NAB 2018 Rewind - Chris Schmidt: 50 Minutes of Tips and Tricks for Cinema 4D

hello there I am Chris MIT from greyscale guerrilla comm where we do tutorials and we do training and we do tools help make you a better motion designer but today we're going to be talking about tips tricks and techniques in cinema 4d so why don't we dive right on in first up is bevel inversion this is just kind of a fun technique that kind of started to be able to work when they added in the new bevel options so very simple scene here we just got a cube let's change our display options like I hit the letters and B so we can actually say our edges let's grab our cube give ourselves a couple extra subdivisions here I'm gonna type in 11 11 11 because that's faster than typing 10 and let's go ahead and grab a well you can do it the former you could also do it by just doing the shortcuts with a bevel tool but you throw that in let's go ahead and change this to point mode though and I'm going to say that I want to limit it because if you don't limit you'll shoot right past the point so let's go ahead and turn on a limit here and start increasing our offset and once the offset goes to the maximum amount you will see that we've turned everything 45 degrees so we'd have to like you know bake this down or combine it so we could grab the cube and I'm going to hold down let's see what is that the Oh hold down alt eruption you can create the connect object make that editable and now you've baked that down and it even welded the caps together otherwise you'd have to optimize we can now see that we've gone and made a funky inverted weird piece of geometry I'm not sure what you do with this but it's really fun and you can go ahead and do this with any geometry really something with even polygons usually looks best we can go ahead and grab a regular old sphere here let's go ahead and increase our poly count and let's do it the manual way this time let's go ahead and select all of our points hit what is it M s is the bevel tool let's go ahead and limit that and instantly you see that went and switch this and now we do have to select it all and optimize so a shortcut for that is you owe so that's optimize that you can do things like do a quick loop selection here just do a bunch of rings funky stuff here let's do a quick extrusion you know just really fun way of getting new geometry and I have no idea how I do that otherwise so just a fun thing to do so moving on what is next I don't even know scale the timeline is a super quick one this is super so if we go ahead into this file let's say you've gone and you've increased your time line it's 999 because that's festered and typing in a thousand you can go ahead and just double click on your little timeline bar it's gonna automatically snap to the overall time save yourself a click so let's go ahead and jump into whatever is next select through objects so it's not unusual you're gonna have a big complicated scene you know lots of different stuff all the way through the entire thing I need to select it somewhere recently Chad and I did a spot for the happy toolbox some models that we sell we made this whole spot and something that I did definitely found useful while working on it is it could be really hard to go and select a very specific object but if you hold down the shift key and right-click then it will pop up a menu showing all the objects that your mouse is kind of shooting through so if I want to specifically select the icing off of this donut I can go ahead and select that and it is now selected in addition to that I used to talk all the time a really important tip to me was scroll to first active object and they wouldn't made a default shortcut to it which is great so I can just go over here as long as my mouse is over the object manager I can hit the letter S it's going to now find that object and automatically expand the hierarchy and to scroll me right to it so that's great and I can go ahead into the viewport and if I use s it will actually zoom in on whatever is currently selected so at the letter S in this context and it's gonna actually zoom up on that donut so really quickly way of selecting things and then zooming up on it in your viewport and zooming up on it in your object manager next up we have text geometry so whenever you're using any kind of fonts in 3d it tends to be kind of a pain in the butt to do anything with it because fonts weren't designed for 3d or for 3d modeling or 3d animation it's just not built that way so it's really easy to go into some sort of like quick extrude like this but if you want to have a lot of control over your geometry you know you're gonna get really ugly edges in general so something I just want to point out like all of us love keeping things parametric I love keeping things parametric all the time but sometimes you just got to model it and a lot of things are really quick to model and I just wanted to spend a few minutes using the polygon pen tool so we just got a font here I'm just gonna just pulled up a simple I don't know which font I picked here it's just something simple like an Arial yeah an Arial black got the word NAB here and you know how messy this would be if we didn't extrude I'm not even going to show you you guys know what that would look like let's go ahead and jump to our top here and I'm just going to hit the letter M e and that's going to pop open the polygon pen tool this guide introduced a few versions ago and it is like it's almost all the modeling tools combined into a single tool so let's go ahead and we're going we can start drawing it here it looks like it might have remembered my snap settings already but if yet the letter P you can pop open the snap menu I wanna make sure I turn on snap and then I would go ahead and make sure I have spline turned on and vertex snap turned on so now I've got that you see even as I mouse over any part of my spline it snapping to it so we can use that as a guide and it will snap even better to a corner because it's also set the vertex so let's go ahead and just start drawing out a polygon for ourselves here so I'm gonna go and click there let's click once there let's click once they're over here double click to close the first polygon and boom we've now created one polygon now I can hold down the command or ctrl key and drag out an edge without even changing modes I've dragged out an edge and now I can just drag one of those points to snap to corner let's drag this to snap to another corner and this quickly we can be going and modeling a very clean and precise text so let's just do this a really quickly and I will jump to a completed version here so uh there's an even I'm gonna you can even do a little bit sloppy like if we're gonna drag these polygons I could be like you know what let's just do that and then I'll do that and let's I know I'm gonna need one here why don't we go ahead and drag this here that should actually weld those two points together automatically and this would go up here let's go ahead there's gonna create a triangle in general you don't want to create triangles but I'm gonna do it here sorry my mouse is being a little twitching on me so we can go ahead and doing that and we could make that into a triangle if we want to pull this down like I said we can be kind of sloppy here because our final steps we can go and clean up even that look at this edge will snap to that one and we're just using this same tool for this whole thing so I could just spend the second going through and snapping these exactly to our points they make it nice and clean and precise oh I just actually you can actually cut your lines as well which is what just happened there so I can pull that down pull this down so you get the idea I'm very quickly being able to drag these out and then we're going to kind of do a cooking show thing here and pull it out but we're we could go and create the final polygon here on the letter B and then we just start dragging out a series of these making sure that we kind of follow the arc so I'm gonna go ahead and pop open a more finalized version here so you don't have to see be going step by step and we I want to show some additional cells so first of all we'd have really nice text there to kind of do whatever we want with but if you wanted to add some additional stuff you could do is do some like inside bevels on this so let's go ahead and I'm going to grab a couple of these edges and you know we can do some nice bevels and cinema4d but I'm even trying to I don't know what the right word is we know you want like a perfect triangular shape so I'm gonna go ahead and grab these as some edges you see are you prepped it on the other ones and I got to let the short cut em F that's gonna pop open edge cut make sure you turn off and Gon's like a apply we got two cuts of there and I'll make sure I grab these two lines and let's do one final one hit spacebar twice and you'll go back to your previous tool hit apply and I got a cut now that cut didn't go where I wanted it to so I'm going to go back to our polygon pen tool and if I hold down command or control and I can just click it it'll race that one out and I can just click and i'm gonna click once and drag and that's just did like a knife tool command once again just straight up the polygon pen tool so I need see we got all these really nice edges going let's go back to a 3d view and we can do some quick loop selections here if we go ahead and say stop at boundary edges it'll actually just select our line and then look doesn't want that one but let's do that carefully select this one hit spacebar to toggle between tools and we could go and do selections on all these if we just want to take a second to do it so let's grab those edges those edges and a deselect these so you see I've got these selected I could go ahead and just drag these up into the air when I get some nice clean sexy bevels you'll see right here that okay that one might want to be triangulated so we can jump back to our polygon pen tool and a shortcut and we could do some final cuts here cut from there to there maybe cut from there to there and even like these corners okay now we got like at this void but I can just once again hold down command drag from one corner to another close that off drag from one corner close that off we could do that everywhere doing these cuts create really clean geometry if you spend a little bit of time you can prepare your fonts manually and you can use yet what you you know any font you want as a guide snappy to it really quickly using the polygon pen tool and you can make exactly what you want so moving on to the next one H B what does HP B stand for so everybody knows that your XYZ but then we got HP B what do those stand for well they stand for heading pitch and Bank so we got a nice little airplane here ready to fly around now important thing to note in cinema 4d cinema 4d considers forward z+ so it's kind of like the front of this point is facing Z plus if you had a character their nose would be pointing on Z plus that's what cinema 4d considers forward have you think in that way then a lot of things like the targeting tags and constraints all that will make more sense if you think of it that way so now that we've got that going I often will confuse and you'll even see if you watch ami tutorials I often I'm like okay which do we need to rotate on this one nope this one no so I'm trying to get better at that so this isn't attempt to help me with that so we've got our airplane here so the first one is heading so okay that's pretty simple which way is our plane heading so my guide to plane and rotate it that is our heading now bank and pitch are the ones that are really easy to confuse heading I think is pretty straightforward so pitch is if you're going to start going upward and downward so that seems that's straightforward but I can remember that well but the way I think is gonna help me remember is banking because if you think of an airplane or something flying around that it's going to be banking you're dodging other bullets flying through the air so you like so that's your banking and hopefully that'll help you remember and hopefully I'll help me remember and you know we'll find out in my next tutorial of that caches so collapsing panels so this isn't actually something I do very often but it's pretty neat we got these little control tabs up on the top and I have not forgotten the name of them but they got a weird name and if you just hold your middle mouse button if you click it as a button it will automatically automatically collapse it you could just click it again it will pop it back open so if you don't have enough room in your object manager and you want to maximize it really quickly I mean I know often I'm grabbing this I'm pulling it down so I need more room or less room depending on how many attributes an object might have but I could just quickly collapse that down and then do whatever I need and then pop it back up again so really nice to be able to collapse all those down and of course you might go and accidentally collapse too many things down or collapse that and that starts disappearing and you get things looking all funky and if you get if things get crazy you get a little bit lost and just remember you guys go back to your startup layout and say you know what I want to go back to and you're back to the beginning let me just get my panel the correct scale again alright so yeah middle mouse button on the panel's offset with fall-off this one's a little bit specific but if I was a cool technique and it's it's almost like a design space to think about something some of the effectors in mograph so I want to share that so here we've got a pretty standard set up a type of thing I talked about it pretty often we've got a cloner and the cloner is set to blend and what that is doing is it's blending between two identical hierarchies so you see they have the exact same objects they're all parametric so it has got a nice small circle and then a big circle and it will transition between those no matter how many I put into this count that's really fun really straightforward we do that all the time now I want to do kind of like this ripple effect cascading like a drop of water here now I want to ripple through well if there's a whole bunch of effectors and things we might be able to do with that but the thing I would most want to do to have a lot control over it would be to use a just like a plane effector and I could use a fall-off to make them travel but the problem here is that all of these objects have the exact same axis if I were to make this editable you'll see that every single one of the Clones their axis is right in the middle so what that means let me undo what that means is if I go in and make a where we go an effector let's make a plane effector and we go ahead and turn on a quick linear a fall-off let's give it a full fall-off here and have it go up on Y you'll see that as its drags through all of them are moving identically they've got the exact same axis so how do we fix that well we have an effector that will look at the index of the objects the number of the object instead of its position and that effector is of course the step effector so I can click on the step effector by default it is affecting the scale I want to affect the position and it's going to be an arbitrary amount I can just drag that up and if I look at it from the side you're gonna see we get this weird bowl shape you can't get this arcing in it's kind of easing in and easing out and that of course is because the step effector by default has the spline and that is not linear so let's go ahead to make that linear and we should see a nice straight line there so based on the index each one is moving a little further than the previous one okay cool good start so now they don't have the exact same access anymore so now I can grab a cloner and let's add another effector so I'm gonna add plane let's go into it the same setup again I'm going to give it a linear fall-off make it full set it up to Y plus and now you'll see as I drag this through it is actually successfully affecting them each individually but of course now the problem we see is that they're all offset we wanted them to be flat well it's pretty straightforward we can go ahead and counteract that by duplicating our step effector so let's go ahead and copy and paste that step effector and grab our cloner and the effects in the effectors tab let's make sure that we end the new step effect that we just copied is the third object so you have the thing about the order of operations here that one calculates and then the plaintiff actor with the fall-off calculates and then this new one will so if we take the new one and we set it to the exact negative amount and even better we can go to our strength and we can set that to exactly negative 100 so if we change the number they'll go they'll reset but you'll now see that that is flat again but what this translates to if you think of that order of operations is now I can pull my plane effector up through it and each one is going to be affected offset wise but that they all still have the exact same access so we've tricked it into letting us work with fall-off and fall off so just I know it's just my favorite way of animating anything like this so now if we actually want to get that ripple effect I could go ahead and go to my point effector go to its fall-off and right now it's just going to be linear by default but if I go and I drag in a couple of points here just holding down the command or ctrl button to add some new points let's go ahead and maybe round that out a little bit more now as I grab my plane effector and pull it up you're gonna say we get a ripple traveling right through it based off of fall-off and we could control all of our animation and the length and the transition all entirely based off of this and even that we could go and grab both of our step effectors and by changing the position here we can actually change how much they've been offset so they could be a little bit more uniform they could be a little it's a lot more distinctly separated so just a fun little rig and a way of thinking of layering even alaric effectors up so that one might counteract the other one but it's enabled new functionality for you so moving on we've got super poly clean redux so I mentioned this one in my last 50 minutes of tips and tricks and that was a fun technique for really super cleaning up unnecessary three in a model I think it messes up your you v's but it would super clean up your model and that relied on the poly reduction de former but recently they've introduced the poly reduction generator which is a completely different thing and the process didn't work anymore and I just want to make sure that anybody who liked that process would be able to continue doing it so we're going to do it again and I just want to mention that if you go to the the former menu it is not here but if you go to the search functionality so it sets shift C I'm going to search in reduction and you see we've got at the generator version but we can still get at the regular de former polygon reduction so let me just show you that technique again real quick because it's fun normally if you go and you like convert this to n guns are gonna be left with all of your extra points you'll get rid of the edges but you'll have all the points we can get rid of all those by grabbing this polygon reduction dropping it inside the object and if we grab our reduction strength and we drop it all the way down to zero we're not reducing at all but is now super optimized all of their different polygons the triangulated it but all the points have disappeared and you'll see if I turn that off we got like extra points all over the place like look at all of these redundant points I won't be doing anything for our final model so if we go ahead and turn that on I'm gonna just go ahead and throw this into a connect object because I will automatically weld it for me so I'm going to hold down alt option as that's made it's now welding I can make that editable and if we go ahead and select our geometry I can right click and on triangulate make sure you hit the gear because then we can make sure we turn on create and guns hit okay and now you can see that we've super reduced all of the geometry on this to only the necessary ones by using that technique only flat surfaces will remain and everything else will be removed now if I go to points then you'll see that even the points have been reduced to be super clean so that's how you can still do that technique and I really like that one okay the animation palette so I didn't know that was the name of it I just called this a timeline but this is the animation palette down here and I just want to talk about a couple neat tricks in it so I've got a little animation here I did a while ago with a sigh the cylinder guy so I'm gonna go ahead and hit play and you see I just got this character falls in the scene does allow animation and goes and crawls up out of the scene and then immediately plummets back in again so we've got this animation I'm going to go ahead and just go into my character in fact I want to make sure I grab all of his controls he's got keyframes all over the place he's got you know two dozen controls on him all over and I wanna grab all those so I've talked about before he can make a selection object and if you let's see where does that even live I think yeah if you go under select selection filter you can make a selection object I've already got one prepared here so it's got all of my different controls so if I go ahead and double click that it will select all of my controls you see all these splines all this madness of all these things but the main thing you're going to see is we get all of these different keyframes going here normally you're gonna you would want to go into the F curve editor or the timeline but there are some really cool things you can do directly in this menu I want to talk about a few of them so the very first thing is selecting it it's probably not unusual for you to go and select some of your keyframes first of all you'll be really careful a lot of people trips me up a lot but anywhere on this top part if you select it just jumps at the time but if you go and you make sure your mouse is right down where the keyframes actually live you can actually make a selection so if you click and drag you can select multiple keyframes now that's that's all well and good we can grab those and move them as long as you have that object selected you're now moving all the keyframes associated with that object so pretty straightforward but it's probably likely that you are like oh now I want to grab this keyframe and you're like oh I wanna grab that oh you can't make a selection because now you're dragging and moving it so you've probably done is gone and then you fiddle around trying to deselect that somehow and then you can move off to the side maybe click one time okay now I've deselected I drag it in but there is a better way you can go and drag your selection moving around whatever you want you hold down shift and you click you'll just erase it out so really quickly carry out the selection I know that used to trip me up a whole bunch the next thing I want to talk about is if you right-click here you got a whole bunch of cool timeline options and there's way too many for me to go through all of them but you can go and change your linear you can change your step your spline you can also change your easing in all of your yeah Easy's ease-in ease-out that's fun but the one I wanted to mention was the ripple edit if we turn on ripple edit any change that we make here let's just grab say that one keyframe here if well actually let's even find a specific time okay let's say right here I want to make sure that this part of my animation he's just gonna lie flat on the ground for longer and just go ahead and grab this time I want this this given keyframe here and if I start moving forward you'll see every single keyframe in front of that one is going to move along with it so I can just lengthen it up without having to worry about grabbing my entire timeline it could even be the animation be longer it's going to grab it and push it further along if we grab something over here we start pulling them back everything will move back with it so ripple at is a really nice fun way of controlling this while still just being in your animation palette and not having go into your timeline and your f curves and make sure you're making sure you grab all of your points and pulling back nope you just make sure you have your object selected and turn on ripple I didn't just drag it across so that was some hints on the animation palette jumping on we've gots insides and lofts I talk about this a lot if you watch ass GSG which is a live show that I run every week on Wednesdays at 2:00 o'clock Central Time we do two hours of live streaming where we just answer questions from the audience anybody hanging out asking questions we try and recreate cool art from other artists in fact I've met some people and this week it was like oh I somebody asked me how to make your animation that we were figuring out it's really fun and I talk about this all the time there and that is I never use circle splines anymore I only use n sides and I also want to talk a little bit about loft so let's go ahead and jump into this file really straightforward a little little model of a potion bottle I've been playing with a 3d printer a bunch I've been in a whole bunch of this and the loft up is really useful for that because get really nice clean meshes but I want to talk about how you can keep these super clean this hierarchy is built entirely with circles if I turn off the loft you can see I've got a whole series of circles here and when the loft lofts them then you get this model here so the first thing I want to mention is let's say we wanted this to be a six-sided bottle so we go to our mesh subdivision on top of our loft and we can type in a six but you'd actually want to type in six if I type in six we're actually going to get five sides when you're in your loft and you wanted to see how many kind of points are getting swept around always go one higher than the actual count that you want of polygons so I'm going to actually type in seven there so okay now we actually do successfully have seven edges here but you see it's not round anymore it's all weird and funky and offset and that's because these are circles and the loft does know how to interpret a circle spine because the circle spine by default it's set to angle except to adaptive and the angle is 5 degrees so every 5 degrees it's making another point and it's trying to interpolate between those it doesn't know where'd you do the subdivisions so and we could go and grab all the circles and try and you know change that we could go and say you know what I want something like natural or uniform but even having done that it's not actually changing our end result here so I've got the exact same hierarchy here and actually here's a cool shortcut if you hold down the command or control and you click your check box let me twirl this open so you can see if you hold down command or control you click the check box it will turn everything in that hierarchy off or on so I'm gonna turn that one off and let's go ahead and turn this one on and I have an identical hierarchy but this time with insides and what's great about inside this is it's exactly like a circle except you can type in exactly how many sites you want so it's a very very precise you get a lot of control over it so along those lines we go back turn on our loft and I can say you know what I want exactly 6 sides which means 7 and it's gonna be look all funky there but now we can go to our inside select all of them and I'm gonna set this to exactly 6 and now and if I successfully selected all of them oops oh I mess something up there but you see at least up on the top here we're getting exactly 6 sides going around now an additional thing that I wanted to talk about is how the loft interprets the polygons normally actually I've changed my default or not I haven't changed my default but normally this is subdivided a lot more heavily you see normally you probably getting a whole bunch of different edges like this and that can be kind of imprecise if you're trying to model something very very precisely so first thing I usually do is go to my mesh subdivision that V and I drag that all the way down but you'll see that this actually still has more polygons than I have spline so that she got twice as many as because you also have a subdivisions per segment checkbox and you turn that off then now it is literally just a connection between each of your splines and you can you know so now we're getting very precise modeling so it'd be very easy go and select any of these change the number of sides here in fact I could jump this back up to 65 grab all of my insides jump this back up to 64 so those should be kind of identical now and we're getting a perfect translation where that n sides point is exactly where the this point is so moving on to the next one we have proximal fall-off this one's fun I don't know about you guys but I use cinema 4d for lots and lots of different things like I'm constantly finding new excuses to use it in yeah in ways that you probably would might be faster if I knew some of the other tools but one thing I did in this case is I run a game of Dungeons & Dragons and I have to make maps all the time so there's no faster way of doing that than making it in cinema 4d so I've got a scene here where I got a cloner it's making some nice trees I've got some simple jobs here for buildings use some sketch in tune you get some nice lines and I was evenly able to overlay a grid on top of it with sketch it tuned it's just really fun to be able to do this kind of stuff in cinema it's super quick it's a superlight scene it's you know like all the time it's like okay these trees aren't laying out exactly the way I want to well first of all you can see that those are cloning along a spline so I did kind of place them exactly where I wanted but in a given point you could always go and change your step you could increase the number that you want you can go with offset randomize are so many different things you do by just thinking about things parametrically and with cloners and with all of your different effectors it's so much fun to create this kind of stuff it's pretty addictive but I want to talk specifically about the proximal shader I actually have an entire tutorial on grayscale grillage all about the proximal but this is another use I thought was kind of fun so this was actually kind of an ancient town there's all supposed to be kind of ruined so I want to have this old path drawn in here so I would probably do would be to jump into the pen tool or maybe the sketch tool and I could just start drawing out a line where these roads are supposed to travel I've already got one prepared actually here so let's just go ahead and pop that open and I'm actually going to go ahead and hide all that geometry so you can see I've drawn out let spline and I didn't even close it it's just right there so this is what I want the path to be but I want to look like an old worn-out path so the first thing I'll do is turn into some sort of geometry so we'll just grab a loft I love me some lofts drop that in and boom we've got a piece of geometry cool and I've already got a road texture set up in here it's just it's just a couple noises layered up on top of each other I could drop it on there if I hit render you're gonna see we got a nice Road is all set up ready to rock already but let's go ahead and jump into that road and I you know go into the Alpha Channel let's go ahead and turn on alpha and I'm going to go ahead and let's just let's go ahead and immediately go to our proxy so I'm gonna make a proximal shader so you go down to effects you go down to proximal so what is the proximal shader the proximal shader is a shader that essentially just creates a fall-off in 3d space based on what ever points you feed into it so the points that we're going to feed in the Intuit are going to be based off of this spline so let's go ahead and drag in the spine and we're going to turn on use of vertices now in addition to that I want to make sure to point out that in my spline normally this would be set to adaptive but I changed it to subdivided I really love subdivided because you can set a maximum length so that means every five units it's going to create another point so that means our proximal is seeing a little circle fall off every five units in the scene so now we've got that we can go ahead and let's see actually we can soon the View for a little bit let's hit render and it's gonna look a little weird because I think our scale is way off in fact we can just see everything because it's so big so let's go ahead and string this up so I want this to be ten units it says percent what's actually in units so at ten percent it means ten units so ten centimeters in this case a if I render now okay cool you've seen something different looks a little bit funky what's happening is we're only seeing the edges that are close to it that's where the points are and that's where it's telling it to be so close but no cigar here first first thing we need to do is it's very it's blowing out a little bit and that's because the blend mode is set to add so there's a whole series of circle gradients and they're overlaying each other and getting brighter and brighter and brighter I'm gonna say I don't want to keep getting brighter I want if they were already a certain brightness it can't get brighter so just by changing that we're going to see a fall-off on here it's looking a little funky here because I actually have ambient occlusion turned on so go to our good old trusty compositing tag so I'm gonna right click on our loft let's go to the cinema 4d tags add a compositing tag and we'll just say don't see the ambient occlusion cool so let's go ahead and render that again and now you'll see that we've got a nice fall of nice fall-off here but it's kind of the exact opposite of what we want we want to see the rest of it and not this falling out falling off bit so let's go ahead and jump out into the alpha channel here and instead of the proximal being directly in let's drop this proximal into a layer shader I love the layer shader so I can create that an important thing to note right away is if you're using the layer shader in the Alpha Channel you have to turn off image alpha otherwise it won't work so now it's working exactly the same nothing's changed for it rendered look identical but now we can go into a layer dish the layer shader and I can right-click on any anything that we feed in here and we can say invert image so now white has become black and black has become white and if I render that you can now see that we get a nice fall off on these edges of course I could just be the start if we wanted it to be we can go ahead and make some noises here let's make a noise go to one of my favorite ones maybe knocky knocky is great for all sorts of organic things so if I were to hit render right now on that we could kind of see the overall scale she's kind of making a little bit patchy fact I kind of like that so you know what I'm gonna make a duplicate of that noise you can actually if you click the image and drag it it automatically makes a duplicate of it if you grab the note the name and move it it will move it so nice little shortcut there as well let's hide one and let's just take this one and actually I'm kind of I'm not sure if I need to multiply your screen so let's just try multiplying I'm gonna multiply that and okay I did do it correctly there where now we get the fall-off and this overlay but you know what instead of multiplying something that's kind of fun would be something like maybe the lever I think you call it you pronounce it lever don't use this one too often but this will just take the two images and do like a literal black and white translation between them so usually with these nice rough edges like perfectly in there making that look nice and worn out and now I could take this one and say multiply on top of it so how we get those nice rough edges there but we're also multiplying this one on to erase out additional elements from it so I can pull back on this a little bit let's see just find a nice balance there it looks a little worn out we got these messed up edges and what's cool about this whole setup here is we can always go back to our original object we can go back to this spline here and I could grab a point and be like you know it maybe that should be down here or we can grab this path and drag it out further there and it's all looking at the proximal it's automatically subdivide it actually it was a bad example there because this road is not fat enough to see it so let's grab that and pull these up that should be bigger so now we've got this patch up here so it's just automatically updating with that so we go ahead and turn everything back on again let's do another quick render and there we go now we've got our messed up path on top here and it's a nice parametric rig that we could honestly copy and paste into different scenes build a whole lot build up a whole library of these different textures and materials and rigs and make all the dungeons and dragon maps you can imagine so moving on we've got too many objects okay so cinema 4d can handle a lot of polygons it does not mind a lot of polygons but it doesn't like a lot of objects you could have one object with a million polygons no problem but it'd be a bad idea to have a million objects each with one polygon so just as an example I've got a scene here from one of my favorite tutorials ever which was like fast topographies so you make these really cool like pillar sculptures not my original idea if I have a tutorial on how to make these really quick so what's awesome about this is this in cinema 4d is being considered pretty much one object so in spite of literally having a million pillars here I'm getting like instantaneous feedback in our viewport here so as long as it does that initial calculation is going to go really quick now in this particular example and what we do in that tutorial is we're using hair and all these hairs are sticking straight up and they're taking the height map from an image but we're telling hair to generate a spline but they the spline is being generated as a single object so it's not a million different splines is one spline with a million lines in it and then it is then extruding it or I think in this case sweeping it so at that point this is turning into just three objects well you got you got the hairs which are splines and then you've got a sweep and you got the front cap and the back cap so there's only like four objects in the scene so it's running incredibly quick so the important thing to note here is you just want to when you you know I love keeping things parametric but at a certain point save Alf that file moving to a new one and bake everything down to a the smallest number of objects possible I actually want to get to some slightly I think here's a more interesting one so I'm not gonna break this one down but this is the scene is going to be moving pretty slowly but I could collapse down all of my different groups of objects and then our viewport be moving just as quick as it was with those pillars well let's move on to a more fun one bouncy Springs I didn't get to talk about this one too much in fact it might be another decent wants a skip I got 17 minutes I think we can talk about it let's do it okay so we've got a pretty straightforward setup here I've got three dynamic objects we got the bottom one which is static it's a Collider body and then we've got these other two and they are linked together via these connectors and we are actually using the rag doll connector and the way like the thing about the ragdoll connector is like those little uh those little things you put around a dog's collar when you don't want after I got surgery you don't want it to itself so its head can't move beyond a certain point so that's what we got going on here these objects can't move beyond their little dog a collar so they're moving around like this that's all well and good but I don't want these just flopping over that's as far as that they're allowed to but I want them to have a little bit stiffness here so Springs are really cool and I ignored Springs for a long time but if you haven't played with them first play with connectors not know people play with connectors but after you play with connectors start playing with Springs so if I make a spring here and let's just go ahead and drop it down inside of our first object here I want to link this spring from let's say yeah that's the base so I want to link it from the base to the next object and then let's copy this spring and this spring I want to connect the middle object to the third object cool so we got two Springs those are automatically connecting I think in the correct positions and if we hit play right now they're gonna be working pretty well it should be adding a little bit of stiffness to it but if you really want to make these work you got two key settings you want to use let's grab select both of our Springs and those two settings are first of all the stiffness and we can jump the stiffness up to something like 10 if we hit play it should be it's going to be doing a little bit better of a job but the really magical setting here is actually taking the spring and scaling it beyond the default in fact a good thing I should have done here was hit set rest length and that's automatically going to set the spring to be the exact length which is the distance between the center point of one object to the other object that's connected to but if we go and we select both of those and we make that spring a larger so you see those are two different values so if I want to each have each of them be larger we can do a little bit of math inside the cinema so you just type in X and X is whatever that objects current value is I say X times two and now each of those Springs has jumped to twice of the length it's you know double the rest length that we had before so trying to scale it up even taller so now we've added additional stiffness here and now you'll see that we're actually they're not flopping off to the edge of that and we're actually getting some control over this looking nice and wiggly jumping back and forth so even more than stiffness increasing the rest length beyond the default like set parameters a really good way of adding in this kind of springiness onto your objects all right shadow as texture I did this one recently it's kind of fun so we just got a whole bunch of models here and I've got a light this light is set as a parallel light it's pointing straight up it's up in the air pointing straight down and we've got a hard shadow set so here go ahead and hit render and boom we get a heart shadow really straightforward but let's say we want to start manipulating the shadow a little bit in fact that's the specific technique I want to talk about here I don't even turn them off for a second is everybody probably is familiar with a fall-off shader and I'm gonna go ahead and make one of those really quick to demonstrate what I mean here let's just put in the luminance channel let's go ahead and make a where do we get it I lose it sometimes yeah there it is fall-off shader and let's just go ahead and make it black and white to demonstrate my point this is really great if you wanted to have let's say snow was falling so you were gonna have it snow do is set this up it's like okay well that's working well but I could grab this drag the black up to the mid point and hit render and I can see anything that's pointing upward is now white remember we're in the luminance channel anything that's on the top is white as occurs down to the side it is becoming black and now the anything from the mid point down is completely black but if this was something like snow then this wouldn't be wiped down here like the snow would have been hit the top here and it would have gone down to the feet so how can we do that well one way that I found recently is kind of fun to do is to kind of convert a shadow into a shader and the way I like doing that is using a shader that we don't use very often let's go ahead and jump back into our lumens channel and set a fall-off let's go ahead and use the old Loomis shader the Loomis shader is kind of like the color channel as a shader so this is a this before-- reflectance this was a way they could add multiple specular zin to like your luminance channel or your color channel but in this case we actually don't care about that I don't want the first specular or the second or the third I just want our base kind of color channel here I'm gonna make sure we're up to white and let's make sure it's looking at illumination 100% so essentially now it's almost as if we have the color shader but I'm in the luminance channel so now we've got our light turned on we get the shadow turn off a render we're getting a shadow but we're in the luminance channel but this can now be combined in all sorts of fun funky ways because we've got a shader now so we could do things like throw this into a distorter Channel and now with that let's go ahead and throw in a noise let's not go overboard on it but if I hit render here we are now going to start getting some distortion on our shadow down at the base but then things get more interesting because we can actually use additional I don't want to keep that so let's go ahead and change our shadow to a different type let's go ahead and set it to soft or actually let's even jump right to area so we get an area shadow and I don't have the settings cranked up too high but you see we are actually getting some nice soft or fall offs on here so along those lines we now kind of had that fall-off but let's let's say snow is falling now it didn't fall even though this is the top of the object there's less of it there and we have the ability to of course go and grab something like the layer shader and we could go and make another noise and let's see what this is a good one I don't want to use naki again let's use Luca so we've got Luca there so we can combine these in different ways and let's just go right away - we don't get to use it too often lever and render that and now you're gonna see that we're going to get this crazy stylize like super funky look here because we are now manipulating at the shadow as a shader I'm not sure what to do with this but it's really fun and there's lots of like design space I think to play around with that so I want to share that with everybody so let's see what is next fools this one's really important I've been a little bit hard on bulls and cinema4d there's still some trouble sometimes they can pop out of existence when you're animating an object through another one but they are actually way better than I thought they were and I want to walk this through with you and I kind of discovered this I just want to show you I was recently working once again this is for Dungeons & Dragons I was working on a character on there this robotic creature so I made this guy he's really fun but this entire character is put together pretty much parametrically like nothing's been made editable on him but I was going crazy using Bulls on this one and the most specific crazy area is something like that in the foot here like this is a series of a ton of different combined objects but I'm getting incredibly clean geometry in fact it's so clean I was able to take this and put it through my 3d printer and get a model off of this because they're all perfect volumes so I want to show you some hints on what makes these work a lot better so here's maybe what you'd be expecting from a bowl this way I've been working with them forever and they said yeah the things I'm about to show you have been in cinema forever so I feel bad that I didn't realize everything so you get this really kind of this messy mesh and it's highly likely that when you combine different things are gonna start messing messing up as you go deeper and deeper and you'll see I'm actually four bulls deep just to make this one object if I turn off all the Bulls you can see this actually combination of all these different things to be able to make that object so as you go through they get combined and you finally end up with this final object but it's all crazy all crazy triangulated that's kind of the default you'd expect but if we go ahead and we select all four of these Bulls there are three check check boxes that you should almost turn on every time so first of all it's already on a high quality object that's good we do want a high quality object but normally if you make a bull editable usually there's two objects in there in the hierarchy if you turn on creates a single object it'll automatically merge them down into one object so that will merge them down into one object one of the only problems is that has broken our Phong but we'll solve that in a second but here's a super important one hide new edges what this is actually doing is making all the new cuts into n gongs and by turning back on on all four bulls we have now gotten really clean geometry here and the final check box is create Phong brakes at the intersections if I turn that back on again that we get our nice Phong brakes back again so those three checkboxes combined are giving us incredibly clean geometry on the pools and it's not just that they look they work visually better it doesn't look so messy I want to show you that it actually will dramatically change the way you're doing modeling as well so I actually got this question in an ass GSG recently where somebody wants to make these headphones so we got the shape here we just kind of got this bowl shape and then we've got a couple of rectangles I stretched it out nice and long and extrude it out let's go ahead and create a bool and I'm going to drop both of these objects into the bool and we have deep by default a subtract B those are all in the null none of them are touching each other so you can kind of group them up that way so if I drag these down you're gonna see boom we're gonna start cutting out the bool now right away you can see there's some like twitchiness there and that switching ditches twitchiness is just like the triangles recalculating making new connections to the best most optimized way you can but you know I'll be right away there's gonna be some problems where if we go and let's say we want to now bevel these edges a couple different ways we can do that but let's just try and do it parametrically let's make a bevel here and before I drop it in I'm gonna make sure that I turn on use angle so it doesn't try and double everything is only going to try and bubble things that are bigger than an angle that's sharper than 40 degrees so I'll drop this in as the third object that we don't have to put into a null and you can see like right away things are gonna go nuts it's exploding we have edges shooting off to the edge this broke here like that's just not working at all now one one problem for that obviously is we didn't create a single object so I go ahead and turn on create single object now they're weld together be see we have more additional problems it's just kind of not working at all for us so let's go ahead just turn that off for a second and instead of leaving it this way you can go ahead and turn on hide new edges so turnout in height new edges and then look at how clean the geometry now is inside of there in addition to that we've got our loft up top and this Loft is creating creating the top based off of triangles but I'm actually gonna go to that loft and on the cap on the loft I'm gonna say you know what don't be triangles be a end gone as well so now that got cleaned up as well so we've gone end Gon's and then our pool is treating everything like n-gons so now and let's see we're also creating a single object so everything should be welded together so now let's go ahead and turn on our bevel and look at that now we've got some bevels automatically working on there and we go ahead and scale them up and they are just looking great so yes now essentially like even by Tefal go we'll go home and set this as default because hiding new edges completely transforms the way I work with pools and I think it'll do the same for you so sketchy variation so I love sketch Atun sketch ensues really fun a lot of people try and be very very precise with sketch in tune but I always find that if I'm gonna be making something look sketchy I want to like mess it up and make it look hand-drawn I'm trying to get rid of the 3d look as much as possible so sketch the tune is really fun but there's a lot of variation you can add that isn't just based on the sketch - - and I've got a little character here from a short that I never continued this is like four years old if I render you see if I get some basic sketches to set up and I've got this material here I'm going to apply and the only this is just a couple different noises I'm gonna collapse all geometry grab this this is just actually this material is just like a pen scribbled on paper and then I took a photo of it and I overlaid a couple of noises on top of it so if you're like me and you don't like dealing with you visa unless you absolutely have to you probably go and you set your materials to cubic so let's go ahead and do that I'm gonna hit render and you see okay we got kind of up look applied to it overall but I want to add like a whole bunch of crazy sketchiness on there so something I might do is I want every single frame to look different every single frame but this material to look different but I don't want to go there's no animated nose or anything it's a static material a way we can get tons of variation in this would be to just go and do something like grab our position and our rotation at the time of 0 I can record that right there and we could fast-forward to the very end and we can type in some crazy numbers in here so we can just like type in a giant number there big old giant number where I'd like the millions here and we can even do the same with position let's put a big old giant number there let's record all of those and record all those and what that's going to essentially enable us to do is it's it's changing and rotating everything so quickly that there should be essentially no relation from one frame to the next so if we jump to our texture here I click on axis and we make sure we have our object selected and if we go to time 0 you can see with that it's actually right there if I go one frame forward it's zoomed out the scene so far that we came to see it so if we were to send this over to the picture viewer we're gonna see frame by frame it's completely changing just based on that one material so that by itself is kind of fun but I just want to mention that we also have it's the one mentioned I'm gonna do of a plug-in but greyscale gorilla makes a plugin that is my personal favorite of all the plugins we make and that is signal so signal my elevator pitch for signal is always it's kind of like the vibrate tag for every parameter but it does so much more than that those like beats per minute and all sorts of mathematical like looping noises that's really fun let's go and apply that material again from scratch I'm gonna set it to cubic let's go ahead and I'm even gonna move it up in the air so we can see what were doing a little bit better so I'm going to right click and I'm going to add a greyscale gorilla signal tag so what do I want to control there oh I don't control pretty much the same thing as we just were but we can be so much more precise with it so I'm gonna go ahead and grab the rotation so I can actually grab the entire vector all three of these and drop it directly onto the signal tag and now signal is controlling that parameter so now I can go into this parameter and I'm going to say you know what how do we want to modify this I'm gonna say I want to add a noise in there so now there is a random vibration on top of the rotation here so how do we want to rotate it well we have our HP and B and I think I want this thing to spin around whole bunch and we learned earlier that that is heading so we can change our heading a whole bunch and in the same way we're just talking we can have this guy go crazy and put a big old number in there complete chaos we can also do a reasonable number like 360 and now control that strictly based off of our speed now I do want absolute variation in here so if we crank the speed up I'm gonna go up to like 11 here it's just gonna make it go really quick so frame by frame you can't see the transition and we go set of random seed or whatever we want here but we go ahead and we select this tag if I go and hit play now you can see that this is randomly rotating around completely randomly every frame you see it's a completely new number but what's cool is I could be like you know I also want a little bit of variation but I like those lines being kind of vertical in general so let's get a little bit tilted to it but not that much so along those lines we can go ahead and say let's do like 5 degrees there 5 degrees there boom those have been updated and now if we have that selected then now we're going to get a little bit of tilting side-to-side completely randomly but that will never loop we can increase our timeline to a thousand frames a million frames it will just keep randomly generating per frame we can do the same thing on position if I want to move on really quick and talk about an additional unrelated technique for adding more variation so this null is containing all of the geometry of the character and there's just hoping to different things combined I want to use a displace to former to start messing this character up a little bit so we'll make it this Placer I can drop it in here that means he'll affect all the geometry I'm gonna go to our shader let's go ahead and grab a noise and instantly you're gonna see that the whole character is getting a little bit messed up a little bit Wiggly once again I want absolute variation so we can crank the speed up to 11 because 11 I think once you get to maybe 6 or 7 it's so fast and some before you won't kind of see it between frames so I go about double that so if I were to hit play here you're gonna see that that's kind of wiggling all over the place so that's kind of fun and just by coincidence it's a good scale because into this place where we could go and increase our amounts now by default of course the displacer is affecting the direction and the direction here is the vertex normal so kind of straight out from the skin it's wiggling a little bit if we went too far with that it's gonna like mess up the character and it's good in this case messing up too much I mean maybe that's what you're going for but I think for us a subtle one is working well so that's a nice a little bit of jitter that we can kind of get automatically but I want to get even more variation on top of that so we're going to create a second that this place are here so I'm going to have it calculate on this one's gonna calculate before it that's fine doesn't really matter and we're going to go actually let's go ahead and crank this up really big and let's go into our shader and in this shader I am going to tell it to be a much larger shader the other one was very tiny so every point was kind of being affected individually but in this one I'm going to start increasing the scale let's jump up ten times the size and see what we get okay even showing up ten times size you can now kind of see the cloud of noise that this is traveling through it's bulging it out all over the place maybe we actually see the noise I'm gonna go ahead and make it bigger than that let's jump it up to about 2000 and now okay it's blobbing it out quite a bit now that gave us a good idea of the scale but now I'm gonna go up and let's go back to our object and instead of it affecting the direction of the vertex normal let's have it be based off of a plane and one of the directions and it's already by default is set to x+ which is kind of the direction that we're aiming here so that should work well now we don't definitely want to pushing out quite that much but if I hit play now we've got a noise that's kind of wiggling these bigger noises completely randomly once again but the entire character is now jittering left and right we can actually push the effect a little bit further though because if we were to rotate our camera or the character turned at a different angle that's not the orientation of it so if we were to go to our displacement X I can right click and let's add a cinema 4d tag and it will be the look at camera tag and once again Z is forward so when I click look at camera our Z is looking straight at our camera and that means it's deforming this based on the X where the X is relative to the displacer so that means it's always going to be deforming left and right no matter what our angle is no matter what the angle of a character is so now we got that going let's go ahead and duplicate that displacer and we want the exact same effect but let's have this one traveling up and down so let's go ahead and change our orientation to Y plus and now it's on y plus let's just change a different random scene on the noise so it's not identical crank that up and now I hit play and now we've got three different layers or variation on the character just like like deforming the actual geometry so you get the little individual skin imperfections but now the overall character is wiggling around quite a bit so let's go ahead and do a quick render on that and just see what we end up with so we got a crazy fairy character and hopefully every frame we're going to be getting something completely varied from the previous one and once again I'm just trying to make it look as not 3d as possible so yep don't know what to tell everybody here who's always striving for like perfected sketches like make it look organic make it look like somebody actually hand drew these things so we hit play and we get all this fun variation where it's like every single frame like it's shifted around a little bit the the cell when they're coloring it was shifted a little bit when they took the photo it just is really fun to mess you make something cool and then you mess it up as much as you possibly can it's really fun so the very very last thing I'm going to say is we've got a second executable if you're not familiar with this it's really powerful cinema 4d is like the most stable piece of software I've used I'm not just talking about 3d applications I'm talking about all applications it's like the most stable thing you use but every once in a while you might do something crazy or you dragon number too high or you dragon number too low and cinema 4d might start a hanging and you're hoping it's going to unhanged but you have to keep on working or alternatively maybe you you've got an important render going and you probably should have said to save it as tips but you said it's a QuickTime and now it's rendering and you're worried you might crash but you wanna keep on working again something that's really fun is making a second executable so I'm gonna go down here to my icon there's really easy on a Mac but it's similar on the PC go find wherever your executable is for a cinema 4d here I could just right click and I can go to options and say show in finder and it's actually gonna go find our cinema 4d now that's actually a shortcut to it so I got to find the actual one so that is this one so there's something for T that's one I've currently got open if I copy this and let's say where's there if I make a duplicate of that what's really cool is this file is really tiny that's only like 8 Meg's the actual executable you can actually go and open up a second copy of cinema 4d while the first one is open so if you get a render going if the other one is hanging and you're hoping it's gonna wake back up again but you gotta keep on working and you lost like a half hours worth of work well it's like okay maybe the other one will wake up open up a second copy of cinema 4d and keep on working and then if you got half hour goes by you've now caught up then okay go ahead and force quit the other one you've now gotten past it but the other one wakes up then you can just keep on continuing working and if you have a second render going that one is safe if you somehow man should crash this version so that's just another useful thing on there so that should wrap this up a couple quick things I want to mention we have just recently this month we are officially brought back five second projects so head on over to greyscale gorilla comm / five-second projects if you're not familiar we were doing these years ago every month we come up with a cool topic and everybody just goes and tries to make whatever you want any kind of motion graphics gonna be stop-motion animation as long as there's something that's not just video in it everybody works together and makes cool things and shares it and kind of competes and we pull them all together we announce the winners it's just a really fun way of you know making something new making something that rails is working on getting a little bit competition it's really fun for kind of game and creative juices going so we just reintroduced this I want to make sure everybody knows about it and of course visit greyscale grille account for all of our tutorials and our training and our tools I love hanging out with everybody when they go there so thanks everybody [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 16,097

Keywords: tutorial, c4d, cinema4d, cinema 4d, nab, nab show, 3d, gsg, greyscalegorilla

Id: VrvNGua4CFk

Length: 54min 26sec (3266 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018