Duarte Elvas and Jake Allen of Sarofsky @ SIGGRAPH 2019 | Maxon Cinema 4D

so to my left our two gentlemen Jake Allen and to warrant Elvis from Swarovski all the way from Chicago so let's give them warm welcome and enjoy Hey hello Lou I reckon there we go testing testing very cool all right well let's begin thank you so much max on for having us this is an amazing time we are so grateful to be invited here among so many awesome artists and people and we're really excited to share some cool stuff that we've done in cinema 4d oh my god it is such an honor I mean we're so excited and nervous and all the things yeah and I mean especially being amongst such an amazing line-up of presenters and everybody's been so nice and welcoming and it's just yeah it's been incredible absolutely Wow thank you big shout out to max on thank you so much so my name is do arts it's pronounced to art so I guess it was somewhat predestined I I am creatively that's Saurav scheme and I've been using cinema for about 10 years now and it's it sounds like a long time it is just such an intuitive tool I I always surprised that how easy it is to create fairly complex looking visuals in so quickly you know and and don't be fooled I've been using cinema for 10 years but I consider myself a pretty basic user I like I like to keep my stuff very simple and when I say simple I mean like bringing some splines from AI and and just throw it in an extruded straight ignoring cinema and that kind of simple yeah but but that's what's so cool about cinema is that you don't need to have that expert knowledge to create some really visually striking work you know absolutely and and that's that's what I love so with pretty basic knowledge II can actually work on Marvel title sequences and yeah yeah yeah so but but this Jake actually dives way deeper into the software than I do and yeah I mean I I'm Jake Alan I'm a senior 3d designer and animator it's rav ski I've been using cinema 40 like full-time for about six years now before that I was hopping in and out of other 3d packages and I've just I feel like I keep gravitating toward cinema 4d because of what Dorrit was saying the ability to create really good looking motion graphics very quickly and the complexity of the systems that you can create and the intuitiveness of the tools just makes a cinema 4d that the tool of choice that we use it's araf ski so it's it's great yeah absolutely yeah so right here we have our awesome space in the West Loop in Chicago alright Shantanu surrounds keep your watch everybody's watching we have skis a boutique design and visual effects production company and we're pretty small we have about 14 people full-time and we scale up depending if we need we're bringing freelancers and yeah I think what one of the things that sets us apart is that we are very much concept and design driven and so we instill these principles and pretty much everything that we do throughout the production and post-production process and we do a lot we do live-action we do editorial motion graphics special effects finishing and I mean for a variety of projects wide range so people know us for our main title work and we love main titles yes I mean it's just so cool that that these these have the potential to become these iconic standalone pieces I mean that's some people they all sometimes they all live the shows that they're made remember people may not even remember the show and they will remember the title sequence so does that ever happen to anybody I mean you're working on so that's kind of cool and we've been very fortunate to have worked with Marvel Studios on eight of their films so far yes so that's really really awesome thank you Marvel - yeah however as we're known for our main title work about 80 percent of the work that we produce is actually advertising work so this is really our bread and butter and we we work really we work really hard on these actually we put as much as or more into advertising we put attention to detail we we really like put as much effort into these as we do our entertainment work so and and it's so different about advertising they they may not have that sort of that archival quality that a main title for a film has you know because they may be gone like after they run for a minute yeah it's like a very ephemeral medium yeah it's really hard on it and then you won't be able to find it on YouTube like a day later after the game exactly it's gone yeah we've seen we love it yes mostly what we do but I think it's enough to talk about enough talking about our work I think it's time to share this freshly cut montage that Jamie at this studio our editor thank you together specifically for this presentations yeah let's take a look at what we do [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] all right yeah yeah thank you everybody so really like a wide range on stone on there yeah I love that so but now that we've talked we've talked about the work we've seen the work I wanted to talk about something completely different it's live yeah brand-new exciting new initiative that that we just started we wanted to engage more with the community in general so this year we started stravsky labs and these are weekend workshops it's a weekend workshop series that covers a few aspects of motion design each one of them is different yeah and it's really like a great opportunity for other creatives we open the doors they come in and do stuff with us hang out get to make cool stuff basically yeah meet new people except really fun and it is like a great opportunity for people to see what our workflow is like what our process is and we treat each person's project like a regular project in the studio so it's it's super cool we've had four so far and we have a new one coming up I think next week it's on UI design yeah and yeah and actually that one is sponsored by our friends at red magenta and red giant is that wretched and yeah and they're going to be giving away some freebies so I strongly encourage if you guys are interested to take a look at our website and learn more about zorroski labs because it's it's really a special special initiative and now we have buckets yeah so I feel like we were talking about I think between us we have like a collective like 15 years of experience in cinema 4d and so we really love the software and we wanted to do a special piece just for SIGGRAPH that demonstrated a lot of the new features in cinema 4d r20 which I know yeah hilariously is old news so I mean the new features in are 21 but we created this animated short called buckets and without further ado let's check it out let's take a look world premiere of bucket yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] all right hmm I don't know if anybody caught the Arnold render buckets at the end but that was the inspiration for the name nice listen they were like what do we call this thing cool there you go yeah so we're gonna break this down a little bit actually we gave ourselves 30 days to get this thing finished our presentation was due on the 22nd of July and we started concepting on the 22nd of June you'll notice we have like a whole week for procrastinating but you know it is the most important part of every project is the rain if you don't have a good concept you're probably not going to have a very interesting piece so during this time we brainstorm we you know throw ideas out there and the we kind of figure out what we want this to be we want this to be a fun puppy piece and we wanted to represent a little or reflect a little bit of what Sasuke culture is like and we want it to be in our voice but also we wanted to show the new features in our 20 yeah so this time was allocated for that and actually Arin our awesome boss and creative director it's actually executive great director it's yes found this awesome image and it's really funny it's the anatomy of a pinata it was created a few years ago by the Carmichael collective and and it this is just an image that got us thinking got us thinking a little bit deeper about like how artists are naturally curious you know and how people wonder sometimes what's inside of different random objects yeah I I sometimes thinking about that for sure you want to just cut and open and see you know sometimes you don't you know you can't just go around cutting things open yeah yeah we thought it would be really fun to just kind of reimagine what what would be inside of all these things yeah you know so what was essentially a technical exercise to begin with turned into can exercise of creativity so and then you'll notice that we have a week where everything looks pretty empty here around fourth of July so you have to this isn't us just chillin we did not just procrastinate actually we we work full-time on client work and with this piece as a passion project so we had to work around that and yeah and that was a short week we all wanted to go and you know and break 4th of July and everybody was really busy so I actually came in and started sketching some some stuff on the on the weekend of the 4th of July he started making these these thumbnail sketches and I hope my drawing professors from college and never lay their hands on their their eyes on their ideas but this was like the beginning of this thing kind of materializing you know like you start visualizing what these things look like you get the idea across to everybody else and and so once I had this I actually started looking at colors I I used a BB color and I browsed their fashion photography section and I started looking for color palettes that would our color schemes that would match the scenarios that we that we made up so grabbing those I started putting together the color story so once we had that I colored the story board and we were ready to cut this stuff to a soundtrack yes I went audio jungle found a cool soundtrack and put it all together got it together so this was really a roadmap for for what the piece was going to be yeah this was helpful because we could look at it and sort of calculate timing you know what was going to be needed to be simulated with rigid bodies with soft bodies with grains all these different kinds of things so the entire team of artists was looking at this sort of like you said is it as a road map or like a blueprint for what we wanted to do perfectly gets the idea across yeah you know I can see it's in a lab I've got some of these viewfinder II things and little things on the side so it definitely tells the story and gets across what the piece is essentially going to be yeah so I handed that off to our three-day team and people started modeling absolutely yes sourcing models we sort of hit the ground running when we got the animatic and we were thinking oK we've got as you can see it starts to get into a little bit of a squeeze so what do we have time to model what do we have time to source big shout out to websites like turbosquid and cg trader because it's super cool that there's so many people creating these models that enable us to finish a project like this in such a short amount of time so things like the TV or the grenades or the shark we were able to get models with really nice topology and I believe they have booths here so go say hello to them but it was very easy for us to find the props and the objects that we needed for these scenes and the ones that we didn't need to model we didn't need to model so yeah and it gives you a lot of flexibility because you get to the last week and you think oh I don't have this model of them yeah I really need and that's really complicated to make so exactly in two minutes you buy it and you have it yeah yeah so once you have the models you can start simulating stuff and really figuring out what techniques work best for which ones are exactly yeah we were already sourcing models but creating like sort of dummy geometry to just see if the simulations would work we'd pass that over to the model and as you can see everything starts overlapping here because we're having a few artists do that and then building the scenes and then doing the simulations so it's kind of like a simple sort of pipeline workflow that we had going during this entire week yeah we're getting to the last week it started to get a little bit more squeezed and things start to get really overlapping so we were animating we were throwing the models into look development we had like four different people that were doing that kind of workflow so getting the model simulating it throwing it into our scene and animating it and yeah then we hit the weekend where then we hit the weekend where we actually broke down I think yeah exactly this is our literal 30-day breakdown but yeah we rendered it and composited it and I was throwing like temp sounds on it it was not putting a damper Faxon it was kind of cool though that on the 22nd when people came into the office in the morning we were able to share a piece that you know happened very very very quickly yeah it was a really big surprise so it was very fun yeah and then a couple of days later a little bit outside of our 30 days we actually sent this over to our friends mcgroove guild who there's the sound design yeah that final son for this and it was really the the cherry on top thank you so much to that because it really added to it yeah and this is the whole team that worked on the project yeah so thank you so much to everybody especially a lot of the artists that were working on commercial projects at Sourav ski came up and said you know how can I help what can I do and it really helped so I mean I don't want us to give the impression that we take all the credit for this because so many people have done this this is definitely like one example where you know the collaboration of the studio really comes through so everybody just kind of wanted to jump in and help out yeah and and do it even outside of their work hours for sure so it's very helpful yeah thank you everybody thank you yeah now we're going to just go through every scene and kind of show you some of the things that we learned and yeah now let Jake Drive from now on yeah we can we can transition into the scene so yeah once we created this road map we we hopped into each of the scenes so we're gonna start with the shark which i think is a good starting point it's very simple we were able to just bring the model from CG trader into cinema 4d and using the modeling tools which you've seen before in previous presentations we were able to go into polygon mode and just cut it so you can see we go into create tools and the line cut tool and slice there we go that's all we had to do with the shark and we we did it at kind of a cantered angle so you can see the inside of the shark cuz we thought it would be very fun to see the jello coming out and not have these sort of straight edges that wouldn't give it that kind of death right so we brought that into our scene you can you can see that the the setup is fairly simple we have like a psych or just a backdrop and if we turn off the active camera you can see what the the whole setup is like big shout out to Greg Smith 3d artist to model the bucket it was very nice we got it in the style that we wanted and we start animating the shark just using keyframe animation having each of the sides just sort of fall with a little bit of bounce we were gonna use soft bodies for the secondary animation but it ended up proving just a little computationally expensive so we used one of my favorite features in cinema which is the jiggle deform er which literally just adds jiggle to the object it takes the point animation and gives it Springs the cool thing with that is you can actually paint a vertex map so you can see here the yellow is a hundred percent stiff and the red is the areas that we painted that we wanted to be more jiggly so the front of the mouth we've got the fin on the top we get the fin on the side and we did it for the back half too it's very easy to just paint these on with the vertex map tools and give it a little bit more jiggle in the areas that we wanted like the tail so when we turn those on and we play the animation you can see that it doesn't even have to simulate for that long it literally works in real time and we get a little bit of that secondary animation so look that's it looks like yeah it's very jiggly for the cubes themselves we were originally going to use the shark as collision geometry but we realized that the moving mesh was just giving it a lot of issues so we created this sort of fake setup which is awesome this was just a good lesson in keeping your simulation simple we didn't even use the shark at all we created these two empty rectangles with their faces facing inward deleted so they had holes for them to fall out of and we parented those underneath underneath each half of the shark so that they would inherit that animation and it's just a series of simple cubes that are put under a cloner and if I hide the shark you can see what the setup looks like you know that the geometry is just fairly simple so for a lot of our simulation work we use a real flow for a lot of the things we do at Sourav ski and we originally had a crunch it was a time crunch so using what we knew we created the soft body simulation in realflow but later on we had a little bit of time after the fact and we're able to reverse-engineer it into cinema 4d so by no means do you have to use real flow as the tool of choice the soft body simulation worked perfectly fine but we'll show you how it worked basically with cinema 4d because real flow in cinema 4d interoperate really nicely and they have a series of plugins that you can use that export your geometry with all the keyframe data all your vertex maps all your UVs are maintained so this is what we used up here we use the real flow SD exporter which let us select just the cubes and the geometry that we wanted to be the soft bodies you can see me selecting here in the video the left cubes and the blockers and then I just add those and I export them and they come into real flow so let's hop in a real flow for a second here we are and the geometry as you can see just imported perfectly we added a little bit of thickness to the boxes so that it would be a little bit more stable with the simulation but you can see that the animation comes in perfectly fine and the cubes are in there too so if I hide these blockers that I haven't make them in wireframe mode you can see that the cubes are in there they get triangulated because realflow uses triangulated geometry for all of it but the soft body system was actually done using particles real flow has a new particle based dynamics solver for soft bodies and it uses the animation of the particles and constraints between them to do the soft bodies and then it uses that almost like a mesh deform ur on the geometry so we were able to have the animation occur on the cubes you can see I added these little pusher blocks because they weren't falling out of the cube enough so they kind of go her and they just push the cubes out within like 24 frames and that was nice because it only had like 1 second to show the shark so if I hide those particles and I bring back the cubes you can see that the animation comes back perfectly fine and there's our cubes falling out the really cool thing is that all of this is baked as Alembic and since our 19 cinema 4d has at a really robust Alembic toolset so this was a no-brainer to import an export back into the software and we're gonna do that right now we're gonna hop back into cinema 4d and you can see that the Alembic comes in perfectly it's scaled for the shark it comes down and falls outside the tricky thing is we were thinking how do we hide these cubes while they're outside of the shark and then when they exit it how do we turn them back on so cinema 4d now is a feature where you can take an Alembic and you can click that button in the upper left corner that's called make editable and it lets you have access to the vertex data of your Alembic instead of just being one point and because we have access to the vertex data we can add vertex maps using the new fields feature in cinema 4d so we created a vertex map using two box fields that gave it a zero percent value when it was outside of the shark and then when it exited it gave it a hundred percent value what did we do with this well we've this into a cutout opacity in the Arnold shader so it's literally just invisible when it's outside of the shark and once it exits the body of the shark it becomes visible again and our 3d artist Matt miltenberger actually came up with this technique he is legitimately a magician on the side like legitimate magician and he came up to us and was like it should be easy just make it disappear make it appear again and I was like this is next-level thinking so thank you so much Matt for the the tips on getting that working the next thing that we had was the inside of the shark you could see the inside of the model and it just looks kind of plain the reverse texture wasn't looking very nice so we wanted to add this kind of body on the inside to our to the idea of having this gridded layer of cubes to kind of look like the organs on the inside and this was just a breeze to create using a new volume builder tools in cinema 4d the way that we built it is we use the volume builder to create a smaller version of the shark and so you can see on the inside of the shark there we've shrunk it down and we did that using an a road layer that is a standard for a VDB modeling and when we did it we created one version of the shark then we duplicated it and we subtracted it so now we have this sort of tube of the inside of the shark and we chopped it with a Q the cool thing and this is something that we learned from the inimitable nose man in the cinema 4d community is that you can pipe a matrix object into the Voronoi fracture object and you get this really cool kind of gridded structure that looks like the jello cubes but it fits the shape of the inside of the shark that we had and all of this is procedural so if duart came up to me and said I want the cubes to be bigger I want them to be smaller it was just a one-click change to the size of the cube and it would just cascade upward in the object manager and it made it really easy to make changes for us and so the volume builder tool set is very nice especially from a procedural perspective so now we're gonna go to the balloon we actually have a demo scene that we're gonna show you real quick so let me just escape out of the presentation and find my mouse and pull open not the bear but our balloon scene so we have sort of a stripped down version of the balloon right here and we're not gonna talk about the cloth for the balloon or the string there's quite a lot of really cool resources online that show you how to sort of explode it but it's basically a cloth surface with an attractor right here set to a really high negative value so when it blows up boom balloon explodes what we're gonna talk about is the fracturing feature just because that uses some of the new features in cinema 4d r20 that are very cool so let me hide the wind let me hide the floor plane let me hide the string and let me hide everything regarding this balloon so all we have is this inside portion and this is a really cool technique that we originally picked up from Chris Schmidt he does a lot of great information on cinema 4d but we applied it to this sort of circular shape of the balloon and I'll go through how it works so we have a Voronoi fracture which takes points and creates the correct version of the balloon but what we wanted to do is have those cracks grow so we have a plane effector that has the position the scale and the rotation turned on and we just move the position slightly down we scale it slightly down and we rotate it a little bit so when the plane effector does its thing you can see the pieces move slightly and it makes it look like those cracks are growing but the way that we were able to animate that on is by putting inside the plane effector a mograph selection and what a mograph selection is is it's a tag you can add to anything mograph related it can be a cloner it can be a fracture it can be a Voronoi fracture and what it does is it lets you select those pieces so inside of the tag we've got this spherical field and when the field animates forward it creates this selection so that sphere intersects with the balloon and it creates the selection above the spherical field you can now add this thing called a freeze layer and the freeze layer normally does exactly what it says it just freezes a selection that you make but it's got this really cool feature called grow and what that does is it grows the selection frame-by-frame outward in space so as we continue forward you can see that the selection grows and everything that was brown turns yellow the reason this is cool is because no matter where this sphere is touching the growth will happen organically and procedurally so if I delete these keyframes and I move the sphere to the top you can see right here on the balloon it'll grow from the upper left corner whoa if I do it one more time from the lower left let's just you know do this for fun sake oh the cracks grow from there so this was a really cool way that we could create a procedural set up to have these growing cracks on the shape of the balloon once it popped inside the plane effector we have our mograph selection we also have this thing called a delay layer and what that is it just interpolates the plain effector so you start with the pieces not being scaled and moved and normally if we've just put the selection in there you can see that they just kind of pop so what the delay effector does is it creates the frames in between those beginning and end versions of the plane effector and makes it a smooth transition so when we click play you can see that they end up scaling over time and so the delay layer is really helpful if you want to take your plane effector and make that into interpolated frames lastly we added this rigid body tag which was fairly simple it's just set to a rigid body so that it reacts to gravity if you go into your project settings though dynamics are automatically set to have gravity on what we did is we turn that off and then we created a gravity force and at a linear field to it and what that does is it goes from zero to a hundred percent so when we take that gravity field and we animate it upward in the Y everything falls organically from this sort of staggered effect one two three four five like going upward and that way we could get this kind of cartoony effect almost Looney Toons a square it's like nananananana you know and it just falls down to the bottom so that's the balloon so if I hop back into this presentation that was how we achieved that effect with the balloon and the next scene was the TV and it actually seemed like this would be very hard but it ended up being really straightforward we use real flow for fluid stuff and they just added a particle based grain solver so using the same tool set and the same workflow that we have with cinema 4d it was very easy for us to export this TV geometry bring it into real flow and get the grains going so we'll show you how that works the the first thing we needed to do though in the scene is crack the screen so this was really simple we just took the screen and ran it through a Voronoi fracture and then we baked it down so everything was an individual object and all we did is select a line in the center of where we wanted the pieces to actually be rigid bodies so we put those inside of a fracture object so we've got our line of glass inside of a fracture object which lets us do mograph selection tags to it why do we want to do that well the rigid body tag actually has an option in the lower right corner arm sorry the upper right corner of the attributes you can see me highlighting it right there that lets you put a selection in there to activate objects over time and mograph selections can now use fields so by using a box for we were able to animate that in the y-direction much like the balloon and have those pieces activate in a staggered sort of stair-steppy effect so if I scrub through the timeline right here you can see doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo they all fall down and they fall into the bucket in sort of this stair-step fashion and we added a little bit of wind because we wanted the pieces to fall directly into the bucket so you can't see it from the angle of the render but I have this little fan just sort of blowing the pieces in there then we brought it into real flow this was just a good lesson in keeping your simulations very simple so we created these two cubes that represented the inside of the CRT tube on the TV and both of their inward facing faces are deleted so there's a space for the grains to fill up these two boxes below or just blockers so that way like the particles won't flying to the inside of the geometry and we animated it just like using the parented animation in cinema 4d so you can see if I highlight it in the wireframe they have those open sides really super simple and this enabled the simulation to be very very fast in real flow but to get real flow to generate the particles that we wanted I had to create another cube that it was just called particle fill and I'll turn that on right here it doesn't interact with the scene but it just tells real flow hey make my green particles here and Dora kept making me up the resolution of the sim over and over again so we could get finer and finer grain particles yeah they look like little spheres yeah they look like spheres they look like spheres until they got small enough that they just looked like static so with the grains on we turn on our boxes and you can see that with these two really really simple pieces of collision geometry we were able to iterate over and over again until we came up with an animation where the grains fall and they end up in the bucket so very cool well for the most part kind of in the bucket yeah it was a stylistic decision so all of these grains are also saved as a lambic which cinema4d supports so it's very easy for us to save this as an Alembic particle sequence the only thing though is that it was around 600,000 particles so it's very heavy in the viewport and this is something that for people who use Arnold with cinema 4d out there this is just a good workflow enhancement Arnold has this thing called a procedural which is just a proxy object much like in octane or redshift or other renderers so you can see me up here in the plugins menu highlight the Arnold procedural this just lets you load the geometry at render time rather than showing it in your viewport it's a little hard to see but there's a bounding box around the TV that just represents the volume of where those particles are going to be in space you can see right here under the path we just passed it to the Alembic sequence and it even has automatic radius settings and will create instant spheres on the animation so it was very easy for us to keep the viewport nimble do our animation and then see it when we opened up the interactive preview renderer and you can see that right here this is Arnold's IPR open and it's loading all of those particles kind of sorta in real time but basically any change that we make Arnold was reacting spectacularly as we move the camera around and we were able to see what our finished product looked like without having to have the slowdown in the viewport and I'm gonna take our camera here in a second and just undo the active camera State and you can see how quickly it moves around in the scene I'm gonna click that button there we go and this is just a really good workflow enhancement if you have just huge geometry that you need to bring in but you don't necessarily need to see until render time so this was just a workflow enhancement that made it very easy for us to work inside this scene and not have to worry about keeping cinema's viewport kind of slow the hardest thing though was getting this staggered color on the on the TV static we wanted to get this kind of look and normally in cinema 4d you would use a color jitter node in Arnold which works natively with mograph and with instances and clones and those kinds of things and basically what you do is you give it a min and a max min and a max number for your gain and your hue and your saturation so it's really cool you can have a you know hundreds of thousands of clones that all have slightly different colors and things like that but Arnold couldn't read this big Alembic blob as separate objects so thanks to somebody on the Arnold forums we were able to use this rendering state node and what it does is it gives you a bunch of variables but the one that's important is this variable Fi and what that did is it gave us a point ID number for each of the points in the Alembic file and in this particular instance there all of our particles so by piping that rendering state number into the seed value of our color jitter Arnold during its rendering loop goes oh cool I see a new number for each of these particles I'm gonna shade this one this I'm gonna show you this one this and I'm gonna show you this one this and you can see that the gain min and gain max now works so this is just a quick workflow tip because if if you run into the same issue and you're using particles from real flow into Micke setup this is a very nice way to get around the color jitter node now we under the boom box this was one of our favorite scenes it was very fun to work with so the boom box was set up a lot like the shark we ended up using the knife cutting tools you can see there and you can see there where this sort of lightsaber s object cuts through the boom box and we split it into a left a center and a right portion and our designer met miltenberger actually did this using keyframes for the center portion because we wanted to art direct the way that it fell a dynamics are great but sometimes you can't get the results you want right away so as you can see he ended up key framing this piece hanging really slowly and then falling at the very end which we thought gave it more of a comedic effect this was in turn created as a Collider so adding a rigidbody Collider tag to it we could have all the instruments interacting with that centerpiece as it fell just like with the shark though we have this tricky predicament where we were thinking we have all these instruments that we want to come out more that can fit inside the boombox how are we going to be able to do this so one of the things that we did is we created these cubes that are just pushed and pulled so that they represent the angle of the boombox as it ends its animation and if i zoom out of the camera you'll be able to see we have all of our instruments sitting inside of it so we didn't even have to have the boombox interact with the rigidbody simulation at all we were able to just create these two cubes and the center portion and have them fall out so as you can see as I scrub forward in the animation the rigid bodies slide out of the boombox and you have this like look that it's almost too many pieces for whatever can fit inside this boombox the tricky thing though is how are we gonna hide these objects we could use vertex maps like we did with the shark but the problem is is the the hierarchy of these objects was pretty complex we got a lot of these models off of CG trader and turbosquid so you've got buttons you've got pieces of the horn you've got these symbols and the snare with a bunch of screws in it and they weren't really playing that well with the vertex map technique so what we ended up using was this new node in r20 called the fall-off node and it lives an expresso and it actually lets you sample fields inside of expresso setups so not only can you drive mograph you can also use something like this box field to activate its visibility in the renderer and that's exactly what we did we created these two box fields and when they were outside of the boom box there interstate was set to OFF and when they exited it they returned back on and we'll show you what that expresso setup looks like right here so this is the fall-off node it's very very cool because you can pipe any sort of position into it get the value of the fall-off and then pipe that into whatever you want so right here in the attributes editor you can see that there's a tab called fall-off and this is where we put our visibility cubes it doesn't have to be a box it could be any sort of shape that you want but I'll go from left to left to right on how it works you have your object list which is just a list of the objects that you want to use and it acts like a loop and goes through each one we have our object and we pipe the global position into the fall-off and it gives us a 0 to 1 value and that's what we piped into our visible and editor and visible and renderer attributes so even when we're working in the viewport all of those objects are hidden when they're outside of the boom box and if we scrub through the timeline you can see that the the animation right here has them hidden so I'll take the animation and go back and forth and you can watch as it works fine and their visibility is turned on and off and this was once again another magic trick created by Matt so we were very grateful because it added to that sort of comedic effect that there was like how could that all fit inside the boom box I don't even know and we've got ourselves all of our hilarious instruments falling out we've got the teddy bear which we've got another demo for which is very fun so the teddy bear we ended up using soft bodies in cinema 4d but one of the things that you learn with soft bodies and a lot of very cool tutorials have covered this on the internet is if you let me just hide each of these halves I've got the nose the left eye the right eye I'm gonna hide the left mesh and I'm gonna just show you our cages so what we did is we ended up making this sort of really low poly cage around this object which is the bear that we wanted to subdivide so the bear will maintain all its UVs it will maintain all its deformation but the cage itself is the object that we make a soft body and I'm gonna show you how we did that right now the one thing that we did do is we deleted these inward-facing polygons because it wasn't giving us that kind of hollow geometry sort of behavior that we wanted so to select all these there's a really cool tool called the Fong rake selection and it works at the angle of the polygon so it basically lets me select 90 degree angle segments that I can delete so I'm just gonna select all these and there they go they're all gone so we've got our bear and we've got our empty cage what we're gonna do to make this a soft body is we're gonna right-click on the cage we're gonna go to the simulation tags and we're gonna add soft body and right now if I click play it's just gonna fall through the floor but what we wanted to do was have the bear hang by strings so it's starting to sound a little sadistic here but we just really wanted it to be tied up and go and spill its spill its guts everywhere so what we did is using the dynamics tools there's this thing called a spring and the spring is really useful and it works with rigid and soft bodies but what it does is it gives you a position in world space where your spring is going to be mounted and in the attributes it has an option to do object a and object B we don't want to connect two objects we just want to connect the one so we're gonna put the cage into object a and we're gonna switch it from center of mass to polygon point what that means is under-the-hood cinema 4d has point index values for all of these objects that's how cinema knows what point you're talking about when you select something point ten point twenty point thirty so what we can do is raise that index value and the spring will find the point that we want well what if we want to do Springs on each of the arms each of the hands I'm just gonna kick play for fun so you can see there's our bear right there but if we wanted to create complex spring setups we ended up using a cinema 4d Python API so if you're looking to do things kind of like photoshop actions in cinema 4d automating tasks and things like that I highly recommend suniverse --'tis tutorials on Python because a lot of this is exposed to scripts and you can tell it to do things like create a spring here create a spring here create a spring here so we ended up creating a tool called a spring break and if I open our script manager we have that open we don't necessarily have to go over the code right now but we're gonna post it online it's free and the code is totally open and you can check out how we did it but basically what it does is it gets the points position in world space creates a spring and then puts that spring at the same point so what we could do is we could go into our cage and we could highlight all the points on the arm so let's say we want that arm to be constrained highlight all of these run the script and we've got one two three four Springs on each of these points and it gives you the index number if we group them together and we call it something like right arm we now have a group of constraints that we can move if we click play you can see that the bear is constrained what we ended up doing is we did it for the back so I'm gonna do that right now I'm gonna click on this cage and I'm gonna highlight all of these and I'm gonna run this script and group them together and we're gonna call this back and what we're gonna do is we're gonna constrain it almost like stitches so now when we click play we've got the back put together like that and what we're gonna do is we're gonna animate this right arm so if I minimize our script and I go into the coordinate values I can set a keyframe by brushing and painting these keyframe buttons right here we're gonna go to frame 24 let's do one second and have it go up to the right and animate so the fun thing about these Springs is that it's all really live in real time and you can come up with some hilarious setups to spread these bears apart now how do we get this animation for the bear applied to the bear under here this is a really cool feature in cinema 4d called the cage deformer and what it does I'm sorry not a cage deformer the mesh deform er I called it a cage but if I go into the right mesh and go into the deform er menu you'll see this mesh to former under here and it kind of indicates what it does by the icon it has points on another object move the points on a new object so now that we have the cage wrapped around it we add this mesh to former to the right mesh and then we go into the object settings and we drag our cage into there so let's drag our right cage into there and click initialize and cinema 4d does some things for you right now it adds a display tag so that it makes a wireframe of the soft body and you can see what it's doing in real time to your object so now if we click play on ru vide bear blip we've got our bear spreading apart like so and the cool thing is you can take this mesh and you can subdivide it using a subdivision surface so now we've got a really nicely smoothed bear that splits apart the fun thing is that all of these Springs also have a keyframe Abul property called enabled and if you go into the basic tab and you keyframe this enabled property it enables you to break the Springs so if we click it here we go forward one tab when we turn it off and we keyframe it you can actually have the spring go and turn off so what we did is we created a series of stitches basically in the front the middle and the top and we were able to animate those parameters so that we could get that kind of ripping effect so if you want to check out this Grips we're gonna have it on our blog at zuransky and i highly encourage you to just play around with soft bodies it's super fun it's a great way to spend your time so we have some more videos demonstrating what happened at the teddy bear we've got our finalized set up here of the springs if we go back to the beginning of the timeline and click play you can see that we have our stitches breaking and then we have the two arms on the right and the left pulling it apart so one two three like that we've got some curves in the background that looked like stitches we rendered those with the hair shader and this is where we ended up with the soft body one of the features of cinema 4d that we really loved was the baked as Alembic feature so once we had that soft body figured out we would right click and we would click baked as Alembic and what that does is it creates an Alembic file for you without ever leaving the app so it's very nice that you can continue your workflow and you can save it while you're working and now you have your Olympic files that you can turn into colliders because we wanted to do it in a step by step process spread the bear add the grenades inside the bear simulate the grenades so it's very cool the hair itself was pretty straightforward cinema 4d is a very robust hair system and all you have to do is go into the simulate menu and click add hair but if you want to render it with something like Arnold we'll do a quick overview of how that works the hair objects in cinema 4d determine the length of the hair and how many there are so you can do a million hairs 150,000 hairs then it applies a cinema 4d hair material tag this does not determine the color of the hair but it does give you access to properties like clomp kink thickness curl tighten and lengths you can do a length multiplier which is something that we used really heavily what we did is we piped a material or a texture file into that length multiplier to tell it don't grow hair on the eyes don't grow hair on the nose and make it a little bit shorter on the feet the actual Arnold hair material though is the thing that's determining the way that it looks in the renderer so we piped a texture map into the hair so that we get those different colors on the feet and we would get a little bit of variation in the fur just a one caveat though if you're working with hair and Arnold you always want to add an Arnold tag and make sure you have this attribute called export you've E's checked just always remember that because what it does is it will take the UV data from the object that it's on and bring that into the hair system so you can color it appropriately if you don't have we were sitting there banging our heads against the table saying like why can't we I have the colors show up what's going on and that's why so just always remember to have that export you v's button checked the grenades ended up being the simplest part of this scene obviously so what we did is we just filled the bear with grenades using a cloner and the physic system ended up pushing them out into the inside of the bear we set those as rigid bodies and set it to automatic for the collision shape created a little bit of bounce and added a little bit of mass and now you have your grenade set up and you can see them sort of tumbling everywhere the hair system itself is really robust and works with animated meshes too so it interpolates those values of the moving points and you don't get the hair popping around so that was very easy for us and that's how we got the bear last but not least we have the deer and the deer was something similar to the bear we ended up getting this free model off of CG trader and props to Tanner wick where for setting this up our 3d artist he split the model set it up on the wall but the texture map wasn't looking so robust so we ended up taking that system that we learned in the bear scene and applying it to the deer so we applied a hair material to the deer and got the color information from the texture underneath now the hair system doesn't automatically have the hair flow across the object so we ended up using this hair tool called the brush and just gently brushing the hair over the deer and I spent a good 45 minutes just brushing hair so if you want something to do that's really meditative just brush hair on a deer with your object just add some hair and just brush it after that it ended up looking much better because it flowed over the shape of the deer and it was very easy to just brush the hair all over it so once we had the hair finished Dork came up with this really nice setup to split the deer in half without having to use any simulations and this was great because you always want to this was a lesson we kind of learned in this project is that you always want to keep these simulations as simple as possible it's super fun to dive in and a go overboard with it but sometimes it can make it really unmanageable so when you have these deformers bending the deer you don't actually have to do a physics so what work did is he put two Bend deformers but had their limit set lower than the antlers and the top of the ears so only the head would Bend but the antlers themselves would remain still and just follow the position of the benda former so that way the which didn't look like they were remember really simple really simple and you kind of do a really cool effect that looks like a soft buddy yes exactly and it's super cool so we ended up using this correction to former in here which lets us move points on the object and then blend between those movements so what we did is we move the points at the seam and gave ourselves a little bit of a rip and the correction deform actually works with fields as well all of these deformers work with fields in cinema 4d so we were able to take this field and animate it from top to bottom to give it kind of this zipper dripping effect and it was just very simple and keyframe a ball and art-director ball so that's really the important part about using these deformers is you can come back and say oh my god the deer is falling open too quickly or open too slowly and you can just adjust the keyframes and not have to worry about the dynamic simulation so after that we ended up adding the objects inside the deer but as you can see it's kind of a complex model so using box modeling like you saw with a geser errors presentation doir created this little box model on the inside of the deer it don't make fun really like the prettiest looking model but it works really well warped that into a cloner and then using the volume cloning option he said i'm gonna give this as a space where i want you to put the clones and that made it easy because we didn't have to worry about clones sticking into the antlers sticking into the nose area or the ears and having the physics system freak out and be like I don't know how to work with this so it was very easy for us to do that just with this simple box modeling technique so here's the cloned leaves and flower bulbs we ended up going with rigid bodies with a simulation when you think leaves you think cloth you think these different things but the rigid body system actually has aerodynamics built into it so you can see right here it fills the deer and by adding this attribute called lift in the rigid body settings Dorit was able to get a little bit of that flowing animation that you wanted as if they were light and they were giving air resistance push against them so if we zoom out this is our cache simulation you can see as we scrub through the timeline that the leaves fall and they flow around and the tulip bulbs themselves actually don't have any aerodynamic set on them so they fell gently into the bucket and it was just a really easy way for us to achieve this kind of simulation without to worry about cloth and dynamics and all of those things sort of coming together so perhaps the door for the amazing super simple set up this is grain and it's very art directive also once again that's part of the reason why we wanted to do this and that pretty much explains all of the scenes that we have so let's take a look at buckets one more time [Music] [Music] [Music] alright that was but it's thank you everybody so thanks again to Maxon for inviting us here if you want to check out Sourav ski and what we do we have an Instagram account called Sourav ski unplugged it has a lot of birthday cake pictures and puppies yeah it really shows what our culture is like at this studio and we have our personal instagrams up here it's aunt Dora elvish and aunt Jake made a thing if you're interested in the labs - feel free to go to saransk EECOM slash labs and come check that out and come hang out with us in Chicago it's super duper fun and we learn a lot from you and you learn a lot from us and we end up sharing information so very cool thanks again everybody and thank you so much to max on thank you everybody on the internet for watching and we hope you have a great SIGGRAPH all right [Music]

Channel: Maxon

Views: 13,075

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: qs1qV9w2md4

Length: 50min 20sec (3020 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019