Make A Dynamic Metaball Title Sequence In Cinema 4D

in today's video you're going to learn how to make a dynamic title card using meta balls in cinema 4d let's go hey everybody its Nick here again from grayscale guerrilla comm bringing you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now we have a really fun tutorial today all about making a dynamic title card sequence but before we get started if you're new to cinema 4d don't forget to check out our intro to cinema 4d series over on our website I'm going to link it up down below and right here on this YouTube video as well alright with that let's head on into today's video so by the end of today's tutorial you're going to be able to make this dynamic title card in cinema 4d using dynamics metaball and other parts of cinema 4d you may not have played with yet so stay tuned for this one we jump into a lot of different techniques on this one I know you're going to enjoy it so let's go in and let's get started right now so here here's the tweet I got and man I'm going to screw this name up as always but Mond ed deathbeds man I'm going to sorry buddy but he some of this twitter message he says hey tutorial idea I sent me a link to this video here we're going to watch just can't figure out how this metal ball is disappearing and releasing its spheres so let's take a look at this thing and see what he's talking about and then we'll head on into cinema and see if we could recreate this so you can tell this thing's right up my alley because there's fears and meta balls and mograph stuff and it's short and it's got a lot going for it but it does this really cool thing where the meta ball is kind of like react to each other first of all but then they all kind of shrink down and fall so first I thought you know this is probably two different systems I tried to like kind of freeze-frame it stop it and look at how this is built and my guess was that there was kind of a metal ball system and then it transitioned into more of just fears falling on the ground separately which it kind of might but looking at it closer it looks like it actually does kind of transition from metal balls into normal spheres so I had I went into cinema and I started playing around and I think it's figured out a cool way for this to happen so let's head on in and rebuild this whole thing in cinema 4d and the first thing we need to do is grab a sphere and this will be what we use for the metal balls and we need to drop the sphere into a mograph cloner object and we just add it in there and then I'm going to use a grid array and kind of shrink these spheres down grab the sphere grab the shrink there we go so what you've probably seen other tutorials of mine or somewhere else using metal balls what metal balls does is it takes a bunch of spheres usually spheres sometimes it works with other objects but I think it prefers spheres and it kind of makes it liquidy or glob eyes of it you know it gives it this this look we're going for this kind of cloudy blobby gel kind of thing and what all we need to do is just drop this cloner of spheres into a metal ball right so we can go here there's a metal ball I'm going to hold down alt and it'll make it instant child you can see what it did was make this kind of big blob now the metal ball is looking at all these spheres and it's creating kind of a new mesh based on on it based on that and we have some settings here on the metal ball which allows us to like make it a little more globby or a little tighter we could also use exponential fall off which which gives us kind of a heavier effect it's a tighter effect and we could see also it's getting a little choppy and this is because of the editor and render subdivisions so if you've seen this before it'll be redundant but let me make sure we understand that editors subdivisions is only for the editor and render subdivisions is for when you go to the picture viewer for your final render so let's just do a quick render of this I'm gonna hit shift R and it's going to render out and let me make the settings a little bit smaller first of all let's make this sixteen by nine and I'm just going to make this like six hundred and see if that's a better fit for our window here we could even go a little bit smaller 500 okay so there we go so now you can see there's a difference between the way that the viewport renders here's the viewport render see how choppy and and like sharp-edged it is and then the the picture viewer render is a much more detailed and much rounder because there are two different settings a lot of things have this like particle emitters they have kind of the working settings which is here and then they have the final render settings which are here and this is so you can actually look at this playback in real time in the editor but then when you go to do your final render you could kind of crank up the settings without having to go back and forth all the time so first of all we need to turn this down we don't have to go all the way to Phi but we do have to give a better impression of how these these metal balls are going to kind of interact but right now all we have is like a static cube of spheres here and what we really need if we look at our original we'll be jumping back and forth to our original and back you know while we're doing this this is how I approach this you know I get a question like this on Twitter and I just kind of pull up the video that they're talking about and think about ways to do it and then I sit here and just analyze the video and see if we can't figure out how this is done backwards kind of backwards engineer it and this is how I try to learn a lot of new things you know like always you know I'm learning with you guys I don't know everything about cinema 4d at all but I could look at a project that's more simple like this and maybe take a guess at it so I'm looking at this and I'm like okay well there's metal balls here and then there's a separate kind of a separate system of metal balls it comes down with a different texture that kind of interacts and it looks like it's actually dynamically pushing this white stuff around with the yellow stripes you can see they kind of interact pretty well and then they shrink down into the spheres and then this other sphere rolls around so if we look at what we have now we turn on our metal ball that's not at all what we're looking for what we need is like a kind of blobby cloud moving around so let's get that going first of all let's turn off our metaball and on our cloner we're going to add an effector and a random effector and we're going to go to the effector and instead of the random mode we want to use noise now the reason we're using noise is because when we hit play on noise it's going to move around random is just kind of a static mode noise gives you the ability to adjust your animation speed excuse me and your scale and do some other stuff so you can notice one thing that they're all moving kind of in the same direction so you could click indexed and now we're getting more of a random look to it and after that we need to randomize more stuff so let's go to the parameter and rotation doesn't work because there are Spears dummy but we can go to uniform scale and we could just kind of make the scale wiggle as well so now they're moving around and I also want them to move more in the x-direction like this because if we look at the original video you can see we kind of have a wider piece here and they're all kind of moving around now that's way too fast and that might be even too too far so let's just turn this up a little bit and then let's go back to our effector tab and turn down the animation speed like pretty low ah sadly it seems too slow 40 seems maybe about right and we also need this wider it's a kind of a wide it's kind of a wide system here so let's just look at this first blob here pause it it's kind of wider than it is tall and we have these extra spheres hanging out so let's build all this white stuff first and then we'll introduce the yellow and white stripes and then we'll worry about the logo later so we have kind of multi steps here so from here let's grab our cloner and make it a little bit wider and maybe add another set of spheres and then let's turn on our metal ball and see what we get so you can see now our metal ball is using those animated spheres and kind of you know pushing around one thing I don't want them to do is collide I want all these spheres to kind of have dynamics because and the reason I think that is because the way that these systems interact the way that these yellow spheres and the end and the white one kind of move around together makes me think that they need a little bit of dynamic so let's add some dynamics to our sphere I should say I never say this enough during tutorials but I should say that I'm using the studio version of cinema 4d so your dynamics may be different or some of the GI stuff we're getting into later might be a little bit different based on what version you have but if you have studio everything should look the same I should also say that we're using our 15 which I think this is the first ar-15 tutorial on the site so we're going to use couple new things with global illumination you will be able to pull this off in 14 but some of the settings if they're not there it's probably because a version or that you don't have studio but just a heads up okay so with our metaball we're going to use sphere and we're going to simulation rigidbody and instantly we have all of our spheres explode and that's not what we want we want them to stay in place and for that we use follow position so let's just give that ten and that means that all these spheres kind of rotate or move around and they respect each other's physical space but they stay where I want them to and gravity is really not going to take hold we don't want that to happen until later so now let's see what we got we have metal balls here and that's not looking at all like what we want so we need to shrink our spheres I think a lot more let's try like something like 30 not definitely not 3,000 and hopefully we didn't just crash cinema here let's see what happens okay we're back heads up don't put 3,000 radius on your spheres when you're using metal balls because your cinema will go crazy but we're back and where were we so we're tricking the spheres a little bit and I think we're going to add quite a few more of these to kind of round out our block as you can see they're kind of individual spheres right now we turn off our metaball it's kind of because they're not really touching I want kind of a cluster of spheres all kind of bumping into each other so maybe we do have slightly larger ones and maybe we add quite a few more to this system and you can see we also lost our dynamics tag here during me fixing all this so let me just add this back rigid follow position 10 okay so now we have we turn on our metal balls now we have more of a cloud kind of thing sitting here but I think our whole value for our meta ball is a little too globby so if we tighten that up we're getting a little bit more kind of close to where we want and even we can also turn our editor or subdivision lower and get an even better idea of what our render will look like because remember these are kind of two different systems so let me turn this back up just for animating purposes and I think we kind of have a rough kind of cloud maybe a little bit too many spheres when we reduce this down and then I'm going to shrink up all their axis so they're all kind of touching kind of getting closer to each other you can see there's still kind of pretty far away and this looks better so let's turn that on let's go to our random and go to our parameter and maybe you see if we can make them a little bit more random as well to get them a little bit more swirly and a little bit more cloudy so this looks similar to what we got and this is kind of the base for our white kind of metal ball so let's call this random white okay so what we basically need is a second system of meta balls that kind of come into the middle and blow up and and give this kind of dynamic thing where this dissenter system this yellow system kind of blows up it from the middle and kind of pushes this white stuff around and and let's let's build that so the easiest way I'm thinking we could do this is just to take this whole system random white the whole deal copy and paste it and that's going to give us a second metal ball system identical to the first one and if we go into the cloner we just want to make sure that the effectors has the new random on it and so now we have two separate systems we have this white system and now we have this yellow system so let's call this random yellow so we could do different things to this and we can also call this metal ball yellow and metaball white just so we can kind of keep things separate and understand what's what the differences are so the problem is is the dynamics between the systems aren't working we have two identical systems here but as soon as I turn off the metal ball you're going to see that we do have two separate dynamic systems kind of moving so we can turn off this cloner and you can see we have one that we can turn on this one we can have a different one so with both of them running let me turn off both metal balls here turn on both cloners you can see what's happening is the metal ball is overriding the dynamics now the spheres themselves are having dynamics within their own system but they're not looking at this other one the somehow and I'm not sure the exact fix except for something I'll show you in a minute but these don't interact once they're in a metal ball the metal ball kind of takes over and their own dynamics work but then the dynamics between the two don't so the way around this from what I found is to make the actual metaball a dynamic system as well so I go to tag simulation tags Collider body and make the metal ball yellow system a kind of moving mesh collision so if we go into here we go to shape moving mesh and we make sure that all this is on so let's just make sure it's all working and there we are alright so now we have our meta ball itself should be interacting with the other system so let's start to color these differently so we can make sure that it's working the way we want so let's just create a new material we'll keep this really simple at first we'll make one white new material we'll make the second one and I'm going to apply it to the metal ball itself let's make the second one kind of yellow for now and you can see now what we have are two different systems now we're also getting a little bit of play back differences the actual render will not show what's happening until we pause it and this could be a playback issue it could be a metabolic metabolic einde of an old system it's been in cinema for a long time so there could be some playback issues with it I just noticed these things where it doesn't really show until you boss just keep that in mind the other thing that it will show is if you do a real render it will actually render out the system properly in the picture viewer you can see it does have to calculate all the dynamics and prepare everything and kind of do all the dynamics all the way up to frame 38 which is why it takes a little bit of time but once it gets going then it can do the rest of the frames so we're gonna let that sit and make sure that's doing okay but we should be okay so we basically have the basics of our system we have our yellow spheres kind of coming down and we also know that these yellow this yellow system is larger so we could grab this and kind of crank it up and now they're going to interact and kind of push each other out of the way quite a lot we also know that this system isn't as blobby and it doesn't have as many spheres in it the reason why is because these kind of look like spheres already you can see when they come down you know if we kind of count up the spheres in the system you can kind of see them there's one here they're bigger than the small white ones there's one here here here here here here here there's like only six of them total or so maybe eight so we can go to our cloner object let's turn off our metal ball for now and just turn off the whole other system and realize that we just have too many spheres here so let's go to our cloner go to our object and set this to like two three two or something really small so now we have kind of a less spheres happening maybe maybe there's three across but we know that they're way larger in scale so there we go so now we have some much larger metal balls and that's turn on the system and talk about getting that in a rounder situation because now it's just a blob it doesn't look have that spherical round blob it doesn't have the really clear difference between all the spheres that we see in the so the way we could kind of play with that is mess with the whole value maybe it doesn't have exponential fall off maybe it does so you know this looks closer to what that video is like this you could kind of see the spheres wrapped in this kind of blanket almost you know either that's how I see it so this is more of our yellow system and we also have our own random yellow that allows us to animate this differently and if we look at the animation of the original you can see the white ones kind of float around and then these big ones have a big kind of bigger slower movements it looks like to me so you know we started by making the spheres larger and we can also kind of slow the system down but then add more movement to the whole thing and really try to make this a different looking system than our white one so there's we're playing around with the I'm going to speed this up as well there we go I'm going to also play with the whole value and kind of move it down and make sure that you hit pause every once in a while to make sure that your systems looking the way you want it to so you can see every time we hit pause it does look different than when it's playing back so let's see we could turn down the scale you know like point nine that way they're not scaling as much now the spheres are just scaling a little bit and I think we may have either two largest spheres or too many because when we hit pause you can see how large it is how far they kind of stick out there and we don't want that so the random we can kind of tone down we want them to be a little bit closer to each other and we want them to kind of be closer to each other so let's pull them in pull them down and let make sure that when we play there we go that now we have more of a round sphere system okay so let's turn the other ones back on let's go back to the beginning and see what we got now when we hit pause you can see that the yellow system is kind of pushing the white out of the way and this is exactly what the behavior we're getting in this video so we have our yellow boom pushing the white out of the way and then we drop in the sphere all right so it's really rough right now and we have a lot of tweaking to do and kind of scaling so let's get our scale right and let's just do a an animation for our yellow system to kind of animate on because you can see what's happening is we have our white and then like piece of yellow like clay falls in to the center and then it kind of explodes out into this yellow white sphere thing and we have to make that happen we have to animate that coming on so one way we could do this is animate the spheres growing and animate the actual system growing maybe the cloner object so let's go ahead and do that somewhere around like frame 30 let's say let's say it starts goes for a second and then the yellow stuff explodes so let's grab our sphere first of all and animate backwards because we already have our sphere size that we want radius 100 that's fine we could set a keyframe for that I'm going to hold down command and I'm going to click this red button right here that's going to set a keyframe right on our timeline and that means we can go backwards now to frame 30 let's say and just scale this all the way down to zero so no sphere scale means no cloner means no metaball which means it just basically doesn't exist and you can see what happens as it grows boom right over time now what we're not seeing is it push everything away but it is actually doing that the other thing to keep in mind is that we want the we want the center objects only turn off this system for now real quick there we go so let's remove that secondary dynamics tag and make sure that it's working on its own and maybe we'll add that that physical push later right now what's happening is the mesh itself is not pushing the other mesh around it's only the spheres that are pushing other spheres around so this is really the way that the meta balls are are interacting right now and so we'll see how that looks we may have to add that secondary dynamics tag let's delete it for now because I think we're getting an okay look with just these two you can see the center ones are pushing in and making these white ones kind of swirl around here so now we have our kind of general scale up the other thing I want to do is scale up our cloner object and by that I mean I want this size of our cloner object to kind of scale with these things so they start in the center and then push all the yellows all the white stuff out and the way we do that is we do it again we did let's do this backwards we already have the scale proper for our yellow metaball so we could set a keyframe at 40 back up to 30 and then just scale all this down to like something like 50 something small not all the way to zero but pretty small so now it's going to kind of the spheres will be born in the center of this yellow stuff and then push it out that's the way we want it to look we want it to look like it's coming from the inside just like that see how it's pushing out there and we can see how this looks if we go to our render settings and go to our output and just say all frames let's just do a quick render and you can see it's rendering a higher-quality metaball mesh because of those settings that we set earlier remember we set editors subdivision and render subdivision it's actually rendering with the render subdivision now and you can see right around now right around frame 30 we're going to start to see these yellow spheres pop up and push out blah cool so there they go and now we could see what that looks like and make sure that all of this looks right before we start texturing everything so have it catch up mmm cool so it's a little fast it's a little aggressive I like it a little bit slower so let's go to our view and let's grab our timeline and move it up now if your timelines not down here you can just go to window timeline and drag it into the interface down here you can see we have cloner and sphere and we have all these keyframes set for a clone red sphere and just going to grab our second set of keyframes which are on frame 40 and just pull them out a little bit I'm just going to make it last it's a good long Girt rands ition so now it goes a little bit slower so now it's over the course of 20 frames instead of 10 and I think that'll be okay okay so now what do we do about this piece of kind of clay that starts off this animation this does yellow blob that falls in and then and then it looks like it punches everything out of the way and it kind of explodes what we do there well let's just make a separate system we don't have things don't have two things don't actually have to look the way that they look in the animation for instance your brain may say well this little yellow thing comes down and then it's the actual thing that explodes into this yellow thing and that's fine but why can't we just fake it and have two separate objects one that falls into the middle and then we animate that other thing up so let's just do it that way that way we'll have more control over it and we're not trying to texture and animate two different textures and do anything we could just grab a sphere let me move this back down so we can see what's going on we can just take this sphere let's move it up and kind of transform this into that piece of clay so let's take a look at it almost got it play pause play pause there it is select this little chunk of play-doh or something so let's grab our sphere let's go to our deformers and add a displacer to form I'm going to hold shift and it's going to automatically add it to our sphere and I'm going to grab our displacer and go to shading and go to shader noise and we can also let's set a camera out you know where we want this but then we'll turn our camera off and zoom in so we can kind of set up the sphere let's go to our noise and let's go to our object and just really crank it up we kind of want to make this a big blobby piece of play-doh whatever we can see we first of all don't have enough geometry so we could set it to something that has more geometry or more even geometry and then we can also turn up our segments so you can see our noise is just too small it's like making these shards if we go to our displace or go to shading got a noise and just change the scale from 100 to something like 1000 now we have a piece of clay look at that almost perfect so like this little moldy not moldy molded you know little chunk of play-doh whatever it almost looks like denticles look at that it's got a little pinch in the middle this is awesome that works great now if your settings didn't work excuse me your settings weren't as perfect a gestures global-scale around until you get something that looks like that the larger the scale the more blobby this this will be and that's probably a good start so now it's a little too large let's grab our sphere and just scale it down there's something like this size we could also rotate it or rotate the displacer or actually just rotate the texture and that will rotate it around as well but let's go back to our regular camera and animate this thing coming in so somewhere around here it needs to look like it falls in so that'll be the bottom piece of that animation so yellow falling sphere let's name it look at me naming layers I'm such a I never do that there's just so many this is going to end up we're gonna end up with so many similar things around here that we've got to make sure we're animating the right stuff so let's grab our move tool and animate this in so right here is where we want it to fall in right when that starts to explode it around you know 3035 we want this to fall in hmm I'm gonna push it back a little so it looks so it looks like it's inside and I'm gonna set a keyframe I'm gonna set a position keyframe for falling sphere I'm gonna go to coordinates and on the y-axis I'm going to hold down command and set a keyframe we're going to go backwards and start at let's say frame 18 or so we could always change this and just move it up and now we set another keyframe for y and we hit play then we see what that looks like so it looks like it's a little delayed it looks like we could probably move these forward I'm just grabbing it right on a timeline and now we have the look of this falling so let's duplicate this yellow layer and add it to our falling sphere and that's because we're going to end up having two different textures we're gonna have the texture for the striped yellowed and then the regular yellow so we can actually start naming these too so falling and stripes right and white boom okay so now we have our rough animation we have our piece of clay falling in we can maybe retime that so it looks a little bit more like gravity we could do that by going to our timeline and going to our f curves and grabbing our falling sphere and then just giving it more of a gravity curve right now it has a default C we could push this out of the way we can't okay you'll have more room on your screen I just have my teeny tutorial screen on so we're a little tight on room but I think we could do it right now we have our default kind of ease in and out curve and gravity looks you know like kind of like if you threw a baseball what it would look like in midair that's kind of a gravity curve it's falling and it's falling slow at first and then it speeds up over time and so now we can look at this and it looks it looks a little aggressive there we go so now it's like it's got more of a natural falling look to it let's zoom in and see what that looks like it's kind of slow at first and then it has a little bit more velocity as it comes down and you know we really can't see what this looks like with our with with with our playback because it's not playing back properly so we could do a test render the other thing we have to do by the way is turn off our sphere once it falls once it's inside right around there we could just turn it off the way we do that is we go to our F sphere we go to basic and we can just say visible and renderer we could just animate this right away it's not the best thing to do because then then you can't actually toggle this on and off using your your check boxes so you can also use like a compositing tag to turn it off but I tend to use this quite a lot you know just kind of turn off that that layer visibly and then it just is totally off to the other simulation and everything so let's do that visible and renderer we're going to say on at frame the frame after it falls at frame forty will say visible and render on animate that go to the next frame and then will say off whoops visible and render off boom okay so now it's just not there and so now we can play this back hit shift our I'm going to say yes and it's going to start rendering this and it's going to give us a rough idea of how this looks so sooner than later we're going to start to see this yellow thing fall from the sky I think right around frame 20 or so it should be coming any second I'll just have a little sip of coffee while we're waiting mmm iced coffee there's a little blob so you can see it's a little late you can see that you can see our stuff start to kind of explode out there before it falls and that's why we're doing this full test here so we can we can make sure we got it right it also seems a little slow it seems a little slow-mo this fall so let's speed that up this way and this way so it looks like it's hitting at the right time yeah so let's do this way and this way and then instead of rendering everything there waiting for it let's just start at frame 20 so let's go to render settings output from 20 to 90 say yes render yes render go ahead so now it's going to calculate up to 20 it'll just take a few seconds to prepare all the dynamics and then now we're here here comes our yellow and we could check our timing a little bit better like this won't clear that now it looks like it explodes out and the other thing I want is for this white a metal ball system to really look like it's being pushed out more I know I know it actually is but a little bit more of a kick I think we'll make this look a lot nicer so for instance let's just expand our metaball system the size of it and kind of cheat it and push it out as this starts to expand so let's find where this yellow stuff or Falls are actually right where this yellow thing falls and hits we're pushing out in and it's almost like a nit picking stuff but all those little things make this piece what it is you know it's really short piece but it has a lot of nice little dynamics to it we have our white cloud mining its own business and then here comes this yellow thing and then it gets pushed out it's like it's affected so much look at all these spheres around here that just kind of get pushed out in it and it becomes a larger system once this yellow stuff pops in right good go boom so let's let's cheat down a little bit let's give that you know maybe a little sound hit will help that in the final render but you know any visual cue you can kind of cheat that animation those little subtle things will help the system so again if we look at our basic one you know boom it does pop open but it doesn't have that aggression that the original has so let's find that frame when this falls in let's take our white metabolic loaner and just add more kind of like out for it right so one thing we may have to do is add a few more spheres just we could spread this out without it affecting too much but right around here let's just set a keyframe for size and actually we'll just set it right here boom keyframe size and it will push forward as this explodes out and we'll just expand that white system out a lot more and this will give it even more of a is a kind of explosion see all those see all that white pushed out boom right and because they're dynamic we're going to see some dynamic floating around and we're also going to add one separate extra system to even push this further and the way we'll do that is just start from scratch cloner we'll set up a really simple system cloner sphere cloner grid array let's say 2 by 2 by 2 and we're just going to spread this out and these are going to be kind of random little spheres out on the on the edge if we shrink these down let's give them the white material so they match these guys are like these these little outside spheres that give a sense of motion as this yellow comes down you can see them animate right there cool see them that's what we want that's those guys that I think are going to help sell this so first of all let's add another random effector and play around with our scale here we can go to we don't well we do want the position to random randomize we do want the scale to randomize uniformly and we probably want them a little bit smaller so let's just shrink these down and what else so let's see what this is we need them to be dynamic so let's just drag one of these dynamics tags up on top of it I held down command so it made a copy so now they're part of a physical system you're going to see them react and move around we also have to tell this random effector to be a noise effector indexed and and let's say slow down our animation speed a little bit now I'm going to push these push this random effector kind of higher on the x-axis so it moves around and a little bit more on on P and y&z as well and you can see now they kind of just float out on the outside and act like their own little system but they're also being pushed by the dynamics maybe a little bit smaller and this is again just a separate system let's tone this down we're just changing this as we're looking at it looks a little fast to me let's slow it down and yeah so that's it that's all they do basically I want the random to be a little bit more on x and y really have them fly around and heck maybe even one on the scale so let's move this up and I want them to not react as tightly to where they want to sit so let's go to force and follow position and make them maybe a little bit less so now when they get bumped they're going to be kind of moving around a little bit more and let's do a quick render so now I'm rendering to our picture view and I could pause our outside render and now we're just seeing what this looks like so we have our spheres kind of floating around and any minute now our yellow is going to fall down good and get pushed blah sweet and it's scaling up they're being pushed in the secondary system and this is getting close so now at this point we we have our kind of rough motion but we have no texturing we have the lighting and this is where right around here is where I start to look at this picture viewer and start to go and that looks ugly and you know maybe I should finish the animation in this kind of normal mode but it's right around here where I just get kind of like ticked off at seeing ugly plastic renderings on black and I start to go like okay well let's light this thing and see and start to play around with that I like the lighting aspect of things and this looks really pretty so like let's let's start building this so the way we're going to do this is a mixture of a light kit Pro NHGRI studio pack and let me show you what what we'll use um first of all we need a backdrop so you can see it kind of looks like it's sitting on a psych here we have a backdrop down and then it's kind of sweeping forward and we have our nice shadows here so with that I'm going to use um a light kit Pro which is right here and I'm going to go into Sykes and I'm going to use Studio s and just push it down a little bit maybe scale it up and this will kind of serve as our main backdrop for the for the animation we can kind of Center this what we could always tweak this later but that'll be our main kind of backdrop so now we have a white backdrop here to to animate on and we're also going to use the new global illumination that's part of our 15 and so for that we're going to need an HDR eye so I'm going to go over to HDR eye studio pack and add the HDR studio rig and we don't need the floor because we already have our psyche we can go to our seamless floor controls and just say turn off floor and and then we're fine so now we have our HDR I and that's going to light our scene exclusively the HDR eye is going to take the light from the HDR and kind of project it onto our scene and with the new global illumination settings you can see it renders pretty quickly using just an HDR I an HDR and and the new GI so let's get that set up really quickly let's go to our render settings let's use our physical render and let's use global illumination so there'll be another tutorial where I go into more detail in fact at half res I did a little bit of a tutorial on some of the new GI stuff and what it is but in this video we'll kind of go quickly through it but I hope to have a more comprehensive GI video pretty soon so keep an eye out for that but what we have are presets we we didn't really have these presets before and one of my favorite and presets is interior preview hide a few steps and this is a very fast rendering GI setting usually for final render I'll go to interior high high diffuse depth instead of preview and this gives you a little bit more accurate solver but for testing it out this looks really nice I'm just going to leave it all on defaults for now you can see the light mapping is turned on we have a ton of bounces which means all this light bounces around the scene and we can go back to our view and just do a quick render and you can see now it's going to use that GI light to light our scene so we have a long way to go to kind of set this up for for the final render but let's start to texture and get everything together so this starts to look more like this and so first thing we need to do is go to our original white kind of floating texture here make it full white and add some reflection I'm gonna add it for now and I'm going to turn it way down it doesn't it's not crazy reflective I'm going to turn down our overall reflection and our Fornell just so we have a little bit of gloss and I'm gonna add some blurriness to our reflections and adding blurriness you know does increase render time but with physical render it actually isn't too much of a render hit and it looks really nice so already we have start to have some really nice reflections here on our white system and now our yellow system needs that excuse me that yellow and white striped kind of thing going on so let's grab the striped texture let's go to the color channel go to texture surfaces checkerboard let's go in and instead of having checkerboard across and down we don't want any across we only want it down and let's take that black and make it yellow instead there we go and let's make more frequent stripes and then let's adjust it so if we look at our final here it looks like all the stripes are kind of pushing up toward upper tamra laughed and kind of pointing towards the camera just a little bit excuse me so the way we do that is we grab our texture tag that's on our meta ball and instead of spherical projection well I actually spherical should probably work so we could just grab the sphere now and grab our rotation and atom and move it and kind of rotate the the texture around until it's facing the right way so now you can see it's kind of pushing up into the top corner and it's still not grabbing this right so instead of instead of on spherical projection let's try a flat projection so let's grab our texture again and go to flat and that's more like that's more like this so now it's really coming flat and I can just kind of tilt this forward and have these little points at the tops of the spheres and decide you know what angle this is sitting here and and then we could do a and see what this looks like while that's going we can go turn on a reflection do the same thing add some for now tone it way down add some blurriness um and we're all looking pretty good here so let's just overwrite that hmm and now it's going to do a real render here in the picture viewer or show you a little bit more room but that's okay we'll see how this looks ah-ha looking much better so now we have um some shadows showing up and let's look at our HDR and position it in a in a in a way that's going to get us I think slightly better shadows and really it's going to match this scene a lot more let's go to our HDR studio rig and go to our rig controls and turn on our preview on so what the preview will show is we scale this up our preview is showing the HDR that's surrounding the scene so this is giving us a preview of the HDR with a giant softbox off to the left here and two smaller ones off to the right and I think it's a little bit more front li lit so we could just grab this rotation and rotate it around a little bit and maybe make it a little bit brighter and you can see it's actually affecting the preview as well that the brightness so let's turn that up and and of course when we render this it's not going to render in the picture viewer it's just there for kind of roughing out where your shadows and everything are so now we have some nice shadows we have some really nice GI shadows here where the yellow of our spheres is kind of pushing into the color of the floor and the backdrops being all lit it's a little bit bright if we look at our art kind of what we're trying to match you can see the backdrop is a lot darker than our white spheres you can also see it's still way too reflective we turned it way down I'm going to grab both of these at the same time go to reflection and kind of tone it way down so 2 and 15 or something like that and while we're at it let's grab our psych material which is part of our you do our psyche and we can go to our color and just tone this down make it a little bit more gray and this should match let's go back to our camera let's turn off our preview and set up our scene and I'm also going to use more of a close-up camera on this we're kind of too far away we can zoom in on it but we're starting to lose some of that detail instead let's grab a focal length of something like 60 or 50 and then that way we're gonna have a little bit more room and less floor to worry about we can kind of zoom in closer to the system and not worry about it so much so let's do a quick render here this isn't really accurate anymore so let's just turn this off stop rendering yes let's do a quick render in our preview you can see it's going to be low res but we're approaching a similar look so let's tone down our backdrop a little bit more make it a little bit darker so that white really pops off the backdrop there and really shows up a lot brighter and it's looking okay looking okay so now let's finally talk about that thing that happens in the in the example where it all falls down into little baby spheres it's really cool right and again I thought about maybe having two separate systems but this actually works pretty well if you just scale down the spheres and then turn off their follow position which is making them kind of stay up in the air so let's just pick something a little bit down the road here this explodes out and then it's very quick and then right around maybe 6070 frames it all falls and shrinks and falls to the ground so it's very quick 1 2 3 like that's a fast count so it's like you know 2 seconds at the most so this pops up at you know 40 frames or maybe around 70 frames we're just going to have all this shrink down and fall to the ground like Spears let's do that let's just animate it and it'll give us a much more realistic result rather than try to like fake it with you with another set of system right it'll look a lot better and if you've seen the example the final render from this you it's a really cool effect so let's go ahead and do that we have to animate a lot of stuff here so make sure you're animating the right stuff first of all we need to shrink all these spheres down to small spheres right now if we turn off our metal ball objects where we kind of have these different sized spheres we want them all to be this kind of rough scale small smaller scale so let's animate the scale first so frame 70 let's say I'm going to do this without the metal ball on I'm just going to take our spheres and I'm going to take their current radius which we've already animated up on this one and just a hold command make a keyframe move forward you know maybe 10 frames and then set this to something small like 15 spheres 15 centimeters maybe a little bit larger let's just go to like 20 24 looks ok actually for the size and we will check this off and I'm sorry set another keyframe so now they're big here comes the big guys and then they shrink down that's it and hey our sphere is still hanging out falling sphere didn't get the proper keyframe so let's let's get a keyframe on this dude basic visible and render on and let's go to here and say visible render on right and then say keyframe and then say visible and renderer off keyframe so now it should this dude should disappear falling sphere huh ah interesting visible in under oh it's because we didn't set editor so you know what let's just delete this track and do it a different way uh you know I'm I tried something didn't work so uh you guys get to watch me mess up and then delete the track and we're going to do enabled so we're going to fall down right around here we're going to say enabled yes instead of keyframe next frame I'm gonna say enabled no keyframe okay now should work so this thing is going to fall in boom disappear our spheres come up and then they shrink down so when they shrink down we need a few things to happen we need the metal ball to turn off and we need all the dynamics to fall on to the ground so how do we do that let's go to our dynamic settings and first of all check the animation on the sphere it looks like frame 80 or so is when the dynamics fall so somewhere right before that let's turn off our follow position remember our follow position which is under our force tab on our dynamics is what is keeping these spheres floating in their position rather than falling to the ground gravity isn't taking over they're just kind of floating around we've used this before in other tutorials but in this case we need to animate it off so right around here we're going to say follow position we're going to do all these at once I'm going to hold down command I'm going to select these two other dynamics tags and you can see follow position has multiple things on it that's okay we could set a keyframe for all of them at once by saying command click and then all the way maybe give it a couple frames we're just going to set everything to zero and we're going to say click it again we're going to set that up so now let's see what this looks like animating and Falls boom and let's give our timeline a little bit more room I'm going to go to frame 200 here and I'm going to stretch out our timeline boom Oh guess what we didn't know so we didn't add a dynamics tag to our backdrop so let's rewind this whole thing let's go to our studio let's open it up and inside of Studio s you're going to see the geometry for studio S we're going to go to tags simulation tags Collider body and we want this to be shape static mesh okay so now let's play and now the sphere boom and then it's going to fall cold and they all fall on the ground sweet that's it so we did it okay so one other thing we want to do is add more friction to the system so they don't roll as far away you can see when these spheres follow the ground they kind of like stay where they are they kind of fall straight down and then they don't really go anywhere too far and to do that we can actually just go onto our collision settings and to turn up the friction like hi we can go to 200 on those and on the spheres we can go to like 100 and now when they fall they should like stick more to the ground they shouldn't kind of roll away as much you can see they kind of have a lot of bounce though you can see they're kind of heavy compared to this one this this looks a lot smaller and scale when they fall because they look more like ping-pong balls like boop boop boop and these feel like bowling balls you know they feel heavy when they fall blonk real slow and for that we can change our dynamic settings hit command D on your keyboard and that's going to pull up your project settings let's open this up and under the dynamics tag you're going to see time scale we can just speed this up let's go to like double the speed 200 and now in our dynamics fall they're going to follow the ground and bounce more subtly that's actually too fast let's try something like 130 blue better cool so that looks pretty good and our spheres are actually falling and rolling now there's one thing that's weird the spheres are actually moving through the plane hold on let's back up there we go the spheres are actually moving through the plane of texture you can see them kind of move texture when they fall right you see that and ignore these guys for now those won't be there in the final but you see the textures like blah blah blah blah properly we don't want that and the way we're going to get around that is we're going to texture the sphere differently than the meta ball so when we turn off the meta ball it will jump to the sphere texture when you use the same texture though let's just drag that on the sphere and now you're going to see when we back up and you move this off when they fall to the ground they're going to be static textures and they're just going to rotate around that's what we want but with the meta ball on we want them to do this thing boom right so ignore all this extra weird stuff we're going to turn off the meta ball and so let's go ahead and animate that so somewhere around frame right when they're shrinking we want to turn off the metal ball system so somewhere around like frames 75 let's say let's grab all of our metaball systems metal ball yellow metal ball white and we're going to do the same thing enabled we're going to say on we're going to say keyframe next frame we're going to say enabled off keyframe you see what that looks like backup system metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball snap that's it that's it so now from here all we're doing is tweaking the timing we have our spheres and ignore the looping and all the weird stuff because we're not seeing it in in the final position so here it is in in our in our render our picture viewer you can see we have our textures happening we have our our blob happening and we're getting closer to our final look right okay so we're having some GI flickering issues that'll go away when we saw when we choose um hi instead of preview but for now this rendered very quickly in fact um if we take a look at our render times see 5 seconds of frame so you can't beat that for global illumination all this light bouncing around you can see the yellow shows up on the ground this is this is pretty cool stuff the way it's it's handling this and it's rendering pretty quickly in fact let's just shrink our output a little bit more so we could see the whole thing at once and let's do another render so let's say yes new render and see what we got and let's turn it into a longer tutorial but there's a lot of separate little pieces on this and we got a lot more animation to do here we got the logo to actually to actually animate as well so we'll let that happen we'll let that go and do what it does and let's start to worry about that final logo resolve where this thing spins around now this thing is just that thing just kind of animates on we're not going to worry about that mostly concerned about you can see this thing is just a scale up you could do that in After Effects or just us a plain piece of geometry in cinema but this thing this thing rotates around it's got a logo on it it's got nice reflections and it's got a so it kind of animates and floats around so let's build that thing let's build that you let's go to a new scene so I'm just going to open a new scene I'm going to add a sphere and I want this to be a hemisphere so let's go to hemisphere and let's take the rotation and rotate this up 90 degrees and there's one piece cool we're also going to duplicate that and scale it up maybe just a little bit 101 there we go so that's the outside shell and then we have the inside shell you can see we have kind of two different sized shells here we have the yellow one and the white one so that represents both and then in the middle of it we have a plane so let's grab our disk and orient it along the z-axis that is not the Z that is the Z we just didn't orient the other ones so let's grab those and rotate them around perfect so now we're looking at it from the front and we have a disk in the z axis we can grab our other spheres and just kind of rotate them around and grab our bottom one which is this one so yellow sphere and white and disc let's grab the yellow one and rotate this in a little bit so now we have yellow and then white and then the background okay let's put this whole thing into a null and let's call this our logo not lotto logo oh okay so I just made this in a new scene just so we can do it without screwed anything up let's jump back to our other scene and paste it in and scale it up kind of bring it to scale between the rest of everything let's grab our tool here and it's roughly roughly I'd say about this size by the time everything falls so let's just have everything fall Oh blue there's our logo and let's grab our existing textures so we have our following yellow a texture we have our white outside texture and while we're at it let's add the reflection to our following texture remember this is for this yellow piece that falls down in the middle here right there so same thing I'm going to add some reflection some Fornell going to knock it down with really low settings and that will have the same effect as this and also our disc needs a new material new material and our disc will have a logo on it so in this case you could load up your own logo you can go into Photoshop and make something put your face there you know do whatever you want in this case I'm going to go to the color Channel and pick the grayscale gorilla logo which this should be big enough 15 by 15 it's just a jpg and it's square I'm going to open it up and you want to bring it into my search path and you can see it pops up right away on the disc but because of the orientation it's backwards so we could do a couple things we can grab our disc and just rotate it kind of 90 degrees or 180 degrees I should say which 40 plus 40 boom that should do it in your case you might have to go into the actual tag and kind of scale it around and turn off tiling and position your logo in fact I could probably scale it a little bit and then reposition it so if we go 86 86 and then I offset it I can kind of Center this in the scene let's move a little bit further down and just have these get the heck out of the way you can see it's getting cut off by this edge um so in fact maybe we just shrink this down a little bit more yeah let's say 75 flips 75 75 boom and then we can just offset it over we could turn off tiling we don't want the tiles and move it down moved over and now we have our centered logo which have all the texturing it's called up all the stuff on it and because of the tiling situation we can actually just drop a new texture under this logo which is identical except for the color so let's just grab it and let's go color clear make it white and drop it under our disk so we don't have that square anymore see what that does and make sure we're okay perfect so now we have our logo we have these spheres you can see even the GI is making that a little bit yellow on the outside we do have to turn up our geometry quite a bit on our spheres so let's just make this something really high something like 100 let's do another render and now we're getting somewhere okay so let's do the animation for it in the same way as the rest of it let's just kind of pick where the the the sphere is going to kind of be visible somewhere around there and OOP we can animate it on so first of all we want that logo to kind of up here maybe scale up so let's grab our logo let's grab our coordinates and say okay by this position you're going to say scale 1 and then we'll back up we're doing a lot of backwards animating we're going to back up and go zero zero zero and we're going to say until then get the heck out of the way so now it's going to scale up okay and then you can see it's not hanging out here let's back up all the way not hanging out and by the time we make it visible its scaled up and it's ready to go so now let's animate the disk and the spheres around to kind of give it this animation like that and you can see in the final that's exactly what it does it kind of spins up and goes boom and then it bounces around like that so let's get that going let's say right around here we're going to start the animation right when things start shrinking so let's say disc white yellow so by the time it's at about a hundred or maybe a little bit longer it's going to be perfectly rotated the way we want it so let's just set keyframes for all these things all at once disk white-yellow keyframed boom rotate rotate rotate let's just set it then let's back up and then set our rotation points around so now it's going to be like this and our yellow one let's grab our yellow one and make it more and let's grab our disk and make it even more so now we're having three different types of animation and we could set that keyframe and in fact we didn't really need these other two keyframes we're only rotating in the in this green axis here and not in the other two so we could just take those animations and say delete track whoops we've got to isolate them first animation delete track look it's done work either let's leave it for now I'm sure there's a way I think if I just highlight one of them I thought if I just highlighted one but I think if I have them all selected like that they're all going to delete I'm sure somebody smart out there is yelling at me and I'll look that up as soon as I'm as soon as I'm off off this tutorial but for now I think we'll just leave it as it is and we have our rotation and we also don't have the spheres animating rotating so let's make sure yeah okay so that's rotating around let's grab our two spheres now separately and rotate them around like this boom and now we have this animation it's actually going backwards so let's just go back do this separately boop boop good let's try that again and let's grab our white and yellow and let's go let's just do them separately to make sure this one's going this way boop animate white is doing the same boom maybe not as far no huh then we hit go that's it okay so let's see what this looks like boo and boom okay so it's a little late so we got to take our animations disk white yellow the whole thing let's go to our timeline let's raise it up and go to our timeline and and get those into our scene so logo dynamics why are falling spheres so it's not showing up so this shows this happens every once in a while you want to animate something up here that has keyframes you can see it has keyframes here but it's not popping up in your timeline and under view you can go to show and you could say oh where is it no it's a link link timeline to a timeline to objects and I think that means object menu or something like that so link timeline to menu and this means that when you select these that they should pop up down here now with the with the rotation because it's in here you may have to open up and just open this whole thing so you can see logo it's here but you have to under this plus button and now we have our timeline and you can see it's already selected so now if we only select one of the objects only one of the objects is selected here and this is what that view link does link timeline to object menu I think that's what that means and then when you select the objects it's actually selecting the keyframes as well which means we could take all these rotations and all this stuff that we're doing and push it back in time altogether and in fact we could take our rotations here we can push those back so now it's spinning around a little bit more naturally so let's give it a play boom and it looks a little slow so we can grab these three and speed it up cool now we have the general animation there's always more tweaks we could do to make this better and better but in order to keep this tutorial a little bit shorter let's take the logo and add our vibrate tag to it because it does have that kind of natural wiggle to it there at the end let's watch that one more time boom cool see it move around and kind of bounce around so for that that makes me think vibrate tag cinema 4d tags vibrate and then we're going to say seed just leave it at zero an able position maybe a little bit left and right but mostly up and down I would say like thirty ten and the frequencies way low like 0.5 much slower than the default so let's see what that looks like there you go I can see it rotate I'm also going to enable rotation and say you know 10 degrees 10 degrees 10 degrees and have it kind of wobble around and turn down the frequency a lot so now you can see boom just kind of gives it a little bit of a float like it's up like it's a hovercraft or like a hovering object here in the scene it's not static and it just kind of gives a little bit of animation there so this is getting there so let's do it let's do a quick render of this frame and see what this looks like and see what we need to do as far as lighting and all that stuff so if we look at our original you can see one thing is is it's a little bit more blue in the background and it's a little bit brighter on the textures so let's go to our materials let's go to our spec material and turn that back up a little bit let's turn up our studio rig HDRI to a brighter kind of setting try to get a little bit more white whiter White's in there and that looks a lot better the vignette I would add in post see how it's like brighter in the center and darker in the corners I would do all that in post or an after effects but getting some really nice shadows here maybe even a little bit more light and maybe a little bit brighter background just to allow the vignette to take over more than make it to gray so that's looking nice and bright and white let's go back to our kind of our sphere looking stuff here and give this a quick render you can see it's going to be low res based on the settings but that looks pretty good it's also getting a little close to the floor I think that's okay for the most part but we have our spheres hanging out here and we have most of it there so let's at this point get our render ready now again you know based on how much time we have and how much time we've put on into this already you know there's always more we could do but there's kind of the basics of it so there it is it's pushed out you can see it's actually generating a little bit and to get rid of some of the jitter you can go into our sphere settings and we could turn down the collision noise we can also go to our dynamics general dynamics tag and turn up some of the expert settings things like steps per frame and collision margin tend to help out a little bit with some of these jittery fears here and also toning down the follow position on your force instead of 10 maybe tone that down to something like 5 or so you're going to have to set it in a keyframe which remember anything you're setting up as a key framed element if you want to change it you can't just go type it in because it's not going to get set as soon as you get play it's going to change in fact it won't this be set until you reset that keyframe so keep that in mind but I think we're getting close here what I would do from here is turn up your resolution to something more proper for final output you could you could set your frame to all frames 0 to 200 instead of just a preview also turn up your global illumination settings so let's go to our global illumination settings and say interior hi-hi diffuse depth instead of the preview this will give us much nicer GI and also our physical settings our default to low you can also turn these up to medium or hand type these in and these settings are very dependent on what you have turned on and we can go over it more in depth in other tutorials but that you know we've gone through this in a lot of tutorials remember that that final render you know we can keep everything as low as possible so we can animate quickly and then we want to come back in and turn up some of these settings so that our final render looks a lot nicer so GI of course we're turning that up we're doing a lot of things and when we go to our picture viewer and we say okay well let's now render it you're going to see our render times or give me a little bit higher so I can be too bad here because we have such a small preview window but our shadows will be more accurate a little bright well maybe we turn up our GI a little bright here or HDR studio rig maybe like one 18 or something let's just reset it and also don't forget to save it out go to file and export them as TX ours or tips or whatever high resolution you want 32-bit is nice especially for compositing and get all this stuff out there's not a ton of post effects on this other than the cousin yet that I'm seeing and maybe a little motion blur but I would just leave it you know we don't have to go in After Effects to show you that you've seen me make plenty of vignettes and motion blur in other tutorials and you can add this thing in After Effects if you want or add it in cinema as well and so let's see here's our there's our first few frames with some nice shadowing with some nice stuff here and I also notice another thing which is it's sitting a little low in the frame so you know maybe we want this to be a little bit higher and just kind of have this framed up a little bit closer and more more higher in the scene and when we go back now it's kind of hovering up where where this original one is a little bit high on the scene like that so not a perfect recreation you know this looks a little more blobby than this thing probably do with less white spheres the dynamics aren't perfect you know I think we though got the gist of it you know all everything from now um is is is just making tweaks to make it more and more like this but the reason I do these kind of tutorials isn't to necessarily emulate this perfectly although that's what the exercise is on recreating this perfectly isn't really doing much to to our portfolio you know we can't render this out and say it's ours this is his work this is their work and we're instead we're using this to learn some techniques and and we're looking at something that we think is pretty um and something that we think is cool and trying to rip it off exactly for the purpose of learning how to do nice work and not necessarily to to steal this or whatever right so what we're doing now is we're we're trying to make this perfect because we love this the way this looks the way that you would you know try to play a Beatles song perfectly because you like that song but that song is not yours right so but by by by playing this and learning this you're now you now know how to turn on and off a metal ball system you know you now know how to take two metaball systems dynamically and shove them together you know how to animate some really basic settings here with spheres and and handle some dynamics of you you now know some of the new globe elimination settings so you know take something that you think is beautiful especially something short like this and try to make it as close as possible to the final and I think we have enough here where you can start to tweak little things things that bother you and turn up some of the settings and and reduce some of the spheres and do all that stuff thanks again for watching everybody and hey don't forget to sign up for our intro to cinema 4d series head on over to our website I'll link it up down below and you can get started with over 30 hours of cinema 4d training all right thanks as always for watching and I hope to see you in another video here on YouTube or over on our website really soon keep learning keep rendering and most of all keep having fun with all this stuff and I'll see you in another video really soon bye everybody metaball metaball metaball metaball medical metal ball metal ball metal ball metaball metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball metal ball something's wrong with me

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 75,527

Rating: 4.9583025 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, Cinema 4D, Stinger, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorials, cinema 4d metaballs, metaballs, c4d dynamics, cinema 4d dynamics, cinema 4d title card, modynamics, metaballs cinema 4d, metaballs c4d, cinema 4d animation, cinema 4d animation tutorial

Id: dDyD1gzoq9A

Length: 78min 2sec (4682 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2017