Cloth Inflation Simulations in Cinema 4D | Cloth Stitching Effect Tutorial

the new cloth engine inside of Cinema 4D is pretty incredible and in this video I'm going to show you how you can create this beautiful cloth inflation animation we got like stitching stuff going on it's going to be a lot of fun and if you want to follow along you can find the project files I'm using in this tutorial in the description below all right so let's start setting this up so what we're going to do is basically we're just going to start out with a cube because the inflation only works with closed meshes so that's why we won't use a plane but let's grab a cube we have to make our own Cube from scratch because we don't get that free Cube that comes with blender which is unfortunate but let's go ahead and let's just bring the size down in the Y to one centimeters so we have like this flat kind of plane here and then we're just going to up the segments to 100 by 1 by 100 and so if I hit n and then B to get my grout shading you can see that we have a fairly dense mesh so that's super dense though Hit N A to go back to garage shading without lines and then what we're going to do is let's also add on fill it and we're just going to bring the subdivisions down to one so let's just go to subdivide and round the edges a little bit so they're not super sharp Now to turn this into cloth we're just going to Simply right click on our Cube go to simulation tags cloth and we're also going to navigate to to our Advanced Dynamic settings or scene wide Dynamic settings by hitting control or command D and then we're going to go to the simulation Tab and in the scene tab we're just going to turn off gravity altogether so just zero out gravity and now this should just kind of float in space like so you can see some stuff happening there like looks kind of cool from the get-go but let's go ahead and let's make this a little bit pillowy and let's like inflate it like a balloon and to do that we're going to go to the aptly name Balloon tab now what the balloon does is basically just inflates your object with pressure so I'm going to check on balloon and let's just give this a value of like 15 to start and so if we let this go you can see that over time it's going to inflate in over time is set here in this expansion time so between frame 0 and 30 that's the amount of time it's going to take for that over pressure or that inflation to fully inflate with that full value here so if we want to inflate this even quicker we can put in a value of five frames and within five frames poop that'll uh just inflate super quickly and you can see that why you don't want small values is uh yeah stuff weird stuff like that so that's the whole point of this expansion time is because you don't want stuff to just explode out so you want the nice gradual I mean that that looks kind of fun you want a nice gradual inflation so you can up that expansion number time as uh as much as you want cool so we have these little ripples let's maybe inflate this to let's say 50. and we got all this weird Ripley stuff here and especially if you have a very low expansion time with a high over pressure number you're going to get all of these types of errors or you can think of these mistakes as uh you know happy accidents or errors as happy accidents that's not necessarily what uh Bob Ross says he says mistakes but we're getting close but so let's just bring this expansion time back to 25 and to remove all these little ripples what we're going to do is basically just add more friction to the scene to just kind of slow down the energy of those particles that are driving the Sim because this new simulation system in Cinema 4D is particle based so what we can do is let's go ahead and I'm going to hit shift C and I'm just going to type in friction if I can even type and then we're going to grab friction right there and you can also find the forces up here as well if you want to do that but I like using the shift C Commander shortcut and then the strength let's let's crank this up pretty high so let's go to a strength of 100 hit play and this kind of Mellows stuff out a little bit but another thing we can do is play around with the just Global scene settings so again I'm going to hit command and control D and then in the simulation settings we can change up some of these simulation sub steps and iterations and all that kind of stuff so sub steps and iterations control how accurate your simulations are but at the same time make sure cloth seem a little stiffer now smoothing iterations will actually smooth out all those little weird undulations and any Jitter that may happen with those particles but again this will also increase stiffness so what we can do to try to like split the difference is to increase the smoothing iterations here to like let's say three but then we'll move some sub steps so we'll hopefully maintain the same amount of stiffness here and then just smooth everything out oh yeah look at that and we can even make this dampening number go up a little bit as well and what dampening or damping does is just remove particle energy faster so this will be nice smooth and we got this nice pillow that looks good enough to sleep on by the way if you are totally unfamiliar with all the updates that happened with the new cloth simulation system in Cinema 4D definitely check out my video I did for school of motion it's a pretty in-depth overview of all the updates and what the new cost system can do and also check out my seagraph 2022 presentation you can find that over on the Maxon YouTube channel I'll leave a link to both of those videos in the description below all right let's hop back in now if we wanted to make this pillow into more of like a quilt where the pillow kind of had stitching think about if you wanted to stitch in a logo or anything like that well in the olden days of c4d back in the day we would need to manually pin all of these points that would mean making this editable going into point mode and selecting each of these points manually storing the selection go up here go to store selection and then if you needed to edit that you would need to then like okay I gotta go into the this again I gotta add more points and then I gotta go into here and then I gotta update but we don't hate ourselves so we're not doing it that way we're going to do this in a much more easy and procedural and art directable way so let me go ahead and just undo that so we still have our primitive Cube here now instead of a 4D 2023 and above we can use something called Dynamic connectors and you can find them if I right click go to simulation tags connector this will allow us to connect this Dynamic object this cube to another Dynamic object so that means we can make a dynamic spline and connect points of this Cube to the dynamic spline and create that kind of stitching so you can go ahead and use any spline here or you could of course draw a spline but instead of that I'm actually going to import the Maxon logo and just use that as a spline so one thing that's really nice in the newer versions of Cinema 4D is I can just drag and drop an illustrator file in here without having to save out as illustrator 8 or anything like that and I can import this directly into Cinema 4D so you can create a vector object which will create like a spline import object or I can just uncheck that and just hit OK and just import that spline like how easy is that just drag and drop your illustrator file into Cinema 4D sometimes I feel like Cinema 4D has better integration with Adobe products than Adobe Zone products with its own products anyways but here is our line so you can do that really easily but here are some splines that I set up right away kind of now that I look at it looks like a web but I got my Maxon logo in the center and then a bunch of other splines here so what I'm going to do I'm just going to command or control C and then command or control V to paste these splines into my existing project here and then what I can do at this point maybe we can just scale up the cube here so I'm just going to go and let's make this 500 by 1 by 500 now let's also up the segments here so we have a bigger Cube let's add some more segments there and now what we can do is all these splines let me just bring them up here for just a hot second here so you can see our splines you can see our Cube let's actually make our splines a little bit bigger something like that and what I'm going to do at this point is right click on all of these splines go to simulation tag and change these to dynamic rope objects so the dynamic connector it's very aptly named it connects two Dynamic objects we need to make sure our splines are also dynamic as well now to make connections between the splines and the cube we're going to go into the dynamic connector tag we're going to go to this update live and I'm going to turn that on and you can see if I up the search radius this is how far from the original object that this tag is applied to how far it's going to search to find another Dynamic object to create a connection you can see those connections right there with the yellow and you can up the amount of connections that are made between each point as well by upping the max connections there now you're going to see that we only have connections on our splines where the spline points are now we want a lot more connections here because if we don't we're only going to have like stitches right here where these points are so we want stitches all along these splines so to do that what we're going to do I'm going to select all these splines we just need to make more intermediate points here and so instead of having adaptive what I'm going to do is change this to uniform and you can see we got this like Spyro gyroy kind of thing looking but if we up the number here what this is going to do is uniformly subdivide our spline into more points and then if we go to our search radius again and just touch this a little bit that's going to make it update so one thing I like to do is if you make any changes at all so if I like you know scale this down this is going to stretch and to update this I need to go in here and adjust this again so you're always going to have to like tweak this uh slider here so what I like to do just make this bigger again I'm going to go into here I'm just going to dock this search radius into my HUD and I'm going to right click show and just say show this always so even if I'm not like selecting this object or this Dynamic tag I can at any time adjust this to tweak it and update it okay so this is very handy and so now you can almost see these connectors forming like a stitching now what I'm going to do is I moved the splines up a little bit so I'm just going to move that to zero centimeters in the Y and then what I'm going to do is make sure that on my Dynamic connections let's just tweak this a little bit for that to update maybe add more connections here what I'm going to do is look below to make sure there's connections on the bottom of this Cube too so if we didn't and we only had like some connections on the top and bottom that's not going to have enough stitching to connect everything together so I'm just going to make the search radius just a little bit bigger something like this and now the moment we've all been waiting for we have these Dynamic connectors let's hit play and what we should see is there we go some nice inflation and this is inflating a way too much just way too much let's just bring down the over pressure to like 20 bring that down a little bit and this is looking pretty nice so remember it's taking 25 frames to fully inflate everything there so you're getting a little sense of the Maxon logo in there you can see that we also have this down on the bottom as well now to add more detail into this and more wrinkles what we can do is go to our cloth tag go to surface and let's up the bendiness here because the higher this bending number the more the object is going to be apt to bend amongst itself so let's really crank this up and now you can see we're getting a little bit more of these nice little wrinkles in there we're getting these little jaggies as well which is just the Fong tag breaking the Fong shading breaking so just to make that not break so much and look a little bit I'm just going to up the thong angle on the Fong tag and this is looking a little better now to add even more detail here what we can do is go to our Cube and let's just crank up the segments here so maybe 250 by 250 and again because we updated the amount of points we have we have to go ahead and make sure again we have this Spyro gyri thing we have to make sure we adjust the search radius now this is so awesome that we can just literally just slide this and update those connections versus like getting a point selection tag and having to update that and reselect all of our points again doing things the old way right this is just such a better workflow here so let's go in let's make sure everything looks good and let's let this go with the higher amount of subdivisions here and you can see that with the higher amount of subdivisions or segments on our Cube that we just upped we are getting much more detail in here I mean how cool is that are you not entertained here all right let me just show you a few more things but before I do I would really appreciate it if you hit the like And subscribe buttons for me doing so alerts you anytime that I come out with new content and it really helps my channel and we all know I could use all the help I can get especially because I just blew all my money on Dogecoin I mean they said it was supposed to go to the moon now you can see that the Maxon logo is kind of barely visible we're getting some nice inflation out here but what we can do to have the cloth have a little bit more give to it and almost like expand is going into our Dynamic cloth tag here and going to this target length now Target length is something that was just added to the new simulation system that existed in the old Dynamic simulation systems and what it would allow you to do is either shrink or expand your mesh Beyond its initial size in that simple thing really unleashes a whole world of possibilities that you can now do with the new simulation system because what this allows you to do is expand out allow the points that connect each point together in the cloth simulation allows it to grow a little bit so allows for a little bit of spacing so if we put in like 115 in here that means that from the initial state our cloth is going to allow our points or particles that are causing this look at that look at that already allowing this to grow to 115 percent of its original size so our cloth has a little bit more give to it and now when the cloth is growing and expanding and we're inflating it we're getting much more wrinkles here and we can go into our over pressure maybe go to 35 just to fill this out a little bit more now remember we're dealing with a bigger object as well because I increased the size of the cube so that's also going to affect the number that you'll need to plug into over pressure so let's maybe do let's I think we could try 40. let's push it here a little bit and if you think that the kind of seams here are too thick try to see if you can just get away with bringing down this search radius again you want to make sure that we're still getting the wrinkles on the bottom it looks like we are cool and let's just rewind here and so we got this going on and before I actually let this play Let's just up the max connections here as well so that's looking good if we don't have enough connections this kind of looks like that actually let's see what that looks like maybe that looks even more like a little bit of a stitching going on let that play So with the smaller search radius you're getting even more fine scenes here which looks really really nice and it looks like yep it looks like our search radius is too small because this is inflating too much and it looks like it didn't connect to the bottom there so that's a little bit of a gotcha let's go back increase the search radius just ever so slightly there you can see more stuff being added there let's go to the bottom it's looking pretty good hit play oh yeah that looks like that's looking pretty good so mind you that this is also having our splines be dynamic so if we go in here let me just hit escape to pause the simulation if I go to simulate forces turbulence I love using the turbulence Force here if I just up this to a strength of like 25 this is basically the scale of the turbulence that's using kind of like a noise so this is the scale of the noise we're using and then let's hit play here and see what this looks like so what you should be able to see here is the splines being Dynamic and moving along as well now once you start adding forces in here like the cloth looks really nice but we're losing the Fidelity and the detail of the original spline or the the stitching there because the splines are also reacting to the dynamic Force objects here like turbulence now what if we want to just stick those splines so they wouldn't move at all so what we can do is select all of these rope objects go to this mix animation Tab and if we check on with pins in this mix animation area what this is going to do is it's almost like the old follow position follow rotation in the old dynamic system where things would just stay try to stay in the original position well that's the same thing with this with pins so if we hit play now what you'll see is that our inflation will inflate the balloon will do the ballooning and then our splines will maintain will stay in the same spot here okay so they're not going to react to the turbulence or anything like that if we wanted to bring back a little bit of that uh interaction we can just bring down the influence and you'll see that now our spline points are moving a little bit so if you want to just have it stuck in place that's where you have influence at 100 but with that we got this really nice coffee inflation type of thing going on with like very minimal effort at all which is pretty incredible now one of the cool things here is if I group all of these splines together by Alter option G let's rename this spline what I can do is hit play and the cool thing about this is that because we're using separate objects and connecting them together dynamically what I can do is hit the r key and we can even animate those spline points and have all this kind of crazy stuff going on and this just really lends itself to some pretty interesting uh Dynamic Sims and again if you move stuff too fast you're going to get these like intersections and stuff so keep that in mind with this new dynamic system but I'll just go back to my spline let's just reset these coordinates down here reset transform and with that we are good and so if we wanted to say edit any of this like I'm noticing this radial line here this point isn't quite making it to the end of this Cube so I can adjust that I can make any changes I want to these splines here in I can totally do that so if I grab this point make sure this goes all the way to the edge here if I grab the Maxon logo maybe I want to move it up or something like that I can totally do that and then all I need to do is remember to again touch just a little bit of touch touch that search radius so that updates and instead of having to go into our points of anything and select more points and update Point selection tags we can literally just edit this and art direct this as much as we want by just literally moving splines editing splines updating that connector tag and voila got something looking pretty dang impressive and really cool that the setup was just incredibly easy all right I got one last trick to show you how to create that stitching effect and if you're really digging Dynamics and you want to learn more about Dynamics and a lot of the more advanced features in Cinema 4D be sure to check out my courses over at school of motion where no matter if you're learning Cinema 4D for the first time or you want to learn more advanced animation techniques like Dynamic simulations rigging care character modeling we have a course for you and be sure to use promo code I design 100 to save a hundred dollars on either of my c4d courses all right let's go Dive Right Back In the last thing I want to show you is how to create this cool stitching on effect and we're going to do a similar workflow where we kind of use this mix animation to pin things into place but the thing we're going to do is drive this mixed animation on this Cube by using a Vertex map and kind of stitching on or holding into place Bits of our cloth so what we're going to do is we're actually going to remove all the dynamic rope tags and this Dynamic connector because we're doing it all with vertex Maps Okay so let's add a Vertex map to this Cube and one of the really cool things with c4d2023 and Beyond is the ability to add vertex maps to parametric objects so if I select this Cube here shift C to bring up the commander vertex and vertex Maps hit enter you can see boom there's our vertex map now what we're going to be using to drive the vertex Maps is all of these splines here so I'm going to hit this lock button so I can select all of these splines drag and drop and uncheck that lock and then what we're going to do is just make sure I change all these blending modes to Max because I want to kind of add on the strengths of all the splines onto the ones below it and then I'm going to select all of these splines and change the distance mode from along to a long and radius and you can kind of see we got this vertex map that is kind of drawing along our spline here we can adjust that radius make it a little bit smaller so we have a thinner Stitch line there and then go down to this along curve options and basically what we're going to do here is just bring this range end down to one percent and then if we adjust this Offset you can see that this is just drawing everything on as we go from negative 100 percent to zero percent so we're just going to keyframe this and have this animated vertex map here so I'm going to go to frame 0 keyframe the offset at negative 100 go to frame 90 and then just bring this offset to zero and set a keyframe so let's actually see if this works let's go back to frame zero let's go to our cloth tag let's turn off the enable so we don't have any Dynamics we just want to see the playback of our vertex Maps animating on looking good okay cool cool cool awesome so that's working now what we can do let's turn back on our cloth simulation now what we're going to do is we are going to use this vertex map to drive the pins which again is going to stick everything into place so I'll drag and drop the vertex map into that map area there and then if I look at my vertex map at frame zero one thing you have to realize is that red means 100 strength of the vertex map so this means that at this very Point all of our cloth is going to be pinned down we actually want the inverse of that so if I go to my vertex map go to basic you can check on invert and then what's going to happen at this point let me just again turn off the cloth tag again is wherever red is happening is going to be pinning down and giving 100 strength to this mix animation here so that's exactly what we want let's go back turn this back on and make sure okay we got the mix animation vertex maps in there let's hit play and you will see if we select the vertex map you'll see that actually what happened our vertex map was starting out red right there but then it just kind of faded away so what what happened there so what's going on is that when our mesh distorts and moves away from the splines it's no longer getting any effect on that vertex map anymore because the points are deformed and they're no longer within this radius of 1.5 to these splines so it's not affecting the strength of the vertex map if we actually want to stick the vertex map to the cube all we have to do and this is very important to do is uncheck use deformed points once you do this the vertex maps are actually just going to stick now even though this object's distorting and what we should see if we let this play a little bit and I'll have the vertex map kind of do in its thing and you can see the vertex map being drawn on because we unchecked use the form points now if I select off of that vertex map we can see everything getting stitched down and pinned down and how cool is this so this is just one of the many ways you can use vertex Maps like instead of using splines to draw on the vertex maps you can actually use like a linear field so you can have the cloth inflate and wipe on and off but this is such a cool way to be able to use splines to drive vertex maps to drive this mix animation pin feature and make it look like we are stitching on or stitching down this cloth now this is just one of the many creative things you can do with this new cloth simulation system inside a Cinema 4D that you would think would only be reserved to Houdini users and all those simulations that we would see being done in Houdini that we'd be so envious of well I think we're just a little bit closer to being able to do something very similar pretty close to what can be achieved in Houdini with a fraction of the complexity so have you used this new cloth simulation system yet what are your thoughts about it did you know blender is free is this too many questions I'd be really interested to hear what you think so be sure to leave a comment below and also put any crypto investment advice you have as well because I could use it all right I'm out of here thanks so much for watching and until next time go out and make something

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 82,421

Keywords: motion design, motion graphics, motion graphics tutorial, tutorial, tips, tricks, techinque, learn, basics, design, mograph, mograph tutorials, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d, c4d tutorial, c4d cloth, cloth, vellum, houdini, 3d, cloth in c4d, cloth animation c4d, cloth cinema 4d, motion design tutorials

Id: jdwnfF_woFA

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022