Getting started with Field Forces in Cinema 4D R21

hello there Chris from a rocket lasso I have got a new tutorial a primer in fact on using field forces inside of cinema 4d now field forces are incredibly powerful they're integrated into a bunch of different places inside of cinema and they're really deep I think it's the deepest tool that's been added in the cinema for a while but with that depth with this complexity means it's a little difficult to make tutorials for it because everybody's use case for this is going to be completely unique to the project that you're working on so along those lines kind of like expresso you just kind of need to learn the nodes you need to learn the way that these different ingredients might combine so you can make whatever you want to make and that is the goal behind this video it's about an hour long and we're gonna be covering a bunch of kind of tips and tricks I've learned basic use cases ways of thinking about the field forces to try and make it so you can build your own rigs and your own setup so that you have complete control over whatever it is that you're trying to build so why don't we dive or right on in here we are an r21 of course you need to be an r21 to use field forces because that is when they were introduced we find them by going to simulate forces and urea and the forces menu and there is field force we are going to be comparing them to these other ones quite a bit so let's start by creating a field force and we're gonna see much to start out we just kind of got this bounding box and we are currently in the object tab now this is very important I have sometimes accidentally found myself in the fall-off tab and I'll be tinkering around him like hey rice and this working because we have a field parameter here and in the object tab we have a field parameter so it's easy to get those mixed up just make sure you're in the object tab otherwise it's not gonna behave the way you think it will now we are not seeing much here let's start by trying to see something going on I am going to create a field layer that we don't use too often it is a solid if we click on solid it's going to create that and now we can see these little lines in a cube in a nice grid formation these lines have colors and they have a direction now what is a solid a solid is just a vector it's a fact that can be a color but in terms of cinema 4d it just means we have kind of three parameters in one we have x y and z so this is being traded as a direction in this case so we can point them in different direction so here is XY and Z is pointing up on Y let's zero that out and instead change our direction to be one on X and now you can see they turn red like our X and they are facing in that orientation what's cool about the solid is it is going to behave just like a wind behaves so we've now recreated the wind force just by creating a solid so we get a direction and we can change the direction I can say negative one it's going to turn to the opposite color blue and it's gonna be facing to the right oh I'm sorry it's gonna be facing left on the left and right axis but we can combine these I can add one on Y as well we're gonna get this 45-degree angle we can set it to all three and we're gonna get be getting 45 s on every angle and they all get combined in this perfect wind and we needn't have to rotate anything so it's really fun using the solid in addition to that let's put these two zero zero and we can crank them up as well let's go ahead and increase our direction to two on Y and you see the line gets twice as long so not only is this showing us the direction via color and the orientation of the line but it's also showing us the power of that particular area that spot by scaling up the line now this line is controlled via the display tab so let's click over to this play tab in our field force and we have a couple of key settings here one of them is a line density that is how many samples are being created currently its sampling 10% of them I'm gonna crank this up and you can go all the way to 100% you see that gets a little bit crazy pretty quick now this is not a super intuitive way for me at least to be viewing this field force because it's giving us too much information especially let's go back to our object tab let's create a different field I'm gonna create a random field so I'm gonna create random field I'm gonna turn off our solid we got our random feeling except that's a normal so it's completely overriding so you can see that this is got these little tick marks and they're all facing in random directions and before I forget I'm just gonna visually hide that because I don't like seeing this extra box if we don't have to so in our display tab as I crank this up you see we get all of these tick marks and you can see we kind of get a vibe for there being a little bit of a noise pattern in there but it's very difficult to see so what I really like to do is to grab our box size and we got XY and Z I'm gonna grab Z and I think I said it from 200 to 0 and at 0 we're just getting a single slice now we get the advantage of this is calculating ll lot less samples and we're getting a better visual representation of exactly what's going on now what's cool we're gonna jump back and forth between these tabs a little bit what's cool is we are using a random we're using a random feel and what's great about the random field is by default in our I think our 20 and 21 the random mode is set instead of 2 random it's set to noise and in noise mode we get access to all the amazing cinema 4d noises which is wonderful and we get the default pearl in which is the old noise noise and so better named now now we can grab this we can change the scale let's can go up and down that what's so great about this is in the past we would be using turbulence I loved using the simulates forces turbulence music for lots of different things but you'll see if I move this off to the side it gives us no feedback all the time when we are using that we'll be changing the scale and I always said like imagine it like a big cloud of three-dimensional noise but as we change the scale it didn't really mean much to us it was always like oh if we go to about 250 it was a good scale and then 0 means like complete randomness let's delete that now our field force with this random field inside of it is giving us that same effect mostly the same effect it's not exactly the same but we get this perfect feedback on exactly what the scale of that noise is so that part automatically is pretty wonderful now we are so let's go back to our display tab and check out some additional features now we've got a setting called display a vector length let's just cover this right now if we go back and go to our over all velocity you can see we got different directions and we even have different strengths but if we go and we start cranking up our overall strength e'er and I start cranking this up you're gonna see this is going very quickly as we increase the power it's gonna explode to something that's a lot harder to see I want to be able to see that a little bit better so what I could do in this instance is go back to our display tab and what I typically do is I'll go to my scale display length and I'll set this to something smaller and I set to like point one so it's now showing one tenth of the scale and the reason I like doing that is I like getting that scale feedback from my lines here but an alternative mode instead of just scaling them to something and you could scale them up we can make them bigger we can make them smaller go back to default by right-clicking but we could also change our line length we could change the length as instead of being length we said it's a brightness and now it's gonna change the color based on how powerful they are and we lose all the color information but we already get that information via the direction so this is another valid mode where they're always the set length no matter how powerful they are so if I were to crank up the strength more and more and more that doesn't change at all so an important additional variable for right now I'm gonna leave it on line lengths just so we can get some nice feedback that way and I'm gonna reset our strength back to its default cool I just want to cover some of those now something let's go ahead and start introducing some objects into our scene here I've actually got a layer hidden I'm gonna bring these in and I've got just a couple objects that can be affected so what can feel force effect well everything that symbol for these forces could always affect though let's just recap those real quick I don't grab this plane object to pull it out turn it on I've just got a couple subdivisions here I'm gonna make it editable so that we can add a simulation cloth onto it now immediately in the cloth I'm gonna go to forces and I'm gonna go to my gravity and get rid of gravity I don't want any gravity now we've got the field force turned on I'm going to hit play and with no gravity it's just going to begin deforming it's they're forming it just like you expect a turbulence to and it's kind of deforming it in the same way in the same pattern that the noise is you can see we get the scale of about this circle that you can draw a little circles around these distinct areas and that's about the size the deformation that's happening as we change the scale of our random field here a strength is weighed down we don't have too much resolution on our cloth but if I play we're gonna see them be affect a little bit more individually and of course if we crank our scale way up and make it really big it's gonna be start behaving a lot more uniformly make this even bigger so it's huge and is we gonna behave in very similar ways you can see how the scale is direct dramatically affected directly controlled via the scale so reset that back to default by right-clicking and okay so that's cloth works perfectly there we can add a simulation soft body the effect is not gonna be so extreme here because cloth doesn't want to bend as much so if I hit play we won't see too much of an effect it'll will it will move but inside of our field force I'm gonna crank this up to fifty five ten times as strong let's see if we see it not so much crank it up to ten times its drama again it's a little hard to see but let's hit play and now you can see it starts getting deformed really strongly now to reset that back to default we don't need to see it nearly that strong so that is affecting a plane with some regular old dynamics I don't think we need anymore so I'm going to delete it now it can also affect emitters so the old-school cinema4d emitters and a turn on the submitter currently I had set to be emitting 100 100 particles per per refresh here per frame and I increased the life if I hit play they're gonna start emitting I'm actually gonna set the speed down to zero so now they're being emitted with no speed but we should start seeing them flying around a little bit right there so they're getting their speed and it's behaving a lot like turbulence yeah they're getting their speed from their field force excellent and lastly in this circumstance I'm going to create a cloner and let's add a rigidbody I got a rigidbody applied important variable here let's pause that is go I can hit control or command if you're on a Mac D for project settings go to your dynamics go to general and set your gravity down to zero by default is at 1000 I'm setting it to zero so the only effect we're seeing of course is our field force so with that I can play and they all start blowing around in the wind to the random excellent so that is behaving perfectly they also there's also the field force node now inside of expresso you can use it with thinking particles but I'm but we're not gonna worry about thinking particles that's a little bit more advanced all right so we got some more stuff to talk about in the basics of the field force and mainly that is to do with its velocity type and its strength so right now let's turn off our random field and turn on our solid so it's just a full on direction and I'm gonna take this direction zero out on why let's blow it on Z so I'm gonna say one on Z they see we get all these facing along Z excellent so if I play we're gonna see them start moving along now just for an example let's go turn on our random again turn off solid and hit play you see these will be blowing around but I gotta jump up to let's say 55 55 is a very reasonable Matt you see they're moving around in a controlled type of way excellent so 55 is not too fast so if we turn off random go back to solid once again our lions are getting in the way so we could go back to our display mode and set this down the point one if we still want that feedback and of course we set the brightness and now those won't be visually getting in the way hit play and you can see that these are gonna start accelerating away you don't but not only that they're accelerating and getting faster and faster as they go you see it starts going so and they're gonna fly out seen and they're going faster and faster faster that's because this field force is adding 55 strength every single frame so they are accelerating now I don't I don't think wind quite behaves that way wind wouldn't did those accelerates but I guess that those behave a lot like the force wind in here but that's cool that we're getting all this velocity but we got to keep in mind of how we need to control that this is gonna be constantly adding more and more force for this type of wind we probably don't want it like that so we need to do is have some way of draining energy out from the system there's two main ways that I know of to drain energy aphromoo system we can go into the actual dynamics if you're in a you know using cinemas dynamics and under the forced tab we have something called damping linear damping and this is a way of draining energy out from your dynamics now they change the defaults from zero to five I think in our 20 or our 21 and it's raining a little bit of energy out but no not that much now when it comes to damping in dynamics I feel like you don't see any effect until we get to about 90 degrees there are 90 percent at 90 percent if I hit play this is going to be blowing 4bc it's not going insane with the acceleration actually seems like it's quite linear we actually crank this up to like 99 percent if we wanted to and that's gonna be draining quite a bit of the energy app and here's the tricky thing with damping is at 100% it's like so strong that it just stops everything dead but at 99 percent it's still good to be moving quite a bit so you want to stay below 100 percent but you can't go up to like 99.9 99.99 and it's gonna keep on draining out more and more energy but don't go above 100 but any case you see it like 95 it's draining out enough energy where it's not going insane it's not accelerating out of nowhere and this is important because if you want to be constantly applying more force we also have to be draining it out somehow I can reset this damping to zero and just we'll take a look back to default of 5 we can also drain the energy out by going to simulate forces friction so with friction this can be draining energy at the same way and what's cool about friction is a is also going to be applying to particles as well as cloth dynamics and regular soft bodies and rigid bodies so you can see that it's kind of the same it's draining out a lot of energy we can create this up to 100 and drain tons of energy out and let's go back to 10 at 10 you'll see if I turn off my field force it's going to almost immediately slowed down to about slowed down the zero eventually so only when we're constantly adding energy back into the system is that going to be getting applied now this is gonna be very important for a lot of the systems we build later on so I just want to really kind of hammer home how important it is the concept of adding to the velocity and draining those forces out via friction or via damping so turn off friction and let's go zoom in our object and talk about some other types so next up this is adds velocity but next up would be set absolute velocity so I'll set to that friction is off damping isn't doing anything not anything irrelevant and now with absolute velocity velocity I can hit play and this is going to begin moving forward at a constant rate whatever we set this number to let's do 155 it's going to movie at exactly that speed 555 drop this down to five we have very direct control it's just absolutely setting it to the speed at that direction which is pretty neat it's a mode that I kind of wish we had in some of the other ones there are definitely times when you would want to be using this mode so we'll go to 155 and let's just look at the way it behaves so that's moving forward I concentrate very nice even if we turn on friction it's gonna have no effect because it's being set to an absolute speed so it might drain all the energy out but then the field force saying nope add this amount of force back in again and now if we go into our field floors and turn off solid and turn on random and the rain is a little small right now so I'm gonna increase it if we apply on here you're gonna see a very different type of behavior as I hit play these are going to move but they're gonna kind of find an equilibrium pretty quickly and what's important to point out here is we're using a random noise there are actually these points of equilibrium essentially trap points where this is pointing one direction and then these will be pointing a different direction and they're gonna be almost like a little gravity well in the middle and these are all quickly finding those gravity wells that getting blown away they're getting sucked in and that's where they get trapped which is pretty neat but it's a very different behavior if we used add to velocity in which case they're kind of accelerating in there and it's a lot harder for them to get trapped you see a lot more flying around although some are still getting trapped we'll be able to work around that in some different ways but it's something important to know and you can see how very different those two behaviors are so this is set the absolute velocity a lot more stable of a velocity type the last mode is change direction and what this is going to do is take whatever our current velocity is and just pick a new direction never change its speed so at play nothing is going to happen but instead of dynamics if I were to go to collision that collision dynamics tab turn on custom initial velocity we're going to say hey you're a speed at the beginning let's turn off the field force just just to show this let's have them fly off on Z so I'm gonna say hey on Z you're gonna be traveling at let's say five five five so if I play let's see okay you see they kind of burst out in that direction it slow fast let's try three three three so they're gonna blast off in that direction now if we turn our field force on it has a direction set so if I uh play they're immediately gonna jump to these final positions because that was the speed that they were traveling at now they collided with each other and when they collide with each other they're draining energy out from the system and then they eventually stop except for the ones that didn't collide with something and now it's being set to its full speed but it's going to one vector and then another and just gonna keep on oscillating so this would probably be a good situation and that we could also add a friction because that will slowly drain the energy out from it and these will slow of themselves down so now that they have an initial velocity they can blast it to this final position this particular noise isn't being super useful for what it's doing but if we were to grab our field force and grab our random noise and crab maybe some animation speed into it and get jump this up to about 100 and hit play then these can start traveling and I guess in this case it will still get trapped but you see how very different this combination of different velocity types is going to to be when when we change between add to set absolute and change direction so that covers all of the super basics when it comes to using the field force object but now we're going to start getting into some of the most useful ways of using it so now the goal is to walk through some of the most useful things to do with field forces and I would love to start out by largely recreating some of the other effects that we get in our regular forces in this case namely the attractor so I'm gonna create an attractor we're gonna turn out for a second and I don't want the friction I don't want the field forces we're not going to use the cloner but I am going to use the emitter so we'll turn on the emitter and here's what we're gonna do if I play right now it's going to be emitting particles but they're not moving anywhere let's go ahead and create way more particles I'm gonna add 10 times or 100 times maybe so get thousand particles zero speed and I'm going to stop admitting after five frames so what we should get is a burst of particles and they just exist there they're not moving they're just stuck excellent so with that in mind let's turn on our attractor with this attractor turned on hit play it's going to be pulling in the particles from really far away in fact I unless I want to exaggerate this even more and grab our emitter and under the exercise we're gonna double actually let's go to 500 by 500 so it's pretty big so we've got this attractor we're not getting any feedback from the attractor if we hit play you're gonna see that the particles in the center are being pulled a lot and the particles on the edge are barely being affected there's some sort of like exponential fall off that naturally happens with an attractor and in some ways that's good it means it's behaving a little bit more like the real world like gravity far away is not the strongest gravity this close up but you automatically get some problems that we're seeing first of all we don't have a lot of control over this when they get to the center point it's almost like they're getting this infinite energy applied and they're flinging out into space so you always have to add in a fall-off to stop them from exploding from the center point they're just not that controllable it can be a little bit of a pain I'm going to delete the attractor and let's instead use our field force I can grab our emitter let's set the size back to default right click again Tory's actually 200 what I want so 200 to match our overall shape and in our field force I'm gonna set our let's go to the display and go back to line lengths or we see the colors and put the line length scale back to one excellent now in our field force object to add make sure one object gonna turn off random don't need to see that and let's rewind all the way and what do we want to play with well let's keep it simple we're gonna build that tractor so we'll create a spherical field currently it's up the max I'm immediately gonna set to normal that just means that it is going to be it's just the only thing of having any effect and currently our velocity type is set to change direction like I said to add to velocity and of course our strength is up to 155 which is pretty big and I right click set back to 0 so hopefully I didn't lose anybody it's pretty much a brand new field force with a sphere a spherical field applied cool so once again let's look at this default if I play you can see our particles get generated now let's turn on our field force and you see everything's gonna pull it in the middle but right away you'll see a couple differences first of all they're not exploding out with a ton of energy and flying out to infinity so good start right there it's a little more controllable after another instant nice addition is we have this nice little radius set here so we can actually see exactly where things are getting applied so if it's not inside the SIRT at this circle it's not being affected at all now we've got so many more things we can directly control here that makes it so much more useful one is if we click on our spherical field we click on it here or via the field force in the object tab we click on a spherical field and see the same exact settings here it's changing the same parameters we have our fall-off are remapping inside of here we can change things like our tin or offset I can give this a full range of inter off set and it's gonna have a really nice clean fall-off where it's stronger in the center and weaker on the outside so you see it's slow it's more powerful in the middle and slowly fall off similar to the attractor except I think this is linear where that was some sort of exponential fall off so that works well but then immediately we have an invert box that's pretty interesting let's turn that on and will immediately see what's happening here is everything is being affected everything's being pulled into the center but it kind of falls off as it's near that center point so if I hit play you're gonna see that they're going to actually this will be really neat but I'm gonna increase my sphere until it's big enough so the fall-off is covering the entire rectangle here and what should happen I could turn off the field force temporarily our particles get created now when I turn it on to say fall-off here so as they all get pulled in look at that neat pattern that happens but they're all approaching that center point almost at the same time just by inverting direction giving a full fall-off so pretty neat instant pattern that we're getting here so inverting very fun to play around with so now we get this big spherical fall-off everything's getting pulled in the center working very nicely but of course we grab our inner offset and crank it up all the way and now it's full power and anywhere in the circle so how do I hit play everything's moving at full power immediately and I'll get pulled towards the center and they get there at the same power they get there when they get there so it works quite nicely as well if we give this the full range of course we can go down to contour and in the contour I'm going to change this to a curve which will give us a spline to represent the fall-off and you see I've visually represented here but we could go and give it more of like a visually exponential fall off so it's gonna be really weak outside and then ramped up really powerfully in the center you can see it visually represented but now I hit play you see almost no effect on the outside but pretty strong in the middle so working nicely put that back to none and let's see some other things we might be able to do well first of all right now everything's getting attracted to the center which is neat but so that's Kuehl is if we go into the direction of the spherical field we have an invert Direction checkbox now interestingly it's actually set to invert direction by default but if I turn that off the colors all invert and now instead of it being an attractor it is a pusher everything's getting repulsed away and pushing away the opposite direction that it had been travelling before so pretty neat there if we turn that back on again we also have our scale and every field that we add in here this is actually an independent power ratio currently the scales at 100 so it's applying 100% of this strength but we could crank this up to 200 oops sorry 200 and it's double the strength so it's gonna be double that original value so everything's gonna travel in twice as fast now that gets important we start combining on multiple ones but for now I also want to show you that we could grab the spherical field just grab the little handle here and change it directly we have c4 scale and scale that down and of course we can change its radius all of these the size all of these are doing the exact same thing but of course we shrink this down hit play and we have control we can grab this and move it this is not you know it's not stuck so if we had e4 move I can move this around and we removed this is moving a tractor we can affect those particles as we travel to those individual positions so we are working as we'd expect but very very nice T for scale scale was up a bit and let's start combining these I'm going to make a second sphere go field let's just go ahead and name it spiracle field - why not just name this one one to be a little bit clean inside our field force let's make sure we drag our second spherical field in it's gonna be set to normal by default I can scoot this off to the side and we have two of them we can see exactly the direction how these are interacting so when we create our particles we can see that they're gonna kind of fight over these middle ones and the curve over the chute around and they're even able to exchange the particles as they go as something that's cool is because we're working on this perfectly flat emitter with no speed everything's remaining two-dimensional which is pretty cool now we can move these around and they will interact in whichever way that they want to but of course these can start getting combined in some additional ways we can right now it's set to normal I think we set to add it's pretty much exactly the same well I guess it's they're adding their strengths together a little bit so there's a little bit of a difference but visually that's not terribly different we can multiply them by each other and what happens in this case is only where when you multiply you're taking the top value and saying hey you can only exist if I exist but it's kind of like multiplying them a top of each other so this only has a value in that circle that only has a value within its circle so the only place where both of them have value is in the center so only where they're combined is there any fall-off so you're gonna get this pretty interesting weird pattern on that is just the show that you can combine these in some pretty interesting ways in addition to that we can add and overlay a lot of these won't do too much but we can do something let's set that back to normal and I grab our bottom spherical field and we can add a mask this was also add in our 21 I'm gonna add a mask to it I'm gonna mask it off via the second the spherical field so now this is still being attracted only to that center point but where that circle is applied is only where this one is masking it so you can see these still looks like I know sorry did that order backwards but you see that this one is still getting attract to the center but only something that's falling within this mask could be applied so that is why we get that effect so you can see all the complex ways that these might start getting combined of course you can make as many of these as you want we can make more and more spherical fields combine them in all sorts of different ways we can set one to an attractor I think if we set one subtract here it actually takes away from them so one is in the tractor one is a repulsor they can get combined in so many amazing ways and it's just this is just using a simple spherical field and you can start seeing the potential of all the ways that those can combine now this might also be behaving as a primer on regular fields not just feel forces but the field concept if you haven't played with those in r20 as well but these can start combining in some really crazy ways I'm gonna delete this second the spherical field that we created and I grabbed the first one T for scale scale it down pretty small and inside of the field force we have something called modifier layers and we there's you can use these to remap a bunch of different parameters they're really cool and you have something like the delay which can add springiness or smoothness to things but in this case I'm gonna create a decay effect and I'm gonna crank this up to let's go up to 98 I found if you go up 200% it can get a little bit weird but what the decay is doing is kind of remembering what the value used to be and because we're not 100% it's slowly fading away but just by doing that if I play and I grab our spherical field which I'm gonna zero out by the way reset PS our button I'm going to hit E and move it just on Y and X as I click this and move it around you can see that we're leaving a tail behind anywhere that we travel it's remembering that value and the particles are kind of getting sucked along that trail a little bit you can imagine all the crazy applications for this kind of thing this could be traveling through a star field or it could be going through some sort of gaseous cloud like the combinations would be insane and you can even imagine when we are sort of masking this thing out that you could instead say the mask should be decaying and remembering that tail but always being attracted directly to where this spherical field is where the center of the attractor is so those kind of combinations can get like just absolutely insane we're not gonna go too deep on it because that those kind of applications are very dependent on what you're working on but it's really fun all the different ways these things combine let's look at objects that aren't field objects now let's do a little cleanup inside of our field for us we don't need any of these things really we can always just bring them back in I'll keep the bear in case we want to pull them back in but for now those can be off all right so let's start out by bringing in some geometry we're gonna keep this really clean to start out with it'll get a little fancier later on I'm just gonna bring in a plate tonic because it's a very clean simple shaped e4 scale scale it down just a bit and in the field force let's drag this in the instance we drag it in we are going to see in effect we get these nice little circles on the corner that's because as we drag it in it is brought in by default and look we have to go to layer it's brought in as a point object so that means it's just viewing every single point on the object now it's creating a essentially spherical radius on the edge so we could increase the radius shrink the radius if we take our object hit R for rotate as I spin it and the different points come into contact with our surface they are gonna see that that is applying an effect perfect exactly what we'd expect with that so we could change the radius increase or decrease we could go into well let's go ahead and change the mode because that one's working pretty straightforward we can go to surface and now we've got the surface now this one takes a lot longer to calculate we've got such a simple object we're not really gonna see the effect of calculation but as you add more and more polygons this one will take longer and longer it's also the fanciest of all of these let's change our display mode I'm gonna hit n G so we can see through our wireframe here and we can actually see that it is creating a radius on the inside and outside of wherever the surface is and keep in mind we're just viewing a slice of this it's actually a three-dimensional object traveling all the way through everywhere that's where the calculations will happen but it's applying everywhere what's neat is it's essentially just creating a radius that's going in and out but let's see how this is actually affecting things if I play we're gonna see that the particles created are going to appear everywhere and they're gonna get pushed away from the surface inside they're gonna be bouncing around if we start increasing the radius that are going to affect more and more things these will get bounced around at the inside that's where it bounced around on the outside so pretty neat there we can shrink this up an important thing to note is when it comes to all these types of fall offs we can always go back into our remapping and completely change the way this is affecting things first of all we could say invert no effect everything except for those areas we can also change our contour mode to curve and we could affect the spline to change that way the fall-off looks even keeping it the simplest mode we can just grab our inner offset we can change this fall off and say full strength anywhere it's touching or do that fall off so at full strength everywhere we need to see that where those lines are that's where it's getting applied so perfect exactly I think we would expect it to behave there's a couple extra settings when it comes to surface though inside a surface we can restrict the effect right now it's not restricted at all but we can restrict it to the inside so the outside is not being calculated so these will bounce around inside of there now this could be useful for lots of different reasons if we were to go to our direction just like we're talking about with the other like the spherical fall-off the spherical field rather we can invert the direction so now anything that enters inside of this it's going to get pushed away in fact if we increase our layer to go really big so it's kind of affecting everything in there you'll see as I grab my object and I start moving around as anything kind of penetrates the surface of this geometry it's going to shove it away now this isn't full collision there's no way of directly doing that when it comes to working directly on the surface of this type of geometry and particles but it's pretty good and there's some really neat effects we might be able to get from that but let's go even further let's shrink this radius so that's inside we can say outside exactly we expect it's the opposite keep in mind at any point we could always go to a remapping and invert this so this would actually affect everywhere except for that little fall-off so a lot of powerful combinations and then our restrict effect we can also do inside and invert which is maybe there's a specific purpose for it but it's kind of it's on the inside but instead of the radius making it up here it's actually making it disappear so it's kind of the inverted effect by pretty sure you could just get that by setting inside and inverting it so maybe it's useful but I haven't found a specific use for it so this calculates really nice like I said the more geometry we put on the longer this will take to calculate it set this to none that's gonna go inside now we are calculating the surface let's see if we can get get it to slow down a little bit I'm gonna grab our platonic here and I'm gonna start increasing our segments and let's keep an eye on our FPS here so it's dropped down to 73 let's increase our segments some more and now you see it's dropped down to 35 now this is a decent amount Java tree but it's not crazy and you can see just by adding this in we are getting a significant slowdown on our frames per second so important to keep in mind but another concept I want to keep hammering home here is the importance of masks and right now this is calculating on the surface so taking really long time but look we created all this extra geometry if we change this over to point mode visually it's not terribly different and let's just say we wanted anything within this fall-off to have some sort of effect we could in our field force drag in our random field again and make sure we turn it on as we get this random field it's applying everywhere but let's turn on a mask so add a mask to arena field inside of the mask we'll drag our object so now we're applying this randomness only to these edges now we highly subdivided our object the surface we saw how slow our SPS was going but now we're saying hey just calculates based on the points and affect the randomness and you'll see that our fps is a significantly higher it's just that much quicker to calculate based on the points rather than the surface so this could be really useful and I can see randomness essentially along all the edges because our point count is high enough and it's just masking everything out the mask concept very important so we'll drag that shape out again and let's tinker with one the last mode here in fact we do not need all these subdivisions so I get rid of them our final mode is volume and this is actually looking at the overall volume of the shape and we were just talking about the masks so I guess I shouldn't get inroad rid of there in a field we'll bring it back in and the volume you'll see is not returning anything and that's because it's just the volume it doesn't know what direction it should be so if we do something like take the Raynham field once again put a mask Tryg this in as a volume we can say hey any effect that we're doing in this case the random field we can mask it inside or of course we could go and go to remapping and invert that so it can be masking the inside or the outside of any geometry so single-handedly that makes this pretty powerful even if it's very specific use the idea that this mask could be applied to anything else is kind of powerful now as I said this is simple geometry we are going to get a little bit fancier later on but that should complete this one for now we'll delete that and let's jump to splines I want a circle but I always use an inside instead of a circle because we have very direct control T for scale grab the inside increase number sites we have quite a few just a lot actually he'll go even higher just make it nice and smooth and we know exactly what we're getting so inside of our field force don't need the random field quite yet we'll get back to it let's drag in our spline so the spine comes in and we got a couple different settings right away and this is actually I think one of the more confusing things if you can if you can harness the power of splines I think it's actually where field forces gets the most powerful but it's the one of the less intuitive ones so first of all you're gonna see that we get just by adding the circle and we're actually getting this whole kind of radial thing but not only is it radial you see the directions that this is facing the arrows are aligning with the spline but they're us also fading out you see over full strength here and as it goes around to get weaker we hear we hear until it's down to zero for you to create some particles here you can see that those are gonna flow around really quickly these are pretty much not going to move at all they're not all going to spiral away pretty neat that we can do that type of spiral but okay why it does it do this well it's because we are currently in a long mode we've got spine shape and we can mask things out with that I tend not to tinker with that too much although it's probably pretty useful but for the usefulness on this part we're gonna focus on staying on a long mode now what's happening is we are traveling from one spot to another and we can actually change our start and end range but what I have found is if we just grab our offset and we crank that all the way up to 100 then this is now full power all the way around that's all we have to do grab there from zero go up to 100 now we see the entire thing you actually fade it out to zero or all the way up but that this is where this is where it starts behaving kind of the way you expect it to so you play and now everything wants to travel along this spline okay that's something that's pretty cool we get that spiral we could start making it significantly more interesting though if we delete out this inside from our field and instead and ark so we got this Ark shape and let's see where is it our Ark is right that's outside it's a little bit big so I'm gonna shrink it down and I'll scoot this over here a little bit more to the middle now in our few in our field for sperm a drag our Ark and the same problem happens but we know how to fix that now we can just click on the Ark crank up offset now you see we have full strength here this is actually traveling the length of this if we hit play it's going to take all the particles and make them travel along that spline but there's a couple of a couple things we need to keep in mind first of all they're all traveling that way let's say we wanted to go the opposite way two main ways to fix that one you can go into almost every type of spline and there's usually a reverse checkbox so I could turn on reverse you see it's gonna invert the colors and now they're gonna travel the opposite way now the next thing we're gonna notice is that it's traveling the spline but it's kind of flinging it off into nowhere why is that well that goes back to some of the other ways we had been using this when it comes to our velocity type we're currently adding to the velocity so as this particle travels upward it starts slowly getting additional forces telling it to go fly to the left but it still has all of our upward velocity so as long as no energy is being drained out from the system it's going to continue traveling upwards so nothing's gonna slow that down so an order slowed down the best way when it's in particles is we need to use this friction so we'll just turn that same friction that we've had it forever on and that should drain energy out for the particles so now we're gonna see it does a much better job of traveling although not perfect so let's crank up our strengthing to go to 100 and now it's draining a lot of energy out from the system and now as it travels up so much energy is drained that you see it's very much following that surface now we end up with a very interesting final shape but it did travel that spline so not too bad there we have to keep some additional things in mind though like that that's using our friction but if we had set this to something like a changing the type to set absolute velocity then all of those are going to start traveling perfectly along that we crank this up and you're gonna see it well first of all at the field objects I'm gonna just visually turn out for a second you're gonna see that there's going to travel up perfectly but of course this is full power all of the time so that might not always be what we want and if our particles were flowing around a little bit already then of course we could set it to change direction the current ring that we have set up we're not gonna be able to see that very well as these are created with zero speed we have to give some some speed it's just a some experiment let's go ahead and give it their default speed they should travel forward and immediately get a direction change so let's hit play and see we get and yeah it does work so they're born with a certain speed and they're gonna continue with that speed whatever their current speed is but it's cool is that you could influence this with other things we could do different follow-ups we could add friction that can actually still slow down you see this will drain them down quite quickly set this to 10 so it's not quite as powerful and these will travel and slowly lose their energy you see they're travelling along the spline though it now I will say that if we go back to our field force here and go back to add to velocity and we'll slow that back down again so we're kind of back to our defaults it's traveling the spline but it it's not very intuitive visually and and this is us simplifying this is us in the 2d mode but if I were to grab this arc and hit T for scale shrink it down even further you see it doesn't really change the effect that much everything from this line is infinitely trying to travel to the left everything down here is infinitely trying to travel up this all the way down to infinity and this arc this curving arc is actually gonna go out also for infinity traveling out there if I kept on increasing the scale of our box and let's just do that right here so I start increasing you see that it's still calculating out to infinity so with that in mind I feel like visually this isn't necessarily what you're expecting now inside of our field force we can actually make it a lot more controllable and there might be different workflows for this but what I found is we actually well actually let's keep it let's just keep all of that in mind it goes out to infinity now inside of our arc we have another main mode that we play with we have a distance mode along let's change it to radius mode so we're gonna change it to a radius and what happens now is we should scale up our arc again what's happening now is it is pushing away from the surface of the spline effectively now just to show it well let's see what it looks like we hit play you're gonna see we're still person got the particles apologies it's zero that out so now you're gonna see that those particles are attracted to the line of course we can always go in here increase the radius and now more will be attracted and of course we go to our direction and invert it and those will push away we've got our fall-off where you make that full strength so now everything is full power blow it blast away all make sense consistent with everything else we've been doing I'm gonna go back to the default of inverted so that's all working quite well and I do want to point out that this is happening in three-dimensional space we're just seeing a slice so this is more of like a sausage type shape here if we were to increase our depth you're gonna see it as this box gets bigger we do have a 3d volumetric kind of bent capsule shape going on and that is it's just always important to keep in mind that this is a three dimensional object but we do want to go back to 2d for the simplicity so this is going to attract objects or push them away so that's very nice but I think where this starts visually becoming most intuitive intuitive is if we set the distance mode to a long and actually no that's the I was gonna say along in radius but actually doesn't work that well this way because in this way we could kind of combine them like you see we can fade off as we go but that is not what I want I got to put this back to along so now we're traveling along it and remember this is infinitely calculating and what ends this one be really clear here how this combines because things get really interesting we've got one arc and it's saying hey that's the direction we want to travel and that's cool that's why I want I want to travel that direction but I don't want it going off into infinity this is not intuitive so if we were to take this arc and create a mask and then we drag the arc in a second time as a child of the mask the second one we're gonna change a distance mode to radius and now we have a radius traveling along the spline but traveling in the orientation of the line so I start feeling like this is a little bit more intuitive so we've still got our friction I'm gonna crank that up again to 100 so it's very strong as our particles are created you're gonna see them try and travel along the spline but only where we told the fall-off to just to be clear if we were to turn off our mask here it's affecting everything everywhere and while it is falling this point it's I don't know there's just something about the way feels it doesn't feel intuitive but you do this combination of travel along the spline but limited to the radius of the spline now we're getting somewhere now we have control over this so that is excellent now just to throw out there a bunch of some more useful tips every time you add a new spline you're going to have to manually make that rig again now it's not as bad as all that even if you were doing it this way try to copy our arc make a second one over there and I'll scoot both of them them down we could we could go into our field force and you can right click on your object you copy and paste because I'll right click and say duplicate and now you get that rig again and I could manually drag my arc and replace that replace both of those arcs and you see it appear on the second one probably a good idea to rename this but you can see how that has indeed updated a copy of it so we've got that proper hierarchy set up and now we have two different arcs both travelling working very nicely like I said you can always go to one of the arcs and say reverse or under reverse this one so those will travel up those will travel down pretty cool and ok so that's working well but that start can start getting a little bit tedious so what I really like doing let's go to our field force and you know let's just do this again from scratch because why not what I'm gonna do is create a connect object a good old connect if we take a connect object put both of these splines in as children if we've only fed a connect splines then it's going to kind of output itself as a spline so with that in mind we go to our field forces and feed this connect in it's gonna ask us is the point object or a spline I'm gonna say hey it's a spline and the instant we do that you can see we've kind of got this overall shape and it's got these two different arcs those golf to infinity but when they collide they split the difference that's what we're getting we know that we want to increase our offset so it's full power all the way and that's pretty cool where you get these two different directions so just two spines combined is pretty neat but now all we've to do is add the mask and then add the Kinect again as a spline object this time instead of being along it is the radius of it we change the radius and what's really cool about doing this workflow is that of course we can keep on making more splines of the Kinect and the rig is already looking for it so along these lines why don't we take this arc it's gonna be a little hard to identify them I gotta rotate this one a little bit and let's place it right there oops I'm grabbing the correct axis so there we go one should feed into the other and then let's make a duplicate of it again and I'll rotate this and we'll move it into position right there so hopefully as these get to their end to their arc they'll travel up now you'll see our display box of course is not showing everything because we don't have it big enough to see everything but if we just cut no this arc is continuing to represent it if we have play we should see hopefully these travel into there then they'll travel up this line and now they'll transition into that one and they will continue traveling yell even though we're not seeing these you know the representation of it they are still up there and they're still traveling so this is where things start getting powerful and interesting now continuing with the idea of these splines we can make this even a little bit fancier now that we've got combined with our Kinect it makes us even more simple but we saw that before the radius could attract or push away so right now if we hit play these are traveling along that line really well but you'll see that they start getting a little bit left behind there if they escape the velocity there's something outside the radius and then they're not being attracted you know they're not being dragged along anymore so let's see if we can fix that a little bit let's drag in another copy of the Kinect and this time it will be a spline well will be a spline object again we're gonna change the distance mode to radius and now we've got a radius but this time let's make sure we match our radius so you see we have a radius of 23 I'm just gonna copy that under our new Kinect I'm gonna make that radius the same and now we have a school we separate iteration of this series of splines but this one is attracting or might be pushing away I forget the default let's hit play and find out okay by default it's attracting it but and it's you know I think it's mostly overriding it but you're gonna see a little bit how they are sort of traveling along it not very powerfully but if we take this connect and add it to the system then they're combining in a more complex way so they're both getting attracted to the spline and traveling along the spline and this I think is where you can really start to see the power of field forces like look at this rig and how we are very powerfully very specifically controlling these splines even look at this the friction is slowing them down but they're even overshooting this arc and then curving back in I just love the way that that is combining into there so this is where things start getting really interesting and once again just really clean spline so we have very very direct control of keep in mind that we could be masking this you know these could be masks of all sorts of other things we could have an overall a tractor pulling things into a center point or they all get pulled to this point and then they travel around we could let's see I bet we can just make a perfect loop here and I'm making another copy of this arc and let's make it a little bit funky because why not I'm gonna pull this one right there we'll do something like that T for scale just scale it so it's about the right one I'm just making this up as I go so let's uh rotate this to match our position right about there so with any luck these should travel to the end there and then those will get pulled down actually it looks like they're traveling upward so I'm gonna reverse that arc and now they're gonna suddenly you start getting sucked down that one you see even how it does a nice little twirl and they start traveling down and then this should it's go overshoot but this becomes a new loop for those to travel along I guess if we made this new arc just a little bit smaller it probably work a little bit better there there we go so we should have just made something of an infinite loop where these are going to travel around this will hit the end and overshoot and hopefully they'll get sucked down that pipe and they'll just keep on traveling and traveling so really really cool now you see that these are really specific they're really kind of latched on to this line we could weaken the strength of this second copy of the connect like this doesn't need to be a nearly as strong we could remap the fall-off we can make that incredibly strong we could pull the strength of this down so it's it's attracting them but not very much you see by dropping this down to about a twentieth that it's following the arc but a lot less perfectly that's the less of a priority for them to arc inward and keep in mind the only thing we're doing is calculating different lines different vectors this is just the direction and the power of that direction when it gets calculated so we could put this back up the full strength and have them follow the line very quickly or closely but of course we could grab our random field I'm gonna drag that in I'm gonna set that to add and this should start adding some extra variation on top of it so I think these will probably going around a little but and these other ones will probably eventually catch our line but we've got that extra wiggle but in general it's still going to try and follow these splines so you just see how it layers and layers and layers now they're all grouping up quite a bit so instead of this randomness being big and wavy why don't we take this randomness and we'll shrink the scale way down so we get this tiny tiny little bit of randomness and it's not very strong right now so I'm gonna increase its strength we'll do that by going to its direction and starting to increase our scale and now it's becoming more powerful and now you can see that this randomness is making them just have that little bit of jitter so they're not quite on top of each other as much we could keep on increasing that even more and now we're gonna see that they're really gonna start chittering around then they're not quite so stuck on top of each other now you have to be careful of court well not careful but you know the display mode here as we increase the power this might get a little bit crazy but I still like seeing that feedback in the rig and as we're started building something a little bit more complex here this is why I don't like completely losing this you see this mode I don't feel like this is telling me too much information if we leave it online mode and we just start scaling this back let's say 0.5 I guess point 1 is probably a good number here you can see that this is giving us a little bit more of that overall feedback although I guess these uh these are being destroyed a little bit via theif the random field is so powerful that's kind of overriding these other ones but you can still get a general vibe for them traveling around and I do like getting that feedback so some of them will escape they do eventually randomly try around but in general we get this really nice flow and man like what a powerful powerful combination we have here it's just it's just so much fun and I mean we can just keep going and going with this I'm gonna delete those all those splines and we've ever got that connect set up so let's make a a text object and let's just say F F for field forces I'm gonna drop this in and that these should automatically become the spline that's both being traveled along and attracted to and is the fall-off back in our field force I'm just going to delete this random field and I can see that we have all the fall-off everything set up there so we hit play and right away not changing any of the settings you have these traveling along creating this letter so you can see how quickly we could update this text you can even see it's a very good job of curving it around if we increase the friction of course that would slow it down but that is just working so incredibly well I'm curious if we were to set this to set absolute velocity I think it would travel these lines a lot more specifically oops gonna be careful on the power there yeah these are traveling around look very very strongly so that might be overdoing it I just curious way to do but you can see these are traveling along if we were to visually hide this original text we could grab our particles we do have quite a few of them so some I slow to it slows down a little bit pause it rewind let's create a mograph tracer object while our emitter is selected it's automatically applied hit play and now it's going to trace those lines along the letter you can see him instantly the letters emerge if we limited this from end I finally finally remember which one of those to click on let's limit it to 11 frames so now they're gonna have little tails and as these travel along we're going to see the letters emerge and let's see what I always like putting an ampersand that's a cool-looking shape so I'll make an ampersand look at that look at one letter just morphs into a new one by by changing that it might not always work that way below st. you twin X and now any particles that are in range to get captured are going to start traveling around in revealing that new letter so it's just it's just really fun there are so many ways of combining that and I really love treating this stuff like it's a two-dimensional plain it just makes a it just makes it very convect very controllable and man these combinations just get absolutely insane so I think that will wrap up we're talking about with splines there and let's talk about the final thing to import as an on-field there might be other ones but let's import our final thing is uh not field and that is going to be a particle object so let's just delete these we don't need them anymore and we still got our same set up we've just been using again and again and again that's we might need that again but whatever I'm gonna hit play now you see boom we get some particles nothing is being fed into them actually those are all dead so I'll kill them all off let's go ahead and start feeding in some particles now I've actually found the particles to be a little less intuitive let's see if we can get I'm actually going to copy and paste our entire emitter don't need well actually we'll figure it out we got a second emitter and on the second emitter I'm going to only emit about a hundred particles not for very long and that all seems good I'm gonna say show objects that might be useful in a moment so let's go to the basic tab and I've got the color set I'm gonna just set this to something pretty bright like a yellow and let's see if we can see it I need to also give it a different random seed it's gonna be a little difficult to see but if I play I think we'll probably be able to see a couple of yellow ones here let's uh yeah you can see that some yellow ones sprinkled in there not not super easy to see but they're there so what do we let's have these do something so they're already just kind of existing there but you can imagine them passing through we could have a lot of control in fact yeah why not I'm gonna grab this emitter and let's make it zero width so we've got a single skinny line right there and now I'm gonna rotate this single skinny lining uh spin it negative 90 degrees and let's go ahead and give these some speed so what should be happening and it's friction yeah we have friction I'm gonna turn friction off for now let's hit play and we should see there we got birth of yellow particles flying through cool I think we can probably make these live for not too long and I'm gonna make that keep on emitting forever so we got a bunch of particles probably too many I'm gonna set it to eleven so it's a little more reasonable there we go so a series of particles getting shot out so let's have these start doing something well the field forces but let's actually do something really quickly let's make sure that we go to include in this new emitter that we made and I'm gonna say in the mode I want to include nothing because I don't want the field force also affecting the emitter itself that would be kind of creating a feedback loop which we could totally do but in this case I want to keep it clean so this is this is just kind of our I could call it a refr reference of emitter and then here's the actual one that's going to be affected excellent so I'm going to start shooting out some particles and in the field force we got nothing in there let's throw in our new emitter and it's guy asked we want to be a particle object or a point object here's where I get a little bit lost if I play actually code is working this I'm cool okay I get maybe they have to be moving for the velocity I'm not sure but anyway the instant I put it in here you can see that these are doing something they're actually making it so that there's a direction on it let's make this did we shrink these yeah I shrank my scale length so let's stare that back out again now we can see it so what's happening with these particles is they are actually creating a direction this direction is pushing left so instantly pretty neat we go to our field force and there's our direction well let's click on nice and slow let's not go too fast field force go to object tab make sure we've got our reference emitter go to layer and here's what's being spit out so currently it's just got a radius so I could increase or decrease this radius and it's actually giving us a direction and then that direction is making everything travel to the left now we could go and say invert the direction and now everything's gonna travel to the right so as these pass through these particles it's gonna start put kind of dragging them along so writer there right there automatically pretty neat now unfortunately that's kind of the only thing that we can do directly with these particles we can make him go back where they came from or though he make him push forward I guess the only other thing that we can do which is obviously pretty powerful is we can do something like let's create a solid I'm gonna tell the solid to go negative one so it's gonna pull downward and I'm gonna set that to blending mode normal and this of course is gonna pull everything straight down but let's go ahead and give it a mask so there's a mask on the solid it's going to reference the reference emitter and now nothing is there unless it's in the radius of the reference emitter and you'll see as these particles pass through it's actually gonna make them travel downward so it's kind of creating these streaks of rain downward so you can see how you can also use this as a layer mask now we could well that's kind of the basics of what this does it's pretty neat you can build some neat rigs where things are getting blasted at it like that but where I've kind of found things yeah a little bit more interesting was grabbing our emitter and emitting an object if we emit an inside put as a child and I get T for scale and scale it pretty far down if we apply that we see them get emitted and I can shrink it down and let's also change the orientation so it's flat on our screen fourth time's the charm there we go and I will create a couple of exercise so it's just very very round so now we are actually emitting these little circles now it's emitting pretty quickly right now I'm going to slow it down let's drop the speed to about a third and now we hit play they're gonna travel along you're still making it rain because of the way we set that up let's delete the solid and this time actually I'm sure let's do this as a quick experiment I'm gonna drag it in I'm gonna say hey look at this as a point object this time I can see if it's any if it does anything no it doesn't do anything I didn't think it would but if we grab our reference emitter and we make it a child of a connect and by the way if you hold down the Alt key as you create it'll automatically make it as a parent if we feed this in now we can say hey do you this connect as a spline object and every single one of these circles now becomes a direction that we can see so now if we go into our field force we click on that connect which is the splines let's go ahead and do a somewhat similar rig to what we had before in fact I think we could say don't make it a long make it a radius and now we get it attracting of course this is a track in a circle and it's kind of like a doughnut shape because you know there's an inside spot an outsize behind but if we grab our inside and we get really small like I say 0.1 now it's a really tiny circle maybe uh maybe it's not a good idea to go that small or is a Kinect obliterating that actually I'm kind of curious by that I turn off well didn't I connect and let's make our radius 0.1 again oh okay cool I didn't actually think the Kinect did anything to a spline but it does and it's good to know that so I turned off weld and now we can make a really tiny essentially circle inside of it and then the circle is being viewed as a radius so now these become tractors these are now tiny little circles that are pulling at these particles to them so I think I would like to a couple different things to you first of all inside of our field for so let's make this a lot strong what we can increase the radius let's also make it a lot stronger I'm gonna crank up the strength you see it's gonna get bigger now of course visually it's gonna get in our way so I'm gonna temporarily set that to pritus and let's see what this does so now you can see it's very strongly pushing in of course we can go into the AR effect and say you know what actually I want that to be inverted so now these are pushing away the particles it's gonna be clearing a path as those come flying through but I think if we turn on some friction here and free invert the direction we can get these getting attracted here and they won't be going super crazy they're just traveling a little bit quick right now so let's slow these down again let's give them a speed of five so now these particles are gonna be flying very slowly through here they're very tiny but as I enter we can actually see them once it's it's so hard to see those like I said I like I'm gonna increase the life I like I like being able to see the colorful one that just makes it pop more so I'm gonna say line length again but we just once again have the scaled down I wish there's our super quick way of doing it but there we go now we now you can see we've got this wave of particles oh it's even kind of cool look it's a pop it's suddenly bursting them out and they're flying the next one I wasn't even trying to do that and that's a really cool effect suddenly one will pop and travel to the next so if we gave this a little bit more variation in the lifetime I'm gonna let them live a little bit longer and I don't want there to be quite so many so I'm gonna drop it down to three and three and why don't we scoot this a little bit closer to the edge so now these are being created and they're gonna attract the particles and they should live for a very random length and when they die they're suddenly freed and then they'll be captured by a neighbor neighboring once it looks like we even need fewer particles and that but that's pretty cool pop and then it yeah that's a cool effect and we could give this some a lot of variation in the speed as well so we'll get some quicker ones and some slower ones and yeah I don't know how fast we can go before these would start escaping but yeah this is a neat little thing and I think it's still continuing to be two-dimensional these are not traveling on Z at all just because these particles are all flat on the same plane but I just love these attractions and then suddenly they pop and explode so you can imagine you know already this is starting to like I it would inspire me to do some different additional effects that we might be able to create it's just really fun so many crazy combinations of different things and keep in mind every single thing that we've talked about could be layering on top of all the other things we've been talking about these could all be in the simplest form we can go back and add a solid and I'm gonna say okay I want to add the solid and I want them all slowly traveling to negative one but I give this a negative one and now they'll all pull downward but they'll be also captured by these particles if it's too fast I can also grab the opacity and pull that down and now that won't be as powerful no those will slowly be getting sucked in there if we didn't want the solid when you delete that we can also add in our friend they random field and let's set that to also add and now these will be randomly blowing in all directions it might be a little bit powerful and it's probably in all three dimensions so we might start losing them but you can just start seeing where these could start combining and capturing and traveling along splines it gets absolutely insane so I think I just like oh there's probably a couple more things to talk about but let me show you a more advanced rig of combining a bunch of these ID and I've already got AC file prepped here let's go ahead and pop it open and here we go we've got the dinosaur rig from Sebastian from the content browser just something that we can tinker around with and I've got a bunch of different things prepped here we're going to be feeding this in as a way of controlling it so let's just take a look at the way we set up our field for us first of all I got the field force moved into a new position so it's laying flat on the ground so we can see that and then I've got this emitter which is going to be emitting particles and you see the dinosaur is animated to walk now we already talked about how the surface of a mesh will slow it down a lot so I don't want slowed down by using this entire dinosaur just to be calculating where the surfaces so what I set up is is I took a copy of this model inside of it and I deleted everything except for a little bit of the geometry on the feet so it doesn't have to calculate everything it's just looking at the feet and that is what I was going to feed in to our field force I got two different field forces so we got our field force here so let's go over what some of these are actually doing will kind of work our way up step by step so first of all I made a solid on the bottom of what this one is doing is its pushing everything up but it's only pushing things up that are on one side of this linear field not really something we talked about but if you make a linear field which is just you know kind of fall off its zero power on one side and the full power and the opposite one so if you take this and you shrink it actually go to the length and we shrink it down you don't want to go to the zero that can confuse it but we shrink this down to one then stuff that happens on one stuff will happen on one side and not the other and we can use that as some sort of mask and that is exactly what's happening in the field force where everything below the ground is getting a force that says no push upward so in the beginning nothing will happen and then there's another solid and what this solid is doing is it's looking it's saying hey everything should travel upward not quite as fast but it has a mask based on the feet of the dinosaur and it's just looking at the points so it's just looking at the radius to calculate very quickly and then as soon as anything kind of goes a little bit above the ground then there's suddenly a big andum field that can take over and blow everything in lots of different directions so let's just take a look at what we actually get combining all these things those hit play and now when the dinosaur takes a step its feet are suddenly being detected inside of the field and these particles are getting raised up or in Asuza go upward a little bit the randomness is taking over they're all kind of wafting through the air there's all sorts of additional things we could do as far as having them fall back to the ground or have a whisper for a little while lots of different combinations one additional thing that was neat was I dragged in the foot of the dinosaur a second time and I have it set to surface now this will be a little bit slower because it's still calculating that surface but this is actually calculating to push everything away so while it's a little bit slower you'll see when the step goes in actually does a better job if we get really up close here it's bursting all the particles kind of to the left and to the right downward but those downward ones will get pushed back up again and the foot would be blocking it so you can't get this nice burst of stuff for this knobs down and it was pretty quick to put this together but hopefully you can see kind of wess talking about where this is all about doing this methodically you have to have a plan you can't just throw things at it I mean it's fun the tinkerer it's fun to play around and see what it does but when it finally comes to building a rake you want be very precise and that is what the setup is so it is actually relatively clean and simple but you get these great stumps with a burst of these particles all traveling up and it's just a lot of fun just so many different ways of combining this stuff so we got our Dino making this nice splashy footprints well almost forgot one thing so we're feeding this mesh several times into our field force but sometimes a deformed mesh doesn't want to be acknowledged by field force and sometimes some other objects now when in doubt put something into a connect object but sometimes even the connect object won't work and something I have found that I usually will try if that type of deformation isn't working is I will try feeding in a correction to former that's another de former we have in here but if you feed that in it's kind of it outputs every single point and oftentimes that will be acknowledged so something is pretty cool is even though the mesh didn't work being fed into the field force what did work was dragging the correction to former in and it's acknowledged just like a polygon object and that works perfectly alright so there we go hopefully you feel like you have a better understanding now of field forces and how they work and how they're integrated in the cinema 4d now I didn't go into everything obviously the video was already over an hour long we didn't go at all into the volume builder and the vector mode which is pretty cool but also pretty advanced and very specific so that will be covered in in the future but I think we hid a lot of things I would have really wanted to get across now one tiny little bit of news rocket lasso live is going to be coming back online I think on January 8th will be the premiere of season 2 if you're not familiar rocket lasso live is a livestream done through YouTube and on Twitch on Wednesdays where I take live questions from the chat in cinema 4d and we try and recreate things or answer questions and just figure things out it's a lot of fun and I highly recommend coming and checking out if you like this kind of cinema 4d content so if you like this video any kind of sharing would be super appreciated but I think that should wrap this up thank you so much and I'll see you next time bye bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you it it makes me think a little bit of like

Channel: RocketLasso

Views: 19,260

Rating: 4.9942031 out of 5

Keywords: field forces cinema 4d, field forces c4d, cinema 4d simulation, cinema 4d particle emitter tutorial, cinema c4d r21 tutorial, c4d r21 field force, Rocket Lasso tutorial, cinema 4d fields tutorial, cinema 4d r21 field force, cinema 4d dynamics tutorial, cinema 4d cloth simulation tutorial

Id: LVkX9NWfjfI

Length: 75min 33sec (4533 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019