a cache layer and this works very similar to the smooth and that it'll work with everything below it so you can have different kind of hierarchies here where maybe you only want to cache some things perhaps you're still making adjustments to others and this also works for animations now from my experience just because you catch this doesn't mean it's going to play back at 30 frames per second but it does mean cinema 4d won't have to calculate this if you do hit the play button accidentally if you do go to a different point in time anything like that all right so there's our cache and let's for just for fun we have 30 frames let's see how long this takes i think it will take just a little bit of time okay it's actually not taking too long i will however go ahead and fast forward through this part so you don't have to wait with me all right well just finished took another minute or two uh now in our volume builder notice how everything below the cache layer is kind of grayed out we really can't do anything with it that's because all that information is being stored there and if we hit play now you can see i am getting a little bit of playback now nothing to write home about but we do see a little bit of movement here not that it's particularly interesting but that will make navigating and working cinema 4d a little bit faster as well okay so that is example three moving on to example four and with this one we're going to see one of the drawbacks or issues with the volume builder and then as best a workaround is we have so with this set up here we have a volume builder you know maybe like a little molecule type thing and the problem with the volume builder is with the geometry it creates we don't always end up with very good selections to apply multiple materials to it we don't have a really clean separation between you know these two kind of blobs or this blob the bottom blob or where our shapes intersect and part of that you know is with the volume measure it's just putting polygons where it needs them it is not taking into consideration edge flow edge loops um any of that type of stuff and you know once again the the remesh here can help a little bit with that all right this may take a second to calculate so we'll give that a chance oh let's put the builder into the measure now into the remesh and we'll see what we get we can see it's computing it here okay now if i did spend a little bit more time perhaps working with some flow spot splines to kind of direct the direction of where i wanted perhaps the the edge loops to be the direction of our edges and segments that could help all right um and this is done a little bit better job and like i said perhaps flow splines here would would help but this is where i think fields come in handy so what i'm going to do is just make this editable convert this to a polygon object don't need the remesher here and what we can do as i mentioned is use fields to make selections for us so what i need to do say all right i know i'm going to want this top section here to be a little bit different you know i want to be able to save out a nice smooth selection here so i'll select that point and come down here and choose set vertex weight and i'll set this to 100 and really what i'm after here is this vertex map so we have it applied to that one point and what we're going to do is use fields with this so fields not just for mograph not just for the volume builder really can be used in so many different places including vertex maps so with this vertex map and fields turned on what i'm going to do is create a spherical field okay in this spherical field way over at the origin well now allow me to select vertex and add them vertices and add them to our vertex map so i can get something like this which looks pretty centered overall here maybe turning the lines off will help so we can see this and we'll see just how smooth that is now one of the things i've noticed when working with fields like this and working with how smooth this is is the remapping section in here and the inner offset can really change how smooth or harsh that transition is so if we do want a harder edge we could do something like this and if we want something a little bit smoother can adjust the inner offset down a little bit more so how do we take a vertex map and use it in a selection well it depends on what render you're using i'll do this with the standard renderer just to kind of show you guys that so new standard material applied to my object here and in any of my properties whether it's color reflectance luminance i just need to come in here down to effects and choose vertex map and now i can drag in the vertex map that i want to use and right away you're seeing that it's giving me a black and white almost mask or something that i could use as a mask and depending on you know what renderer we're using we may get slightly different values um for the vertex map but if i was using a node-based material like the uber like maybe redshift i could definitely use this for a text map as a mask to you know change what colors i want where on this object with our standard material we can do something similar using a colorizer so colorizer allows us to take our existing colors from say our vertex map in this case and change what color goes where so i'll just choose let's see why don't we just go with sky and you can see how we're now able to control the colors and where they go based on that vertex map so this can be a really helpful way for applying multiple materials to a object that we created with the volume builder and that's all i got so stay tuned for the next video

Channel: Behind the Button

Views: 1,040

Keywords: Cinema 4d, C4d, Rendering, 3d, 3d modeling, volume builder, volume mesher

Id: CHfOgb-L7ow

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021