Dan Pierse @ The 3D and Motion Design Show

hello everybody i am dan pierce i am a design director at the fox broadcasting company at the uh tv network and we do a broadcast design for the promotion of the shows that we have and um cinema 4d is one of our main tools and i personally love it and we have such a great team of talented artists that leverage it in such an amazing way and has always been such a great um creative problem solver for some of the stuff that we do so i am very happy that maxon has invited me to share some of the things that we've been working on in how we did it and how um uh cinema 4d has made it so much easier so let's just get into it one as i was saying i'm dan pierce i'm the design director at the fox broadcasting company and um one of the things that i just sort of want to get into today is um how cinema 4d has helped us in um in the development of our looks like in the end we might only see you know two seconds three seconds of our work on air but um there is so much and this is one of the most rewarding parts of it at least to me is uh all the development that goes into it and um how we can utilize you know all these different talents we like i said we have a fantastic team of very very talented people that know a lot of different things so um so we just tried our development part of it is you know quite a lot of it and we'll go through iterations and we'll figure out different ways to do things and cinema 4d is one of those things that gives us um uh the chance to do that because it's really light and versatile and we can just try different things without spending too much time on it and figure it out if it's going to work and two we have um artists that use different programs and but it always comes back down to cinema and that's our hub and that's where we'll render out and we'll we'll finish everything so here's just an example of some of the shows that we've worked on and all the different types of development that has gone into it now um in this presentation i'm going to focus on one of the shows that we have called matt singer which is uh right here and here's some of the sort of development that goes into it and i just wanted to show some of these slides just to highlight how we really stretch out and do lots of different elements like you can see up here in the top right those were modeled in zbrush i think a little bit of marvelous designer um here we have just uh figuring out some texturing here's some zebra scott shots um i believe this hair was made in houdini but the purpose of all of this is that it always comes back to cinema 4d we use olympic files we use all different uh types to bring in uh we're an arnold shop and we just use that specifically um but uh i i think it just goes to show again how versatile uh cinema 4d is and how we can have all of these things all of these wonderful things that will just come together um in one place and here is a little example of some of the uh stuff that went into one of the seasons of the mass singer [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] right a lot of stuff so um and this is a few seasons ago and um what we've done over time is that we've just sort of built on it built on it built on it and um uh evolved this package into different things and he sees them there we we get new costumes and then we just grab things out of that um so again cinema 4d very very important part of being able to iterate and evolve this look into new and more interesting things so uh here i have a promo of uh from season four which is this look down here so you can just sort of see how it all come back together we just call the winner right now oh my god there's two people no way the mask singer season premieres september 23rd on fox fun right super cool i i loved working on this show i mean it was stressful and you know all of the things that usually come with uh some types of jobs but in the end it was um there's an energy and a playfulness to it that was always fun to work on so um in this presentation i'm gonna you know just do a couple examples of some of the things that we worked on um we're gonna talk about geometry and what that means and how to take it apart and put it back together uh the uh ever essential cloners and effectors and fields um we're gonna talk about dynamics uh connectors there's gonna be a little talk about pi as well um uh how can there not be um some espresso and really just how rad cinema 4d is so let's just uh get stuck into it straight away okay so let's take a look at this one as an example as you can see on the left here we have that something going on background these totems that i was talking about just relation to the different costumes and stuff and on the right we have the um the raw render of what's going on in the background here now we always found it important to have some sort of you know uh expansion coming out in the beginning just so we could sort of you know when text flies in or something like that just a sort of moment of excitement and we found that um this kind of process on the right hand side worked out really well where it was dark on the front and then nice and shiny on the back so as it flipped over it had this like really great feel of um things coming into the light and you could really your eye could really follow this expansion so let's just jump in straight away and uh see how we built this because in the process there was a lot of things that we kind of learned and um that presented themselves and i just heard you know the power of cinema 4d you could just kind of like riff on things and figure out things on the fly which is a fantastic uh thing to have so uh as you can see it's just kind of the circles and we always like to build things or start things in the most simplest form so let's just use a disk because that kind of looks like what we're going for right now in display let's put on some lines just so we can see what's happening now these are kind of like pizza pie shapes um we're gonna want some more geometry on this that feels pretty good and then let's make it a little bit rounder let's go up to let's just make round numbers here okay that looks pretty good right so what we're going to want to do is instead of you know we can break this apart and then make those the individual little pieces and so what we want to do uh if you press c that will make that edible so as you can see now we've got all these like little different panels and stuff so but we want these to flip around individually which they're all connected so how do we disconnect these things so what we're going to want to do is we can go up to mesh and then we can go to clone and then we can disconnect so now this we have an option here do we want to preserve all the groups which means disconnected you know geois but it still retains one thing or do we want all of these as individual pieces and of course we want all of these as individual pieces so i am going to uncheck this and then i am going to press ok now cool so this should all be disconnected so if i just pull this off looking pretty good but now i'm going to want to control these individually but this is still one piece so there's got to be one more step here where we can break it into uh other pieces so actually before i do anything i am going to flip my normals i don't know this is just one of the things i like to do um there we go that color is better so you can kind of see this is just telling which ways which way i feel a lot better thank you for indulging me okay so now to break these apart we can go to conversion and then polygon groups to objects so if we click this if you watch over here something's going to happen and then all of a sudden this becomes a group and now look at this this is great we have all these individual pieces here and these we can just move individually now um what it does to do is credit this remains the original one and then it just creates duplicates of all of these um so we actually want to get it out of those because this is still the full full one and one of the things that we can do with mograph is if we put individual pieces into a fracture object then we can still leverage all the power of um all the effectors uh on individual pieces so this really comes in handy for multitude of reasons so let me just drop it in here and then i'm gonna hide this this old one um we can save that for later just in case we need to do it again so now we have all of this and let's just put a plane effector on it okay cool that happened straight away and what's our parameter here so it's going up a hundred which is what we want but we want different things uh happening to it individually so we're gonna need some fall off because this is working as a whole um one of my favorite uh ones is i'm actually gonna turn this a little bit down so you can see that's better i love using the torx especially on these sort of expansion things because it's a donut i mean it goes out in a radial way and um there's kind of a on and off you can do the same thing with a spherical but it's kind of on the whole time so okay well you can see that now they're doing individually i just have this facing the right direction so let's do z okay pretty cool so now this is actually moving that in position let's let's try with scale first let's see how that works so let's just just so we can see what's going on two minus five so that's gonna make it all right so we're already off the races here this looks pretty cool and now we can just start animating these things and now these are all going to work in individual ways so let's make these come up too that'll be pretty cool or down from that you know the falloff now so now that might be a little too much so now we have this whole thing going so let's animate this now i'm kind of particular on how this goes so let's start from total zero and if you uh option click i'm on a mac uh option click the radius that's gonna do a keyframe and so we're starting at nothing let's just say 10 frames up um let's go kind of all the way through option click again set another keyframe and let's just go all the way to the end and make it go all the way through cool so it's all right now that looks pretty good so we can see that uh affecting those individual pieces now i want to look at the curves on this these keyframes just make sure everything's uh going good so if you actually right click on this you can go to animation and then show f curve and then this will bring up this window here so this is actually pretty close however this is telling it oh go a little slower faster faster faster and i actually want this to come out like super fast so now we have this coming out pretty fast and then it tapers off into something and bring this down this means this is going at a a linear rate pretty much because that's pretty much just a not a straight line but a um a constant sort of angle to that okay so another close hat all right so that's pretty cool now the next thing that we're going to want to do is let's try out some stuff but you know what it does remind me of something else before i get into this is that that whole process of breaking these things apart and putting in a fracture object we actually leveraged that on something else that we did here and this was for the upfront here let me just play this this is for the upfront and um i did this with sabor who is also a presenter today a fantastic designer animator director uh and overall great person too so we went through this and figured out how this worked and uh it was using the same process because we needed to specifically um break these down into specific sizes so we could put all of these logos in and um that's how we figured out how to do the other things so let me just jump back into cinema here real quick and just make a new project i just run through this really quick because once once we figured all of this out it just made our lives so much easier and funnily enough too i've used this process on all different ways so again another great thing of just like problem solving in cinema and then learning things and then that gets applied to other stuff so let me just make this flat plane here and as you saw in that animation we to kind of needed to have um you know particular blocks so if you press u it will bring up a menu i just know this from habit and then z would melt this into one piece and then let's say uzi this bottom corner over here actually let's make this big one uzi let's make this one z let's do one more over here you see okay so now we got actually let's do it let's do one more now so now we have this here and you can kind of see where it's all broken up so now we need to do the same process of like how do we break these into individual like little pieces so it went up took her oh look at my uvs i mean my normals sorry there we go that that looks better um so mesh clone disconnect make sure unpreserved groups mesh conversion into polygon groups so now we have all of these individually let's just take this out of that first group boom okay so now we can just put all of these into a fracture object but what we're gonna have to do because they're look at this all by itself now but what we're going to do is we're going to make this a we need some depth to this so if you do m t you can extrude these out which is what we wanted but one of the things i always like to do create caps which means on the back when you pull this out um it will actually keep the back side to it so let's let's just pull this out and then if you do m i'm going to have to look at this inner extrude m w there we go just gonna make tiny tiny little little edge there right and then back to mt for extrude and then just go now we have to take out the cuts go back the other way now we have this i don't know essentially like a like cabinet with a specific like little places so we can put things so now now these are just the individual little boxes but very specific to whatever we wanted and we could design it and customize it now this is fantastic you can do something this detailed this quickly and i thought um this was super impressive so let's just drop this into a fracture object right okay and now we can leverage all of the effector stuff you get which is great let's let's just do a linear fall off on this so we can see what's what's happening so that's pretty cool right and now you have all of these pieces happening individually now we we didn't we wanted some to just kind of like rotate over which was um good so they wouldn't like um um they wouldn't intersect as they came over so we had to figure out a few things too because i changed this parameter to like rotation i never know which way the rotation is this happens every time i just go go go and just enter here until i find out what i want so i guess i want p which i think is pitch i think that stands for pitch um okay so now that's great but it's rotating from the center axis we don't want that so let's just turn this off first so we can see and then we take these and then we can just go to axis and then let's look at this axis center for a second so we want the bottom and the back so it just rotates and just flops over so definitely zero y so that will take it to the bottom and then all right here's where the guesswork comes in i'm i'm thinking that's backwards so let me just do let me do that and let's see so now all of these should have their access points in a play oh look at that i chose chose wrong no problem we can fix all that let's just change this to this way cool so now all of these individual pieces have their rotation in the back here so huh okay it still seems to be off a little bit um another little trick that we learned in this is that um we had to put these into null objects for the access to be uh respected uh for whatever reason i'm sure someone smarter and better at this than me can uh tell me why and probably figure out something else but again this was another uh highlight of cinema where you can just hey let's just try this let's just try this until something starts to work so if i selected all of these i held down option and went to null now these nulls were placed this was placed inside a null but the null also was where the axis was so let's turn this back on and then now that's starting to work from where we want and that's pretty much how we went through all of these and then you know we ended up using um signal for this uh sabor figured that out and it worked really well but also you know we could do this and then actually z to let's just go fulton happy so but you could essentially do do this and they would come up and reveal itself and the benefit of also having a null is that we can put objects within it too and just like really really stack it up and then everything would just be responsible to the knot okay so that is a little side thing let's go back to our other project here okay so we're here so just we were just talking about rotation so let's let's try the rotation on this too all right like i said before i always stumble through these okay that's not what we want we want it to sort of like flip over oh that's weird it seems like it's gonna work too so theoretically we could probably figure out some sort of null thing i think it's just you know um trying to rotate these around a different access point from each one of these pieces and um it's not exactly what we're going for we just want to clean kind of swivel over just like a flop over so that is not exactly working so let's kind of figure out a different way to do this and then get the effect that we want so we could probably go through and do all individual figure out where all of the access points should be but there was actually another way that we came up as we were doing this that seemed to work out pretty good so let me just go into the thing because it's we're going to use some cloners but we have to make some um here let's just full screen um we have to make some objects first so let's just again just saying let's just keep this as simple as possible so let's let's just do a plane see i'm sure this is far too big let's see i don't even see it oh there it is okay i see it now so let's just say that's kind and kind of the size of that but close enough but what we're gonna do is try and you see that these are smaller in the middle and then get bigger bigger bigger as they go out so we're going to try and replicate that kind of feel um just with uh another approach so we have this established and what i was saying before let's just keep this as simple as possible so one and one so this is just essentially just one polygon so let's just keep this nice and simple all right and let's put this in a cloner and by default by default it's going to be a linear one which in this case we actually want so this obviously too much space we know that this plane is 20 so we want this to so now it's like side by side by side and let's just say 8 for now so what we're going to want to do is make this a essentially a pie slice and one of the things that work really well in doing this is if we just use the deformer here the taper we can make this squinch this down like here let me just squinch this down into a um a point here now i sort of have a love-hate relationship with some of these departments especially when i'm trying to like figure out sizing and like how to get it there is a really great function um that is it's it's fit to parent but i can't make this a child of this because it will just repeat itself and see here's the fit to parent i want it to be the actual size of this entire thing so to have it work if you select both of these and then option g it will put it in a group and it's a hierarchy thing so this will affect what's going on above this and that way you can stack different um uh different deformers and stuff like that um so now i gotta figure out well i know this is 20 wide okay so there's a start let's just make it 20 deep now the height is where it's gonna come into it um well i can do a little bit of simple math i know i have eight here and then uh it's 20 high so let's do 160. okay well it's pretty good however i think the axis is where it's doing the math is a little bit off um but here let's let's just activate this looks like i'm going in the right direction too all right whoops let's make this go around one eight okay so that's good um however it doesn't seem to fit properly and if i want to do more it's just not going to work out that way so one of the things that we just dipped into just really quick to um try and help this along is is there a way that we can just sort of like adjust one thing and have everything uh work the same and of course we have espresso in a cinema to do that and like i'm no math whiz at all and it's really really intimidating however if you just sort of like just take it step by step and uh leverage you know the the sort of like tricks that they have in there just to make it a little bit more easy and a little bit less overwhelming um it is actually a really functional tool so i think what we want to do well we need to figure out how we can match the height of this and still have this change and have this respect that and that's probably and probably where the position is because it seems like that's off as well so let me just i'm going to put the another spreads over here so if you do shift c you can search for anything you want so i'm going to do espresso and just put a tag on here and i'll just put it on this note just to make it a little bit easier so we're going to want information happening with the taper right and then we're gonna want information coming from see if we can base everything around this and change you know just to this simple thing and of course we're gonna need some information in the cloner as well so let me just make these a little bit bigger all right so what are we trying to do here we are trying to figure out the taper size that x height and then probably the x position as well so um let's just kind of think this out first all right so the taper height equation we we have the panel let's just call it x and then the cloner count i think i already did that would be um the taper height so pretty simple x i'm just using variables here x times n equals c which you know 20 times eight kilometers equals 160. so that's a pretty straightforward thing so how can we figure that out so first thing though and one of the things that i love and discovered about um about espresso i used to go through and like right click and like try and find all of the parameters that are in these things to be able to put it together turns out you can just drag and drop it in there so i can just drag this into here and look at that now it's got that port and so this way you can be like okay what parameters do i need to use or have and then you can just drop them right in here so what do we need with the cloner probably the cloner count and actually you know what we can we can use the panel height to drive the the uh uh the x part of uh the distance between the cloners so we can just do that immediately okay because we'll be cool now is if we just change this then the cloners will always be next to each other there'll be no gaps and then okay so we probably want a cloner count as a little bit of math so look at this just drop it on that side and then with the taper what information do we need with the taper um need the x position so let's just drop that in there and then with this one specifically um you actually do need to go and get something because i can't split that uh xyz but whenever you need a very specific thing you just go to object properties and this will have all of the stuff that's specific to the thing that you're going for so let's just do size wise okay so i think we have all of this uh mapped out so what's our first equation another good thing is you can just search here i know it's going to be math so let's do math so let's start here so we want the height of this panel times how many um cloners are so let's just do here's your first input and then here's your second input and then inside this node you can just say hey what do you want to do i want to multiply i want to multiply this times this and then that will equal the size and there you go and one of the things that you can test that is there's a result node you can just port it and port it in there and 160. so um 20 times 8 equals 160. so now we know that the size of the of the taper should be 160 and if we change any of these values it's just going to reflect all the way through which is super cool okay so there's our first part here let me take the strength off this so we can see now the second part of this is the uh position of it so the way that the x position is i'm sorry the y position is it's just half of the height because it's always this is always going to be in the middle and that might not reflect the same with the cloner but the way the taper works it will always be the same so if you think about it we have this result here z half of the z will be where the position so so wherever the um the height of the taper just half of that and that will um uh be the exact center of the height so just let's just do another math node easy so we wanted one result this result and port that into here now you don't always need two things because you can if you look here you can just go divide by two let's just let's do another result so you can see if i can spell properly so it was 160 so it's 80. so we know what that is so let's just do this and then port that back up here now that seems to be off so something's not right here i wonder here we touched on the null previously i wonder if this has something to do with it let me let me take it out of here for an up look at that okay so look that is pretty close let's let's try some of these things let me change the cap uh that's working pretty good look that's like totally locked in i gotta say i i still get it when these things work out but we're off a little bit and i think that's because this panel you know this again is um this point is uh the cloner is starting from the center of this first panel which means that it's half on this other side and the taper is starting from from zero essentially so we can adjust that too because we know exactly what this panel size is so let's just go back over here one more stage to this okay so we figured out the taper height great z we ported that into this one awesome and then we can actually use this so this minus half the height of this x look at that d is the true overlord of the taper position so we're just gonna have to add a few more uh uh nodes to this so let's let's just go back up here real quick let's open this up and put this all right so here we have this and we have this so we need to add a few more things between this so it's almost like this and this it's got to go so we know we have to do half the amount we got to get one bit of information and as we did with the height of just like splitting it by two so we're just going to port this in and then we're going to say divided by 2 which will give 10 and then we got to do this minus this we'll go back into here so one more math number and we so we can go this one which is the height minus 10 subtract and then go oh hold on let's do a reveal here let's see if this goes down here come on can do this sweet now we have a total rig that is responsive to just two parameters so now we can see that this will always stay the height to this no matter what and then if we change the cloner count two everything will be locked in that's pretty amazing right so just doing this i know this looks a little bit messy but if you sort of like think it out in your head this has to happen this has to happen this has happened you just look in inside espresso figure out which parameters that you want and then that's it it's really quite amazing that i i self-admitted non-math genius could just sort of stumble my way through here just with a few um math notes so this is really exciting so but the next thing that we want to do is we got to get this taper going so now like i mentioned before we can't get it in there here let's just put this back into the null back into the null and let's see what happens well that's being weird here let's create a new note maybe it has something to do with where the espresso look at that all right so we want this makes that work all right so let's i like pi let's call it that let's be cool to our friends and always name our things okay so now we have this and we can just port that right into a mograph we want a radial thing so let's just put this into a cloner we do not want linear we want radial that's kind of cool but that's not what what we're looking for let's go this way hey hey all right now we're getting somewhere let's just get that you know what we're gonna go so now we just up the count and one of the things once you start doing a lot of videos this is this wonderful instance mode let's just change it to multi-instance it'll just make the performance a lot faster okay so now we have a total pi like a little bit of a gap a little further okay so now um let me just take the visibility off this so now essentially we have the exact same thing happening here and since these are individual pieces it's going to respond in a different way so we can actually just take this exact same effector that we had previously let's turn this guy back on and let's see what happens okay that's super weird why is that not working huh oh wait we have we have a cloner inside a cloner i wonder if we change it to here because this is the individual pieces that we want let's see if this works that's it so again just to touch on the hierarchy of how these things work it's just important of like order and you know you saw how hard that is it's like something's not working let's just try it in this and that's again one of the fantastic things about cinema 4d is that you can just go back and forth until you find what you're what you're looking for now let's go back into this the parameters of this because i think i got this all wonky all right this is looking better so i want these to like flip over completely but some it's just mellow out this uh this uh flip it over too um obviously we can change this again you know if you just do right click f curve we can just make this bigger so we don't have to like keyframe anything so let's just pull these up so it gets bigger cool great all right look at that everything just sort of like live happening all just rolling with it until you get what you get what you want so actually i'm going to take off this scale and now we have this cool just sort of like thing going over and if we have one side dark one side um bright as it catches the light as it goes over um that's kind of how it worked out so let's just go look at this one more time pretty amazing right and look at all the different things that we learned a lot along the way of like how we can leverage and just sort of like riff with it and um and just figure it out on the fly it's um really fantastic for creative solutions so let's move on to the next one here all right so here we have another background one of my favorites here let me just play this now there's always a costume that has some sort of feather so when we sort of like lean into trying and distill out of um what the costumes are and just trying to pick out elements and stuff uh one of the things that we always appear somewhere is a feather and uh this is this nice sort of like i don't know twirly tunnel uh that we made and uh actually this is from season three so this was back when there was no uh uh fields for effectors so i was just um using shapes and and uh different uh techniques to get to this point and so when going back since this was still one of my favorites just in terms of looks going back to actually uh see how we could modify it and uh make it a little bit better and a little bit more dynamic um it was fun just going through and making this again so let me stop this and let's go over to cinema 4d and uh start checking it out okay so we have this uh feather here and we're gonna want to apply it cloners that's always the best place to start now um just like the previous one i always like to just base things off of like the most simple uh geometry or shapes or that kind of stuff first so um so this is a helix you can use it for corkscrews or or um twists or any of those things um it's a really useful thing because uh it has so many different uh parameters here that you can dial and you can really form it into different things i use this for um paths for cameras as well just get nice even rotates around if you want to come down something so um i always uh just uh look for the simplest thing because a lot of times the simplest solution is usually the best so um but uh this default shape is not what we're looking for so let me just change the inner radius so it starts a little bit further in and i think we'll probably need to make it a little bit bigger as well okay so that's that's good we got a lot going here um and then uh but we're gonna want it tighter like more um more revolutions in here so uh one of these things oh i just want to point out really quick that all of these um entry fields for parameters and stuff it will do math for you so um i always link into it like uh say i want four times the amount in here like i wouldn't know what that number is i'd have to get the calculator out but you can just go boom look at that asterisk for multiply times four it looks like it's 28.80 all right so you can do this plus minus multiply divide all that kind of stuff the other cool thing too is if you want to do it will actually change the units as well so if we do oh inches it will change it to what it is in centimeters which totally blows my mind so if you have like a variation in what you um have measurements on uh you can just type it in there so these fields are actually really powerful um so this is kind of like a cone shape which i'm not really into so let's just make the height zero okay so this looks more like a heating element and just nice and flat and tight and we can make things come out um in in different ways okay so have our helix so that's the shape we have this geometry is what we're going to apply to the shape so if i hold this hold down option go to cloner it will um apply um put this inside the cloner and apply it so the default is linear we do not want that let's just go straight to object and then whoop drag this right into the object okay so we have it in here obviously going in the wrong direction we don't want that at all so just easy ways to to fix this up so um i also like it evenly spaced too because if you start with it even then you can add the variation to that afterwards so let's just put a little a few more in here um just so we can see what's going on now if you go to the transform flag tag inside of cloner object you can do global changes to these things so i know that i want to get it at least 90 here so it's flat but see since they're curved you don't really i'm worried about overlap to be honest so i'm going to overcrank this so it's let's go to 120 so it's up a little bit so that's good cool and then um maybe we just want to change this direction a little bit just so it's sort of like an outward kind of thing go okay that's feeling pretty good to me however we want some more density to this um let's go up to 400. that feels pretty good however there's lots of gaps in here before i get out of this area though these instance modes you can change it to different so if you have tons of a cloner so you can actually change it to multi-instance and um it will the functionality in the performance will greatly um increase um so let's just do another global change here it's just double the size okay that feels pretty good right um so now we have our shape that's looking pretty good so let's do some effectors on it now just to save the um boredom of me doing my beloved uh taurus field again i have one set up here so i'll just activate this this is uh i'll drop it in here but it's it's the same as the other one it does a quick expansion at the beginning so you can see here and it will go through but what i have been doing is i'm having it sort of like ripple out and go through and then as it passes through it goes down i i also have a little bit of rotation on there too here we can just look at it real quick so we can see what's going on so i got things moving and then i got i dialed this in uh saved you the trouble of watching me do this endlessly until i start feeling like it's good so let's just look at this real quick that has a nice feel you know what it would be cool too let's just rotate this guy a little bit all right so like i always say i never know nope which directions which um so it must be this one and then let's go to the end and i want it to go i want to go this way let's just say 20. now the default is those who might be easy and easy out on this and i actually just want to continue this one so let me right click on this animation f curve all right so you can see it starts slow gets faster and faster and then it starts slowing down i actually want it just like straight linear so you can select mod you can click this and it'll just do it for you or sometimes what i do is i right click it and i'll go to zero length and that will flatten it out but the it won't make it a linear keyframe this is still a keyframe where you can do a curve on it so let me do that and then it should be a constant pace the entire time okay so let me get rid of the visibility of that all right so this is looking pretty cool however i just want a few more like different um variations to it if you just layer this stuff and it starts to feel pretty natural so let's do let's do a random because i do want something random so if your cloner over here is selected and then you just go here um it will automatically put it in here and also remember you can reorder these um it depends how much is layered up and uh it does probably an important part uh for this is is pretty simple but i if you need something to especially if you have like one parameter say the x direction or the x scale only on one and you want that to happen before some other one happens then um order here is important too and and you can mix them as well which is which is super cool okay so back to here so i just know from writing down what this is so i i actually don't want that much of the position so i'm just gonna do like two just barely barely however i do want a fair amount in the um in the rotation so let's do 30 here so even now it's starting to feel a little bit more ruffled and better so all those two okay so that feels pretty great all right so let's look at this again in motion cool all right one of the other cool things without having to keyframe anything with the random if you go to this tab the effector tab this random mode if you change this to noise this will actually start animating the noise to it you can sort of see a wobble here not really interested on such a fast one so you just change the animation speed a little bit slower and then the scale is if you can imagine sort of like a fractal noise what's what's generating this i kind of want that a little bit bigger so it feels a little bit more natural like if it's small here i'll overcrank this so you can kind of tell but hey if that's the effect you want then that's cool too so let's go back to this back up to 200 okay so this is feeling pretty cool to me all right but the other weird thing is i'm not exactly happy with if i start going through here you can see i'm getting some um some uh intersection here which you know in the grand scheme of things and it goes pretty quick it's not going to be a huge deal however is there something that we can do about that um i know we can do um dynamics on cloners so so let's try that let's just let's just put a assuming if you've got a simulation rigid body let's just do that and let's see let's just see what happens press play okay well you don't want that because that's all just going to fall away one of the things i often play with is like if we can just have this we obviously want these to stay in place um if you uh click um command d it will bring up your project settings and there's a dynamics tab here and it has gravity so you can actually change the gravity of how much you want let's just zero this out and see what happens are they going to stick in place kind of but they also start floating away because they have sort of like velocity inheritance for the um from the uh effector going through so all right we're getting a little closer i mean that's cool but how do we get it to stay in place so one of the things that you can do is even mix um further sort of dynamic techniques in this so let me just take this feather go over i have this other um project here so let me just paste this in now just a quick note too we version a ton of stuff sometimes our projects are super um uh simplified and rendered down and figured out or sometimes they're really complicated and some things need to stay in there and say accessible but we don't want to clutter up anything we leverage the layers tab a lot and all our great artists like do their due diligence to name things properly and assign things into groups and all that kind of stuff it really does make for a better workflow now i'm using this one in particular because one of my favorite ones actually if you click here it will show you what each one of these icons look like for me it's the manager it's like i don't want to see it up in here and you just click this now it's now it's there which is incredible to me um or you can just like clean everything up and just have whatever active thing that you want in there um so let's see how this is going to play out so there's a thing called a connector and if you can just imagine this as a hinge or any of those things here let me do shift c i'll do another connector so if she um searches everything so um sadly i don't know where everything is in the menu so i end up just like typing things and will come up um so if you can see in this one here there's all these different types of movements that can go but most importantly this means that this will stay in place in orbit around an axis or a combination of axises and or move like that so this might be a good way to be able to anchor this in still have dynamics applied to it but not have it float away hopefully it will be uh remain sort of like locked into where the cloner is putting that on the hinge so the way this works it's actually quite simple so here let me clear this it's just saying hey i need one thing for it to be we know we want the feather to hinge now let me just go with that now the other thing is you just need to place you need two items you need what's gonna swing and what is sort of like holding it in place and right here i just put a null here that's all i need it doesn't need to be geometry it doesn't need to be anything else and i just put that in here so what i'm telling it is this feather can orbit around where the hinge is really easy so let's press play well nothing's working because you need to put a dynamic stack on this so rigid body let's just press this and apologies uh that is something i'll get into in a sec so impress press this and there you go you got a hinge now is this going to work inside of a cloner let's try it how weird so if i do it like that it will just default to this first and completely disregard the connector so i wonder if there's some hierarchy thing that we can do let's just let's just make these two children of this let's see what this oh that's pretty sweet right look at that they're even interacting with each other that's incredible so this is definitely what we're looking for so let's put this back we're going to steal this one we're going to go back to our other project here and then we're just going to do the old switcheroo so let's take this put this in here i'll take this one out and just hide it all right so now hopefully we got something going on here oh wait we got doubled up dynamic size so let's get rid of this because we know this is the one we want and here's the connector too so let's just see what happens oh that's pretty wild it is coming off a little bit though so let's see how we can limit that but that's something too and then just to highlight just real quick i don't want it to like orbit too much to rotate too much so there's actually an angular limit here so if you can imagine just you know five degrees this way five degrees that way it will sort of like limit how far it will go it will move as a whole because of the dynamics but in terms of the actual connector the hinge moving it will limit it will limit that okay so let's think about this how can we make this chill out a little bit and here let's go in closer so let's see what's going on okay so inside the dynamic stack there is a gazillion different things that you can choose unless uh we're mograph and dynamics that didn't really change anything but i just feel better that it's that way probably don't want fiction friction so friction is like when it rubs against each other it will sort of slow down and then bounce obviously is like if it hits each other it will bounce a lot so i don't want other settings we have in here that will help um i know from previous things this this force this follow position and follow rotation sort of dampens things down a little bit and mellows it out let's just let's start it two let's see how this goes all right and look it wants to come back to its original place so that's super cool it's trying to find where it came from but obviously it's still a little crazy so let's let's go to five let's see how that looks okay better here let's line this up that's looking pretty cool okay so we're cranking even more let's go to seven no let's go to ten see what happens here all right there's some errant ones here that might actually be too much so let's go back to some okay so that's feeling pretty darn awesome to me so now we can see actually here let's let's do the animation speed up on this so one of the great things is you can sort of just you know do pretty much like live updates on this and just sort of tweak it until you get it to the place you want so for me this is looking pretty darn cool and natural and you know if you texture this and light it right as these things sort of like turn and move around and hit the light in specific ways um it it'll work out so one of the other things i just wanted to point out really quick is that to get this sort of look here where it's all one and then just sort of like random ones this was important to get the color palette into there now um uh our shop uses arnold and there's a way to sort of like randomly assign you can just tell most of it to be one color in the little bits of pieces which is good but if we want to do it this way and i don't know if this is a cheat or not but this is how i ended up figuring out to do it so this will you see here clones iterate random blend sword so this you can sort of like move around iterate just means it will just go from one to the next to the next so actually if i duplicate this here and go back to the beginning it's not the cloner duplicate this and i do that by holding command and then dragging and then if i put make that one red so it will be one black one red here's another one let's make that white okay it went back so but if you change this to random you'll sort of randomly assign it and two you can just like go through these and figure it out but i want mostly black how am i going to do that so i figured i don't know if this is a hack or not but i would just duplicate these until i get to the point where i have the amount of black that i want so there we go i mean that's pretty easy if you don't have that functionality in your renderer this is just a pretty easy way too and it's still referencing this random here and so you can just cycle through until you get to the combo that you like um so that's kind of where we got with this i'm super excited to share that with you the fact that you can mix dynamics and connectors and your cloner together just to make something really dynamic is uh exciting for me and how to elevate your work well thanks everybody for uh listening i'm looking forward to answering some questions from you um this was really fun to uh get a chance to do this um again my name is dan pierce design director of the fox broadcasting company uh here are some of my uh information the automator.tv is my website if you just search stampers on behance i got tons of like bts things and breakdowns and then my instagram is waiting for renders but um be fair warning there is almost zero motion graphics on that it's mostly my baking pictures so just fair warning on that and special thanks to the team at visual innovation studio which is the sort of agency internal agency that we have at fox and the team there and then of course maxon thank you so much for um letting me be a part of this again i really love this hope to do it again soon

Channel: Maxon

Views: 2,842

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, mograph, maxonvfx, Broadcast Design

Id: gp5tXbqWPlY

Length: 62min 25sec (3745 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021