Dynamic LED Light Show - Cinema 4D Tutorial

hey what's up guys this is Eli for my box graphics comm and in this video we will be creating an LED light show so the parts we are going to cover is how to make this LED look so the material for the lights and then we will be going over how to create a cloner object with a plane effector to create a light show also if you just want to download this project file you can find it on our patreon page the link will be in the description also before I move on I should mention where I got my inspiration from to make this and that is from this video where people actually use cinema 4d to drive a real-life LED light show so I really like that video but I wanted to see how I could do this in just cinema 4d on its own but for now let's get started with the tutorial so our first thing we are going to create is something that represents one LED light bulb so the easiest thing to do is just creating a cube and you are going to add a filler to this maybe the default option is just fine but we're going to shrink this cube down a lot so something close to maybe 10 centimeters on every side okay so that is one LED but now we want this in some kind of shape like the triangle we saw at the example video so you can go up here and create any kind of spline but just to stick with the video we are going to create a star for example and we're going to decrease the points to three points so that way we have a triangle and now just rotate it while holding shift so it is straightened out so that is 30 degrees and rotation and now we are going to create a cloner object so we can drag the cube inside of this cloner but now it is cloning linearly so we need to set it up so it clones around the triangle so go to our cloner inside of the object tab if you're going to set the mode to object and now drag the star inside of this object field this way you can see the clients are distributed over this spine but you're going to increase the count of clones so it fills up a bit more and also try to stop at a number where we have one cube at every corner of the triangle something like 27 will do I guess so that is the first stage of our LEDs now let's already move on to the part where we create the material for the LEDs so create a new material and open it up and we're going to disable the color channel and enable the luminance channel you can pick any color you like for now I'm going with some kind of blue color that you're going to increase the brightness of the luminance to a hundred and fifty percent so that it's just a bit brighter than the default we're also going to add some transparency to this so it looks a little more realistic as we zoom in on an LED light bulb but from a distance you will not notice much of a difference let's add it anyway so an able the transparency and we're going to set the refraction preset to something like Plexiglas and right now you can see this a very transparent so the color of the luminance is totally gone so to fix that we're going to add a texture which will be Afrin out also one last thing we are going to do to give this more of a glow is adding the glow Channel and we can decrease or maybe even disable the inner strength so I'm just going to stick with something like 15% also the outer glow is way too strong right now so we're going to decrease this to 200% and the radius can stay at ten centimeters so let's just take a look when we drag this on this cube and render that you can see this is getting close to some kind of LED look but it still looks a little flat so we want more of a glow around it but we can't do that with the glow Channel like I wanted to so luckily there is another option to add more glow to your scene and that is going under the render settings and down here we are going to add an effect which will be glow this one is very strong compared to the material glue so we need to keep these numbers at a very low setting so let's just go to something like 2% maybe but we can increase the intensity to something like 50% let's take a look again and this way you can see the glow is way stronger and gives us more of an effect where the cubes are emitting light so maybe even for this one you can increase the size of the glow it's up to you it also depends how far the cubes are apart from each other I think something like this looks ok one more thing I like to do is adding a floor below all of this but I do not recommend using the floor object because it will try to calculate all the shadows and reflections on an entire floor and to infinity so just having a plane that covers most of the area where you should have reflections is more than enough something like this will do that you're going to create a new material for this one so we can add some reflections to the floor we need to make this one pure black so it blends with the background of the scene and then order your reflectance Channel we are going to add a GG X reflection and you're just going to increase the roughness to 20% and down here under layer 4 now we are going to add a dielectric for now so this way we have some kind of rough reflective floor so let's render and you can see we have some nice reflections at the bottom here ok so that is how you can make an LED look so maybe I'm going to increase the fill it even more so this is a bit more rounded not too much and that is all there is to creating that LED light on its own but now we're going to move on to the LED light show so a first thing we're going to do is creating more of these triangles so that should be quite easy by creating a new cloner object and you're going to drag the previous cloner inside of it so maybe it is best to name these so this will be the LEDs and these will be the triangles so right now this cloning upwards if you don't want that I'm going to clone them in the z-axis it's up to you how much you make of them and how far you space them apart that's maybe a bit too much something like this will do for now next up we need to find a way to animate where we turn off the LEDs and turn them on so a good way to do this is going to our mograph menu and going in the effector tab and pick the plane effector when you create this they should affect one of the cloners we have so let's take a look at the cloners and enable the effector tab and you can see both of them are empty if you had one of the colors selected when you created this plane effector it should be down here but in my case it was not so let's drag this plane under the effectors under the LED cloner and now if you move this effector nothing is really happening so let's create a follow and right now it is set to infinite but we want something like maybe a cone would be nice let's rotate it so it follows the direction and if you move this one you should see something or maybe you need to scale it up even more to have the real effect okay this way you can see it so right now it is set at the position deformation so let's go to the parameters and disable the position because we want to turn them on enough and not move them but to make these go on and off it is just a bit more complicated and enabling something in here the first thing we need to do is going back to our material and under the Alpha Channel you need to enable at first of course that we're going to add a texture to this which you can find under the mograph tab and enable the color shader you don't need to do anything with this so just close this window but now you can still see it nothing is happening but it is because we can now change the colour of the cloners anti plane effector so by default the corner color is set to white which actually means that it is set to on so white is on and black is off we want them to be turned off by default so set it to black for the cloner and that deplane a factor you need to search for this tab it should be under the parameter tab so set the color mode to user-defined and you should see it is white by default so that is okay this means we should be able to turn on the lights by moving this effector so you can see the corner ones are not turned on so we need to scale up this cone so we hit all of them also notice how you can't see the ones at the corners here but if you render you should actually be able to see them and much more even so there's a good habit to always look at the render before moving and scaling this plane effector so what we could do now is animate this cone so let's get started at the beginning make a second keyframe at the ending so one more thing you could do to make this more entertaining is animating the color of the luminance channel so let's quickly do that for now make a keyframe at the beginning so let's start with blue for example and end up with some kind of more cyan or green look oops okay so let's make one more render to see how this looks so right now you can see the LEDs that are in the distance are totally not visible because they are actually disabled so what you can do is creating a duplicate of both of these cloners I'm going to call them placeholders also make sure no effectors are inside of here and of course to make them visible again we need to go to the transform tab and make sure the cloner color is set to white but right now we have this bright material on it so we need to get rid of that but first let's create a duplicate of this that you're going to disable the luminance channel and choose to enable the color Channel make sure it is some kind of dark gray or almost black we can also disable the Alpha Channel anti glow and that way it should be just fine let's drag this on top of the original material to change it but now if you render you can see it is overlapping the other parts so what we can do to make this work is going to the cube object on its own for the placeholder one and we're going to scale this down just a few millimeters so if we render that again you can see it is not intersecting as much yeah it still doesn't look like I intended it to so I'm just quickly going to check my preparation file maybe you can also decrease the reflectance of this that way you have some kind of shape around TC but actually to be honest I like it even more when they are just hidden that's up to you what you do with this one more thing I would like to add to give it a more interesting look is a depth of field so first thing we need to do is going under the door under settings and changing the renderer from standard to physical that way we can go to this physical option and turn on the depth of field so that's the first thing now we need to create a camera which will generate it up the field so get inside of it by clicking this button and you're just going to set up the camera at a good position like so and now you need to go under this physical tab that you're going to set the f-stop do something like points 25 or point 3 so it has a very small number but otherwise Sweden will not see much of a depth to it and now one more thing we need to do is telling what should be sharp and what should not be sharp so let's go outside of the camera view that way you can see it in the viewport and this is actually quite simple all you need to do is selecting this middle point and dragging it so it lines up with the part we want to be sharp so let's set it something close to the beginning so this way if you render like this it should be quite sharp but if we go all the way to the last LEDs it should be more blurred if it is not very blurry you need to decrease the f-stop even more you can even go down to 0.1 or even lower if you want to so that's up to you so I'm quickly going to render this just to see if this looks all right make sure you set the frame range to preview range so you can see this quick render it looks just fine only at the bottom here I can see the plane is not big enough so let's go out of here then just make it wider so it covers the whole part at the bottom there are just a few more tips I would like to give you guys if you want to go more advanced with this so first thing is if you want to give some specific parts of the triangles a different color for example or want more movements and animations on this light show is that you can create multiple plane effectors of course so let's create a second one by just duplicating the plane effector and let's take a different fall-off so maybe let's go with sphere I'm also going to disable the animation on this and let's just randomly set it up somewhere at the middle and I'm also going to scale this down so now we have these two intersecting with each other but I want these LEDs to have a different color so we need a duplicate of the material and let's just change the color I'm also going to delete the animation on this otherwise it will not work but let's set it to red for example so now I need something that holds this material which we can do by just duplicating the cloners again once more and I'm going to change the color of the original but right now it is intersecting with all the clones so now we need to make sure the new plana Factory created is inside of the effectors of these new LED clones so let's delete the old plane effector and drag in the new one but if you render you can see it is just overlapping with the original ones so one more thing you need to do is the same thing as we did with the placeholders so for those we made them smaller but now we need to make them bigger so it is overlapping the original ones so just adding like one millimeter on every side is just enough and that way you can see it is overlapping the other ones also one last thing I would like to show you guys is how to set up a gradient on hold the cloner like you start with red on this side and end up with blue on that side and it's not as easy as you think it would be so for now I'm just going to disable some of this stuff so it is not in our way maybe we can also make sure the LEDs are visible for now and I'm going to get rid of this material on top of it let's go with this one maybe mature this we don't want a flat color we want the actual gradient so add a gradient texture and as I said let's start with red and and with blue just as an example and we were going to drag this on top of the triangles cloner because we want to effect this whole series of triangles so now if you zoom in you can see it is applying the texture on every cube on its own that's not what we want so the first thing we need to do is making sure the texture tag is enabled or selected and go down here to projection and change this to flat this way you can see this applying the gradient on the whole cloner on the zone but not like we wanted to so let's go in the texture mode and you can see how this flat projection is happening so let's try to rotate this and see what happens maybe we also need to scale this up and this way you can see it is starting at this point and ending at that point so let's try to make it just long enough but not too big and that way you can see we have a nice gradient where we can apply the effectors own so let's go back to black for this one and you should be able to see if we move this plane effector that the gradient is still being applied to it okay so that is actually all there is to it I just showed you guys the basics of this I know it is kind of complicated but if you get a hold of it it is really easy to make a lot of fun animations with this I'm going to show you guys some animations on the screen right now it are just some quick gifts I generated before making this video also if you like anything you see right here you can also find these files on our patreon page and as always I really hope you learned something new today and I hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 101,675

Keywords: mobox, after effects, tutorial, vfx, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d lighting, c4d tutorial, light show, cinema 4d light show, animated light show tutorial, animated lights, led cinema 4d, cinema 4d led light, led lights, animated light show cinema 4D, effects, fx, mograph, motion, visual effects, vfx tutorial, how to, cinema 4d tips and tricks, beginner tutorial, c4d basics, c4d modeling, animate light

Id: zRJ_HWQ7peE

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018