Dynamic Waterdrops in Cinema 4D using X-Particles & Octane Render

hey what's up guys this is free bonfire back with an amazing tutorial my name is Marcus and I would like to show you how to do these dynamic water droplets so you can see there is a lot of stuff going on so we have a squash and stretch behavior of this main liquid droplets also we have a rain set up in the background and also we have some beautiful retiming of the scenes so we go from a hundred percent to some slow motion action here so this is a beautiful technique and I would like to show you how to do it let's get started alright guys so before we really get started in cinema 4d I have to admit I was just using the content repository from in cydia me to learn and study pre-made scene files so this is a great place if you are a little bit more advanced and you know how to dissect a complex ex-parte you can set up step by step for beginners this is not maybe not the easiest place to learn the foundations of X particles so they could feel a little bit overstrained if they are like 10 or 20 X particle objects and yeah you just don't get your head around where to start so this is why I just wanted to help you with the dynamic water drops of course you can't just download the scene file here it is set up for cycles renderer but we want to work with octane so I was studying the scene file and try to dissect it step by step and give you an easy walk through so yeah I think this could be beneficial for beginners but advanced users just yeah they just can go with the scene file here and I think there will also understand it but for beginners this is the right tutorial so let's get started in cinema 4d alright guys so we are in a brand new scene in cinema 4d and what am I doing here so why don't I just grab playing this seems to be a really good start because we need a Collider for our rain I work with six meters which is more spaced and we really need I think the scene is interesting if it is angled a little bit the floor so water can go down here it is not just coming down in a 90 degrees angle and before I go too deep into the scene I have to apologize because in the last YouTube video I was asking you for what do you want to see next sorry I couldn't do that right now because I was just learning new stuff and I felt excited about this technique and I thought this is also a good share with you guys so bear with me this time we learned something else but maybe next time we learn something of the old stuff so let's continue here I think the bounce with 40 is too high so we don't want to have to water go too much up and down bounce like like it's crazy so I would say 20 is more than enough here we want to work with more friction because what I shouldn't pour down too fast so friction of 50 maybe with a variation of 20 and some scattering this is just some randomness to be not too mathematical correct here so this is just mixing it up a little bit so this is a good start we already have a Collider for our reign next I would say hmm what are we going to next all right I think we should do some scene preparations so of course we need a camera I would say we put it in a null object so we have a null in the center put a camera into it and when you walk through it you can easily like do something like this right so wherever your camera is go to your now and go to your null and you can rotate around the center so this is super helpful so we have a little simpler camera rig here of course we need some light most of the time I work with HDR eyes but I think this time we could just use some disks and use them as a light source so I will create disk here and maybe this could even be much higher much bigger just go down out of the after line shading so you can see this can be a really huge I already have a luminous material here so you can see it's just it just in the luminance but maybe we convert to an octane material later so this is one of our light sources or reflectors I would say angle it a little bit to our scene maybe we use another one and go to your I just switch let's just switch the word access mode so I can just move it in this axis come back here rotate it and I think this is already already what we want so maybe just you have some very incident I make this one smaller and why don't we just put a hole in it could be also cool in the reflections all right so we have our lights our cameras and I would think the last thing we should do is control D so let's see is it a right yeah control D is for project settings go to X particles and I already switched it to for sub steps should be default is for s1 put it to four and so we have more accurate collisions and you don't lose so much particles which will fall through the floor and you would have to let kill up to tear to kill them lose a lot of particles so just put it to fall and you don't have problems with this one alright guys so we prepared everything for a success here we have some lights we have a camera and we have a scene to work with to some set of some stage I would call this so next I don't know what to do next maybe maybe we could start with them emitter so this emitter we already can call this one drain don't think yeah this is an essential part of this tutorial so yes so I think this one could be a little bit bigger let's put it to 700 and if you didn't recognize I increase the scale of our plane here to 10 by 10 meters so the scene is big enough all right so we have some acid rain here not totally convinced about it so why don't we improve it I think first of all we shouldn't work with a speed parameter here this is just artificial I think what we should do is work with modifiers so give it some physical background in your scene I would say we need some gravity already we have some beautiful acceleration here but I think this is a little bit too intense so put it to 700 and I think also we should put some let me think about it some wind some wind would be perfect so we don't want this one to happen here so make it a little bit stronger that's already good why don't we just move the plane a little bit so it collides more or less in the center so I'm satisfied with the wind and the gravity but of course you can't work in X particles with outer turbulence so let's see what is happening here just increase this like crazy so you get a better feedback here mmm what would be the right scaling I would say put it a little bit higher and this one lower this seems to be a good turbulence for me just something subtle and just to get a better visual feedback I would say we should put our display two lines so this is like a water droplet in motion put it two lines if he is already more aggressive and believable and I would say I just want to color them by a gradient parameter blue to white feels totally fitting for rain but I think I want to increase this to in word dam soul and let me think about it what do we what do I want to achieve here I think I want to put this to the radios so let me tell you about my thought process so I think not all water droplets should move in the same speed so how can I control this one I think what droplets have different sizes and I think depending on the size parameters like gravity and wind will have a different effect on it so smaller water droplets will move slower faster it will be the larger ones so I think first we should work with different radii so what a drop is are really small so I start with a radius of zero point one seven and give them a variation of zero point one free so in when you do the math right biggest particle would be a zero point three and the smallest one will be zero point zero four so this is our range in the radius and I just want to give me a visual representation of this so I think I put this one two radius and I said as smallest one is zero point zero four as mouths correctly and the biggest one would be 0.3 so no mmm me think about it so this is not the correct representation I wanted to achieve because first yeah we need something like I would say we need something like like a speed modifier and we don't want to give them some initial speed we just want to control the maximum speed value and we want to control this one depending on the radii we just gave this emitter particles so this is a good reason to use something like mapping we just add a mapping here and I would say the particle speed maximum so this is this value we want to control will be transferred on the particles depending on their radii and as we did the math correctly I would say this would be our numbers smallest particle biggest particle and now if you play back this should be a better representation of what you want to achieve so you can see the smallest particle with the smallest radii they will have less speed and the biggest ones they will have the maximum speed like this where you so this already feels like a quite beautiful rain like some sparse rain so I would say we want to have way more particles how about ten thousand this is totally working for me so I think for the rain so far I'm quite convinced about it so this is working quite beautiful now I would say we need to think about the splashes so maybe for speed sake because my system is not so powerful right now I just put it to 3,000 this is more than enough so we can work next on the splashes alright see you in the next setup alright I think it is time for some spawning here so you can see this is not exactly what you want so it's just a party lick colliding and going over the floor but we want the particle to split up into smaller particles and kill the original particle add collision so how can we do it you can see already I already selected it so you go to your Collider tag and you can trigger some actions so for example you can enable spawn add collision and just create a spawn emitter here let's just call it splash and I think this is almost done we just switch this one to collision point is perfect face normal this is also great so it's just the normal direction here and I already switched us bred to 100 because when you have it on zero this is a little bit boring right so put it to a hundred and you get more diversity in two angles so let's see this one this is way better and to get a better visual representation I would say we go to the splash emitter go to display and also change this one to lines maybe give it a white color so this is more pleasing for the eye yes I like this one the particular parameters I would say they shouldn't live forever so let's give it something like 12 and 5 for their lifespan the speed I also want to worry it a little bit and the particles shouldn't be that big so maybe something like maybe just change it to 1.5 so they are smaller than the initial particles because the initial party is split up into smaller ones let's check it once again and I just think this is it so this is beautiful for the splashes let's go on to the retiming I would say so next we don't want to have two particles all the time at a hundred percent so I will show you how to do some retiming for your particles here all right there's one last thing we should do before we are-- time to simulation and the thing it would eat to set an initial state so we don't always want to wait 60 frames until the rain hits the floor the easiest thing would be to set an initial state so go to your emitter objects and just set it so now right from the start the rain is colliding with the floor that's perfect all right so the retiming would take some consideration but I'm pretty sure what I want to happen here so I know I will have some bigger particles like maybe a little bit too big some big main water droplets and they will collide squash and stretch in a soft body behavior and go up and I want to retiming to the time to slow down here and then go up again or maybe just keep the keep the reduced time from here on so I will say this will happen at frame 15 and there I will slow down the time so how can I do it I just go to my emitter to the mission sorry to the object to the emitter and you can see here is a retiming parameter so I just say maybe maybe it happens at frame 10 from a hundred and go to frame 15 and put it to 20 so what what happens here you can see this rain is slowing down but Explorer splashes they will just continue with a hundred percent so that's not really believable so we should also go to the splashes emitter set one to one frame here to 100 and go to 20 now we should have a beautiful slowing down of the time yeah that's beautiful all right so now we have some beautiful retiming and we can continue with our main objects here that will collide squash and stretch and get too big fluid blob so let's see how to do this one alright guys so now we need our main objects and one sphere is not enough so we need some objects that we can melt together in some beautiful liquid blob here giving them some behavior today melt together and therefore we need couple of objects right so we want something to melt together so this is just an artistic part here so on to grab couple of spheres of course you can do it with other objects but I just want to have some droplets so maybe woman there oh that was a mistake go back to placate it again duplicate it I just hold down control or strg okay just a little bit artistic here oh just wasn't precise with my keyboard so yes this is looking good maybe a couple of smaller ones so again so you need to hold down strd let the mouse go and then let them button go otherwise you can't duplicate them alright I think this could be a nice pattern maybe one more here and something like something like this could work beautiful so I think a better subdivision pattern would be to put it to like I say he drawn and now we just put it into a null call this one maybe it's something like soft bodies and from now just to have a better overview I would say get rid of the supply splash and the rain and get dynamics tech onto soft bodies so initially when you press play nothing will happen hmm I guess so maybe first collisions the soft bodies or however however you want to call it dynamics will be calculated particle based so a good idea is to add an emitter here and call this one dynamics no can't spell dynamics alright that's better so you can see particles I can't see them okay can I see them now no actually there should be particles that will be generated on the points of these spheres plus on the mid because this is more more precise I think I need to set it to include children because this is a hierarchy I guess now we will get our particles alright you can see it so these particles will help us with the collisions okay what I already can recognize the wind has a strong effect on this particle so there is a dire diagonal movement but I think we don't really want that so let me go to my dynamics to do modifiers exclude and I say we don't need to wind nor do any turbulence or the speed modifier now we only have gravity working on them but what's happening here I mean could be an interesting animation I don't even know what's happening here it has to do with the collisions okay so the system is a little bit confused how we set it up so I think to have a clear understanding for make it easy for the dynamics to work we just duplicate the floor call this one dynamics dynamics spelling is not my strongest part so we have one separate thing object for the dynamics this just makes it easier for the system to read so I would say on this one we just include the dynamic particles and on the other ones we just include the spawn and the rain also you have to be careful so for the new floor we don't want to spawn additional particles so that doesn't make sense so now maybe I hope so we fix this collision that's better that is way better but you can see these particles they collide with each other so that is a very weak dynamic simulation I would say so let's be a little bit more precise here so I think what we should do is to play with these settings so first the calculation radius calculation radius is way too big around these particles to have it more precise I'll just go down to one particle sorry one centimeter and the rigidity is how how massive this object is how soft so when I put it down to or for example 1.5 which is a good where you for us to have this soft body dynamic behavior yeah this is way better and not so rigid anymore also to have them collide with each other we should activate push and we don't want to have fifty percent accurate collisions but we want to have 100 percent accuracy here now they bounce off from each other but we introduce some other I would say some in accuracy here so how can we get rid of this one I mean it's interesting but it doesn't help us well I think therefore we should play with the constraints so these are I guess how I understand it some initial constraints that keep a distance between particles and overall calculate dynamics so when we go down with the structural constraints to something for example like 70 maybe we can fix this issue mmm we introduced some other issues maybe for now just make this invisible so this is looking really bad so it seems like they don't have enough pressure to hold up to their initial shape so therefore I would say I'd go back here and him put in some pressure let's see all right hmm I think just looks better than it is worse better and that's that's not the right word so it looks worse than it really is because I think this is a nice super nice simulation here well um I think I'm quite pleased with this one so of course you get some squashing and stretching but this is only for a couple of frames then it blows up again so I think this is a super beautiful pattern we can work with this one definitely let's put it to 11 just to be a little bit nit picky about it alright so doesn't make much of difference right but these whales are great okay next I think we should go over to the open V DB and mash this together into one big block alright so I would go to the generators and open V DB measure inside of it we should just drag as a source our soft bodies ban just looks ugly but so we have a new object here now you could make these ones invisible and you have a beautiful object so now they melt together and let me see this once again okay it looks a little bit not so smooth here but we can smooth this later so go back here let's see yeah how does box the size of to look I even think we don't have to go that low so 4 will give us a smoother feedback and of course you can try to push these values as far as you want but I'm already pleased with this one so I just try some filter go with the standard medium Gordon is a little bit more extreme so this is a stronger effect of course you can play with the iterations make it even stronger but I think for me this medium is working median works quite well okay so I have to say I'm already pleased with this one now we have another issue so I think this animation is a little bit boring so they just fall accelerate and collide with the floor but we want some more brutal more strong squash and stretch effect there therefore I would say I just go to my dynamics tag and play with the initial velocity and I think we want some force down the y-axis so why don't we just play with this where you give it some strength here and now they will have some force better effect there and Plus this is almost working with our retiming so we retimed it from oh maybe I just shifted this one I don't know what we initially set it up here I think it was from 10 to 15 right so I'm sorry this one got a little bit shifted so of course you can always change your retiming but we worked with something like this when I remember it correctly so and you can see our spheres will collide here around let me just check it once again yeah so this seems to be a decent time to go back to a slower slower speed but maybe I just stretched us a little bit and shifted a little bit so I feel more comfortable with now they collide a nautical light now the retiming is happening so I'm sure I make sure just I select both of these ones where we retiming and just set it to another time here another frame there so this seems to be a good value yes that's that's awesome so I think we should also go to the retiming off to the first frame of this one so you can see we have to set a hundred and I guess we should also read time out dynamics here so put it to a hundred go to frame 20 new yeah we set it to a retirement of 20 so go to the dynamics and also set this one to 20 now I think everything should be in sync with the retiring and when I activate this once again and think it is time to cut the scene set a folder for it and cut it and we will see us in a minute all right the scene is cached so let's have a look on it look at it I mean all right so yeah this is what we wanted okay so we have some slow down here some nice I always say bullet time because I like matrix the movie so full speed slow down we can enjoy this one and it's amazing so I just cut my timeline I've worked with 150 but you don't really need so much frame so I think this is beautiful so of course you can push this way further so I didn't have it in such a big resolution but obviously to be honest this is going so fast you don't really need to worry about need to worry about it just like this one or something like this yeah you just you to just don't recognize it so when I play it back yeah I mean no for me this is not a problem and maybe just a quick fix here let me see what is happening when I put open BTB into oh you can see I didn't even activate the filters I think I activated and then I deactivated it again so so I don't need a subdivision surface I think it just needs some filtering here so let me just recap this once more deactivated this one and use the filter so you can see the filter is smoothing it so give me just a second and I will be back alright just recast it and yeah I think this is a little bit more smooth I like it better of course you can even try to give it more initial velocity to squash it even more or play with their rigidity to make them even flatter and don't hold so much up to their shape but for me this is good enough and why don't we continue with the shading first so you have a nice render for your Instagram all right let me just quickly set this up so first I would open my life viewer for it maybe here give me some more screaming screen Estate so all right so let me see can I even render something right now okay so almost there almost there but not a hundred percent so maybe we just go into our camera and set it up to something for Instagram maybe put it to 1080p 1080i just like to lock my view let's see how big is it put it to one point six five all right so we have two orders here instantly go to physical I mean two part racing and put this one to decent number something like that alright so we should also put our environment to black let me calculate it again alright so we can't see anything maybe now it is time to grab something like diffuse get rid of this one and do some illuminated materials so I just put it to surface brightness go to our disks voila so these ones and just go out of the camera they will illuminate a scene like crazy right okay super huge maybe it is also time to could talk taint tag on the camera and I think we can also go to the octane text here and make invisible for a camera set it to invisible so this is already better mmm I think I also want a diffuse material on the floor quickly switch this one to something glossy and I think it could be way darker so let me try this one put it to the floor oh the flow dynamics we only need to see one floor so and one material here and so this is already better I think we can also put in some roughness it's nice I think hmm am I satisfied with this one maybe what happens and I just reduce this a little bit so this is better from you all right and I look all ready for a nice camera angle so something like this maybe have it more in the center maybe angle it even more so something like this could work just want to see my Boris all right so this okay maybe it is time to get some beautiful shading so put a specular on our soft bodies sorry on the open VDP measure and you already can see this reflecting disks maybe I also put them into a null press alt D and where is it okay maybe I just I just rotate them a little bit let's see if this more it's more interesting oh okay I think this is more interesting in our specular shader so I'm working in an older octane version but it should be almost the same in a newer versions you can go to the dispersion and just play with it I think some arbitrary value works for me I go up with the roughness a little bit there too much maybe even less all right I mean maybe I just rotate this null object with my disks in it a little bit more so let me just see what I get yeah so this is asking for some for you to play with it to get reflectance you prefer I think already this is quite beautiful I already go into my octane settings and Noah ventus's this is good enough maybe we could go into the already set it up to octane going to doctor in renderer render passes activated denoise and in the camera go to immature and able camera immature AI D noise and enabled in eyes Pass I just wanted to see you akia image so this is without denoising this is with it of course it is blurring it a little bit but in the rendering you could go up with your samples or maybe whatever you need to get a key image alright so this is looking okay just put it there alright so I think we also should show the rain okay because this feels totally empty so let's go to the rain and put on it octane object tech go to particle rendering and set it to geometry okay maybe we can do the same for splashes all right so we have some particles here mm I think we create another specular put it I'm sorry let's just create a sphere so this is a placeholder or I mean this is this would be our rain particles I just sided here put it to a size of make 2 and tell these ones in the particle random geometry use this sphere as rendered geometry so put it in there and put specular on this one let's can call this one raindrop almost there so what we really like lagging here as some I would say some depth of field so get rid of the autofocus grab your focus picker and click on your main object this will give you the right focus focal depth and now play with a patre so 10 we this is already giving you a beautiful image and now we have some blurred raindrops around us I have to admit maybe I made a mistake here with emitter all right so no sorry the rain and go to emission all right I just cast ten like three thousand which is really not enough put this one to fifteen thousand and you would have a way better seen more beautiful raindrops there so maybe I just deactivate the cash on this one and recast it with 15,000 so give me a second I just continue and now this would be a recast oh this is super fast okay just give it a second maybe now we will have more raindrops I'm not sure I think it should be more mm-hmm maybe something went wrong but we doesn't we don't care so much about this one so let me just see I should have way more raindrops okay still it feels a little bit empty I mean it's okay so maybe we just make this rain drop a little bit bigger put it to five just anger the camera a little bit here this is already okay for me so look at this beautiful oil film dispersion some beautiful raindrops I guess the floor is a little bit too too dull get back with the reflections yes more beautiful here all right so look how beautiful is this looking so when they connect this is a really nice effect in the rendering and I think we are almost there so now you maybe tweak your render settings a little bit so for me this is only five seconds and I consider images quite noisy so I guess I could go up with samples or just use a denoise past year oh that was stupid I was in the focus picker so focus pick my main object again get out of it and now you can select your main path entity noise pass yeah I mean everything left to do would be to render your image out and make a movie of it so I think there's tutorials at the end and yeah it's a strong technique right hope you liked this one see you next time one last thing if you want to support me you can go to patreon.com/scishow and fire and therefore only $5 a month you can support my YouTube training plus you will get some of my scene files you will get a good feeling of supporting me and there will be bonus lessons on patreon so maybe it is something for you or you just want to say thanks Marcus then you could become a patreon also an Instagram my name is Marcus Khan's Afridi and you can follow me there to see some of these ideas always translate into tutorials for example this time was this one maybe I will also teach this one I'm not sure about it so yeah consider to follow me also on Instagram all right guys this is it so I'll see you next time goodbye

Channel: Motion Designers Community

Views: 11,939

Keywords: motion designers community, tutorial, motion design, video, copilot, greyscale gorilla, greyscalegorilla, eyedesyn, brograph

Id: P5lzlaXGDpk

Length: 45min 13sec (2713 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020