Hi again! In this five minute tip, we're going to
take a look at a method of placing objects on the surface of another object; usually a larger one... and we're gonna look at a couple
different ways to do that but the focus of the tip will actually be uh... the way that I usually use which
gives a uh... much higher degree of precision when placing the object. so there's a couple different uh... methods here and what you're seeing on the screen right
now is the result of my method and I'll get into that in a bit... So what we have, some some trees that are placed pretty much exactly on the surface of this landscape object. So there are few other ways to do this
and I think... [pauses] let's start by taking a look at the
blank scene. The bank scene consists of a tree model that I created [jokes that it's beautiful] It's beautiful I know... and uh... as you can see from its shadow
it's definitely not touching the landscape so the focus of this tip would be getting it to touch the landscape the uh... second project I have here is the landscape
(using a cloner) so this is a way to put lots of trees on
the surface of the landscape uh... but you don't really have much
control over exactly where they go now i know that uh... some of some of my viewers may know how to use MoGraph pretty well and they may... they may know that there are other ways to do
that (effect) so for instance um... If I'm not mistaken, you could create a polygon selection and restrict the trees to just that selection, but i'm looking for even more precision than that so if we jump back into my landscape file
where we haven't done anything to the scene yet i'll show you guys the trick really quickly. Cinema 4D is a strange program in that a lot of its features ah... overlap and and i'll show you what I mean so we have this tree object and we want it to stick to the landscape. So we want to constrain it to the surface... so we use a constraint; but the constraint is actually in the character menu. So let's take a look at that. If I right-click an object and I navigate to... Character Tags, there's a constraint. OK, so we have a few different constraints available to us. and... none of these really look like they'll do the job but there is one that will do the job! It's called a "Clamp" constraint. So if I select "Clamp" We now have a Clamp constraint, on the constraint tag on this tree. So... the way it works is; right now it's clamped to an origin (coordinate) but what we want to do is; we want to clamp it to a surface. so at this point... we need to give it the surface or the
object. Even with origin mode you need to give it the object (that you want to clamp to) so I drag my landscape (object) into the object slot and now we can see
that the tree is indeed constrained to the landscape and it's not allowing me to move it much closer to the landscape without it sort of flying away but this isn't really useful to us. What we need to do is; we need to constrain it to the surface and we need to reduce its distance all the way down to zero. so now as we move this along the mountain... along the landscape it sticks to the surface! So that's the tip, right there uh... once you have this tree you could then make copies of it or create an instance so we have an instance now and we can
just control-drag the constraint onto the instance and all of the
settings come along with it... so we can then move the instance! And
copy another instance, and another one and we can even go to the top view, and we can just start placing trees
exactly where we want along this landscape being pretty sure that they are all
sticking to the landscape and not intersecting the geometry in strange ways.
Now... there is one catch and this is pretty
important when using this technique if you save this file and close it they will all go back to the position of the of the first one; the position they were at when you added the constraint. That's kind of strange because things in
Cinema 4D don't normally do that but I'll just warn you that this tag/object will! So you work for should be to: Place the
objects exactly where you want them sort of a... sort of just fine tune them, and say "OK, I want another tree right there..." and then either get rid of all of the constraint tags (just delete them)... or what you can do... (let me just make sure I have all of them selected) You can select all the constraint tags and you can activate the "Lock Position" option. this way when you save (the file) and you re-open the file, they'll still all be in the right place. So I can actually show you a demo of this. If I close all of my files... And then I go to my recent files and I open the "landscape end" file that I have... you'll see that it looks like there's
just one tree, but I have all these objects. When I click on one, they all remember what position they're
supposed to be at, because the position is locked in the constraint tag. So, there's the tip! It's an interesting one, the constraints are well-worth playing with... but this is just one use of the constraint tag. uh... I use this particular surface clamp constraint when placing... bolts along the faring of uh...
motorcycle model. Or... placing any sort of machinery along an
uneven surface and the coolest part is when you're done
you can just select all the tags and just delete them. Your objects just stay there. but remember if you're going to leave the tags on there, you have to click the lock position check box before saving and closing the file or they'll all go back to where they originally were. uh... one last thing worth noting; when the "Lock Position" check box is checked, you can't actually move the objects. So... that makes sense, but it's just worth noting. So I hope you guys enjoyed this tip! uh... please let me know if you found it was useful, and I know this is one of those tips
where there's probably a lot of other ways to accomplish the same thing if you guys feel like sharing some of your techniques, let me know and until next time seeya! thanks for watching.
