Organic Growth Effects in Cinema4D

foreign [Music] hey folks I'm Kyle and this video is about how to create organic growth effects in cinema 40. it's a shortened version of the first ever tutorial that will be available on my patreon so we'll cover the basics of how to create the growth effect but if you're interested in more tips and tricks and also how we take that basic effect to the final look that is in the images and videos at the beginning of the video that will be available there and so if you're interested my patreon will include in-depth tutorials about cool effects using Cinema 4D Houdini After Effects and maybe some other programs as well and you know you'll have access to the project files and everything to poke around in as well as any digital assets that I have created or will create and access to a private Discord Community where we can you can get support from me and other people and basically just have a positive place to get encouragement to keep learning 3D um so with that said uh let's get let's get into it okay let's get started so this is my default scene um I have my camera asset that uh I have on my gum Road that's my default in here uh some uh just a dome light and an archive folder and a Target uh null at the origin um if you want to change your icons for your nulls you'll just go to the basic tab under I go under icon pick a preset and a color that you want and that'll be it but for this uh we won't need any of this for right now so let's just delete it um let's get a disk uh turn on your um your wireframe view by pressing NB and you can turn off by pressing n a so we want garage shading lines um and let's add some more resolution to this so okay that looks like Okay resolution for now um but one thing we're gonna do is uh we're gonna remesh this and the reason is that when we use a displacer um and that the displacer is going to be the main driver of our effect so when we use a displacer on a disk you can see that the noise kind of gets bunched up in the center um the more the higher frequency you can see it kind of follows this um this disc shape which we don't want we just want it to be like it's a flat uh it's a flat piece of geometry so what we're going to do is uh I'll make a copy so we can compare so let's uh get rid of this displacer hide this and rematch um remesh a disk uh it looks like it look it's pretty even but sometimes you need to take on the symmetric X and Y or x and z i mean and then uh we'll make this higher resolution okay that's fine press C to uh save it as an object as its own object and then let's add another um displacer so we'll add our noise in and so you can see okay this looks like the noise is completely neutral in terms of the way it's spread out and then if we compare it back to our original um you can see this is much more bunched up obviously this looks a little bit higher resolution but um just ignore that part for now you can see the way it's distributed is not completely even so that's just something to keep in mind uh for this effect or others where you know you might be using a disc or a sphere or something so let's just delete that one and this is the uh this is the one we'll work on for now um let's turn off the displacer so how how we're gonna make this effect work and also how we're gonna shade the effect is with uh vertex Maps so vertex maps are going to drive pretty much everything about this effect so uh let's get one Okay so we need to use fields we don't need to paint anything on there it's um we are going to keep this freeze effect here at the bottom that's automatically generated anytime you create a Vertex map most of the time you know if you're using just other fields or anything you don't you don't need it and you can delete it or disable it but for us we are definitely going to be using this this is going to be the base of our whole effect so uh we're going to switch the mode to grow so that will help us to expand our um our vertex map over time so we'll set that to grow we're going to add a spherical field that's going to be kind of the basis of our of our growth effect we'll make that pretty small we'll we'll animate this later but let's just get a sense of um the effect first so we have our growth so everything should the the spherical field should expand when we press play and it does and that's great but it's really fast and it's not very interesting so let's bring that down to 4 and 30. uh you would you can adjust one or both of these settings to slow down the effect okay and that is pretty good I think maybe we'll boost it tiny bit okay so our speed of our growth is okay I like that but um it's pretty boring so let's let's uh let's make it more interesting with a Shader field and some noise so if we add our Shader field nothing's changed um because a couple things we need to add a Shader so let's add a noise so now we see something but that's not what we want that's not gonna you know work when you just drop it in there you need to change the blending mode and you might think you could change it to multiply but that won't really work the way that we need it to we what we want is overlay that will uh it doesn't add but it mixes the um mixes the values of this Shader field onto the uh the spherical field and you'll see now our effect should be much more uh interesting and much closer to what we want basically this kind of folding curved organic shape around the outside which is driven by the noise and looks kind of fungal you know and that's that's sort of the look that we're going for so um okay that's that looks good to me um and then we can so if you want to customize this the the shape of the growth even more just hop into the the noise of inside the Shader and play with this you know to your heart's content you can edit all kinds of things and make it look you know look wild and whatever you know whatever you're going for so um and you know don't forget there's all kinds of noise types too so if we uh change to you know a smaller one um we'll get these very intricate and restricted kind of growth uh growth effects let's add more frames to our timeline so we can see a longer preview um and I think this is really cool too I think there's all kinds of ways you can explore um you can explore different effects just by changing the settings so what you can see though is if we zoom in this is not going to uh look very high resolution because the vertex maps are directly limited by the resolution of your geometry so we could we could boost up the we could boost up the resolution of our geometry before we apply the vertex Maps um that's one way we can do it which you know might be helpful and if you have close-up shots maybe you know maybe that'll be you know something your uh you're wanting to do but we'll as we'll see um there are other ways we can add in extra detail too one thing to note uh is when we're using a Vertex map and we have these kind of chunks in here and this applies you know to a lot of different uh a lot of different projects to one thing we can do is add in another vertex map um we have to name name it something different because if you have vertex maps that are the same name sometimes things go wrong so we will say we'll call this blur so uh this one we'll call growth okay so in our blur we're going to drag in we're going to delete the freeze in this one we're going to drag in our other vertex map and um under the mode we're going to select average and then we're going to decrease this radius to whatever is appropriate for our scene and then it will uh it will blur the result so compared to that chunky you know Jagged looking version here we have a much smooth a much more smooth result on our vertex map and we can use this for whatever else we need if we need a smoother version so just remember that uh strategy as well if you're if you're working with vertex maps and you need uh you need the end result to not look as as pixely and chunky as this so remember that technique um I don't know if we're going to use it later but it is I think it's a really solid one to know so let's we can delete that one for now because we can just remake it if we need it um I'm gonna switch back to the standard noise profile I I just I like that one I like the effect that we get with this this is kind of what I'm after so okay we have kind of our the basis of our growth effects set up now we need to pipe that into the displacer so the displacer knows to use this for its effect because right now you know this these two are not linked in any in any way so we're going to go into our displacer we are going to go into the uh Fields section and we're going to drag in our vertex map so now that it's uh operating as a field for the displacer nothing is happening which is exactly what we want so um the this was a huge issue for me while I was like you know I kept uh you know trying to figure out why this wasn't working under the fields for some reason this used deformed points option needs to be off or else uh yeah the displacer won't be able to uh read that in and use it so when we turn that on we can or turn that off excuse me this use deformed points needs to be off and then the uh displacer will work the way we expect it to so there there we go you know you can kind of see how this effect is gonna is gonna work um and that's the basis of it and so it you know again right now it kind of looks static um and not as interesting as as you know we want it to so we we will uh one thing we can do is is animate the noise so let's let's bump up the animation speed of the noise and that's not working either so let's see okay I think I must have been in the wrong the wrong noise oh my God I was in the wrong noise so I again I was confused why that wasn't working but I was just in the wrong noise uh Shader so we need to be make sure you're in the one for the displacer or else you're gonna be confused as to why things aren't working like iOS okay so uh now once we add in some animation speed we can see our noises is moving and evolving over time which that looks great and it looks much more like alive and organic and that's what we're after so we can add some animation speed um if you want to uh if you want to get uh even more um fine-tuned with your noise you if you select a layer go into your Shader and make sure this is on the Shader tab you can stack all kinds of effects um and this again this applies to all kinds of uh all kinds of Shader building stuff too so um we are going to use and let's try another noise you know layering them on top of each other this is a very small noise so let's see okay um the way they're interacting is not what we want so let's again try different blending modes let's try multiply that looks cool I mean it it looks cool to me it's not the effect that I'm going for but again like we're just discovering how many different kinds of effects that you can achieve with this sort of setup um let's try overlay okay that's looking cool um again with this one let's introduce some animation to the noise okay yeah that looks cool it looks very kind of alive and chaotic um maybe we'll reduce the effect though yeah to me that looks that looks cool um so when we layer for some reason the animation speed on this one was turned off um so when we layer it together you can see we can start to build these very interesting um chaotic growth effects so that part of our our growth is is kind of done for now you know we could we can customize and tweak it to you know whatever degree we need to for our projects but that's the basis of how you build these types of things if you're interested in turning the effect we started with into something like one of these video examples please uh check out the full tutorial on my patreon [Music]

Channel: Kyle Sullivan Design

Views: 16,560

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Id: zvTBMO0UK8E

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023