Siggraph 2018 Rewind - Russ Gautier: Cinematic Techniques in Cinema 4D

my name is Russ Gautier and the art director at a studio called perception in New York City today we're going to be discussing cinematic techniques in cinema 4d specifically how we use cinema 4d and how you can use cinema 4d to achieve some of the things that we put up on the big screen so before we get started with with cinema just really quick a little bit about who perception is and what we do so perception was founded in 2001 by Jeremy Lasky and Danny Gonzalez we are based in New York City we are a team of multidisciplinary designers from all walks of life from all backgrounds 2d 3d UI UX everything we do a ton and we have a very unique focus that unique focuses what we call prototyping the future so what exactly is prototyping the future prototyping the future is applying principles like UX design both 2d and 3d obviously we spend a lot of time doing 3d animation and visual effects to two primary pillars film and tech so on the film side of things we do of course design we do animation we do visual effects we do title sequences we do what is called fui which is like futuristic user interface so things like Ironman Holograms and most recently had done a ton of work on on black panther which we'll discuss a little bit today so on the film side of things we've worked on black panther thor ragnarok spider-man homecoming all the Avengers movies Batman vs Superman etc etc there's a ton of of work we've had a long-standing relationship with Marvel Studios which which has been really fantastic really wonderful people there on the other side of things we spend our other half of our time working for big tech companies so we've we've been fortunate enough to work on early development for things like the microsoft hololens developing UI concepts for the microsoft hololens we got a chance to help with early days on like the Samsung Galaxy when they were working on on their their UI design we were fortunate enough to get our our hands on a little bit of the 2017 Ford GT which is a really really cool project where we were doing things like dash cluster design and that kind of thing for the concept car really really fun and then of course there's a ton of stuff that that I can't talk about it's all you know super tight lip NDA stuff but it's really cool it's really fun stuff and all of these things really feed into each other they create this sort of like infinite loop because of course all these you know the the executives from these big tech companies they go watch movies they go see Marvel movies and they think like oh how can I get that kind of cinematic influence into my product and at the same time when Marvel Studios comes to us and they ask us to develop some really wild out there technology they asked us to bring a little bit of that real world with us something that feels like a little believable something that doesn't necessarily feel like completely magical and fantastic but it is somehow grounded in the real world and that's something that that I really want to discuss today so today I really want to talk about Black Panther and some of the work that we did on Black Panther so for this movie we had this was by far our largest engagement with Marvel Studios there's about 18 months of work that we put into this movie and it really started with a discussion about technology they had come to us like very early days in in their development Wakanda which is where black panther takes place is a a highly technologically advanced society they're built on this mountain of a comet of a material called vibranium if you're familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe it's what Captain America's shield is made out of it is everything that powers Wakanda everything about it's really you know quite a quite a substance so they they came to us and they asked us you know what are some really out there sort of fringe technologies that we could start to incorporate into some of these things so we did a bunch of technical development on all of like almost all of the major technical moments in the movie we had done like previz and development and conceptualizing of how these technologies work you can see all this stuff right now if you go there's just a ridiculous amount of stuff way too much to to cover in my short time here but you can see our entire full case study at experienced perception comm and this morning both the perception and my Twitter account tweeted out direct links to some of our case study elements as well as our black panther reel which you guys can check out at experience or exp underscore perception and at robot astronaut underscore that's mine so back to Black Panther one of the one of the things that we developed one of our sort of keystone technologies that appeared throughout the movie as well as the so we we were fortunate enough to spend several weeks doing previz and development for the prologue at the beginning of the movie if you've seen it it's this like really amazing history lesson of Wakanda that's all rendered in sand done by some really fantastically talented folks and we had a chance to do previz and development for that and then we had actually done the title sequence at the end of the movie which was all done in sand as well so sand was sort of this keystone technology and an element that was present through throughout the entire movie if you saw it there's like sand Holograms there's sand interfaces really really cool stuff sand was a big big thing for us so we had we needed a way to execute sand and so we turned to cinema 4d and we love working in cinema 4d this is our our primary 3d package it is incredibly powerful just really quick why we like to use cinema 4d as a studio it is really a 3d designer's tool so like it really allows somebody who doesn't necessarily have like a large background and visual effects or you know crazy 3d development to really get in and and tweak and push and pull and make things very quickly it's very fast it's very accessible and easy so for the first-time user it's really easy to get your hands on and make some fantastic things but it also goes really really deep the more you dive into it the more you realize that these features are incredibly powerful and really really cool it's a fantastic program so back to San sand is kind of a tricky Beast sand is it's a weird thing like you wouldn't think so because really at the end of the day sand is it's just little rocks right like it's not it's not anything special it's just tiny little rocks but that's kind of why sand is such a tricky element to work with and to build right you can't just take a picture of sand and map it to a 3d object and have it look just like sand like it just doesn't it doesn't work and and the reason for that really is is and you'll have to forgive the my poor quality iPhone video that I shot in the office but as you can see here there's there's like a randomized highlight or like fall-off like each of these little rocks has like facets and reflections and refractions and that's what makes sand such a tricky element to to generate in 3d at least in in a shader right because we could scatter a you know a billion particles on a 3d object and turn it into sand that way but that gets really really heavy you know even for even for a program like cinema that becomes really really intense so our sand shader needs we needed to be able to develop a SAN shader that was both fast and flexible it needed to be it needed to be scalable so it needed to be able to work for a human and it needed to be able to work for like a bridge you know like it needed to you needed to work at all scales it definitely needed to be client and comment friendly because the pressure is really high on these jobs as you can imagine you know if they wanted to make it more Glenn T less Glenn T we needed to be able to react to that very very quickly and then last but not least it needed be consistent for stereo because we were delivering left and right eye for this movie so we need to be able to make sure that the glints were exactly the same in the left eyes they were in the right eye because otherwise you get something called rivalries and it just looks really it looks like weird it doesn't it doesn't look right so we needed to make sure that it was consistently repeatable we couldn't use just random scattering of elements that we couldn't repeat again and again and again so that's really sort of the motivation behind our our sand shader so what I'm gonna do for you guys today is actually build a version of our sand shader just really quickly so you guys can see exactly how we put this thing together and to do that I've pulled out a lovely Raptor model out of the out of the content browser and we're gonna turn this Raptor model into sand today so I've got a very very simple setup just a simple camera move on this guy so we pull out of the mouth we get sort of a nice rotation around and then we're back in we have just three really simple lights I've got like a really strong rim light back here I've got sort of a secondary rim light over here and I've got just a fill light just to get a little bit in there but we have no textures or anything so if I if I hit the render button on this thing right now you can see it's just just a gray flat nothing like there's no shading to it I've also got in here a couple subdivision objects so I can turn up the subdivisions on this thing and and make it look nice and smooth but for the moment I think I'm gonna leave those off just for the sake of speed so I can make sure to get through this for you guys so the first thing we're gonna do we're actually gonna make a brand new material I'm gonna drop this on to onto the teeth and then onto the body I've actually got the teeth separated out because later I'll apply a displacer I didn't want to displace the teeth they get a little funny so we're gonna build a color shader first and we're gonna do this using cinema 4d z' noise shaders which are absolutely incredible like if you've ever used cinema 4d xoi shaders you know how complex and how deep and how fast they are they're really really amazing so we're gonna build this entire thing using noise shaders so in here in my color material first of all the very first thing I'm gonna do is name this color just so I can keep everything straight in the color channel I'm going to drop in my first noise and if I give this a quick render you're not gonna see a whole lot it's it's you know it's got very broad noise on it doesn't really quite look like sand at all so we're gonna fix that I'm gonna go in here the first thing I'm gonna do is change the random seed to just a random value it comes with a default value but I'm gonna change it up just so you know just to keep it random and under noise we have all of these different types of noise we can apply to this I'm gonna apply something called booyah we're gonna go with booyah I like booyah because it's a very high contrast shader you can see here it's got lots of really dark values and lots of really light values so that we can really kind of get something that feels like they're grainy out of that right so right now it's gonna be a little big if I hit the if I hit the render button it's gonna look a little gigantic and there goes okay cool we're gonna make that much smaller I'm gonna say like three percent and before I go any further I'm actually gonna jump over here into After Effects we're gonna save this project file really fast I'm just gonna drop it right to the desktop and we're going to name this so we're actually going to do a little bit of look dev using Cinna we're with this guy as well so you get a little extra extra look at how some this works so I'm going to bring this cinema4d file I'm actually just taking the cinema 4d fell right into After Effects so like no exporting no rendering no nothing just taking the whole thing right into AE and here it is I'm gonna drop it into a comp just like any old layer I'm going to turn off pre calculation I'm going to turn on keep textures in RAM and I'm gonna tell the renderer to be standard final because right now you can see it's it's giving me like a software preview render I want that to be like standard final and I'm gonna go out to like frame 40 where I can really see the full Raptor right in one of these days it will work for me cool while that's doing its thing there we go beautiful all right so there's my current version of the sand Raptor rendered as a frame so I can take a look at that right it doesn't look like sand just yet it just sort of looks like a I don't know weird noisy clay or something and part of that is because the specular fall-off right now is this very broad kind of fake specular fall-off which I don't want to see so we're gonna go in the next thing we're gonna do is actually change the reflectance Channel so I'm gonna come in here to the reflectance Channel I'm gonna delete this default specular let me get that out of here and I'm gonna add a GG X right now that turns it into a mirror that's not gonna work very well so one thing I want to do is is make sure I get pretty aggressive with the roughness I'm gonna take the roughness up to like 60% so it's it's more rough and ragged like you don't see like little shiny bits in in sand they're always you know very kind of broad so the next thing I want to do is add again another noise so I'm gonna come down here to my texture tab I'm gonna go to noise look at that and I'm gonna change my random seed to just some number and in here I think this time I'm going to use dents we're gonna use dents if I go up just a little bit you can kind of see what dents look like here in the preview and I know that this texture is gonna be really really big because the last one was really really big so this one I'm gonna take down I'm gonna say like three percent I'm gonna go ahead and save this really quick I'm gonna pop back over to after-effects and we're gonna wait for that maybe we go back a frame see if it'll refresh itself it's like rendering in the background as we're doing this so the reason I want to do this is so that I have a chance to tweak the look of these materials in after-effects before I go ahead and render this thing out because I don't want to wait you know 45 minutes or you know 20 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it is to get this thing rendered out okay so there we go that's that's currently what we've got so I'm happy with the scale but the the distribution is a little intense at the moment so I think we're going to do is come down to here I'm just gonna expand this up so we can see this I'm gonna change this low clip value and I'm gonna get pretty a aggressive with the low clip and then take it up to like 50% and you can kind of see what that's done it's it's clipped all the values and the noise below 50% so everything that's below 50% is now black which means it's not gonna have any specular affect whatsoever I might even take that up higher because I feel like that might be a little low there we go all right we'll go to 66 we'll try that and give that a quicksave pop back over to after-effects let that do its thing and then we should see something that looks a little bit more like sand a little less like a weird there we go that's looking a little better cool so that's looking a little bit more sandy right let's go ahead and add in this let's add a bump channel bump channel is a nice thing to have here just just to keep keep the the variation in the the light and shadow across the surface of the Raptor a little less even because right now it's going to be very even and predictable so again I'm going to add a noise same thing we're just gonna change a random value here and I think I'm gonna use booyah again for this guy and let's change the global scale to let's try 4 percent let's see what that does give it a quick save pop back over to AE we're gonna see that update here in a second it's not gonna be a huge difference but when you render this thing out it will add like some nice subtlety to the way that the the specular highlight falls off so it's not a huge difference but it does add a little bit of something so the next thing I want to look at is if I drop like a solid behind here let's throw just like a white solid back here let's say white solid throw it back here right now this this silhouette of this thing is very even it's very geometric so if I if I go back in to cinema and I turn on my my subdivisions this will get nice and smooth it'll kind of accentuate what I'm talking about here where we've got this like really hard edge it's not really something you would see if if this was really made of sand right like this this like nice hard geometric shape just doesn't feel Sandie so one thing I'm doing in here is I threw in a displace two former and what this is doing is it's adding a little bit of that edge noise to it to kind of break up some of that some of that silhouette and let's pop back into After Effects and see what that's doing one of these days it'll render there we go it's coming in so what that's gonna do is just just give the edges like a little bit of sandy look to it so we don't even have to scatter geometry on this thing we could we could totally scatter a whole bunch of clones on this thing and that would help break up that silhouette as well which is fantastic so there we go we've got like a nice little silhouette break up so it feels like it's got little grains of sand that are breaking up that edge right so the next thing to do would be to render this out and that would be really boring for you guys to see it here and watch so I'm not gonna make you watch it I'm just gonna pull on a render that I've already got so I'm gonna bring in my base color render that I've already got and I'm just gonna alt drag it right into place right over right over this guy so we're gonna alt drag that just like that there we go and I'm gonna change its interpolation to 24 frames a second there we go cool so what we have I turn off this this white solid if I let this play you can see we've got this like nice noise going on right but it's totally look like sand it still looks like just sort of like a rock or a granite or something like it doesn't look sandy it doesn't have that that sparkle to it so the sparkle is the next thing we're gonna do and this is really the key to making a sand shader look much more like sand so we're gonna jump right back in here to to cinema and I'm gonna make a new material and I'm gonna call this material glints cool just like that and this one's gonna be a super super simple material it's just gonna be a luminance material and that's it so I'm gonna drop that onto my two pieces of geometry here and in here we're gonna use yet another noise love noise and for this one I think we'll use booyah again that maybe we use dense let's try dense let's see what that looks like we're gonna shrink this down again pretty pretty far I'm not gonna go quite as far as some of the other passes I've done which have been like the four or five percent range I think I'm gonna go like maybe six or seven percent let's try that and I know that this is off the bat way too many glints I can see here so I'm gonna get really aggressive with the low clip again and I'm gonna make it just a handful of glints so I'm just gonna give this a quick save pop back over into After Effects and I'm actually going to take the same cinema 4d file and drop it right on top just like that and we're gonna let that let that cook okay change some of these settings here standard final keep textures and Ram just so it doesn't look like this and we're gonna let that think for a second and then there we go cool so it doesn't look like sand yet but we're getting there we're getting we're making some progress so this will be our glint pass right so again we're gonna render this thing out and thankfully I've already done that so you guys don't have to watch me do it so we're gonna go grab my glint Pass we're gonna bring that right in and again I'm gonna alt drag that right here cool so obviously mic glint Pass was a little bit different from the one I was just showing but it's the same idea the great thing about this is you can really do this in in in any of the renders which is awesome so if I hit if I hit play this is just a static noise map to this geometry again not very sandy right doesn't quite have that like Clinton is to in fact it probably looks even less likes and then the last one did but the next step is sort of where the where the magic really happens and that's we're gonna make a third material we're going to drop that on here and this material we're just going to call this and I will call it in noise about that there we go and again this one is going to be illuminance material and for this one again we're just going to use the noise we're gonna use a different noise for this guy I'm gonna change this random value we're gonna come down here we're gonna use cell Voronoi the reason I like cell Voronoi for this particular task I'll show you your an After Effects we're just gonna again grab my cinema 4d file drag it right on top we're gonna say standard final we're gonna say no pre calculation keep textures in RAM I'm gonna let that cook for just a second and you'll see what we get is a raptor with these like big plates of color right so I know that's way too big I don't want it to be that big but I don't want it to be super tiny either so let's try let's try to twelve twelve percent scale on this thing and give that a quick save pop back to after-effects see what that's done for us so we should see like those plates kind of shrink down right so we've got these sort of big plates of noise that are thinner in here we don't have a lot of black values we don't have a lot of white values we have a lot of like sort of medium Gray's and that's kind of exactly what I want for this particular task which you know of course I've already rented this thing for you guys you don't have to watch me do it I'm gonna bring in my noise render thank you see okay we're just gonna alt drag that just like we've been doing right back on top here and gotta set this interpret footage for 24 frames a second there we go cool and if I rip if I let this Ram preview you can see here again no animation in this thing whatsoever so you're like why are you doing this you're there's no there's no glints or anything happening but what we're gonna do we're gonna use this ancient weird plugin for After Effects under here and color correct Colorama as soon as I drop this thing on here it's gonna turn like crazy rainbow colors right if you've ever used Colorama it's it's a it's a wacky plugin so I drop it on here and wow that I've now gone the farthest from sand that I've been so far right like this looks insane but what's happening here really is if I jump back here and go under effects there we go we don't need this sin where that can go away cool so what's what's going on here exactly is if I if I turn this off for just a second what it's doing is it's taking those gray values and it's mapping them to this color wheel from from black to white right so it's taking all those gray values and it's remapping them to this this insane rainbow color wheel I don't really want rainbow color wheel all I want is really a gray so I'm gonna come under here and I'm gonna go to ramp gray and now it's gonna look pretty much exactly like a look before but what this allows me to do is now it allows me to kind of remap these gray values so I'm gonna drop in just a couple black values a couple white values and do this do this here so I'm basically just kind of breaking up this color wheel a little bit so that it's not quite so even you know I kind of want to randomize this a little bit all right so now I've got this thing and you know now this looks a lot more contrast to right like I've got a lot more blacks got a lot more whites the power of Colorama really comes in this input phase tab where I can change the phase shift so what this is gonna allow me to do is basically cycle through the gray values and remap them based on this input all right this sort of phase shift so what that lets me do if you guys are familiar with After Effects let's get rid of this that's gonna let me take this and use it as a luma matte for my glints so now I've got my glints layer underneath I've got this crazy noise and when I animate this all right if I set my glints to something like a screen mode you won't see the black values in there there we go so now I can animate through this and you can see even though I'm sitting still I've got this like glint enos happening on my sand shader right so I'm just gonna set a couple of keyframes I'm gonna say we've got this big move right here that kind of eases in at this point I'm gonna go to phase shift and set a keyframe like reveal those and we'll like scooch this so we get this and then down here at about frame 90 I want to change this value so we get some glint eNOS over that time and then we get another big move right at the end right so we're gonna really get aggressive at this wheel and I'm gonna do a little just a little ease in and a little ease out and here just like that cool so now when I hit this its Ram previewing a little slow you can see though I've got like a little bit of like glinting this happen and thankfully I've actually done a little a little comp on this guy and I'm rendered it out for you so you can see what this looks like with a little bit of love applied so this is this is my sand Raptor with with that sand shader applied to it so that's sort of a rough version of this sand shader and this is what we did for for a good chunk of the the title sequence in black panther this is a method that we used and it really allowed us to be very flexible with client comments and everything which was awesome cool so moving on to cymatics so we're gonna talk a little bit about cymatics cymatics was another component of the the black panther work that we had done and cymatics is if you want to get technical about it it's the visual menaced manifestation of sound through some medium right so like salt or sand or you know a ferrofluid or something but really you can kind of think of it as like if you take a plate of salt and you put it on a speaker and you play just the right consistent tone through that speaker that sand or salt is gonna arrange itself into these really cool organic patterns if you haven't seen it check it out cymatics are absolutely incredible really really cool so we felt like this was a fantastic sort of world to play in for for some of the black panther sand stuff right particularly like vibranium like it's response to sound in really unique ways so it sort of made sense that cymatics were going to be a part of this we did its this for the tech development we did a ton of this in in the title sequence as well so semantics were a big part of what we had done so I want to show you guys today how you can do something like this in cinema 4d and for that I actually have a little Python script that I developed so I'm not gonna bore you with the details of what's actually in the Python script we'll make it available for everybody so you can download it and check it out and pull it apart and do your thing but I will show you just a little bit about what's going on under the hood so I've got four that I've got this sort of little Photoshop demo right and before we actually before we dive into this let's let's do this let's make let's make some geometry in cinema 4d first so what I like to do is actually start with like a disc or like a circle shape right but I don't want to use the regular disc because the regular disc has like a very radial distribution of points so you get more points you get more densely packed points in the middle than you do on the outside edges and it creates some kind of uneven geometry sometimes so I'm gonna make my own sort of weird disc and I'm gonna use a plane for that and I'm gonna take the plane I'm gonna take its width and height segments down to one I'm gonna make it editable and I'm gonna drop that into a subdivision surface and I'm gonna crank that subdivision surface up to six as high as it'll go and I'm gonna make that editable as well cool so here we have a roughly circular shaped object that has a much more even distribution of points across the surface right so when we apply something like a displacement we're gonna get a lot more even displacement than we would with like a disc shape and I'm gonna rename this we're just gonna call this base object just to get started cool so what I've done I've actually got some some images from do that's the wrong folder I've got some images that I rendered at after-effects that I'm going to use as as a displacement essentially so I've got these guys so these are just rendered out of After Effects and all they really are is just a radio emitter just duplicated three times and rotated around so I've got one on each side and they're all emitting sort of simultaneously and then I'm doing a little bit of blurring and a little bit of crunching of levels to get these kind of shapes right so these are sort of vaguely cymatic they're not actually cymatic patterns because for that we need some like resonant frequency simulations and everything we're not going to do that but we can make something that looks relatively close the nice thing about this is we could also pipe in other things as well it doesn't have to be a a cymatic like pattern it could be literally anything which is what we did for the movie so I took these things out of After Effects and I'm gonna bring them into cinema 4d here as a displacer so I'm gonna displace this base geometry object I've got here and we go into shading and I'm gonna bring in one of these materials so let's bring in let's say this guy I'm gonna say no we don't need to do that so what we get is this this kind of shape here right so the areas that are black are moving down so if I look at it from the side the areas that are black are moving down the areas that are white are moving up I actually want to make sure that the areas that are black don't move down at all so I'm gonna go into object and I'm gonna change that from intensity Center to just intensity and what that's going to do is it's going to limit all of the black values to of a wide position of zero and push all the white values up just based on that image so you get you get this kind of shape here right and I'm actually gonna take this height up up a little bit let's say like 25 right okay so here we have this sort of like weird kind of undulating shape based on this like this symmetrical pattern that I had developed in After Effects so what we're gonna do is we're gonna apply my little Python scripts so now I'll show you guys before we actually do this sort of a little bit what's going on under the hood if we imagine that 3d shape that sort of shape that's all over the place if we imagine that as just a line right we aren't we aren't going to visualize this in three dimensions you said we're going to keep it 2d if we imagine this is just a line with a handful of points on it what the script is doing is it's it's establishing a threshold in the Y position so it says points below this line we're not gonna move at all we're gonna leave these points alone points above that line these guys up here what they're gonna do if I grab a make a new layer I can actually draw on here for you so what they're gonna do is they're gonna go through every single point that's above that threshold and they're gonna find their closest point below the threshold so like this point here this guy will forgive my drawing with a mouse ouch this guy is gonna look and he's gonna find this point down here is the closest one same thing with this one this one's gonna look and this down here is the closest point to that point this one is going to likewise be looking at this point here this one I drew in the middle so we're gonna say sure it's looking over here this one here likewise so so basically it's going to go through every single point above that threshold and it's going to find a point below the threshold that is closest to its position and then what the script is gonna do is it's gonna flatten everything out so it's no longer gonna be like a wavy line it's gonna flatten it all out and then it's gonna move all of those points close to the points that it was closest to so that sort of looks something like this where it's it's gone from this sort of wavy line to now a flat line and all the points are kind of squished together so essentially what it's doing is it's it's taking a displacer that was displacing in Y so it's displacing up and it's making it displace in instead based on a black and white image so we're gonna run that script really quick so I'm gonna take this object there we go and we're gonna right-click and I'm gonna say current state to object so what that's gonna do is it's gonna bake that displace or into that object so I don't have to have the displace to form or on there anymore and I'm just gonna hide this object with a displacer we're gonna call this cymatic one sure so on my on my constrict points no object I've got this user data field and all at once is a object to deform so I'm gonna drop this object in here this cymatic one object I'm gonna put that in there I'm gonna leave these settings alone but the multiplier basically tells it how far how aggressive to move those points towards towards the areas that are white I've got this sort of fall-off curve that would allow basically a distance based fall-off to to exist and then I've got execute and and reset I apologize in advance my Python skills are just enough to be dangerous so hopefully this works for you guys if you get a chance to play with it so I'm gonna hit the little execute button and what that's gonna do is make this geometry look real weird as soon as it's done there we go cool so essentially what it's done like I said is is flatten everything out so it's flat as a pancake and it's moved all of those points that were on the outside edges it's moved them in so the next thing I'm gonna do I'm actually going to duplicate this this base object the way we're gonna move these points we are gonna use a pose morph if you guys have ever used a pose morph before it's basically it takes two objects with the same number of points and it moves the points from the one object shape to the other object shape so I'm going to show you what that does and it's actually a really nice illustration of what this script really did behind the scenes once I get this up and running so we're gonna drop in we're gonna go into tags we're gonna go to character tags we're gonna go to pose more if we're going to throw this in here and you can deform all of these kind of properties what we're going to do is deform points and when you click points now we get this interface we have a base pose which is which is essentially what we're looking at here and we have pose 0 which is going to be sort of the the next pose in line and if I twirl down this Advanced tab I can actually drop in my cymatic one object as a target and now it's going to sort of move all those points to where they were on that target object so I have base pose and I have pose 0 which is my somatic tart so when I go over to animate now I get this slider right so this is actually a really good illustration of what that script does so as I slide this down you can see it's moved those points close it's essentially displaced them inwards based on that black and white image that I had so I've got this this working pretty well here that's cool but I actually think this this looks a little even and to illustrate that I think what I'm gonna do is we're gonna make this now sort of look a little bit more like sand by using a cloner object I'm gonna clone just a cube we're just gonna take a cube and make that cube pretty small and make it one by one by one and I'm gonna throw that into a cloner object just like this and if you've not played with a cloner object before it does exactly what it says it does it takes an object that's underneath its hierarchy and duplicates it many many times in this case it's duplicating it three times in Y and each case it's moving it up 50 centimeters not really what I wanted to do so I'm gonna change this to object mode and I'm gonna drag my base object one into the object here OOP just like that and what its gonna do is it's gonna put one of those cubes on every single vertex that's that's on that object and once it does that you'll be able to see that that what it's doing is is creating a very sort of even pattern all right there we go cool it just needed a little refresh so what it's doing this this doesn't look like sand at all it looks like a like a grid in a circle right so I can sort of check what this pose morph is doing if I slide this you can see now exactly what's doing it's taking all those points and it's moving them based on that greyscale image that I had still does it look like sand it looks very regular but we're gonna change that right now so I'm actually going to turn off this cloner really quick and I'm gonna go back to my base object and I'm gonna use a if I go up under mograph I'm gonna go use a random effector a random effector usually in the past has been used for mograph objects specifically but I'm gonna use it as a as a de former for my base object so I'm gonna throw that under here and I'm gonna go to the de former tab and I'm gonna set that to point right now it looks like a giant mess as you would imagine like it's moving points in every direction it looks crazy but we can we can reduce that down a little bit if we go back to parameter I'm gonna set this to like 1 in X 1 and Y and 0 and Z so now let's go a little more now let's say 2 & 2 right so now we're kind of disturbing those points a little bit they aren't going up and down like if I look at the side view you can see the side view is perfectly flat because I haven't disturbed it at all in in in the y axis I've only messed with it like as its as it's on that single plane now when I turn this off and I turn my cloner back on you can see we'll have points let's give this a little refresh just slide this guy there we go okay so now we're much less even right we have points that are scattered they feel a little bit more random which is exactly what we want and then when we start sliding this slider it starts to feel like we've got these sort of more organic groupings of particles they're not stuck in a grid anymore which is really nice that's sort of what we want the only other thing I want to do with this is right now if I if I go back to look at my geometry and I slide this slider everything moves very evenly right leg I'll kind of move at the same time I want to add a little bit of flare to that and I want to have those move from the center out so not just moving all at the same time in order to do that I'm going to go under the deformers and I'm gonna grab a morph deform er and what this is gonna allow me to do if I drop this under my random effector actually that's drop it on top there we go yeah it's gonna work better so what it's gonna do is it's gonna basically take over for this pose morph tag so the pose morph tag still works but on my morph to former you can see I've got the same exact slider where I can slide it around just like that but the nice thing is now I've got a fall-off that I can apply so that allows me to affect different points at different times in different ways right so if I change this to say Fira chol de former fall-off and maybe we'll make this like 300 by 300 by 300 what I really want is that that kind of red sphere area to be outside of all my points if you can see that I'm sort of moving that right now and I want to make sure that it lies outside my points pretty effectively so I'm gonna say like 35% will not fall off just so all the points are fully affected right so I'm gonna go back to my object here I'm gonna slide this all the way up and now when I go back to my fall-off and I change the scale it's actually gonna move those points based on that fall-off so I'll be able to to make this animation a little bit more dynamic as I'm transitioning from somatic pattern to somatic pattern by going from Center out so it creates this kind of like rippling pulse effect which is really cool the other thing about this that we can do is actually play with the spline if you want to have like a little overshoot we could add a couple points to this spline down here because we it's a it's a fall-off so we add a couple of points and now we have complete control over the way that this thing falls off over the over the duration so if I take this slider and I push it up a little bit what we're gonna get as we move this scale across is actually a little overshoot which is fun cool so what I want to do really quick is I've actually rendered out a pretty simple example of what what this ends up looking like to show you guys really quick so this is a simple example of of morphing between three different cymatic patterns which is cool we're going to come back to that in just a second because I actually have a brand new thing that I want to show you guys I learned this yesterday and it completely blew my mind this is uh so this is sort of the old school way of doing this right this very brute force like Python method of doing this thing sort of beat it with a hammer until it works I've actually learned of a fantastic way to do this in our twenty that I want to show you guys because I literally fell out of my seat yesterday when they were showing you this so we're going to did you do too we're gonna start a brand new oh you know what I'm in the wrong version there we go cool so we're gonna jump over to our 20 and I want to show you guys how to do the exact same thing in our 20 in a super elegant way and I hope I don't screw it up because I've only done this a couple of times so what we're gonna do is I've got I've got my sort of base object created exactly the same way as I did before with the plane with the subdivisions up to six and then make it editable I've got this very even distribution of points so under mograph I'm gonna go and grab a target effector and I'm gonna drop that under here and I'm gonna change just a couple of things in the target effector we're gonna use fields for this so the brand new fields feature in our 20 which is ridiculously powerful really really cool stuff so I'm gonna change the target mode to field direction which I'll explain in a minute we're gonna set this to repel which I'll also explain shortly and then under the former we're going to set the deformation two points so I want to I want to use the target effector to deform the points in the object right so it's sort of like I used the random effector to randomize the points this one I'm actually going to use the target effector to to to control the points and now the the really cool stuff happens under the fall-off tabs so when I was using the the morph de former before the fall-off tab was very limited it had like just a handful of options I could do like a sphere or a torus or I could do a linear the new fall-off system is absolutely incredible like the new fields are really really amazing so for this one I'm actually gonna use a shader field so under here I'm gonna grab a shader field and drop that in and I'm gonna change just a couple of settings here in the shader field for one I want to add an image so I'm gonna add my one of my weird cymatic patterns I'm gonna grab this guy I'm gonna throw that in here cool so automatically this looks weird and broken but you can tell it's doing something something is happening in here I'm actually going to go under direction and turn off normalize direction so if I go back to my target object I'm gonna change my distance I'm gonna reduce this distance value down to say like maybe 15 right so now if I change this distance strength with like three things I've done all of that work in this incredibly elegant way and this works exactly the same way with mograph so if I you know if I make my like my little cube sand particle and set it to a value of 1 and we throw in a cloner and do this guy here we're gonna set this to object mode and we're gonna set our subdivision surface the object and we're gonna set this to be a vertex and we're gonna turn off the visibility on our subdivision surface now you can see if I go in here to the target effector and I change this distance strength now you can see I'm getting almost exactly the same thing but it's got this like really cool kind of organic feeling and it's so elegant it's so simple and intensely powerful it's really really cool I like I said I literally fell out of my seat yesterday when I saw this thing completely blown away it was it was really really amazing so I'll run this this sort of example again for you guys really quick just to just to show you this sort of simplified example of how this could how this could work and that's what I've got for you guys today thank you very much so if you if you want you can check out again see our work at experience perception com follow perception on Twitter it's at exp underscore perception and follow me on Twitter I am at robot astronaut underscore awesome thank you guys very much [Music]

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 20,115

Keywords: 3d, 3d software, c4d, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema4d, maxon, tutorial, c4d motion graphics, cinema 4d motion graphics, cinema4d motion graphics, mo graph, mograph, motion graphics, c4d live, c4dlive, siggraph, siggraph 2018, siggraph 2018 rewind, siggraph c4dlive, siggraph maxon, siggraph rewind

Id: VOYKdfq1hBw

Length: 48min 28sec (2908 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 07 2018