How to Use Field Forces in Cinema 4D R21

with every new cinema4d release there's always one feature that seems to fly under the radar and I feel like field forces is that powerful new feature in cinema 4d r21 that everyone's gonna be raving about let's go and check out field forces in this video I'm gonna break down the new field forces in cinema 4d r21 and show you how it can completely change the way you work with dynamics cloth hair and particles now if you want to follow along there's gonna be some project files you can download in the description of this video so what the heck our field force is where if you go to your simulate menu you see all of these old particle forces that we've all grown to know and love and there is our field force now basically what a field force can do is allow you to use mograph fields to control the direction of particles or even control dynamics cloth hair all kinds of stuff so what the field force essentially is is all of these old field or all of these old particle forces wrapped into one so let's go ahead and add a field force source scene here's an emitter that is just a flat line basically you can see that the emitter is a size of 625 in the X and then we're just birthing a whole crap ton of particles a thousand being emitted there and a speed of 300 centimeters okay so let's go ahead and let's start using field forces to manipulate these particles so field force has a few different settings here one is to just add to the velocity of whatever object you have currently flying whether that be particles or dynamic objects another one is to just set the absolute velocity so you actually set the speed and it's going to maintain that speed throughout the entirety of the movement and then you can have different fields help particles or dynamic objects change the direction not contribute to the motion at all just changing the direction of that so let's go ahead and use some fields to help change the direction of this object so you might be wondering well what is the wind particle force here that we have here win basically what wind is is a linear field you'll see that when I added a linear field to my list here you can see we have the linear fall-off and you can see all these little dashes here what those dashes are our vector lines and they determine the direction in which a particle is flowing so you'll notice if I move this up and down you can see that all of my particles are actually moving this way the way the the actual fall-off is facing okay so let's go ahead and let's change the direction to this is facing in the positive Z let's go ahead and do the positive Z here and you'll see that actually the positive Z is shooting all the particles back the other way so let's try negative Z and now you'll see we'll get back to how we had this before okay so this is really cool we can control the direction by just rotating this field this linear field linear fall-off and you can see we can then you know keyframe this if we want to to have this kind of rotate all types of different ways which is really really cool now where the real fun happens is once you start adding different types of fields in here so maybe we go ahead and let's add a random field to randomize all this stuff and you can see that now we were randomly moving and changing the direction of these particles one thing to know about the blending modes with few of horses the only modes that really work are add and subtract ok so what I'm gonna do is add to this and let's go into our noise and let's just scale this up to about 500 and you can more see the giant noise happening here and you're gonna see that all of the particles just stop moving that's because what's going on is our linear field is no longer taking effect in these particles just get wrapped up in all of these random directions that you can see here now what we can do is go to our random field maybe add some animated noise so now we have all the this really crazy undulating jitter going on so what's going on and why are particles are just stopping is this linear field again ramps from 100% strength to 0% strength so you can see as that little linear push from that linear field is dying out because our linear field goes to zero percent strength right here now to get around this we can just go into our linear field and go to the remapping tab and we can either adjust this in our offset or we can just bring this min value all the way up to 100% so there will be no die-off so basically what's happening is our linear field is gonna have a hundred percent strength throughout the linear field here so now this is basically your wind áformer or your wind your wind power call force that you have up here okay so we can change the direction and there we go now this is one way to get particles moving in one direction there's another way you can go ahead and add a directional force and that's by using a different field so let me go ahead delete that linear field and how we have like all these little fireflies which are kind of cool but a better way to do this is using a solid layer okay so here's our solid layer and if we go and add a solid you can see that if I place this below my random field all of these particles are now flying upwards in the upwards direction because we have this direction in our solid that is represented as x y&z and since we have a value of 1 in the Y all of our particles or the direction of the particles and the vectors are going to be facing upwards and you can see all these vector lines they're all facing upwards now what if we want to have this going in the Z direction well we would go ahead and put any value like one in the positive Z direction and now you can see we just changed the direction of those vector lines you can see as I make this direction even longer my vector lines are even longer in our noise is kind of getting blown out from how powerful the vector strength is so maybe we'll get a value of two in that direction now we've got this really cool wavy particle movement coming from the random noise that is kind of undulating and rotating all of our vector lines here now a better way to see this is if we go to our force field go to our display and here we can choose how much density of our vector lines we're seeing and then we can also like flatten this out so we can see any flat 2d plane what our vectors look like okay so we can really see this ramped up and you can see there's our noise kind of represented in there so if we go back to our noise and maybe crank that crank down how do you let's just tamper this down Rock and crank something down but as I bring the scale of the noise lower you can see that represented in the vector direction so if I make this even lower you can see that the vector it's not a smooth noise so we're getting all this crazy wacky particle movement going on if I make this very large you see this nice smooth noise look at that looking good so really cool particle stuff you can do another thing we can do as well is mix even more fields together so we got this big ol noise going on we can add in a let's do a spherical field and you can see with the spherical field on this vector let me go and just let me add on to this wherever I move this spherical field let me just really scale this up and move this down you can see wherever I move this it's gonna attract these particles now I can go into the spherical field and go to the strength and really crank up the strength remove that inner offset and now you can see I can kind of influence the direction of which these particles are flowing so I can maybe capture some of these particles on the end and have them veer off to the side here or maybe have this kind of in the center and all these particles are now kind of getting sucked into this black hole so this is like you're a tractor okay the old attractor particle effect basically that's just a spherical field that we can use in combination with other types of fields here now to create a something that disperses or deflects objects we can go ahead and use the subtract and what that will do is now you'll repel all of these particles just like putting in a negative number for the attractor particle force okay so a lot of really cool things we can do here we can go ahead and where this really starts to look cool is if you go and maybe add a a tracer so we're tracing all of those lines look at that super cool looking good and then we can go ahead and make a hair material and that's one way we can go ahead and it's down here it's cut off buts in your materials right below the new uber grass material and it's right underneath the grass material there's our hair material let's go ahead and let me make like a bright blue kind of color here and let's go to our specular maybe turn that on or turn that off and just have the thickness be consistent let's throw that on the tracer and we got something like this look wow that's looking cool don't even have any lights or anything like that but that's super cool if I do say so myself so that's a little bit of scraping the surface of what you can do with the field force and particles but like I said there's a lot more you can do with field forces alright so that was using field forces with particles and be honest I don't use particles that much where I think the field force is gonna be very very powerful and actually use a lot more often is in the area of dynamics and cloth or even hair because field courses can also affect those things as well so for example one thing that I think is gonna be very useful and something that you are unable to do in previous versions is actually have objects be attracted to the surface of another object so here I have just a little animation with my plus sign and it is animated with just a vibrate tag and it's just moving back and forth and what I want to have is these spheres kind of be attracted to the surface of the object now in previous versions you were just stuck with an attractor force or a tractor particle force so let's just grab an attractor let's make it a child of this plus sign and let's crank up the strength of this attractor to about 500 and you're gonna see that everything is just gonna kind of fall so let's go ahead and turn off the gravity in our scene so I'm going to hit command or control D to bring up our project settings if you go to the dynamics tab we're just gonna turn off that gravity so give the gravity a value of zero and hit play and you're gonna see things are still bouncing around let's go ahead and go into all of our dynamics tags that we have here and go in the forest tab and just give a little bit of follow position follow rotation so this will try to have these objects maintain their original position rotation maybe add a little bit of linear dampening so they won't move linearly so much and now you'll see let me actually crank this up even more so maybe 1500 you can see that the best you could do in previous versions of cinema 4d is use an attractor and you can see all of my spheres are now attracted to not the surface of my object but where the axis center is of my attractor so if I have my attractor over here let's hit play you're gonna see that all the spheres are going to be attracted to that part so there was no way previously to use the surface of the object as an attractor well in cinema 4d r21 we can now use field forces to correct that issue so let's go ahead get rid of this attractor let's go to our particle forces and go to field force and now what we can do with cinema4d r21 is we can drag and drop our object into this field force force menu here and you can see this is gonna be represented as a volume object here okay and what we can do is basically say you know hey we're going to set the absolute velocity which means you're going to set the velocity of the objects at this absolute strength and one thing we're gonna need to do to have this act as an attractor is go ahead and change the strength to a negative number so it won't kind of deflect it will actually attract all of these little spheres so let's go ahead let's hit play you're gonna see that nothing is really going on here you're seeing out a little vectors so what's actually going on is our vectors don't expand past the volume of our objects so the vectors aren't reaching these spheres so they can't be sucked in by them so what we're gonna do is go to our direction tab here and this is basically determining the length of those vectors they're too short right now they're not reaching all these other spheres so what we can do is change this length from use value to no remap okay now if I scale this down you can see there's all of our little lines okay but one thing I'm gonna do is go to my display and I'm going to uncheck this display vector length and now we can just see what our vectors are looking like so let's do an flatten this box size down to about zero centimeters so we just have a flat box and let's maybe make this box a little bit bigger maybe 500 by 500 and let's bring up the line density here so now you should be able to see all of these little vectors they're now expanding out beyond the original surface here and if I go ahead and hit play now cool now we have those vectors that aren't basically constrained to the surface of or the the volume of our little plus sign analysis acting upon and attracting all these spheres here you can see all of these little vectors kind of always pointing towards the surface of an object okay so very important that we didn't use a use-value here because again you're gonna see that now our volume is determining how big those vectors are now you can increase the radius here and you can still see that that's really not doing anything at all so very important workflow here let's go to no remap and this will not allow those vectors to be remapped to just the inside of a of a volume of an object so this is something that previously not been able to do before this is so cool and something that I've been wishing for for a long time so along with objects to create vectors to be able to make dynamic objects go towards the surface of an object you can actually use splines to create vectors in art direct dynamics thatwe have them follow say an arc spline or say a spiral spline as we have here helix spline so let's just go ahead and set up this scene so I have my dynamic object here it's a Voronoi fracture and basically the trigger set to immediately I'm gonna change this to velocity peak so what we're gonna do is just have another object and that object is a plane effector and that plane effector is going to set that initial velocity by whatever we put in this position tab here so I'm gonna make it a very low position transformation value here and that will just nudge the dynamics just enough to then trigger that dynamic so if I go ahead here we got a philosophy peak let's go ahead and let's control that plane effect you're using a fall-off and I'm just gonna go ahead and use a spherical fall-off now if I go in hit play you should be able to see that if I move my spherical field I can move that spherical field it'll nudge just those little fragments just enough that let me just move this forward a little bit that it will trigger the dynamics and the dynamic objects or Voronoi fracture pieces will fall okay so we got all this action going on which is looking really good okay got the spherical field doing its thing but what if we wanted to have these pieces kind of spiral downwards as they fall well that's where we can go ahead and add our field force go into particles field force and then just drag and drop this helix spline into this field force and we're just gonna leave this at add to velocity for now and let's see what changes here so let's get our spherical field in here and you're gonna see not a whole Lots going on you can see some rotation let's go to our field force again and let's go and make this field force box big enough let me scale this up we're not quite seeing much of our vectors right now so let's go ahead and change that let's go to display so let's make the line density a little bit longer so let's go and get this display length up and you can see there's our vector lines and you can see by especially if I go from the above view you can see these vectors are pointing in a spiral direction which is really cool okay so that's exactly what we want so let's go and let's try this again so let's change this strength to say 45 this time you can see that the vectors are getting very long at the top so let's hit play and let's get our spherical field and now you should see a little bit more of the objects kind of swirling around let's make this very pronounced so let's go and crank this up to maybe 80 and let's make it so these vector lines aren't really clogging up the the viewport here so what we're gonna do is in our field force in the helix we're gonna go to this direction tab and we're gonna say just use normalize and then go back to our display and bring this display length down so we don't see all those large huge lines or something like that and let's see what we got so we're gonna hit play Garth spherical field triggering the dynamics now you're really seeing those pieces kind of swirl away which is really really cool okay but the one thing you're gonna notice is that the swirling won't stop stop the swirling so how can we do that well we can do this by utilizing a fall-off in the actual you'll force itself so we can actually reference the same helix Fline and we can go into this helix go and change this distance mode of how this fall-off is working by just choosing a radius and let's just make the radius a little bit bigger so you can see there's our radius right there and basically what should happen which we should get the spiral from our field force but then once it actually is is arcing in a specific direction it should stop getting affected by it as it leaves this helix radius here of this fall off so you can see how big that fall-off is okay it's kind of like a cylinder almost but if we go back to frame 0 and then move this around again you can see the arcing you see the twisting but then there's no more spinning okay because we added that fall-off to our field force there ok so really cool stuff we get some cool spinning going on let's go ahead and let's replace the helix with say a arc spline so we can just drag and drop this over this helix and just replace that spline let's do the same thing with the fall-off here just drag and drop that in there to replace it and now you see we have this arc spline which actually just hide that helix and if we go to our field force you should be able to see especially if I make V display longer you should see all these vectors arcing in the same direction as that arc spline okay so let's just make this box size very small in the Z so we can see this more flat okay looking good and now what we can do as in this field force fall-off maybe we shrink this down a little bit so now we just have a little bit of our arc field force so again this is gonna act as a fall-off as well so let's go in let's get our spherical field move it right there hit play and then just move it down and Wow everything all of our objects all of our fractured pieces are kind of floating up in following the arc of those vector lines which is really really cool all right so really awesome stuff something like that now you can play around with some different effects here so we are doing add to velocity maybe we can do set absolute velocity and this will kind of just set the speed of the velocity at that 80 so if we do this you can see that's the speed it's very constant it kind of doesn't look that realistic at all but hey maybe it's what you're going for let's maybe go and crank up that strength to say 135 and let's go like that and you can see that that's still not that fast let's go back to our field force let's really crank this sucker up there we go and go to our spherical field boom so we got some really cool effects you can see that as I move this up and down it's actually affecting a lot of these other pieces too so with this workflow basically what you want to do is just move this once get all those chunks flying and they'll go into a pile right next to your object or wherever your arc continues on down so really cool stuff art directing your dynamics to fall in whatever direction you want we can even move this arc all this stuff is editable we're moving these vector lines and you want these to arc more towards the screen here so let's see what that looks like so let's go back to frame 0 get our spherical field now we got all this stuff kind of falling in front of our screen just like that just really really cool stuff and again that's that's using the set absolute velocity if you just do add to velocity it's a little bit more realistic a little bit more controllable but again you're gonna need to tweak these settings a little bit more let's say 150 for this to get this looking good you can see this follows the arc pretty nicely but then we got this nice scattering going on and again that's more realistic it's not as straight as much of a line as our set absolute velocity but it I'd say it's looking pretty pretty dang good now one quick note about the splines and using them to kind of drive your vector directions and your field forces sometimes when you apply a spline sometimes the direction in which that spline is going you can see that I had Reverse going on you can see that we're actually pointing in way different directions here so if I had this reverse turned off let's go ahead and hit play let's go to the spherical field you're gonna see that things are actually gonna go backwards okay they're not gonna jump out forwards like we did before and that's because of the way the spline direction from start to end is going so it's very important that when that happens if it's not acting predictably using your spline that you just hit reverse and now you can already see that this is now acting in this direction versus this direction so each spline has their own reverse toggle here that you can then use and that will again do a load of difference as far as which way you want your vectors to be pointing so keep that in mind having that reverse again that's on most spline objects here that you can use to then create vectors and art direct and drive the direction of your dynamics so one last cool way you can use field forces is by utilizing volumes so we're talking volume builders here you might be wondering well how can you use a volume builder to create anything cool well I'll show you well here we have just a standard emitter I didn't change anything from the default and what I'm gonna do is go ahead and I'm going to grab a volume builder okay and what I'm gonna do with this volume builder is just go ahead and throw in a random field so I'm gonna go to my field menu and just get a random field and place it underneath the volume builder and you'll see there we go we got our Sun distance field and we got this big blob but you're gonna notice one new thing in the volume type in that is vector so we can actually utilize different objects and fields to create vectors using the volume builder here which is really cool so if we go ahead and use this volume builder as a field force by going to particles and going to field force and then just placing that volume builder directly inside of our object just gonna do volume object here you can see that if I change this to change direction if we have the emitter going let's go and you can see just in there let's go to our field force and let's change the display and let's remove some of the density of the voxel size maybe to scale this up a little bit so now you can see a little bit more of the crazy little vectors pointing all randomly and we're getting all of these little particles bouncing all over the place now this doesn't look all that great looks like a lot of these particles had way too much coffee so what we can do is start utilizing some of the tools inside of the volume builder to help smooth out and create more cool effects so we look at our little menu here we have a vector smooth button if we click that you can see that that just smooths out all of those vector directions to a very nice and smooth path so what I can do is just decrease the voxel size here and that noise that we were using from that random field will be much more smooth and you can see that this has way less of a really crazy looking effect now if I go and hide this volume builder so we just see our particles here you can see that we're getting some interesting stuff going on here let's go ahead and maple will place the emitter in a tracer object so let's go and just grab a tracer and now we get these really cool lines okay now one thing you're gonna notice is that once this object gets out of this bounding box once these particles get out of the bounding box they just shoot off into nowhere because they have no more vectors to tell them where to go so how we can fix that go to the random field and in this creation space it's set to box now that box is fairly small what we can do is change this to one in one way I do to make this 1,000 be entered into all of these entry boxes in the scale I'm just gonna select all of these sizes and then just hit command and enter and that will transfer that 1000 to all of those highlighted scale markers a little quick tip there but once we have that we have a much wider swath of area that our vectors can now work with our particles can now travel through so we have more vectors to give them further directions on where to go outside of that original small bounding box state so if we go and hit play again you can see now we have more little stuff going on we're still getting some weird issues there so maybe we'll have to you know smooth out our vector smooth a little bit more maybe even make the voxel size a little bit bigger but there we go we can really get this voxel voxel distance so this is basically just using like a Gaussian blur on our vectors so we can bring this down to pray lilo don't want to bring it down too much but maybe we'll bring this down to two and got all these really cool wavy lines and maybe we'll just stick with ten for voxels sighs so let's see what we have looking good and this is just kind of you know flowing off into space which even that is a really cool effect we got some pretty smooth out noise coming from our random field and things are just kind of flowing out now where the true power comes in and where you can really start to get some cool stuff is in this vector smooth option if you hold the button down we can get this vector curl now once we add this we're gonna place this below our smooth we got all this really cool curling noise that's really really fun and this is just super super awesome so you got that we have our tracer if we go ahead and create some hair material so let's go to do materials new hair if it's cut off it's right there at the bottom and then we can just go ahead and apply that to our tracer and boom we got something cool going on we got some really cool noise going on let's maybe up the emitter to birth twenty twenty little things there maybe even make the emitter size bigger now we've got all kinds of stuff going on so this is all dependent on the size of your emitter how many particles you have and just look at all this cool stuff really awesome so you can go ahead and render that make some really cool abstract mo graphi stuff and no X particles you know this is something that you typically would have only been able to do in X particles before but we got this really cool curl noise inside of cinema 4d r21 field forces is super deep and I feel like we're just scratching the surface on all the possibilities that lie in this new feature in 740 R 21 now if you want to learn more about some of the other features that have been added to our 21 be sure to check out the other tutorials that I've done on this channel covering things like mix mode control rig and caps and bevels now if you want to keep up to date with all the latest information in the industry of cinema 4d or just mograph in general be sure to subscribe to this channel and if you want to know more about the courses we offer to help you take your career to the next level check out the school of motion courses page thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 63,208

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, Animation, Cinema 4D, Animation Design, Motion Design Tutorial, Animation Tutorial, 3D, 3D design, 3D animation, 3D tutorial, Motion Graphics Tutorial, How to Motion Design, How to Motion Graphics, How to Animation, How to 3D Animation, Cinema 4D Field Forces, 3D Animation Field Forces, 3D Animation particles, Cinema 4D Tutorial, How to Cinema 4D, C4D Tutorial, How to C4D, 3D Animation Tutorial, Cinema 4D Animation

Id: m8WCss6m2aI

Length: 32min 55sec (1975 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019