Creating and Controlling Wrinkles in Cinema 4D Tutorial Part 1

hello there everybody this is Chris MIT from rocket lasso and I've got another tutorial for you today actually it's a tutorial in three parts we are going to be tackling creating wrinkles with cloth specifically these soft bodies inside of cinema 4d this started out as a question during rocket lasso live a weekly live stream I do all about answering semaphore any questions live from people in the audience it's really fun I've actually tackled this question several times before but I figured let's try again see if we can go a little deeper and we were able to go way deeper than I thought so I continued exploring it more and I want to get that knowledge out into the world so other people can make really cool things and I'd love to see how far this could be pushed so there are three parts like I said the first part is the basics of it getting it working very quickly and then kind of a way of testing everything the second part is a more practical application of it revealing an object and then the third one is the most advanced where we're going to try and cover a car with very specific art-directed wrinkles and then pull it away and each one gets a little bit longer and each one is definitely more detailed but at least check out the first one I think there's a lot of details I just wants what everybody can make from it so let's dive right on in I've got cinema 4d r21 open you'll be able to you to these techniques way back I think as long as the cinema 4d has dynamics you'll be able to do these techniques I guess when the aerodynamic Edit that's like version 13 or 14 so you should be clear or going way back now we're gonna start out by building a test scene we want to be able to play with our dynamic properties and figure out the formula that we can control at that way when we actually start putting this on the actual objects we want and it's gonna take longer to calculate we've already done lots of tests we understand how it works along those lines I will create a plane okay and B so we got two shortcuts I'll be using often here and B will show polygons and a will change our display mode just going to these different display modes shortcuts and bu will show us polygons all right subdivide this 40 by 40 on height and width segments and I don't want this just to be gray so let's make this simplest material ever make a new material by double clicking in the material manager drag over our material editor turnoff reflectance inside color create Fornell make the white color red and this shouldn't go all quite all the way the black so I'll click a little bit before the black and dragged over at dark red excellent so we got a very simple velvet color should pop really nicely from the background so there's our plane call it cloth keep it nice and clean then we need this to have something to collide with we create it we could create a floor but let's make it a little bit nicer make a cube and I want to be below the cloth so that can go to negative 100 would be exactly the numbers say negative 105 so it's a little bit further below and let's make this wider than the object let's say 600 by 600 excellent so just a little table for to hold our cloth now we don't want this cube let's even rename a table why not let's uh add a dynamic stag table simulation color lighter body immediately I'm going to tell the collision in the collision tab there's shape I don't want to be automatic even though that might automatically pick box I want to make sure that it's on box by clicking on some of these very manual shapes you can make sure that cinema 4d is very mathematically accurately calculating that these should not be intersecting so that is sets a box and what is the one well know bounce and lots of friction we'll just leave it the default of 100 and you know what I don't want any collision noise excellent now moving on to cloth let us add a simulation soft but II no bounce on that and once again very heavy friction the shape on this does have to be automatic it just means that it's going to well I guess it's not technically automatic it is a moving mesh is what's going to be assigned so we can say moving mesh that's fine just to be very definitive no collision noise we don't need that now right now you just see it's not bouncy and there's lots of friction we haven't gone too crazy yet but I were just gonna type in some very specific numbers here because I've played with soft bodies a lot and I fix the past and I've especially played with them a lot in prepping this just playing around because it's been really fun and let's just set some default numbers here and then later we'll start going into a lot of detail of what these different settings do but let's just get it begin working so under on our cloth under soft body let's grab our structural damping and put that to zero our shear and damping put that to zero flexion damping put that down to zero and then grab shear set that to five and flexion set that to five excellent now we've got our default setup the last thing we need to do to make it do something so we can actually see it happen is rest length let's say that it's got five frames let's even hit play will it play boom it falls on ground nothing too exciting it's even turn on ssao so at the time of five let's record the rest length it's at full scale at this time 100% actually you know it before I record that keyframe you hit undo or hold down control and shift and you click it'll delete the track out good you go to control D or command D and go to key interpolation and make sure my scene file is set to linear I want these to be straight straight lines when I record I don't want them curving and easing in and out so that's linear now at the time of five rest length is 100 I'm gonna give it 45 frames which means we're gonna jump up to the time of I guess 50 and then I want the scale to double so I'll type in 200% on the rest length now what the rest length does is it's just the scale of the model what is the calculation size it's very important I think at the time that we record at the beginning that the scale has to be 100% otherwise it's going to if it's not one of the percent it's going to try and scale immediately to that size and we don't want to do that we want it to slowly ease into a new one that way it can just calculate smoother excellent and you know what before we even hit play before I forget when we're doing a lot of I always feel like the dynamics of cinema runs a little bit slow it feels a little bit floaty so I like going back to our project settings control D or command D under dynamics going to our time scale here and changing that to one hundred and fifty percent so it's just a little bit faster unusual so with all that setup looking good I'm gonna keep the scene file a quick save because it's a nice place to begin cloth wrinkles excellent now with all this working let's go ahead and hit play and see what happens if I play it's going to start expanding and almost immediately receive this explosion of wrinkles in the center exactly what we're going for so I definitely want to cover the basics of this very very quickly and as we keep going we're gonna get more and more advanced and try and understand more and more what's going on but this is a great way of just instantly getting beautiful looking wrinkles as funny that were you doing cloth simulation not using the cloth dynamics but using soft body dynamics but hey what you gonna do now we can begin playing around and seeing how we can manipulate these settings some more one thing you'll notice right away is as the starts expanding even though we have a lot of friction its sliding along the ground quite a bit look how much this kind of grows on the ground before it kind of explodes in the center so let's begin by increasing our friction a little bit we can select both of the tags under collision and increase the friction now let's try jumping up to 111 just making a little bit stronger a little bit above 100 let's see if it still slides and it does so you know what let's go crazy I'm gonna double that double the friction in the 220 to keep in mind those two numbers multiplying each other so this is actually very strong this is like four times the amount of friction maybe a little more so now in at play nothing else has changed but you can see that this is having a lot more trouble sliding and where this explodes out into a bunch of wrinkles it's happening all over the place not just in the center now why is all of this happening well the straightforward explanation is all of these polygons are getting bigger but the gravity is pushing it down within the box and there's so much friction that it doesn't have anywhere to go and once it gets to a certain point they just has to go somewhere can't go down so they pop upward and they begin folding over themselves this is the basis of everything to do with wrinkles so it's a so boom instantly we've got wrinkles everything from here is just adding more control and more style to it now lots of things to talk about first of all our keep in mind we made a default plane here cinema 40 likes calculating dynamic objects can at the default scale so if you make a new scene file and you make a cube that's about the size that cinema for these dynamics like to work and this default subdivided plane is another scale that cinema is very happy with you change the scene dramatically your dynamics might behave differently so I'm trying everything kind of default scales here now continuing there's there's a lot of different details we're gonna cover here but moving onward into the cloth you know it's exploding it's moving all over the place you can see that the wrinkles are there popping out over the place and it's travelling you see it we're passing through here a little bit but I think if we zoom in closer I guess they are passing through that ground just a little bit but no worries on that coit yet we'll get there so we get all these nice-looking wrinkles there kind of traveling all over the place we see that the wrinkles are a certain scale now the next thing to talk about is kind of the speed we're calculating and the way Springs interact the more subdivisions we have the quicker the more subdivisions the slower it's going to be now we could always decrease the number of polygons could run a lot quicker in fact if I have play you can see that we're running with all the collisions happening about seven frames a second of seven eight ten depends on how many polygons are colliding with other polygons that's what slows it down so you actually see the first few frames as it's falling are very quick and then once it's ground it suddenly slows down so only where the collisions are actively happening are the calculations happening unfortunately with cloth everything's alive all the time so you don't really get to speed it up too much along those lines something that's very important to note is under soft body we're gonna be manipulating mostly the settings structural shear and flexion and those are all springs and springs are about how these individual polygons are interacting with each other the more polygons that you have if we cram more and more polygons in on the same size these elements will behave differently because imagine right now we've got flexion and that's how much something can can bend it's kind of like you can imagine like a hinge like here's one polygon one big one here and one right here and that the flexion that is the hinge in between them is saying how much can this bend how much does it want to bend now if we have in this case 40 polygons across it's like let's say that one can bend five degrees it wants to bend about five degrees and then that's five degrees and that's five degrees you have to start adding up all those polygons as they go but if we had a very low polygon objects drop this down to let's say five by five now there's only five Springs connecting between those so they won't Bend that much so the more the subdivisions are there the less flexion and shear that you need so an important element to keep in mind four of the basics now click back on this Diamond hammock body soft body excellent so we're back here additional things for us to keep in mind well you can see that's looking pretty good it explodes we get some nice-looking wrinkles a good rule of thumb I found is to keep the shear and the flexion the same number it's not it's not totally cross aboard but you good-looking defaults by doing that well now continuing to play we can see the scale of the wrinkles I've found that five by five is about as small as we can go if that's any smaller we just start getting chaos so I don't even check that I can put this to one by one and I'll see what we get so as soon as it starts exploding you're see that it's not exploding out in the it's not exploding out kind of something coherent as a wrinkle it's everything's popping up like this little pyramid clearly not something we want and if we increase this even to four it still sort of does this effect so five appears to be our minimum number so that's as small as that number can get and boom we get the wrinkles okay with that in mind what else can we do to potentially get smaller wrinkles from your how much detail can we extract out of this well something I found is structural can be pretty important but there's a there's a push and pull on here if we start increasing the structural I'm gonna double it what structural is doing is saying how much can these polygons stretch it can get longer on kind of the height or the width is what it's doing so as we increase structural it's saying these cannot stretch if there's less stretch then they can't move away as far and you're gonna see this explode and they're gonna start Wiggly even more honestly it seems like these became these became bigger these are bigger wrinkles so let's try to do the opposite drop this way down I'm gonna go to yo do 20 so a tenth of what we just had do the exact same simulation again and now let's see what we get actually but with the structure being so low you see it's taking a long time for the wrinkles to be created but when the wrinkles are created you can see that they they are a lot smaller they're almost a lot more detailed and the reason for that is these individual polygons are allowed to stretch and if there are lots of stretch then they can kind of compress into a smaller space and they are allowed to kind of twist around each other a little bit more and we get more detail now something to be clear with is yes this looks very rough right now but any point we can create a subdivision surface and drop this inside and you're gonna see that these will look like very very nice-looking clumps of wrinkles very random and not even much in the way of a distinct pattern here but very important to note is the subdivision surface can mess up the simulation calculations in fact it can entirely disappear let's see if we can make this happen I'm gonna just hit play and it's gonna take a while we saw it took some time to explode before but eventually something should happen and boom you see something just popped in that's the subdivision surface doing that to us so we're not gonna do the calculation that's inside a subdivision surface even though we will use it later on once we've baked it and I was gonna say something else and now I can't remember what it was gonna be but I'm sure we'll get to it so let's keep an eye on the polygons and continue tinkering around so those now have the ability to compress and stretch a little bit before they're being forced to explode we want to keep that in mind but I you know what to tell you through this I don't want the structural to be this low I want the polygons to maintain their scale but there should be kind of two different modes you're gonna keep in your head and it should be creating the wrinkles or the initial state and then a different mode of like are we gonna animate it afterward and we'll see that in a little bit so potentially we could say that the structure here could be at a different number but then at the time of animating later ruby played with springs once we start playing with the springs maybe we change the settings at that moment but don't need to worry about that quite yet now leaving sheer at this low number I have I don't have to tinker because it's just too many numbers for me to keep in my head but let's try tinkering around these numbers some more we're back to a default structural increase the flexion to let's say 20 so 4 times a strong let's see what this does now we're back to the same structure so it should be pretty strong let's see how coherent this is look at do you see how we're getting all those interesting vibrations happening there do you see our individual polygons they don't know where to go with the frictions not letting to go and they start fluctuating all over the place before it finally pops and then we can see that we get all these wrinkles going now these are some pretty large wrinkles overall so perhaps I wanted to do this the opposite way let's change this instead to the shear being up to 20 and see if anything visually changes on this let it play and very quickly they pop up and now look with a higher shear we're definitely getting smaller wrinkles overall now we got keep in mind that we've added a lot of energy into the system by scaling up the overall shape so it's trying to you'll see that in the beginning a lot of these wrinkles are kind of wafting around and it's kind of like it's got all this compressed energy and it's trying to throw that energy out and eventually could throw that energy out by reaching the edge of our overall cloth so let's keep that type of thing in mind so yet we get these nice wrinkles are kind of wrinkling and then extra energy is escaping and eventually this will settle down you can see it starts coming down quite a bit already if we let it go for a long time eventually it will settle down completely and that will be important for some of the effects that we're going to a try in the chief later now let's talk about damping what is damping well all three of our spring settings here have damping what damping does it's a drains energy out of the overall system so let's let's go crazy here I'm gonna drain tons of energy out 99% of the energy is going to drain out so you saw how those were wafting through the air and they're pushing all their energy out we're gonna be draining that energy very quickly just by doing this on shear and now exposing you see these are not going anywhere as near as crazy and because they're not wafting around as much all of these wrinkles are a lot tinier all we do is change the damping and look how kind of stylistically different this clumping how different that looks so damping is very important however unfortunately for some stuff we're going to be doing later damping is bad that damping can add a lot of influence in the areas that it could be can be really can really mess up the overall effect so we're going to avoid using damping whenever we can now this kind of experiment because I don't have these all memorized but I'm going to now that we're in this position dropping our damping it down to zero and I will see if this was barely moving let's see if this kind of suddenly reaccelerating that's stable so it actually it is it is pretty stable now so once again like I said we could use a bunch of that damping let it get to a particular state and calm down and then take the damping out and then continue from there so important things to remember so with a relatively high shear and I guess it's important to note what shear does what shear does is enables a polygon to tilt side to side the best way of demonstrating this I'm gonna open up a new file and create a shear so you're so sure de former put the curvature down to zero and let's animate or to pull the strength and this is what shear does in cloth as well in the soft bodies as I increase this the polygon imagine we're looking at single polygons that can tilt side to side also shrink it'll pinch down as it goes but it's its ability to tilts back and forth so excellent so one flexion is like a hinge and shear is that shear force excellent so this is a lot to tilt and because it's allowed to like tilt over like that it can bend in tinier ways and that's what's enabling this to look a little bit more compressed and so those giant wrinkles we're getting smaller ones let's start pushing it even further just for fun and once again I will drain a lot of the energy out I just want see what this looks like stylistically you just have to start play and you see here that we've got once again some pretty small wrinkles it's not terribly different from what we had before but yeah very interesting let's just leave the energy the damping down and played I don't want to do too many tests along these lines because we could spend all day doing it changing the numbers but something I do want to point out here well let's add the spring in I want to add the spring in here as the basic stuff before we start doing some more a be testing so you'll see that I picked 40 by 40 which means it's an even number which can be cut in half which simply means we have a point right here in the middle so at that point in the middle I'm going to create a simulate dynamics spring so we've got a spring right here now I'm sad to say that I did not use Springs for years and years and years and years and it turns out they're incredibly powerful in cinema so in let's see how they work in this case I'm going to drag our cloth into it and immediately we see we have a spring and it's going to the center of mass now what I want to do is attach this to a specific point two different ways of doing that one is point selection in which we could make a selection and those points will be locked to it but you have to make this editable to do that and we might change poly count so we won't do that will instead use polygon point in which case we're just looking for a point index here here is the number this specific point so there's point 1 2 3 4 now we could figure out this precise number here but instead I'm just gonna keep on increasing this until we get close to our center point and increasing it more and more and more boom and you see right there we just kind of get this one ring that it that's the spring compressed all the way and that is now at 0 0 0 it's all zeroed out so this spring is now looking to connect just to that one point it's got a 20% region of influence tell you the truth I don't know what that means what it what directly drives it's how much it will fall off it has now 20% it's a 20% of the model I'm not sure but 20% is a good default to it for us to work from another setting we need to worry about right here is the arrest length how long does a spring want to be and currently the spring is 0 so let's click the set rest length and you'll see that yes it is currently a 0 that's what we want to be at if I hit play right now all this gonna happen is these middle points want to stay in that particular position but that's no fun we want to see these animates so that settles down pretty quickly so increase our frames here and there seeing up to 120 and jump our timeline we wanted to settle a little bit so I'm gonna jump our timeline to about frame 70 now I'm actually gonna hold down the Alt key as I click and what that does is it doesn't refresh the viewport which means it's not trying to calculate any dynamics here now with that in mind I'm going to grab our spring go to coordinates and record the Y position it's still linear so at the time of 70 this is now at 0 and let's jump up to let's say 105 and at 105 how big is this that's this is what's the width here I think it's 4 yeah 400 so we want to move it up into the air at least 400 and let's move it up 500 so under coordinates at the time of hundred and five I want Y to be 500 record that and now you can see the spring is stretched up excellent now we don't want it to play we don't want to hit play here cuz it's gonna make it explode those rewind and what the overall sequence happened and check out kind of the idea of we can create a wrinkle and that's gonna be the first part of the sequence this is just it might be a little bit weird there in the middle but you can see that's gonna create the wrinkles and then it's gonna have a little bit of time to settle down just enough to settle down a bit and then starting at frame 70 we can start having some very direct control over the way this is this is going to move so we're now controlling this little region so I'm gonna hit play and we continue you see the spring is going to move upward and as it moves upward you see the entire piece of cloth is being dragged up into the air excellent very good position give this another save cloth actually let's just say save incremental I've been trying to get into that a little bit more so saves incremental we've got a spring that is now going to directly control the way that this is moving excellent now we can keep on going and testing this a little bit but what I wanted to point out is the way I like doing tests is a be testing and it's very difficult to a be tests animation like this so something that's pretty neat would be I'm gonna select the spring the cloth and the table copy it paste it hold down shift and now scoot it over I'm gonna try and get it to exactly its 600 knots being difficult 650 there we go just a little bit of separation there now we've got two of the exact same setup here and if I play they're not necessarily going to be identical but they're gonna be pretty dang similar so any change that we we can make changes to one and see how it compares to the other one now our frames per second isn't amazing right now you can see that's dropping down to about four we've got a lot going on and it's gonna get even more complicated but I still think this is can be a pretty good setup yeah not identical not the same wrinkles but you can see it fuels the same so with that in mind we do a little bit a be testing so I'm gonna cut the top one this cloth one the one on the right is going to be the one we do with experiments on so there's our baseline here's our experimental one so let's try changing just one setting at a time and we don't ever want to use stiffness in this kind of setup stiffness is telling every single point to return back to its original position like no matter where it is so we don't want that and so along those lines let's try increasing structural up to 200% and hit play changing these numbers shouldn't slow anything down but let's see that's exploding out you see that it feels like this is got a lot more travel it's just bigger overall which is interesting let's try pushing that a little bit further I'm gonna jump this all the way at the 500 and with that in mind let's see what happens now okay now it's become very the structure is very very very strong it's saying you guys are not allowed to bend your now that's a stretch or compress at all so very quickly you can see the wrinkles start to emerge they're not allowed to move meanwhile over here this is starting to stretch by this within the tolerance of the structure thus it's not exploding as quickly so with that in mind we can see that this one is now activating a lot faster so yep that definitely made difference and the cloth is not stretching as much which in general I think is a good thing we don't want cloth to stretch because each polygon stretches a little bit and suddenly cloth gets super huge so whenever we can get away with increasing structure that's a good thing now once again were a/b testing but let's say we now say we like that I'm gonna jump this one also up to 500 let me also say this is important 500 is about as high as you can go on structure in fact these should be pretty much identical now so on our second structure I'm gonna jump this up to let's go higher mm which is only four times higher not in the same number but let's see if we can actually get this to happen what I find starts happening it's a introduces so much energy and so many vibrations that it never calms down it'll just keep on shaking and shaking and shaking forever you see this one's got a little bit of coherence and this one is still fluctuating a lot now eventually our Springs are gonna yank these up but yeah you have to be careful there and there could be additional settings that's doing actually the shear is up pretty high it's up higher than I thought it was so I'm gonna rewind these select both dynamics tags and let's put here to five just like I said baseline five and five and now we've got the mm there I'm not sure if we'll see a difference here but I'm just trying to point out the things I've bumped into you see immediately that ones oh look at this one start going crazy without the shear it's like compressing itself really small it's just freaking out now that one is as well a bit but once again playing with the combinations that's the entire point of this part now let's grab both of them but the structural to 200 which seem to be stable but on this top one everything's identical on this top one let's put a lot of energy drain I'm gonna do a damping of 99 percent an increasing let's see if we get anything different so let's see oh okay definitely something different this one's got a whole explosion happening and then this one in spite of being identical is nowhere near as it's you can see a slowly expanding out and then we got these smaller wrinkles now we actually can push this I think the damping beyond we jumped up to let's say 2 to 2 and now it's gonna be draining even more energy out and actually yet I think that's what maybe I'm switching those two numbers by accident but I'm gonna do a damping of 500 maybe that's what I wanted to do so now we've got a structure of 200 and a damping of 500 and now this is training tons of energy out and I can see that these wrinkles are emerging but you can see that it's not they're not twisting all over the place and you can see that we've reintroduced these tiny wrinkles I think that's that's a good thing we got high structure and we're not to animate anything but we do have that damping and damping is bad so but once again just by changing that one number just by changing damping of all things so you see yet that's the only number changed look at how different these look and especially if we were to grab this one and drop in the solution surface like look how tiny these wrinkles are versus how big that one is well just once again good test and okay anyway let's the important part here is that you should tinker around with the different settings now let's go back to damping being z or 100 they're equal now now I want to point out how important it is to play with aerodynamics so we've got our aerodynamics the first thing to do is turn on two sided we have a plot of flat plane so we want the wind to affect the top and the bottom we hope this to kind of travel through the air cut cut through the air so turning on two sided and on one of these let's jump it up to a 100% and 100% and that's all we're gonna do one's got lots of aerodynamics and the other doesn't have any besides that they're identical I don't think we're gonna actually we might see a difference right away so let's see what we get so that's just a spring in the center point but now they're going to explode they're doing their own thing and now in spite of every other setting being identical the drag is introducing a lot of slowdown so where this is trying to dissipate their energy this is forcing the energy out from the system so you can see immediately that we get these really nice wrinkles no damping but AO and the tinier scale and I always think these tinier wrinkles are better it's easier to get big wrinkles from small ones so that immediately is a good thing but let's let this continue until we get to the time of seventy in fact also you met a little bit as these get pulled up and let's check out the difference when the spring begins to pull them upward so right around now it's gonna start moving upward we see the center point on both begin to pull and this one very smooth overall so a little bit difficult to a be test but look at how clean this one is in fact let's pollicis and look at some of the different things that are happening some of the different properties this is creating a very straight line overall it's kind of tugging everywhere and pulling that at this part we see this is maintaining first of all a lot more of its wrinkles but there's more of a curve to it I guess there's some curves going here but I've done a lot of testing and the lift and the drag introduced a lot of curves where the the path that this wants to travel is where the previous polygons had traveled so let's let this continue preg needs some more frames 140 not too many more these will get continue getting yanked up where in fact that might be I don't that's as far as they go so we actually want those Springs to go a little bit higher so easy enough to fix spring spring 105 hold down alt as I jump to that time and you see the keyframe didn't update but we already know 100 wasn't enough so let's do one or I guess those 500 I'm gonna do 1000 double the height I think that's fine rewind all the way and let them play exact same thing it should happen a lot of time for pre rolling everything's exploding lots of energy dissipation here very nice clumping and it's settling down very quickly so automatically two points for it drag and lift as far as that's concerned and then we get to the time of 70 and at that point it begins lifting very nice and clean you can see that the polygons are stretching back to their previous position all the wrinkles are sort of disappearing as it goes but this is maintaining oh no I know if I pause or if I should have let that we exploded cloth that's not an uncommon thing cloth not cloth but uh soft bodies can explode so that seems to be what happened I know if it happened because I paused or clicked I don't think that would happen but along those lines there's not I mean oh we all we could do is slow down a little bit these Springs are perhaps traveling a little bit quickly in fact I'm gonna say that they should start traveling 10 frame earlier so it's gonna make them travel slower let that go I'm actually glad they exploded because we need to see the different problems that might happen and if everything just works the first time you can't troubleshoot it so these travel it's gonna be starting 10 frames earlier and hopefully the slower speed will enable them to not explode but if they do then we'll have to add some extra sub some steps per frame on the dynamics so you see I've got them selected you see the two Springs pulling upward it rotating like that doesn't really any difference that one is definitely exploding which is unfortunate now something I found if you the best way to pause it when is exploding which it is right now is just to click the pause button or the play button and have it pause and eventually it should work its way out you see there it just took a second if you click it and you're not sure if you clicked it not sure if you missed it a good trick you do is just hit ctrl or command R to trigger a render you can actually see the exploded huge we're inside of a giant piece of cloth right now via control R you've told cinema it's like hey stop any process you're doing and render the current frame so it will actually stop it from playing so that's a way you can be confident that it has stopped it now it could still take up quite a few seconds for it to actually stop but that's why I've been doing a lot with these tests is making sure that I hits controller and do a render now it's still exploding so unfortunately I didn't want to do this but well a couple things we do first of all our time scale is going faster which is almost it's almost like making it do half again as many calculations in that time so while we're just doing these a beat s let's try dropping our time back to 100 and see if it can handle that that's almost like adding a couple extra sub steps to it so calculating a little bit slower we'd still see the same stuff very stable here some nice bigger wrinkles here but just by adding a lot of drag that's working fine now once again all we're doing here is scaling up the cloth which is just so cool I can't believe it it works as well as it does so everything's getting pulled upward come on don't explode now okay do you see this really nice curve we're getting from that and you'll see as these bits of tail are pulling those are kind of like just just flopping over but these are trying to travel that same path that the rest of it got pulled in and look how much more pinched to this is you can can I mean I this just feels what that feels like I'm off the clock to puss but this feels more like a like a thicker piece of cloth getting pulled up into the air working very nicely I'm quite pleased with that if we let this continue playing through I want to reframe this continue lighting this play through a little bit then we can even see there's a lot of differences in the springiness as well this is traveling through the air but there's a lot of drag a lot of lift I mean while this one has does all this energy so it's overshooting before it goes to try and settle down I think this one will settle down a lot quicker so the point being we now know how to control our cloth using Springs we can tug it in a particular direction we can make it stiffer we can start creating the wrinkles all of that is working really well and I highly recommend this kind of a be test setup a simple scene do it kind of at these default scales and then you can start dialing in exactly what these settings do and I'd like I said I can give you a rest the recipes that I've played with but I've used dozens of them and done different renders with them and every single one is a little bit different than the one before but can't beat this a be testing let's just do one last one and then we'll move on to actually trying to apply this onto an object so and along those lines I will just delete because I like the way that aerodynamics looks over here I will just delete the one I don't like and copy the one I do in fact I don't even have to delete it if you drag a new one it'll overwrite the old one because an object can only have one dynamic stag so they're identical now we could just play around by changing different settings like the damping now actually this is a good opportunity to show you on the top of the-- the top on the experimental one i'll show you what the damping does I'm gonna add let's just add a lot of damping on both the shear and deflection that should drain lots of energy out but you're gonna see once we get to the time of 70 that and actually yeah lots of differences here you see but with that flexion in there this cannot bend anymore it straining the energy out too much and it can't bend so there's actually not any gring khals really being created so something important to keep it by but that's not why I wanted to show you I want to show you the bigger problem with having any damping this is just an extreme version of it is once this starts getting pulled into the air you see that this is gonna start stretching very nicely but on this one look at how all see how these points are staying on the ground but look at these these are starting to move up into the air I don't know exactly why that happens but you can see how this entire structure is getting yanked up and then nothing is touching the table anymore I don't think if we go down here you see the whole thing is hovering definitely not behavior that we want to have happen so very important to keep in mind there now go back to the beginning I just want to point out the big problem that took me a long time to understand what was going on there but it is all the damping damping is fault now if you don't want too much stretch you can of course do more structural we're doing a lots of drag and lift so you know you don't go that crazy we can set the 50/50 and that is still on our experimental one so we hit play everything's identical except for different drag and lift and I think it's just gonna make it not pinch in quite as much so with that in mind let's let this go through very similar wrinkles this one seems to be expanding a little bit but that makes sense it's not draining the energy out in the same way but they're still pretty tiny wrinkles which is good it's a good kind of combination of the two now the tug begins gets pulled up in the air and we have to keep in mind as much as nice as it is that we get that curvature tugged in here and you see that that feels like it's curving more than that one that's a little bit straighter but with less drag I think we'll get a little bit more bounce at the end when the cloth reaches the top and let's see what let's see if we do indeed get that so everything's game pulled up you see that this one's travelled further along but it is still kind of tapering in it's following the curve a lot a little a little dragging a little lift actually go a long way but let's see give it a few more frames lots of collisions happening so you see it's taking a little bit longer we're only getting half it's taking two seconds for one refresh but you see already look at much higher this is shooting up into the air and I think that this is just gonna give us a lot more bounce and just look at the way these wrinkles look I like the way this is clumping up better but it's this is stylistic if this was a wet rag like that feels more like a wet rag oh the spring is freaking out a little bit up there if there goes so couple opportunities we have here well things we should talk about first of all I hit pause here but I mean also well okay I was able to pause it but once again hit render if you have to and stop it then rewind okay now if you're gonna start getting exploding cloth is very common the most the thing of it's a very brute-force method but if you hit ctrl or command D go back to your dynamic settings under expert there's a setting called steps per frame if you start increasing this number it is gonna make everything calculate way better but it's gonna take way longer if we double our stuffs per frame it's gonna take twice as long for a frame to calculate but I pretty much guarantee that's gonna stop that from exploding because it's take it's doing twice as many calculations as actually steps per frame which means it's taking each frame and before or saying between zero and one kind of go 1/5 of the way and do that calculation that 1/5 of the way and do that calculation now we're saying divide that by 10 go 1/10 of the way of a frame and do that calculation so we have now doubled the amount of calculations we have there I would like to do one more a B here just to show you I copy the tag over again it overrides the old one holding on control it the debt and then under soft body we're talking about shear and what shear did when it stretched up and that allows it to bend over and pinch that's the main thing that I think is letting this stretch really long so all those lines I want this to be a lot bigger I'm going to let's go with crazy I'm gonna say I want a shear of 50 it's a really big number but now it's a lot stronger and it doesn't want to shear it doesn't want to tilt over as much and let's just take a look at what that does for us because given the overall setup that we have now I think that's this gives a really nice pull I probably went overboard 50 is a pretty big number but let's see what we get first of all we get the explosion these wrinkles are bigger you know to see these are definitely little bit more pinched so that changed that but let's keep this going it's not they're not too much bigger and stylistically I don't know if you want bigger once or smaller ones also keep in mind that the scale that you have your rest length always gonna have a huge impact on how much this stuff clumps up but okay I guess at the end those look too different from each other definitely bigger though okay and now it's gonna start tugging them upward and we are at the it's taking twice as long to calculate so as these get pulled up you'd see that this is getting pulled and let's see if I can pause it a little bit and show you a huge difference that's happening right now you'll see on our one do you see how this is forming a diamond shape but it's not very pinched you can see it's very it's still pretty square if we go to the one with very low shear look what's happening here look at how these rectangles are stretching more into this diamond shape and if they stretch like that they can they're not they're not getting like longer the volume isn't changing on that rectangle but what is happening is you know if that angle if this is stretching that way these are actually longer polygons at their longest point so what that means is this should have way longer tails falling at the edge where this one is going to maintain its overall shape a lot better so I'm glad that that theory seems to be working let's let this continue pulling now one thing you well I guess it's kind of happening in both we see we're getting some nice pinching here like this very tight pinch where here this kind of overlapping itself a little bit more and keep in mind that's the only parameter we changed allow it to keep on pulling upward and let's see what we get yep you can see look at how these are stretching a lot but this look at like that feels so good look at that claw it feels like like a towel being pulled up from the ground it's not stretching look at how long elongated that these are getting it's it's super crazy so yeah just overall I think that that we've now got a nice formula for just some overall cloth here which ends up being a shear of 50 but I'm glad we talked about the differences between them and this one has I guess they're they're identical but let's see if we get a little bit of bounce here because I would like a little bit bounce and let's see if it explodes once it the spring reaches near the top now it's not it's not the spring is being pulled down by the weight of this cloth so I don't expect that spring ever to get to zero but it's just gonna keep tugging and trying to get it close to zero now interestingly this one just which shear changing look at the top got up there quicker so that's kind of interesting so everything's flying up it's flapping around a little bit and let's let this go actually you know we should do is I'm going to let this one calculate so we can watch it in real-time so just you don't miss anything I'm gonna jump this up 255 frames just give us a few more frames scale that up rewind and if you're not super familiar with cloth or dynamics if I select this one Tagg I'm gonna go to the cache and I could say baked object if I can also click a baked all it's gonna bake everything in the scene so I will do that and here's my meter it's not gonna take that long it's gonna take essentially as long as it took for this to scrub through it's a couple extra frames but we'll be doing this quite a few times throughout the tutorial especially as we get to the more advanced ones and I'll just skip over those and let you know about how much time it took so we'll do a little cut here there we go that is done it took about maybe three minutes unfortunately it's not a constant line if it starts taking long to calculate at a certain point in the time line that will also slow down a bit the good part now though is we are able to see this in real time hopefully hit play and we see that they wrinkle up looking great and then they get yanked up and then we can get that nice overlap you see it like overshoots and then like saddles back in again and it's just the way they're wafting and wrinkling like both of these look look really nice I like the way this one finally settles down but this one is getting the way it's pulled up I like that better I mean you got a kind of picket shoes you could always animate those properties but there's a lot of tinkering to do there and I highly suggest that you do would tinker around now we're gonna end this very soon as the end of part 1 I highly suggest continuing into part 2 and 3 because I go into a lot more detail in more specifics and way more ways of art directing this but I just want to go through kind of the complete process here so we got one last step to do I believe which is it's baked now and that enables us to output this and I guess this does require our 20 or our 21 but something that's very nice it's being able to bake this out to something like Alembic so in our 20 then you can just right-click on an object and they said exporting the entire scene of course you can bake it as Alembic so I'm just gonna click that and let's just say that this our main one so that's gonna export very quickly I can disable the piece of cloth that was there already and now we've got the Alembic file running right there what's there's a several things I grab create about the Alembic first of all we can put this into a subversion surface and instantly that's going to smooth it and it's not gonna have any problems doing that calculation so hitting play that's turtle in and it's going to expand and it's playing the subdivision surface and it looks great and smooth and it's looking wonderful another thing to note though is we can't let's say that we're doing a car reveal we'll be doing that actually in one of the next segments but you can't just yank the spring as fast as you want without cranking up all the sub calculations so something that could be really handy is speeding it up something that's wonderful about the Alembic file is we can speed it up going inside of the cloth I could say you know what I want this to be double the speed and now when RiRi Ryan rewind and hit play that that is gonna play twice as fast boom and jumps up in two you know it's gonna get to that final position a lot quicker so the Olympic file is just enabling this look really clean and it works quite well I'm actually very happy with that so you'd see the very basics of getting some nice-looking wrinkles and then pulling this up in the air there's a lot of information that's gonna be in the next segments so please jump on in to part two I should be releasing all three at the same time so that should I think there's so many things we could keep on just playing and playing you're playing with these settings there a lot of funds we could keyframe more settings all over the place this does work with some motion blur I was doing redshift motion blur and it deforms beautifully if you want to give some thickness we can create a cloth surface I usually well we can put the cloth surface after the subjects and surface so it's gonna be sharper edges and actually no it's back well it doesn't matter if it actually does make a difference I don't wanna subdivide but I do want to add a little bit of thickness it's gonna be little bit hard to see but if i zoom in you see we can add thickness here so we want to keep a light touch on that maybe just a thickness of one but it's nice if you actually give it that thickness especially if you're kind of intersecting the object just a little bit and that'll pull up and that should look very nice and that is working wonderfully and then actually an important thing to note that we didn't go too far in it but I'm going to have up on the rocket lasso patreon I'm gonna have some different fabric image dye rendered out like this repeating pattern fabric image we didn't build in this one but we'll build in the next part I just want to throw that out there so I think that will wrap up part one here please like this testing protocol super fun just tinkering around I've done the hundreds of like running through the simulation and testing it and seeing how it looks and hopefully I was able to distill the information a relatively short time so there we go that wraps up the first part of a three-part tutorial we're gonna get even fancier in the next one we're gonna be working with a spline or something extruded so kind of like the way text would work and the third part is about covering up a car and revealing that that one's even more advanced so if you liked this video go ahead and hit a like and I would love for everybody to come and join the rocket lasso community we've got a slack channel and you'd follow on YouTube and twitch and Instagram everything's at rocket lasso and we do live streams every Wednesday answering cinema4d questions be great to see you there and I'll see you next part of the tutorial [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: RocketLasso

Views: 8,347

Keywords: Rocket Lasso, Cinema 4D tutorial, cloth simulation cinema 4d, cinema 4d wrinkles, cinema 4d cloth simulation tutorial, cinema 4d product visualization tutorial, cinema 4d soft body dynamics tutorial, soft body cinema 4d, c4d cloth simulation tutorial, Chris Schmidt tutorial, cinema 4d fabric tutorial, cinema 4d product animation tutorial

Id: d0RN576MYWk

Length: 50min 44sec (3044 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020