Hi there, in this tip
we're going to sort of answer a question and sort of dive
a little bit deeper into a comment that I got from
one of my viewers he was looking at my five minute tip
on placing objects on the surface... on a surface; the one where I place trees
on a landscape and I went over a technique in that tip
to very precicely place trees on landscape now in the comments, I'm not sure which
comment, but in some of the comments one of the uh... viewers said that uh... they were trying to place
sesame seeds on a hamburger bun and that this technique would
have saved them a lot of time. now... that's good but it
also made me think isn't there an easier way to
place sesame seeds on the top of a baked good in Cinema 4D? now of course if these
sesame seeds needed to be in the shape of a company's logo or
showing a smile or some other sort of specific order this technique won't work very well... but if you just need some sesame seeds
scattered on the surface of another object I think this'll work pretty well. So, let's dive right in and see how we
can accomplish that what I've got here is a torus
representing our bagel and a giant sesame seed
that I haven't scaled yet. so... let's scale the sesame seed down a
little bit; I just wanted it to be big so you guys can see it, and then let's actually grab a Cloner object.
The MoGraph cloner is what we're going to use here. We can actually place our
sphere, (A.K.A our seed) inside of the Cloner and the cloner is going to attempt to
do the default thing: make a few clones. one two three...
[counting the generated clones] now that's fine, but we don't
want sesame seeds in the air. so we select our Cloner and then down here in the mode menu, there's "Object", "Linear", "Radial"...
we're going to choose "Object" what that'll do is give us a slot that
we can actually put our object into. so we put the Torus into the object slot. so now what's happened, is it's
covered our entire object in sesame seeds it's actually... quite awful looking. this may be a good time to
scale the seed down... the viewport is updating very slowly, so maybe we can tweak some settings before I do that. instead of leaving the
distribution as "Per Vertex" you can change the
distribution to "Surface" that way it simply places seeds all
along the surface of the object now that there's a lot fewer of them
we can just select one and scale it down so now that we have our seeds on
the surface of our object we're partly... we're part of the way there. we now have to change the count you can simply just increase the
count of seeds this'll go up past one hundred
(to as many as we need) and that seems fine, except... when you
have a baked good like this, the seeds aren't all pointing in one direction
and they're also not underneath it. So we need to find a way to restrict the
seeds only to the top of this object. that can be done pretty easily if we select our torus and then
go to the top view and then we use our Live Selection tool with "Only Select Visible Elements" checked in face mode (polygon mode) we can
actually start to select an area on the top of our baked good so I'm just going to select pretty much
all the polygons were I think sesame seeds would land if we sprinkle
them from above just like that once we have that selection we make sure our torus is selected, go to
the select menu and choose "Set Selection" we can even name this selection
if we want. Let's call it "up" because these are the faces of
this object that face up. now if we go to our Cloner, we can actually drag this selection tag
into the selection slot of the object. Now we only get seeds on the top part! It's beginning to look a lot
more like what we want except now all the seeds are
facing the same direction I'm just going to make them kind of
large for now, just so we can see. they are all facing the same direction and by the way... if the seeds seem like they're just not
in the right position you can always try changing the random seed (no pun intended) so we can change that to five hundred or any number really, will give you a
different random pattern now with the Cloner selected if we go to the MoGraph menu and
choose the Random effector all the seeds fly away.
(this isn't what we want at all) if we look at why that's happening, we can
see the default for the random effector is to change the Position attribute if we uncheck that and
check Rotation instead, we can control just which axes of the
seeds need to be rotated so the heading (axis)? Nope. the pitch (axis)? Nope. it's got to be the banking (axis) so as we change the banking, all the seeds
are still stuck to the surface but we can now sort of change which direction
they're (pointing) and I'll just change that to
360 degrees, meaning that I'm okay with them pointing
in any direction we can also change the heading
and pitch just a little bit the reason for that is that we can basically make it
so that each seed doesn't exactly lie perfectly flat so we just rotate them all a little bit and that's it! if we wanted to make the seeds move a
little bit away from the surface... right now it looks like they're really embedded
into the object and not sitting on the surface of it... what we can do... let's bring the seed down into view
(this is the original object) we can actually use the
Axis tool right here [gestures] and we can move the axis. So notice when we move the axis more
towards this [right edge] of the object it becomes buried. when we move the axis to the other
[left side] of the object it almost seems to be just
sticking to the surface so if you need to place sesame seeds
(or any other object) on a surface and you actually don't care where they go all you care is that they're sort of
randomly placed against the surface this is how I would do it. You can easily change the number of
instances on the surface you can use a an effector to change how they are rotated you can use the Cloner's
"random seed" to change how they are distributed... and you can use a polygon selection
to change where they appear. So this is a really simple tip, and I hope you enjoyed it! Let me know if you like it, and until next time... Seeya!
