Creating Organic Animation with C4D Volume Mesher: Elizabeth McDonald

hi everyone okay how far away to plan this do I need to be um so today I'm going to go over the new volume builder generator for those of you who use cinema 4d so a little overview this is a new feature in the R 20 release that in my opinion is pretty much a game changer when it comes to modeling however I found it to be really useful as well for creating kind of complex MOA animations so it kind of allows you to build and complex models based on a box'll base sculpting method so what is a voxel the answer is I don't really know I just think of it as a 3d pixel and then besides that I'm a little in the dark about it so I think the easiest way is for me to just kind of show you some examples of ways I've applied it to animations lately since the release came out so the first example I'm going to show is molecular modeling and this has been the most useful for me for this demo I just chose an antibody I think it's the most recognizable molecule probably out there so to begin with I go to the PDB and locate the entry that I want to source the data from then you go into sorry it's very small on my laptop and I'm going to use EPMD which is an open source software that was created by Graham Johnson I'm gonna pause this I recorded this ahead of time so it mess up and so yeah I want to pause this and say that basically it just allows you to bring in data from the protein data bank directly into c40 so you don't have to use an external application so let's play this I just enter the PDB entry information and it will pull that antibody model for me so I want to select the point clouds option and this gives you a point for every single atom in your molecule and you can also see that it separates the chains which is really nice if you for instance wanted to pull in like a complex receptor with a bunch of different chains so I'm gonna delete that stuff out and it also puts these points into an atom array object which will give you a sphere for every single point now I'm just arranging my model so the atom array is what my volume measure is going or volume builder is going to use as a source so I need to increase the subdivisions of the spheres and make them a little larger then I'm going to go up to the volume builder and I'll just drag one of my chains or atom arrays into the object box so now you can see the box holes and it just looks like a really pixelated image basically so when I drop that down then you start to see the form taking shape now I'll drop this into the volume measure which is going to generate my mesh and it doesn't look so good but if I tweak a few settings you can see it start to take shape and all of this was you're able to do it an EP MD but you were never able to do something like this in cinema 4d before unless you're using metal balls which are kind of a nightmare so this is like the new and improved metal ball I would say um so you can change the threshold bridgette to the different shaking so you can see everything and then you can add a smooth layer which will kind of go in and refine those like some of those rough edges that you can see and you just have to adjust the voxel distance adjust the strength there are different filter types you know just play around with it until you get what you want right so for the interest of time I went ahead and did all of them and then applied materials to it so this I'm just showing you can also manipulate the mesh by changing the scale of your atom array you can you know have finer detail or you can make it larger to kind of a bigger surface model and so that's that with that antibody another way I've used this in probably the most useful way is creating bone matrix if anyone has ever tried to create a complicated by matrix by hand it takes forever and it's a huge pain um so this new feature really takes the legwork out of it I'll just run through a quick tutorial um start off just with a simple cube and make it a thousand five thousand is what I chose so the bigger your objects obviously the larger your voxels can be I'm gonna crank up those subdivisions on that you a lot and stick it in the volume builder all right so apply the volume measure and you can see your mesh generated so for this I am going to you to basically make my Ben matrix using a shader filled in fields is another thing that was introduced in our 20 which is also amazing but I can't get into that right now I don't have time but you can use the shader field to model with procedural textures which is just awesome so I'm just gonna load a noise and nothing that's happening yet but I'll get to that and kind of increase the clipping alright so in my show you field I need to increase the box size to my actual cube size and now you kind of start to see it I'm taking shape so there you go and I'm still gonna refine this oh it's right here in front of me I don't have to be looking at that okay so I'm still gonna refine this decrease the voxel size a bit to kind of get what I want change the noise up to be something a little more organic and if anyone has ever used the plugin procedural this is in my idea kind of this along the same lines but it's so much faster and it's just something that c40 never had before you know it's like creating this model would have taken probably weeks in my opinion um so adjusting the clipping will you know get some contrast in the procedural and that'll make the kind of chewed out sections a little more obvious all right so this is looking pretty good I can go in and add a smooth layer which I need to drag to the top of the hierarchy all right it's too crazy so I'm going to go in and adjust the filter type voxel size and I think this is where I think this was the sweet spot where I ended I'll just give this a quick render let you see the final product so yeah that was I'm creating a cube of n matrix with a shader all right now I'll go into kind of more at the animation side of it and do just a quick demo and cell apoptosis which is something that again we have to do a lot of and mo animations but it's just other than metaball is kind of difficult to do in the native c40 features so I'm going to start out with a basic sphere change it to an Ecosse you drin and crank up the segments again and then I'm going to duplicate this and this is what my little interior spheres that kind of blob out so my computer is always full okay um I so I'm going to clone a sphere to this smaller interior sphere all right they still just adjusting some settings and crank that up for a cloner if you're going to use it in the volume builder it does need to be an instance it can't be a render instance it needs to source the actual geometry which can bog down the scene which you will see later so now basically I'm just kind of adding some deformers I added a displace over the noise that's going to kind of give the surface some undulation zazz it starts to die basically crank up the segments alright so now I'm going to animate this do some keyframes to animate that noise on alright it's all hide that for the time being now want to focus on the interior spheres so I'm gonna add a random effector which I will change to the noise setting so that it is animated basically crank up the position now those are moving so I'm also going to add a shader which will not to show you I need to set this in the UV space so that it doesn't pop on off when I'm animating the noise so this is what I'm going to help this is what's going to make the spheres basically disappear over time so I can animate the clipping and set a couple of key frames and now you can see that they kind of just start popping off I need to offset this so that they gradually fade so this is going to be basically the base or my a pop to sing I don't know if that's word I'm sell so now I'm just gonna stick these in one volume builder undress my voxel size and I want them to be on the Union mode because I want them to all basically mesh into one object so when I put this in the measure and scrub its gonna play pretty slow because it's kind of dense you can see that the little spheres are intersecting but they're all meshed into one object alright so the next thing I want to do is keyframe the radius of the main sphere to disappear over time so now you see this is pretty typical of how I would normally animate a cell dying but we can add another little I guess a piece of complexity to this by using I'm going to just duplicate my cleaner make it a little bit different and then put it on the subtract mode so you can see now that this cleaner is subtracting out of the other surface so it's basically becoming a negative implant so as I animate that it kind of eats out part of the surface I just highlighted that with my cursor and other things um so if I add a smooth layer adjust these settings that kind of puts it I'm just gonna scrub through this that kind of gives it like the last organic touch I think to make it look you know nice and gooey as I imagine cells being all right it's not my screen recording okay so nope the next the last thing I'm going to touch on and this is probably the thing I'm the most excited about is creating a dendritic cell we do a lot of immunology animations and this is a dendritic cells just something we've never been able to like naturally create without some kind of like X particle Skinner or something like that so now that we can do it in c40 it's it's really awesome I've used it for like two or three projects since our xx came out and it's a really simple setup so I'm just going to kind of break down my file here so I start out with a sphere turn that to x-ray mode and then I have another sphere inside that I'm going to use to generate the hair so the hair it's what my little I'll call them the little dendrites are and they're linked to my sphere so I'm gonna do them the hairs coming from the polygon Center and then you see as I moved the sphere it has a vibrate tag on it it the hairs react to it which makes it just natural looking so I'm gonna generate a circle which is gonna be sweeps along the hair it swept along the hair but you see it's not reacting anymore with the movement and the hairs are kind of static this is a priorities issue so if you go into the basic and change that lower the priority they go crazy and then they start to react again so if anyone ever has that problem with hair it's probably your priority so I can change I can adjust the sweep of that circle inside of the hair material adjust my thickness taper it at the end and then I can adjust the length and add a noise and if I animate this noise it'll start to kind of grow the tendrils in out I'm kind of a fun organic way all right so doing a little more tweaking and I also add a displacer on to the cell surface and also animate the snowy's and that you know gives it that surface tension and you can also see this is pretty dense because that's what my about voxel is going to use that's its information so I need the mesh to be you know somewhat dense so we get a good end result with the mesh and I also add clone a few spheres to the body of the cell and this just adds another layer of complexity at a random effector to those and that'll kind of that affects the position and the scale of them and then animate that noise as well I just crank that up so you can see so the last thing I do is add a turbulence effector and this affects the hair and it gives it kind of a more wavy you know undulating motion so this is the base of my macrophage and originally and c40 this is where I'd stop and just adjust the material so you couldn't see the seams but now you can drag this entire thing into a volume builder and adjust the voxel size and when you throw this into the measure it's one smooth object so again I'm just going to tweak a few settings I'm probably running late on time so don't know if it's worth showing all of this but I'll add a semi layer and then you know the end result is basically something I would have never been able to achieve you know before this new feature came out so that's pretty awesome that's not the final result but I'll just skip to the end so yeah that pretty much concludes it and yeah no questions mine if anyone has any questions afterwards feel free to talk to me I love talking about this new feature obviously you

Channel: Educational Resources

Views: 17,990

Keywords: c4d volume mesher, semimeeting2019, medical illustration

Id: bIOt_pXxxXk

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019