Siggraph 2018 Rewind - Tim Clapham: Fields and the Evolution of Mograph

hello so this is all done with fields it's kind of the thing you can do it's a privilege to the beer thank you max on for bringing me out thank you everyone for coming and thank you the internet for watching so how's that for a hello hello Lux many of you know me from hello Lux which is a it's kind of started out as a blog and we have about 100 free tutorials there cinema 4d few after-effects X particles octane all that stuff and we also do paid training we just released the new product so if you use redshift this is by rich Norsworthy who's an incredibly talented guy it's an amazing bit of training volume one there will be some more and there's a bit of a shortage of redshift training for cinema so if you do use it definitely head over and check it out there's a free chapter you can watch Hello Lux comm Lux is my main business we're a production company based in Sydney very small pulling freelancers work with other Studios work directly with clients all sorts of stuff and this is the work we do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] whoo thank you and many studios involved in that not just lux we get to work with other studios people like kin things buck tendril never sit still anyway check out Lux TV for full credits because definitely a lot of amazing talented people involved in that I don't know who's feeding back there so anyway what I'm here to talk about is our 20 cinema 4d released 20 it's pretty awesome i've been using cinema since version 5 getting on a bit now but this is the probably one of the best releases since probably mograph for me it's just amazing and what I want to talk about today is the new fields fields so you know wait a minute what what our fields feels actually a really simple they are like the new generation and fall-off but actually they're like a whole new way of spreading data through cinema but essentially they're just controller value and one of the developers explained to me and oh how they work one way is an analogy of like comparing it to an alpha Channel and we all know how alpha channels work we have like a white pixel we have a black pixel if we have a black pixel then it makes our image transparent if we have a white pixel it makes our image opaque so really you're looking at a value between like black and white or noir and one or zero to a hundred and any of those in-between values and that's all in a all the field to do but they do it with maybe how high you're going to move a cube or maybe how far a vertex is going to move on a displacer or it could be like a shader the other cool thing about fields is that we can blend them and it's a really interesting implementation because it's so easily accessible to everyone if you've used fall-off at all then you your progression into using fields will be totally natural if you've used an image in editing package like Photoshop for instance then you can be immediately at home because the UI is just like working with layers in Photoshop so this example here is an interesting way of showing it because what I've done here is used three spherical fields we can now change the color in the fall off itself in the field rather than on the effector you can do it either way but using the fields is a lot more versatile I guess so here I've got a red green and blue one and then I've just used add composite mode to create this obvious hue wheel which is something we're all familiar with but this is all done using the vertex color tagged and rendered in cinema and it just I think this is an easy way to sort of understand how it works because we can all immediately relate to this kind of stuff but rather than just show you slides well I thought we'd do is jump into cinema and have a look I'm gonna start off with some basic stuff of how of how fields work so here I've got a matrix object and one of the options on the matrix object down here is that we can use or form object so I've dragged in this extrude says hello or Lux and then I've got a couple of effectors so for example a random effector if we enable that it's set to randomize our position color and scale we come to the fall-off tab we can see the new interface so I've added some fields in here already but we couldn't add them all from this list and we've got three different types so we've got objects we've got these which are maybe solid layers or linked to other elements in your scene and we've also got these which are like adjustment layers so if I enable the spherical field now we've got this and it's wrong one selected you notice that we can select them actually in the field list even though I've got the random effector selected I can also select the fields in here and move it around it gives you this temporary transformation which is pretty cool notice that the fields themselves are now separate objects to the effectors which means we can share them between all of our effectors which is much better workflow before the fall-off was tied to the effector now it's separate so that's pretty cool so this isn't really anything too groundbreaking we could already do this kind of stuff but now obviously we have this freedom where we can apply them to other effectors so here I've got a formula effector if I enable that I could just drag my spherical field in there so now we're containing that that effect - within that one spherical fall-off which means that it's very easy to adjust it move it it will wherever it's used it's going to ripple through on top of that we can also stack them as I said before so here we've got a box filled if I enable this you can see that that's set to subtract so now we're doing boolean operations with our fall offs so the field here is in a subtract from that other field so which is pretty handy you can use all sorts of shapes objects splines everything as field so I'm just trying to sort of show you the real simple approach to start with the great thing about this new whatever IDE whatever you want to call it the new method of doing it is that we can use them in various places but we can actually use them in different ways as well so in this example I could set this to add here and now I'm going to get the formula in the cubic fall-off over here and here in the sphere so if I select this box field I can move that around and we just contract containing the formula there and you can see at the same time it's subtracting from the random so this gives us so much control and obviously we can stack them and build complicated setups that one's nice and simple moving on and let's have a look at another example so in this example I wanted to build something very similar but showing you another way that we can use fields everyone who's used cinema and fall-off are going to be used to using them with effectors but we can use them with loads of different objects throughout our scene we can use them with tags we can use them with deformers all sorts of things so in this example I have a color vertex tag we can choose down here use fields that brings up the fields interface and we get this freeze layer we're going to talk about that a bit later but the freeze layers like a way of storing data so if you'd already painted onto your map maybe it's a polygon selection maybe it's a vertex map maybe it's an edge selection when you enable the freeze layer it stores all that information there and then you can reuse that to do other things but the nice thing about this is that we can now create these tags and these Maps procedurally so in this example I have a vertex color what I'm going to do is drag in my spherical field and you can see that it makes it go orange that's because we can now control color so what my spherical field I've got this color remap you can see here I can adjust the color so the thing about fields that's so powerful is that you are actually like transferring the data it's a data unification system in a way and you're moving data between all these different places so at the moment we're starting off with the color information and we're passing that into a vertex color tag and then if we take a material such as this one we put in a vertex map shader and then we can pass that tag into there put that on a material and then we're passing that information from the field into the tag into the material as a shader and then we can render it as I say we can stack these so let's add in a random field this is a very similar set up to the last one but the last one I was using effectors this time I'm using just fields you can see in the interface that we have these little icons these ones refer to the value do we want that field to affect the value of a parameter or do we want it to affect color so you can use the same field in different ways maybe you want to use add mode for your value and then you want to use overlay for the color or something so on here I'm just going to switch off the color there you go but I'm gonna set this to overlay and you can see now that's overlaying on top so it's just like doing an overlay as if you're accompanying after face or something of course our spherical field is the main layer here so if we grab that around we can reveal that everywhere let's drag in this formula field as well and let's set this to overlay so now there's a different result than last time but it's using the same kind of principle and if I press play you can see we've got some animated random noise we've got a little bit of a pulse going from the formula and we've got our spherical field which is helping us contain all of that so all of those fields are combining together the values are all all the math is happening there in the background and then it's going into that vertex color tag onto the shader into the material so that we can render it but now what we can do as well is we can take this information maybe we want to come to the fields we could select all of these in here and you can copy them so then we could come to our display sir and we could paste them in here it's even easier than that actually you can come to the tag and you can choose on the fields parameter you can right-click and you can set driver and then come to the displacer and then you can choose expressions set driven so you can basically link that parameter with an expression and whatever you do in the tag will then flow straight into the displacer so it's really nice and quick I'm actually not going to do any of those things I'm going to just come to my shading tab I'm going to come down adding a vertex map shader and then we can drag our vertex color tag into here and now you can see that that displacement is now also happening and it's being driven by exactly the same fields so if I come and change that random field it's going to change all of those different elements without me having to go to all my different objects and change it it's like flowing that data through and that to me is one of the key features of working with this new system so coming back to the old keynotes in here what I wanted to do is kind of go through rather than just show you examples like that maybe show some real-world projects and how we could do them using our 20 and how I workflow might be a lot easier now so I did a job recently with buck always one of my kind of aspirations to work for buck and they opened an office in Sydney which is fantastic they came and asked me to work for them done a few jobs with them now and and this was a huge project he was for Nike and they were it was like it was buck Sydney but it was truly international because we had we got one trainer each or one sneaker each and uh James Owen was in New York he worked on one and then as Chris Phillips though James in LA sorry Chris Phillips in New York Geordi pages in Barcelona twisted Polly in Slovenia and me in Sydney and of course the great team at Barca one of the loveliest companies of ever going to work for so I only did a small piece of this job let's just watch it [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so nice thing about buck is they always put all the credits on their site so visit buck TV and you can see all the people that worked on this job huge huge number of people involved big up to Gareth and Lucas the creative directors they're wonderful guys and the art direction from buck is second to none like it's a it's a real nice job like smooth everything goes well pretty challenging work to do but like an absolute joy really lovely company to work with so as I say only did some of the shots on this so this shot for example I did the AJ 3 and it was nice because all the shoes were white so they went for these really crazy bright pallets with loads of saturated color really lovely contrast and each shoe they specified a certain pallet so in this shot here I just use cloth for this in cinema and it's like the basketball court it's sort of rippling so it's almost like a grab a piece of cloth and then kind of like whip it like this and you get this nice ripple flowing through I did this shot here with the way that all the board's lift up like an elephant and this was all done just using pose morph in cinema so we just create morph targets for each one of these and then using like fall-off wipe it through so that it lifts up and comes back down the final shot of the shoe this one I set this up and then I had to go to Bali for a few weeks so this one was handed over to twisted poly who finished it off so it was a really truly a collaborative piece the shot that I want to talk about is this one and this is this is where we have all these kind of ripples lifting up and flowing across and I wanted to have a look at how we set this up in our 19 and then I'll show you how you can use fields to make this like so much easier and it's an unusual use of fields as well that you wouldn't necessarily think of so I think it's like a a good example of the flexibility of the system so here we go so at first class it's not that challenging the actual shot but it's a little bit tricky because one of the things we had to do and this is the actual shot from the job one thing you notice as well as that it's like square because of all the social media and everything we had the puck had the challenge that they had to try and make it work in landscape portrait and square and rather than do three versions of every single shot we decided that or buck decided to do it as a square thing so everything was rendered at 1920 by 1920 it's a little bit tricky from a kind of art direction point of view because it makes it slightly awkward and difficult to compose each shot so you know that it's going to work cropped to all those different shapes but I think they did a pretty good job of it anyway let's have a look what we've got here so you can see I've got a whole bunch of subdivision surfaces and if I fold that down we basically got loads of displaces in each one of these wooden panels and the reason it's set up like this is because you'll notice that here we have this gap between each displacement so for instance this one is like 20 percent 40 percent 60 and 80 percent and there's no real way of doing that easily without using a separate displacer for each one so I mean I had to have a separate áformer for each for each lump on every single bump which it means we end up with however many there are here like 30 or so so to make it a bit easier on each one I set up a constraint tag link them all to this null which means that we can grab this and pull them back backwards and forwards and that at least links the position of all of them but the problem with this approach is that if the client says I want to make the bumps a bit higher or and I change the shape of them then we have to go through each and every one of these displaces and make sure they're all in harmony so when we come to one of these and we for instance we want to change like though the fall-off we've got this curve that's the shape of it then we'd have to go to each and every one and adjust that spline or copy and paste it to each one so not the most efficient workflow now though things are a lot easier so in this example I've got the same kind of setup but this time I'm going to use a cloner which immediately makes it easier couldn't do that before because we needed a separate Informer for each clone pocket just come down to the camera you can see this is pretty much exactly the same shot I just grabbed the camera etc from the other file so now I've got a displace two here I'm going to enable that displacer and you can see that by default what happens with this displacer I've just got a white color in there so just displaces everything the displacement is set to be along planar on the Y orientation so it just pushes all the geometry up now one of the cool things about the new field system is that we can tags as well so here I've got some tags if I select this mograph selection tag you can see down here we've got the option used fields so we can use fields with tags which means that we can procedurally generate our mograph selections or we can procedurally generate polygon selections and things like this which opens up a whole new world of possibilities not only can we use fields with tags though we can also use tags as fields so rather than using this option here I'm going to come to my display sir under the fall-off tab I can just drag my mograph selection in and now you can see that what's happening here the clones that are selected the yellow ones they're the only ones that are now receiving the displacement so kind of seems a little bit trivial in a way I guess but it's actually a bit of a game changer to be honest because it means that you can now control deformation on hundreds and thousands of clones with single deformers just by using a selection tag on them rather than having to split out the geometry and have lots of separate objects so it's kind of like million times more efficient we can then take like a spherical field for instance drop this scene on top if I set this if I just drop it in normally we lose the selection and because that that layer is set to normal mode so if you think in Photoshop if you put an opaque layer into Photoshop it's going to hide everything underneath so we can either adjust the opacity of this or we can just use a blending mode so I could just set this to multiply and there we go and you can see that now we're using the spherical field in combination with the selection so it gives us a lot more control but it just it actually gets even better than this if we take this one out here I've got a mograph weight tag and once again we can use fields with that but you notice the colors from the weight tag if I just come here so you can sort of see them the middle one here it's got a weight of like 100 and then we've got 80 60 40 20 so normally you would use these with effectors and it controls the amount of strength that effects are will apply to the certain clones but we can actually use this with deformers as well now so if i come back to my display sir and i drag this tag into the field here in fact hold on let me just take this out for a moment let's drag that in and you can see now that's what's happening is it's using the weight of that tag to control the amount of deformation that's happening so the selection tags allows us to choose which clone and then the weight tag allows us to choose the strength of that deformation so that's an incredible amount of control and then we combine it with our spherical field and you can see now I've achieved what I did in the previous job with one displacer in one field instead of using 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 deformers I've done it with one de forma immediately it's a lot more efficient and honestly you could do that whole job with one display so we can come down we can add in another spherical field okay again it overrides because it set to normal maybe we set it to add you can see now that's adding but we're getting a different result on that one so what we really need to do is we need to composite our two fields together and then multiply that on top so in Photoshop you would use a layer group in after-effects you'd pre-comp it here we're just adding a folder Bob's your uncle all done so just drop this one in here we set this one to normal and then we multiply the whole thing over and it's worked just like that so you can see now what this means is that we've this display sir we've got like a global control for the whole thing and then the spherical fall off so we can fine-tune that for all the others so I can come to my display sir and I can just say alright I want to make them all a bit higher I want to make them all a bit lower so I can keep my client happy much quicker if I come to this very cool fields themselves under the remapping tab we have controls for the strength so rather than animate the displacer itself we can animate the strength of each field which will give us the same result and if we wanted this one on the left to be like the hero and the one on the right to be not quite as important then we can come to the remapping tab and we can adjust our minimum and maximum values so we can just say okay the maximum this one can go is 50% so wherever we set our display so this one can only go halfway as high and so now if I take this up to 100% you can see that second one isn't quite as high so by doing this our light lives are gonna be much easier so yeah it's pretty cool when I just go with that was like oh my god that's amazing yeah jumping back into keynote let's have a look at something else so Sydney Opera House we did a job for Sydney Opera House in Sydney Opera House is this big white pointy building in Sydney and they do operas there I'm going to see whoo tang in December which is like the most anti opera but looking forward to it every year they do this thing called vivid where they light up the whole of Sydney basically but the Opera House is probably the most exciting prestigious of all of the production protect the projections some massive cameras you know it's quite daunting and company called spinifex came to me and to Lux and said that they had the job and it's funny because at the same time ash Boland who was the director and he used to work for a company used to run a company called you Merrick it's an eclair incredibly talented guy he came to me separately as well as said Tim do you want to come and do the opera house I'm like yeah anyway ended up that we ended up doing like nine and a half minutes of this job at lux it's 15 minutes in total so they subcontracted up to us and then we kind of just rolled with it and it was basically me and my good friend Mike to set Oh Mike tossed their tow runs a studio called never sit still and also had a guy called Dan bragger working with me at the time we did pretty much all of those nine and a half minutes in seven weeks 6k didn't see my kids much but at the end of it is pretty amazing to do also had a few guys rich Noseworthy helped out a little bit and twisted polly did a did some work on it as well so these are some shots from it you can see there's small little people gives the idea of how big it is and they actually project it right across the harbour and they use I think 16 projectors or 12 I'm not sure six projectors just for the mainsail Mike kind of own this shot there's a close-up of it you can stand right under it's pretty amazing goes on for a few weeks this is one that rich and I worked on it's really nice you get this sort of transparency through the sails this butterfly shot we had all the each section was done with cloth we belted them together and they sort of unfurled like flags fluttering out and then this is what I really wanted to talk about now we had this like weird parasites that grew over the surface and that and the thing here is the growing technique and I wanted it to we wanted it to feel kind of organic so we used like a combination of shader effectors with noise noise patterns and um vehicle fall-off and it was pre it was reasonably successful it's weird with projections because you if you've ever done them you have to do everything really slowly and it's kind of funny watching it on a monitor because your monitors are so small but if you think about like if you stood on the top of a like skyscraper and dropped a football the amount of time it would take to hit the ground is quite a long time but when you watch that on a computer screen it seems to take forever so you have to you do all your animation you slow it down a lot so I've got a bit of a render here from one of the comps I've split I've sped it up a little bit [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so yeah the music was by Arman Tobin who's an incredible kind of dance musician producer but he jumped on board and create these mad sound scapes so you could go there and put headphones on and just stand there and watch it was pretty cool so what I really want to talk about this is a weird segue into back into our twenty but I thought it'd be nice to just put some eye candy in this presentation you know it's always nice to see see some work but we've got some new growing features that we can work with in our twenty so let's have a look they're pretty cool so imma start off with a basic approach of some stuff that we can do here I've just got a landscape object on there I've got a vertex map so on this vertex map as I showed you before we get this thing called a freeze layer freeze layers stores any data so if we'd have painted this vertex map then when the freeze layer would store that but once you've got that data you can do stuff with it like you can grow it or you can blur it or you can do all sorts of things in this example I'm just going to use this growing method it allows you to take whatever's there and grow it based on the radius and the strength so if I take like a spherical field here and I add that you can see that we get this yellow dot and remember what I was saying right at the very beginning about that all the fields really do is change the value of something so a vertex map is a great way of visualizing it because the vertices have a way of either nought to 100 or zero everyone laughs at me sane or it's very English so now if I take this vehicle field what happens is the freeze layer kind of does like a loop so it looks at the information there and then it grows it and then the next frame it grows it a bit more and rinse and repeat so you can create these kind of cool growing patterns it's about as simple as it gets really but even there even that is kind of interesting in a way but of course what we can do is then we can use it like as if we were doing a comp in After Effects or nuke or everyone we can build up all of our layers to make that much more organic and more interesting this is a basic setup but it sort of gives you a taste of what you could do with it and in here I've got I've just got a random field and the random field if I just set this to normal for now the random field allows you to use all your noises that you're used to in cinema got a whole bunch of noises and we can just procedurally generate these values onto our vertex map so that in itself is just pretty amazing you know just a linear fall-off or linear field and you're gonna be able to create a gradient that kind of stuff and you can combine them all together with all of your composite modes so for example here I've added in a modifier layer and I've just got a curve and I've just crushed it a bit just to change the the noise pattern I think this noise is animated as well so we get this kind of result if I set this back to min I didn't really know what min meant to be honest when I started testing this out by a googled it it's the same as lighting in Photoshop and then you have max which is essentially the same as dark it just shows the the minimum value of the two when they're composited together it shows you the minimum so now if we press play you can see that we get this slightly more organic result just as before we can take this data from that vertex map and we can use it in all different places so here I've got a displacer if I enable that you can see that that has the same vertex map in its fall off so now when we press play we're just going to get the displacement only where that vertex map tells us to and this sort of data unification is what makes this workflow so streamlined because now if I come I've got a matrix object here and I've just got all these scary nasty virus e things growing over the surface or there could be trees maybe or flowers and then I've got a weight tag on here so we could take this set up we could copy and paste it into that weight tag but it's easier to just take the vertex map and drop it in so then we only have to go back and change one thing rather than keep changing lots of things but if we've the vertex map it would be the wrong way around it would because I've got this effector here that's set to scale everything down so as it displaced all of the matrices would scale down and disappear I want it to be the other way around so I just put an invert on there which is another modifier layer and it just inverts the values and then we just on our plane effector we use that weight tag in here this is set to scale them down and then now you can see that when we press play we get our displacement happening then we get our matrices on top and they all move around with the displacement and if we need to change the way that displacement happens the distributions going to change as well now if we wanted to say for instance we've got these nasty virus things we want and put a friendly one in between in all the gaps you think that maybe you could just take that original setup and just invert it but what will happen is that then the growth pattern will ungrown so we need to think of a different way of doing that but it's still pretty trivial and easy we can just take this original tag that I've got up here if we remove that folder we're sort of back to where we were at the beginning but notice that when I rewind don't me just switch off this matrix notice that when I read one we end up with this pattern already there and that's because my freeze layer as soon as I duplicated that tag it just stored everything that was there so we could work with that or we can just come down here we just click clear gets rid of it so now this second tag is right back to where we were right at the very beginning it's just doing the same as the very beginning one but what we can now do is we can take the very first result and we just subtract it from this one and it's going to leave the holes so I'll grab my first tag I dropped that in I just set that to subtract and you can see now it's giving us the in-between bits so now if I switch on my display sir and I enable all of these okay this is my friendly one and on here I've got the same setup but notice that this one is called a variable tag which means it's not linked to anything yet so you could almost set these things up and have them stored away and then when you think okay now I've painted my vertex map but I just grabbed that map and just drop it on and it's just basically real inks it and now when I press play you can see that now we've got the green ones growing in between and obviously you could repeat this so what we're really doing is we're adjusting that range of values that we want to work with for each separate effect and anything you use with mograph that you've done and then you can do it using this trick so these could be kind of this could be grass and these could be trees okay so someone's going to say well look this landscape though it's it's a polygon object it's a point object it's not very but it's not as procedural as it could be so how do we keep it really procedural well I've got another example set up to show you how you can do that we come in here we can do it using the correction deformer so the correction deformer is a de forma that'll iäôs you to access the components of your object so in this example is to allow me to access the points where you can access the edges and polygons etc so on here I've got a vertex map this vertex map is set up just the same as the last one I pull this down you can see we've got a freeze layer on here we've got this set to grow and then rather than just using the one spherical field I've got a whole bunch of these and they're scattered around that's just cuz I want the grow to start from different areas so I want it to grow on each letter so if we come back to our vertex map and press play now you can see that we're starting to get that growth pattern happening but now we're doing it in a procedure way because my text is still a parametric object so this is definitely the kind of thing that you can set up and then save and reuse because if we hide this and then unhide this matrix object and you see I've got the matrix here with the weight tag inverted same as before and there you go you can see it's working if we press play we've got a lot more matrices here but you can see that now we're getting this kind of really nice organic growth revealing the type this could be put into like a open V DB and it would come like a release fluidy effect could have fluid or it could be done with like a candy or something like that you know whatever you whenever you can think of you can do but the nice thing about this is that if I come back to my text spline come in here I can change this maybe I'll write Maxon instead now rewind when it loads the font when I press play now you can see already worked you can see now it's going to work as long as those spherical fields are still touching one of the letters is still going to grow the effect so then you've kind of created this preset so every time you build these things procedurally like this you can save them out and then you could just reuse them in later setups so this kind of parametric approach is absolutely awesome so back into keynote just momentarily this is an example of a just a short animation that I did when I was learning how to use this and this pretty much uses exactly the same trick and you can see that we've got two we've got one noise type which is a Voronoi and then i've inverted it one for the pink one for the purple and then where i've got the blue triangles or the pyramids as well I've used the same noise but I've just crushed it a bit more so there only puts the triangles in the very middle so if I change that noise type this whole animation would still work but it would just look totally different you could use set sail noise and it would all look cellular you know or a Voronoi cell or something like that very flexible now one was all rendered with the physical renderer as well so yeah reaction diffusion it was too long to fit in the slide so I thought I'd just be cool man and take out all the vowels that's what everyone does but reaction diffusion is like this trendy thing though I don't really know what it is it's like when two chemicals react yeah it creates this diffusion if you go online in tag mo who makes some great tutorials oh we don't want to see that one yet in tag mo who make these great tutorials they're the guys from Eric's spawn so they do a really good tutorial introducing reaction diffusion and basically what it is is I kind of think of it as like when you're at the office party and you photocopy your face and then you take that photocopy but you keep photocopying it again and again and then the result and then you take that one and you get this organic thing that happens where the photocopy deteriorates and it starts becoming a pattern and changing that's essentially what reaction if you but it's more of a sign it's bit more scientific than that but if you take like a sphere for a circle for instance and you blur it and then you crush it with levels or something like that so it becomes a bit harder then you take the same circle blur it even more than the first one and crush it and then you subtract one from the other so then what do you get left over you get that little thin bit around the edge that's left then you do the same thing to it again and again and again and each time you do it this weird thing happens and it starts to become like this organic pattern and we can do those now and there are a lot of fun so I've got this is a really basic example of how you set that up and then you can kind of expand upon it and start really messing around with it because they're kind of tricky to art direct because it's a simulation in a way but you can definitely guide it like you would a particle system you can coax it into different ways to do things that you want so this is probably one of the most groundbreaking pieces I've ever done and I've got this spherical field on a helix within a line to spline tag and we're using a vertex map I love the vertex map because it's a really visual way to show how things work rather than if I try to do this weave like time offset would you just be like what but with this you can just see it and understand it so if I press play now all that's going to happen is that spherical field it's just going to draw onto that vertex map so we can do right on effects as well you can see in my setup here I've got a freeze layer just as we used on the previous growth example at the moment the mode is set to none we have a few modes in here we've looked at grow let's look at average so average what that does is it basically looks at the values so here we've got 100 here we've got naught it looks at those values and averages them so it just blurs them they should just write blur it's a blur if we use the auto update option it means that every frame it's going to update that so it's a bit like having a Gaussian blur and just animating the strength of it over time so if I press play now you can see we get that result so we get this really nice soft Fleury result if you would come back to what I said about reaction diffusion this is kind of exactly what you do you take something you blur it then you add a curve on top to crush it a little bit just increase the contrast then I've got another freeze layer here and you can see my bottom freeze layer has got a blur of four the top one has a blur of ten so if I add this then I've got another curve and then I've set this to subtract some subtracting one from the other so now when we press play we're going to get this weird reaction diffusion and this is that's how easy it is to set up and as soon as we do that we start to get this crazy weird thing that happens and that's my brain but yeah it's like it's just interesting already but we can like I say we can guide this we can coax it at the moment I've just got a lot as just drawing a spiral you could be firing particles through the system you know and each one triggers a different pattern and then they'd all interact with each other whatever you whatever you feel like you could do it could you could use it like with someone running across the surface and then as each footprint lands it's like these things come out and then you could take that and you could use it in a display so or you could use that for generating clones upon or you could use it in a shader oil whatever you want to do with it in this example here I've just got a random field it's just set to purl in which is regular noise in fact we can come here oh if I enable it there we go but by yet by adding that noise in there what we can do is we can we can essentially like coax it to do something else so if I press play now you can see that now it's changed the pattern and we and it's moving around that noise pattern you know if we scale this up we're gonna get a different result again you see totally different so like I say it's a little bit hard to art direct sometimes you get this sort of feedback thing but a good example of how you might do this is like let's change it to something like mod noise I don't know 250 mod noise is like a sale noise so we should see like a checkerboard effect and there you go and you can see that that checkerboard thing is now influencing the reaction diffusion so you could definitely guide in when you get these sort of flickering things very often you can just pull the pull the opacity down of that layer because you're using kind of feedback that's why it's happening it's feeding it's like filming a TV that your video and you know but you can get some good results with that as well so that's a pretty simple example or someone look at another one here I've got a matrix because I just did that with a vertex maps quite easy to see but you can do it with anything you could do it the polygon selection if you wanted in this example I'm going to do with the weight tag so I've got this matrix here with a weight tag in here I've set up the same kind of thing as you can see you've got the freeze layer etcetera because I want it to be the other way around and to reveal the clones I've done the same thing as I did before I'll just drag that tag in there and inverted it so if I enable these and then enable all my effector and my fields okay and rewind you see now we get this kind of reaction diffusion happening in 3d space so it starts to kind of get really interesting and I think in this example we're using a regular grid array so it's kind of a bit techy you could use it for heads-up display that kind of thing maybe you want to do something a bit more organic so I've got another example here this time a cube not very adventurous and I've got a matrix object which is set to fill that cube so already it looks more organic and in hindsight it's funny because the I don't think this technique works so well with big thick volumes like this I think it almost works better if it was like a tree structure you know if it's like natural coral branching structure or or maybe fingers or I've done it with her head in it it didn't it worked but it was quite hard to see the head I'll come back to that so here if I just enable these we get a slightly different result now because it's a bit more organic and you can see it just works straight off the bat so it's again it's like you can set up your your field system and save that out and then whenever you need this kind of organic growth pad and you've got that saved I just come back to the o2 here love actually got a render of that here look so this is this is that thatthat shot and that's just dropped into like an open V DB and then smoothed out so you can see it's got that sort of coral feeling but it's just building a cube it's pretty rad so coming back into cinema last thing I'm going to talk about like I said it didn't really work very well with the head so I was thinking how can i how could I do this you know and I thought maybe another approach would be to rather than filling the whole volume with matrices how about we just put them around the surface so immediately it's going to be quicker which is always a good thing in this industry and actually it's it works more effectively because the shape of the head and everything is more defined so you get a better result so I think how you approach these things depends on the application and what you're trying to do definitely good to fill the whole head with these and try that technique but actually pushing them over the surface more efficient so if I uncheck this plane effect you can see there we go I've got this matrix object it's just set to object mode and it sets us boys their 50-thousand matrices over that surface of that head set up pretty much exactly the same with the reaction diffusion but this time I've got two spherical fields let's just come off there though spherical fields that just set just pushed between the eyes but talk about that that's just to trigger that effect and that's all it really needs so now if we hide that and we come in and we press play you can see now we've got that reaction diffusion happening across the face and the cool thing here is that we can now introduce open VDB an open V DB is another new feature in R 20 it's been around for a while but max on the implementation of its pretty solid it's a great foundation that they're going to build upon and one of the things we can do with it is we can now use matrix matrix objects which don't actually have any geometry when I render it comes out black but they're really fast we can mesh them now we can drop those into volume builder which is our way of creating open V DB if I hide this okay just calculating I mean you can see now I've got all of these voxels and we can then take that and we can mesh it so then we can mesh these kind of results and we end up with something like this and these kind of things were just not possible before in cinema 4d until the introduction of open V DB in fields I'm not going to talk about open V DB today but tomorrow I'll be doing my whole presentation on open V DB and the kind of stuff you can do with fields and it's amazing and now the sales pitch so this is awesome stuff and well done maximum for this feature because the feature set is incredible totally impressed with it now I have just released some new training which is called learn C for D fields in one day it's just under seven hours come on you can do it in a day but it's all about open V DB field to the new system it's nearly seven hours my presentation is like 50 minutes so there's a loads more stuff that I go through we got a C graft special going on at the moment and this little edit that I made kind of gives you an example of all the stuff that you will learn on my training so thank you for coming that's it from me if you want to check that out go to halo looks calm it'll give you a list of all the stuff you can learn please come back tomorrow and see my other presentation but thank you for coming today if you want to follow me on Twitter that's it other than that thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 40,185

Keywords: 3d, 3d software, c4d, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema4d, maxon, tutorial, c4d new features, c4d r20, c4d r20 features, c4d r20 news, c4d updates, cinema 4d new features, cinema 4d updates, cinema4d r20, new features, new in r20, release 20, release 2018, c4d live, c4dlive, siggraph, siggraph 2018, siggraph 2018 rewind, siggraph c4dlive, siggraph maxon, siggraph rewind

Id: -0PiG0rnpLk

Length: 49min 16sec (2956 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2018