Key New Features in Cinema 4D R20 | Greyscalegorilla

in this video you're gonna learn about a new instructor here at greyscale gorilla and also learn his three favorite features of cinema 4d r20 don't miss this one hey everybody it's Nick here from grayscale guerrilla bringing you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now today we're excited to bring to you a new teacher here at grayscale guerrilla and his name is Mathew better known as mash from 3d fluff now he's been doing cinema 4d training since 2003 and he's also been using cinema 4d for over 20 years in fact when I was just starting to learn cinema 4d his DVDs really opened up what was possible with this new program so it's really exciting for us to have him here at grayscale gorilla and he's gonna be showing us his three favorite new features in cinema 4d r20 in fact he's even helping us with a brand new training package over at grayscale gorilla called the grayscale gorilla guide to r20 it's over 11 hours of concentrated training all about the new features in cinema 4d r20 and it also features all of us here at grayscale gorilla and also mash who you're about to meet in this video we're super excited to have this training a lot of you have asked for some really robust training on all the new features in our 20 including fields volumes nodes CAD import all that stuff's covered I'm gonna put links here in the video and also down in the description if you want to learn more about this robust training definitely check it out but first I wanted to introduce you to one of the teachers of this training mash he's gonna be showing you is three favorite new features in cinema 4d are 20 take it away mash hi I'm Matthew Anil you may know me as mash from 3d fluff or if you want any of the forums I usually go by machination I've been using cinema for quite a few years now I actually worked for max on many moons ago but I've now been freelancing for myself for about the past 15 years I thought I'd use this introduction video to show you some of my favorite bits of r20 ok so one of the first things I want to talk about is cinema's node system but maybe perhaps not quite in the way you're expecting so version 20 introduced as a new cinema node material you making you know material you open it up and here we go we've got lots of nice lovely nodes brilliant but it's not really so much the node material itself which excites me it's actually more what it represents it's more what this can lead on to you see yes sure we've got a node system and it will help you with your complex materials piping things in here piping things out there but there's a million videos out there which will be showing you how to use cinemas node system so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make yet another one here what I want what I want to briefly talk about is just what this means so first of all this means cinema has a a brand-new fundamental basis on which all materials can now be based no longer are we sort of stuck with our colour Channel and our reflectance and our fog and again keep mind a lot of this stuff is just a bit rubbish and a bit out of date nobody really uses the fog channel in a material nobody uses all that often the Environment Channel and the goal is as we've all probably discover at this point complete junk but it's more what this represents so take a look at the uber material the key thing to realize with this uber material so it'll look fairly familiar we'll have sort of our our colour Channel which is now renamed to diffuse just to be a bit more industry standard and we've got all our reflection and transparency and such cool nice lovely but it's not what it represents and what it represents is that there is now a much larger team of people capable of making really nice core materials so think about think of it this way for anyone who ever delves into them remember these old smells like home and shaders these these weird SLA things here so we're talking banzi banjee team Danelle these were made by some guy at this point it must be it must be a good 20 years ago this was I think even pre-2000 so there's a programmer and he made a bunch of materials well how many other materials have you seen made since then what what material collection has anyone gone off and created themselves I mean sure but different render engines will have a material system but that's more by necessity what I'm saying is why have you never seen a great brushed metal material plug-in available for cinema the problem is you've got a very small number of people who are capable of doing the programming to make these sorts of things what node represent is the ability for less technically inclined people to now make new materials because you need to understand this uber material here this is a node-based material if we jump into the node editor and we ungroup this we we convert it from an asset which is basically just something you'll find here into a group so we turn it into regular nodes this arrow here this lets us jump inside and see what's going on so this this uber material is a node based material all the controls all the gadgets all gizmos that basically been wired together and a cool thing for me which I think it's really going to change things is that there are hundreds and thousands of people who are technically capable of making good materials with this many many many many more then you would need to program a whole new set of materials from scratch so if you look over here we've got this no materials and you'll see we've got entries such as car paint ceramic gold granite you can always think of these as new versions of these old SLA shaders these things pretty much never ever got updated because it requires one of the specialist material programmers in order to be able to do that but they're rough busy doing other things these these are just nodes so if someone competent comes along and says hey this this marble material which again is just a node-based material all these settings you see here are really just feeding back into these nodes someone who's capable could come along and say hey I bet I can improve this I bet I could sort of iterate on this and make a more powerful or an easier to use or a better-looking marble shader and there we go that in the nutshell is what sort of really excites me the fact that you're probably within the next year or so the way we're now 2018 we're probably going to see I imagine a whole series of different individuals different companies coming out with material collections so you know you've got this this greyscale gorilla topcoat to plug in for example well that's really just based on top of a standard material and there's only there's only so far you can really go with this it's not the best basis for making something new well with a new node based system I would be surprised if you started seeing sort of new even more powerful even easier to use material systems so there's one of my sort of my big things the the potential future of the of the node system now the next thing which sort of gets me excited is definitely the volume modeling system and again I will say yes there is the fundamental factor of what the volume modeling system does but there is also the potential future here so let's do sub split this into two mini bits first it excites me because it means all these horrible annoying subdivision surface modeling techniques we've had to learn over the years then well I'm not going to say they're no longer needed depending on the kind of modeling you're doing you may still very well need those but it means that they will be needed far far less so let's take a typical example let's say you're modeling up some nice organic shaped TV remote the amount of time that you would previously have to spend with all these modeling tools all these cut tools and line tools and everything else carefully making sure that you've got these edge flows going through your objects and the nice and symmetrical and everything else and that the loops go round and then don't make in Gon's and then you'll you'll throw it inside the subdivision surface and think oh no that's that's okay but it's it's making this weird pinching shape down here because of because of the way that the loops flow around the surface all that hassle or at least a lot of that hassle is now just out the window if I've got to make some sort of organic TV remotes some sort of a handheld economic shape in the future I'm very very likely just going to completely ignore the subdivision surface options what I'm gonna do instead is grab my nice remote-controlled shape so let's see if I throw a ton of polygons on here volumes do benefit from quite high polygon surfaces because you whatever shape you make that's what's going to come through in a volume so any faceting you see that would actually come through in a fan of shape but I say I've got this nice ergonomic handheld shape here and I think right okay I need some indentations for buttons or I need a raised area for a directional pad or it just makes life easier because I can take this shape here again I'll give it some more polygons maybe I'll slightly round off the corners just to make it a bit smoother and then I'll shrink it down so here's my sort of protruding dial area for my my new Apple remote and within there again I'm just kind of making this up as we go along let's grab a cylinder shrink it down pop it over there but let's say this is one of our buttons here's some more and then we'll just copy and paste spin these things around so let's say this is kind of my little d-pad and maybe just for a little bit fun we'll also take one last cylinder spin it round throat over here we'll just have some sort of a indentation for a finger to sit within or something like that well with the volume system we can take our volume builder this is our main body so we'll just throw all of this stuff inside and say hey look that last cylinder we added cylinder number four this one should be getting subtracted and maybe this ring here as well as let's also subtract this tube did you do their subtract from the surface so yep the quality is pretty low but that's just our defaults let's pop this down to maybe two centimeters it's still a bit rough but we can always come back in there tweak this and fix it that's no worry and of course maybe my tubes got a little bit too far down there so I'll just have this a kind of indentation there and again these buttons here they're supposed to be indentations for the buttons to sit within so let's also subtract subtract subtract subtract let's remove all of those bits raise them up a bit so it's just a small indentation perhaps okay so here's my nice ergonomic objects I can of course now mesh it just chuck this builder inside the measure and smoothing it off a little bit we can always just add a bit more resolution to the Builder to begin with so let's knock this down to maybe one centimeter and to smooth it all off well there you go you can see what happens if you don't add enough polygons eh you got that bit of faceting but don't worry we can just chuck that in afterwards that's no biggie and without builder we can just smoothen it and I do quite like the laplacian float because this tends to leave the the shapes a bit smoother there or you can always leave on gaussian and just turn down how much it tries to actually smooth and things off so here in what two minutes was this we've got this nice lovely smooth pretty pretty high-quality organic remote control how long would this have taken me to do with subdivision surfaces not only is it quickly to make but because it's an order of magnitude faster I would compared to me doing this with subdivision surfaces I would peg this at a good fifty to a hundred times faster it means I'm also free to play with it if I decide oh yeah yeah you know all this stuff over here it's probably too high up I should have moved it shuffled it further down this would be a nightmare with a subdivision surface but that's fine it's a lot quicker here I just turn these off for a second it just makes things easier to select but I can just go one two three four five pop those a bit further down there turn it back on give it a moment whilst it calculates and there we go I've now got all those adjustments further down surface so just from a modeling point of view this is it's great I'm gonna absolutely love this modeling feature but much like the note it does also represent something else now I'm not predictive future here I'm not gonna give you any actual insight I'm just I'm just gonna make an educated guess Maxon have put the volumes in their own dedicated menu they're not part of the mesh tools they're they've got their very own met their very own volume menu now keep mind all of this stuff is based on the the open source open VDB libraries so I'm just gonna take a wild guess here I bet they've popped this in its own menu because at some point these volume tools won't just be for modeling I bet at some point we will probably get all the fire and the smoke and the general sort of volumetric modeling volumetric rendering side of things now it's not there yet I've seen nothing of it this is just purely a guess but it would explain why it's got its very own volume menu because if you're gonna make fire and smoke from volumes you wouldn't want to put it in the mesh menu because that would imply it's only for modelling by putting in its own volume modelling volume menu it does sort of open it up for other uses in the future now maybe this is a year we'll to down the line maybe this is five or ten years down the line I really don't know even if it is gonna happen but it does bode well let's just put it that way now moving on my next favorite part is definitely the CAD importers now again I'm gonna try and put a bit of a different spin on on my favorite things here I'm just gonna pick a feature and then show you all yes you can do this with it I'm so gonna maybe show you an alternative reason to like it so cinemas got pretty good file format support it's got all the sort of the the coladas and the FBX is and more recently the Olympic importers but we can now bring in all virtually all the biggest CAD formats so yes there's the obvious feature here we can now of course just load in these files I don't know about you but typically when I'm freelancing and working with other clients the number of times I've asked for their files and they've sent over some step file or some Aegis file or some other format which is common in the CAD world but maybe not so much in the sort of cinema4d mayor max Houdini world the number of times I've had to sort of phone them back and say hey that's lovely you've sent me this file but I can't do anything with it I don't have AutoCAD I don't use it I don't run it I certainly don't pay for it could you maybe export this as something else and if you're lucky they will but even then but grudgingly you're gonna end up with a certain number of polygons you're gonna end up with not enough or you can end up with too many and you're just gonna end up annoying them a bit so the fact that you can now just load all these files straight into the software is absolutely great but let me give you my different twist we've got websites we all use for grabbing models if you need a good high quality model you're probably nipping over to say turbosquid comm and you're grabbing whatever file it is you happen to need from here if you're a bit cheaper you can nip off to archive 3d nets and you can grab various models off of here but the issue with this is that these things yeah there are limited quality there they only have so much so many polygons and the textures frankly very often just don't work but this CAD importer opens up a whole new series of different resources for us for example you've got trace parts and you've got grab CAD you can get all sorts of pieces from here now even if you're not the kind of person who wants a mechanical electronic coupling or a a a water fluid or gas piping electrical hydraulic thing if you're the kind of person doing perhaps motion graphics you suddenly have this whole series of really cool mechanical pieces maybe you're trying to do some special effects for some sort of Transformers type video where you just want all these mechanical parts swirling in its tornado and then they come together to form some sort of shape but well you now have you now suddenly have access to all these pieces all of these parts I have no idea what a 0.5 ode Tigerclaw rugged reliable dual wipe socket strips CLP is not the faintest idea but I do know that grabbing some of these items I think ah there's a nice bit of sort of tech gizmo I mean I think this is a I think this is like a fan head on a motherboard maybe that's what it looks like to me but we can now just quickly download these things throw them into cinema 4d and play around with mograph stick them on objects you could make an entire city made of electronic components maybe sort of sort of cool things like that and so that's trace parts and then you've got grab CAD where it's a bit more about sort of LA scale objects so if I search in here for I don't know some sort of clamp maybe what do we have clamp wise we've got these sort of a toggle press clamps again I have no idea what these do I'm gonna pretend I do but we've got very quite specific bits of equipment or let's say you're trying to do some sort of engineering motor thing if I search for an engine you can get full engine units with all the internal workings and Pistons and everything else this would you could do some great animations for these you could do some great still images with these so yeah it's it's about the world it opens up that's that that's what I'm getting at with the cat stuff even if nobody ever provides with the CAD files it now opens up a whole world of CAD files for you to sort of rummage around and pilfer and use for your own use for your own needs so finally I thought I just end with one of the longest-running little niggles I've ever had with a software if you have an object actually a table let's go back to our amazing remote we'll just make you so this showing if you have a material and into that material you load let's see some random image is there let's just nip into my pictures and then into my textures and what should we load in pictures of doors why not let's load this in let's go for some stripes if you load a texture and you throw it on an object and you choose some sort of prepare projections such as flat for example it used to be that when you choose this material texture icon in the corner you would also have to turn on the axis mode so you would turn this one on turn on the axis mode make your adjustments and then when you're done you had to do the same thing in reverse order turn off the access mode then go back to your modeling tool it was an absolute pain in the derriere just because you had to remember to do icons everytime otherwise you'd either end up ruining the axis of your model or you'd end up mangling the texture well lo and behold finally maximum listened when you turn on the texture mode in our 20 you no longer have to turn this on you can simply take your texture move it around spin it move it rotate it place it where you like and that's it no messing around with the access tool any longer we can just place our texture and there we go we're done so yeah that's gonna save me cumulatively when you head this up how many times have had to click this button this is probably gonna save me quite a few hours per year just clicking this button anyway there we go so again my name is Matthew and ill but most people know me as mesh and I'll see you around in a grayscale gorilla training video hey thanks again mash for showing us those tips and also thank you for watching now if you want to learn even more about the possibilities of cinema for TR 20 and how you can add some of these new tools to your work definitely check out our new training over at grayscale gorilla called grayscale gorillas guide to our 20 we're gonna have all the links down in the description and here on the video as well it's a very robust training package to get you acquainted with all the new features in cinema 4d r20 can't wait for you to check it out and again thank you again for watching this video so until next time thanks again for watching and we'll see you in a video really soon bye everybody quick question in the day what's your favorite new feature of cinema 4d er 20 put it in the comments below

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 41,636

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, r20, modeling, R20 new features, R20 OpenVDB, R20 Nodes, Cinema 4D Fields, Cinema 4D CAD

Id: 44C7ptypxH4

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 12 2018