The Four Most Important Settings for Softbodies

what does the crumpling cardboard box a jiggling cube of jell-o and some ice cream splattering on a sidewalk have in common well you can create all those effects with soft bodies inside cinema4d [Music] everybody this is chris schmidt from grayscale guerrilla combo we make tools training and tutorials to make you a better motion designer now in this video we are going to be tackling soft-bodied specifically i want to really get you to understand what the different settings do some have kind of weird names and they're kind of all over the place but if you can get to the point where you understand what the settings do then you don't have to guess and check and keep tweaking everything all over the place to get really nice effects out of your soft body so I want to make it kind of like you have a recipe you can add a little bit of flexion maybe a little bit of structure will get rid some damping and then you've got your jello now if you enjoy these videos you might enjoy ask GSG I really enjoy getting into the nitty-gritty the tiny little details of what makes all the different things happen and work in cinema 4d I take that knowledge and in as GSG people in the audience you guys come and ask questions and show me inspiration and different things that have inspired you and that you want to try and make and we try and create it live now we do this every Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. GMT and it's all it's all just participation to the group there's a really great community there we all hang out and just talk about cinema 4d and try and figure things out and help each other so be sure to make it through to the end of the video or I have a bunch of examples I put together of different soft body effects different kind of materials and the goal here is for you to see that material and try and recreate it using the knowledge you gained from this video so the goal here would be that you can recreate the effect without seeing the settings that I use although I do show you those settings so you can compare them directly if you want to work you were really something you want to see what I change to make that happen and you creating any cool effects or make different types of materials render writing videos be sure to link them in the comments we love seeing those comments we try and reply to as many of them as possible so that should that should wrap this up I'll see you inside the video okay so here we are in cinema 4d r18 although I think these techniques would pretty much go back to our 12 when soft bodies were introduced so I've got a little team prepped here we just got a couple lights a floor with a color on it and a couple materials prepped so why don't we dive right on in so I'm going to create a cube and we want to kind of keep this as straightforward as possible so we're going to leave the cube at the default size I'm just going to increase its segments to ten by ten by ten nice and simple and if we wanted to see that you can go up to your viewport and say we can change to a line mode here you see how they're subdivided and we can go back to our display mode the important thing is separate note but it's important to learn your shortcuts so you see the shortcuts right here of n B and n a so ready hit n a it's going to jump to our just our shaded mode if I and B it's our line mode but I'll go back to na okay cool so I got that and let's go ahead and apply our soft bodies so there's actually two different ways of doing this there's a nice quick way which would be right click and we can say simulation soft body and I'll apply right away but I just want to show you that almost all the dynamic settings all live in the same tag so I'm gonna click on the rigid body and this is going to be kind of a normal I'm going to copy that tag onto the floor so this is just going to be regular dynamics at play boom is going to follow hit the floor done but you can instantly turn that into soft body dynamics by clicking on the tag on our cube and we can go to the soft body tab right here up in the top and we can change it from soft body off to soft body a made of polygons and lines and now it is a soft body that's the only thing that changes when you right click and add a soft body tag that's the only setting you can see right away if I hit play it's going to fall and squish on the ground a little bit so the goal here of course is going to be playing around with these settings and kind of only these settings and really there's four main settings we want to talk about although we'll talk about all of them a little bit and it's so that we can kind of art direct and control and get the feeling from our soft bodies that we want in kind of an intelligent way if you're anything like the way I used to be if I want to create some particular thing let's say we're trying to make jello I would just kind of tinker around with different settings until we I got it but if we spend a little time and learn what these settings do then we can treat them more like ingredients like oh I need a little more structural that's going to do this and I need maybe a little stiffness on there it's going to do that so let's jump right on in so first thing I'm going to do is grab this yellow material apply it and I'm going to grab another texture that I've prepared another material and I'm going to go ahead and drop that on there and you can see this nice little kind of steel beam thing now I'm going to set that up to tile ten by ten times and now you see we've actually got ten of them and the point of this is I want to explain the first setting we're going to talk about and that's going to be structural and what structural does is it makes it so that each polygon each of these is out lighting exactly a polygon each polygon wants to maintain this distance it wants this point to this point to not be able to stretch or compress and that goes for every single one of these so it's kind of like your basic building outline like the basic structure of a building is a way of thinking about that so these steel beams don't want to bend or get closer and that's what that's going to do so we're to go ahead and just for the sake of actually seeing this why don't we go ahead and grab our structural I'm gonna drop it down to one and now I hit play you're going to see boom is going to hit you see right away a bunch of these are collapsing in you see how they're really pinching in there's a lot of compression going on directly on these beams so you see with virtually no structure that is what is happening let's rewind all the way and I'm going to crank up that structure back up to 100 in fact why don't even double the amount and go to 200 and now let's go ahead and hit play and boom you see that it didn't crumple on top of itself right away now you see that these are actually being maintained you see it's bulging out quite a bit we can see that the distance between these points is attempting to be maintained and that's really important though it's not like it's 100 percent and you can keep cranking this number up to higher and higher numbers to make sure it doesn't go too far but as a general rule to lower you can set that number the better because if you crank these it's a really high numbers you can start vibrating a little bit that's once you start getting like two five hundred a thousand range but you can now see that the structure is trying to maintain it be maintained which is the distance between points is trying to be maintained so cool that is structural pretty straightforward I can set that back to the default of 100 and I'll start talking about sheared so I'm going to drop our shear material on here and I'm going to show us what shear is trying to do so what shear is trying to DT I've got these nice little in line shown where the polygons are but Shearer is trying to maintain kind of the angle between oh maybe not angle but the distance between kitty-corner points so this point is trying to maintain a certain distance from that point and that point is trying to maintain a distance from this point so it's kind of the inverse of structural kind of cross bracing so it doesn't want to Bend along those lines so why don't we go ahead and check that out I'm going to actually so we see this one a little bit better I'm going to rotate this to an angle thank you pause Dropbox so rotate that to a little bit an angle so we can actually see it happen and let's start out by grabbing our shear which is default 50 I'm gonna drop that down to 1 and let's see what happens if we drop that I'm going to drop that down let's go down so we actually see it and boom we're getting boom a whole lot of compression here a whole lot of shearing you see very similar to the structure that the distance from this point to that point is getting compressed and you need to see this point to that point it's even kind of bending up and then down because this is a quad is a four point polygon so it can actually compress in those odd directions as well so lots of compression on those angles and it can really shear it can really kind of bend these cross beams so if I rewind all the way and go back to our soft body tag and I'm going to put that back up to actually why don't we crank it up to 200 as well so we can really see it hit play and then let that strike it'll even frame-by-frame and you can see that these cross beams are really trying to maintain their integrity it doesn't want to change the distance from that point to that point or that point to that point and it's really twisting and breaking around these corners but these distances are being maintained so that is what shear is doing for us it's cross bracing it's stopping it from tilting to the side so that's shear let's go ahead and return that to default as well and I'm going to rewind all the way and why don't we unrotated so I'm going to hit the shortcut of shift C which will be our command to barring that I've been PSR you see it automatically pops open a reset PSR and click on that and it's going to reset me to zero zero zero on every coordinate so now that we've done that why don't we talk about our final ones I'm going to grab our flexion and drag that tag on here and now we see our flexion so what is flexion doing well what flexion is trying to do is prevent points from rotating relative to their neighbors so the best way of thinking about this is on a corner right now you can see that we have a point here and a point here and a point here so we've kind of got this 90 degree turn and flexion is trying to maintain that angle so you see and you can grab any three points kind of that are connected in the line so you say this point this point this point it's trying to that's kind of a zero degree rotation and it's trying to maintain that and here you get a 90 degree it's trying to maintain that and so for every single corner like that to that 90 degree it wants to maintain that so let's see what that looks like so if I were to grab our flexion and drop that down to one let's go ahead and it play maybe it's just completely falling over falling in on itself now you'll see even with the structure and shear being at their default that the distance between the points is being maintained pretty well and the distance on the shear the crossbeams is being maintained pretty well but it's really kind of caving in on ourselves and a good setting a good way of thinking of flexion is kind of like the crumple parameter it's kind of like the inverse crumple parameter because the smaller it is the more crumpling that will happen and if we crank this back up again so let's go back up to 200 and rewind and hit play boom it's going to hit and maintain the structure overall so it's trying not to bend now you will still see this top it's going to cave in that little bit where you see it sagging but that's because you know that point to that point is being maintained you know that's being maintained really well that's being maintained really well but once you kind of add a bunch of these together in a line it will start sagging a little bit so I goes you know this goes a really long way into maintaining that and it's really hard to tell with these settings do unless you really play with cranking them up really high and then lowering them really low to kind of think around just see what they do now let's reset that back to default another cool trick is you can right-click on any parameter and say or reset the default which is 50 and I'll talk about some other settings now another really important setting and counting treating as one because it's the same setting on all three of these in fact it's also here and here is damping there's a setting called damping I don't know what's not called dampening and I always want to call it that so if I say dampening I mean damping and what this does is it's sucking energy out from that part of the simulation so right now if we were to hit play it's sucking 20% out I think every refresh every refresh 20% of the structural bounciness is going away and 20% this year and deflection and stiffness everything a lot its sucking away a bunch of energy but not super fast so let's see what this looks like kind of in practice and we'll do them kind of together so you see that's a default just kind of Falls and flops down nice and soft and sags a little bit now if we grab our damping and drop them down to 1 1 1 and hit play look at that instantly we're getting a jello vibe now keep in mind that structural shear and flexion are all set to their defaults but our damping has been changed and what's happening is the very little energy is being sucked out per refresh per frame so we're getting to all this wiggle and don't seen us all over the place in fact why don't we give ourselves a few extra frames here so we see it follow through so yeah we really get a good vibe for these wiggling around now it will eventually stop even for your set piece to zero I don't think there's a big difference between 0 and 1 honestly it might wiggle a little bit extra but we're really getting I mean it's not sucking the energy out from the scene so why don't we go ahead and crank these up to really high let's go 99 99 99 and it play and boom it just kind of stops and you see it's going to Sag down a little bit but there's no kind of bounciness to it whatsoever so damping can be thought of like kind of a bumpiness parameter how much it should wheel around or really it's how much is energy is draining out from that part of the simulation so in essence I do feel like those are the four most important parameters inside a soft body but just so we can tinker around a little bit extra why don't we talk about some of these other ones now I'm not going to get too much into the elastic limits here but the elastic limits allow you to break these Springs because if the I think behind-the-scenes code why these are called Springs but right now when it's trying to maintain is 90-degree angle you can lower the elastic limit and then if it goes beyond that it'll snap that spring and then go to a new permanent position so it's kind of a way of denting an object which is really cool and you should check out the Vans mash tutorial on greyscale gorilla for a bunch of information on that one and then okay so that's elastic limit and then we have a rest length and rest length is a really cool parameter where it scales our object so if I were to say that the rest length should be 50% it's actually going to take our object and scale it on every angle every direction it's going to shrink it to half its size now right now it's actually trying to maintain the volume so it's actually popping out a little bit if we set our volume conservation I think to zero maybe that'll still be maintained but it's trying to shrink the object down now if we were to increase oh we also really high damping let me put those back to default as we talked about these presets default every to set up 200% you can see our object is going to explode up to double its size so it's a way of scaling the object through dynamics there's a lot of really fun things you can do with that it's not super applicable to what we're talking about right now but it's very important to know that's there I've used it often next up is probably the next most important setting and it's Dismas but this is a very particular setting it doesn't behave anything like this spring so I don't even realize it says Springs right there it doesn't behave anything like Springs the structural shear or reflection what it's trying to do is imagine if this was a like rigid body if I turn off our soft body and just drop that object like that okay so it's just one object it just kind of cares about where the points are colliding now imagine that simulation is happening but it's actually happening during soft body and what's happening is when we turn our shape conservation up like I put up to ten it is constantly trying to get these points to move to where they would be if it was a rigid body or that's pretty much the way I think of it so by putting in a bunch of shape or a bunch of shape conservation stiffness stiffness in there it is constantly trying to maintain its original shape it doesn't care about how much this end has been bent it's just always trying to return back to that original shape now along those lines we also our volume on it which is actually pretty important to trying to maintain that the overall volume of this shape and we have the damping which is sucking the energy out from that and of course we have our elastic limit so if we were set that to a low number it could actually kind of break it and permanently dent it but stiffness is great for trying to maintain an overall shape but you also kind of wanna use it on depending on what you're doing maybe a light touch because it can immediately override everything else with all this stiffness like it doesn't matter that much I have structural and shear inflection because it's always trying to return to its original shape so big big limitation there and then we have pressure and pressure is pretty fun if we were to maybe increase the pressure to 100% it is now think of it like inflating it is adding additional pressure it's inflating this and boom instantly going to see it's going to inflate our cube here to almost a spherical shape and it's gonna be a little bit bouncy and we have our volume conservation we put that up to let's go up to 100 that's actually going to try and keep it constrained to its original volume but it's maintaining some pressure but it's just trying to round out the shape so those two can fight each other a little bit and of course we have the damping there so if we have to drop that down to 0% I think we're going to get some very nice wiggle on that and I guess all the other ones are sucking the energy out a little bit but you know we get some nice bounce students there where we could also drain out a bunch of energy you and we're starting to explode and actually let's see if it's immediate explosion no it's not it's just because I changes mid-frame but actually that's kind of an important thing to mention why don't I try and break this intentionally boom okay nice I just broke our change of parameter this can happen in a lot of different ways if you crank a setting up too high or maybe too low or something hits it too quickly or too soft bodies hit each other it's entirely possible you're going to start getting a crazy thing where you see parts of it almost like inflating or shooting off in the space and that is very dangerous but is a dangerous thing when you are playing with soft bodies because the farther they explode outward the more calculation time that cinema is trying to do to recover from it and it can kind of quickly freeze up the machine because it's trying to calculate it and you can almost never escape it so as soon as you start seeing any kind of exploding the points are shooting off in the space it's a very good idea to immediately pause it to reset it or maybe hit the render button if you were hit render then it'll immediately do its best to stop the play bar and then render it or you can rewind all the way but there's a bunch of different ways you could potentially stop that and this might actually not be too bad it might recover but you see it's it's thrashing around that's pretty dangerous and you see it's getting bigger and bigger and the bigger it gets us Moore's more slowly it's going to get and I was exploding and I just stopped it but it starts getting really dangerous when it explodes out too far there's a bunch of ways that can happen important to pause that as soon as possible and also say it almost never recovers once it starts exploding it's going to explode now having said that two useful things I like doing is jumping to our render settings actually not even render seing just jumping in into a render and instead of outputting a full render just doing something like okay render out my hardware and then you can render to the picture viewer and you won't it won't freeze up if it explodes in the picture viewer like right now I can go ahead and just hit render as a picture viewer it's not saving and it should I didn't tell all the frames let's say all framed we're not saving it's just doing a hardware render so it should go super fast and I play here and boom we're going to get nice SuperDuper fast render naive unless is happening but if it did start exploding it won't crash the computer won't that time in crashing it's just trying to calculate crazy you know dynamics but effectively freezing up your machine that's a good way around it and another thing to mention now this isn't repeatedly breaking but there's a setting that if you start getting some things exploding you can crank up to kind of make hopefully fix it a little bit and the way to get to that I don't even know the manual way of getting early another shortcut way I think preferences nope edit project settings project settings but the shortcut is command or control D that's gonna pop open your project settings and you click dynamics expert and there's a setting here called steps per frame and that's the most important one and I don't want to get into the technical stuff here too much but right now in between frames 0 & 1 the dynamics is calculating 5 times so it's almost like it's jumping part of the way through the frame and doing sub calculation another part of the way through the frame doing another sub so you can actually change this setting if I were to jump it up to like 15 it's now doing 15 calculations per frame and it will take three times as long to do the calculations but it's more likely to not break and to catch quick dynamics it's just a it's kind of the go to a fix-it setting if something's not going well and I set that back to five because we're not actually having any problems but let's go ahead and jump back into the soft body tag and actually I think we have done a pretty good job here of talking about all of the settings now this is just kind of an overall you know vibe of what they should feel like just to you know like I said I want you to be able to in you know play with the ingredients a little bit like oh I need a little more structure or you know what I want some more bounciness in there and you know what settings to change to make the happen instead just kind of tinkering around until kind of works so along those lines I did a little challenge here for you guys so I've got a whole bunch of settings I've got a whole bunch of files here actually and what I just did is I set up different soft body settings and if you want if you want to try and learn this I'm going to hit play here and you can see the way this feels and then based on the way it looks like it's crumpling try and I guess my crumple this one's gonna crumple but based on the vibe of the way these are moving and squishing and bouncing try and recreate that effect now I'm going to go ahead and click on the dynamic tag so you can see the settings directly but don't try not to look at the settings that I did until you've tried your own try and see me like that I think I've got seven or eight of these to show you so we're just gonna play through them and I want you to try and recreate them so we're gonna start with this little cardboard vibe I'm gonna go ahead and hit play and a little crumpled there maintains a pretty well starts following over but we got some crumple going on one more time boom little crumpling box so go ahead and try and make that one and even pause the video and then try and recreate that effect so now let's go ahead and click on the dynamics tag and you see exactly the settings that I change also keep in mind I only change settings and soft body I didn't everything else was default and if you want the to be the same my floor is exactly 300 down so I to drop up 300 units default cube 10 by 10 segments you should be able to recreate it identically so one more time hit play crumple alright let's jump on the next one we've got ice cream I'm gonna go ahead and hit play blurp and then slowly melting or so tinker around think about the settings we've just talked about and what would you change to make this effect so let's go ahead and take a look at those there they are of course pause the videos you can see the exact numbers and all that when that gets to come here super long so play through one more time with the settings up blurp we've got our little melty ice cream going alright cool let's go to the next one next up we've got jello hit play boy you should be able to do this one we can't talked about this one directly so we've even got a little bounce this is pretty fun where you actually see it lifts off the ground for a second there so nice little bouncy jello vibe so let's go ahead and click on those soft body settings take a look at it very straightforward see these numbers are just dropped and everything else was pretty much default all right so that's jello now let's look at some whipped cream so that was great super gooey I actually made this shape and I was like what material would drop like that I couldn't even think of it so I end up going with whipped cream maybe it's more like pancake batter or something but it's got this really great melty vibe it's actually doing a pretty good job of maintaining the volume you see it gets really flat as it spreads outward so let's go ahead and click on that and see the settings there we go a bunch of them changed on this one so I want to check those out carefully pause the video if you want to one more time alert all right next up we've got we what do we get we got two more after this one so we've got some metal and like I said the only thing I changed was soft body settings so this is still soft body funk so this is now behaving almost exactly like a rigid body would and there's actually really good reasons to do it this way first of all you could could with this technique you could transition from a soft body to a rigid body vibe but the effectors and I'm not gonna go into that in this one but under the simulate particle menu we've got all these effectors and normally on a rigid body those only affect the axis but if it's a soft body they affect it point by point which can be very important so knowing how to kind of make this a stiff shape is important so there we go let's take a look at the settings change the bunch of numbers here but they're all very clean round numbers use you can see I zeroed out a lot of things so pretty straightforward on that one so definitely try and make these before you see them but there we go go ahead and jump to the next one we've got some butter let's see what this one does and then this slowly melting away I really like that one we've got a really good butter vibe so just slowly spreading as it's in the toaster making some delicious toasts so I really dig that one so think about the settings in here how much is its hearing how much is the flexion bending how much is a structure being maintained is it maintaining its overall shape like the stiffness would and yeah you can totally see the men and keep in mind you can always pop open your pop open the line move mode the N be short cut and you actually see what is happening we can actually see that these are stretching away from each other and the flexion doesn't seem to be doing very much it's totally like just scooting around so let's take a look at those settings boom so a bunch of wild numbers here but yeah hopefully you're able to get that somewhat close nice fun one there but agree alright last one we've got a balloon so we've got our cube once again default cube only changing soft body settings Boop we get almost a perfect sphere we nice little soft bounce on the ground go ahead and take a look at those polygons we vary spherical very nice so definitely try and make something like this and also in the video we cover something pretty close to it so go back and watch that part if need be because the goal here is for you to be able to do this not to copy my settings but to understand what is happening so that you can figure it out yourself so later when somebody comes over and says I want some wet clay to slap on the ground you be like oh I know what to do there or what something else maybe maybe a clump of spaghetti is being you know thrown at the wall like there are so many different settings that you might want to be thinking about now I guess let's take a look at the settings before I talk about other things so here's the settings looks like a couple of them changed but hopefully you're really get something close to that and also keep in mind if you got the effect but your settings are a little bit different and that's cool like I could probably crank different settings up different amounts and we'd still be approximately looking at the same thing but there you go seems to be working pretty good pretty well aware so I kind of forgot what was going to say oh I remember an important thing to note is that we are we have been tinkering on the shape but with a 10 by 10 grid actually it's my 10 with 10 so there's actually a thousand polygons but an important thing to note is that soft body and even rigid body are there they're designed by Maxon to kind of work really well at the default size so this is a default cube it works really well and you can shrink to be pretty small and shrink to be pretty big but in general the effects look really well at this scale now if we were to crank up the number of polygons or really lower them the effects are going to be drastically different so if this has like ten times as many polygons in one direction think of like flexion remember how is sag with a flexion well that'd be mean there's 10 times as many polygons to slightly sag so that might sag a lot more and each one maybe the structural bits they can each compress just a little bit but if there's 10 times the amount and that might be 10 times the amount of compression happening so keep in mind that the changing the scale and changing number of polygons will change kind of the amount that these values are needed but the overall effect should kind of be maintained throughout but also keep in mind that's not it's a very good idea to kind of maintain nice even clean polygons when you're working with soft bodies or even just dynamics in general so I think that will wrap this one up so hopefully just learned a whole bunch about soft bodies that you didn't know if you made any cool materials or examples and you rendered them out go ahead and put them in the comments I would love to see them we also like trying to respond to as many comments as possible your feedback is really valuable if you enjoy the kind of stuff that we're doing please subscribe and like the video it really helps us out now like I mentioned earlier I also run a live show every Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. gmt called ass GSG where the audience all shows up people from Twitter and people from Facebook everybody just kind of hangs out we talk about the things that inspire us and we try and recreate the effects mostly in cinema 4d but some After Effects some photoshop and we just try and create things together and solve problems and then just you know figure all this out so thanks for watching this video and I'll see you guys in the next tutorial bye bye everybody so be sure to come check that out now at the end of this video now be sure to stay tuned for the end of this video now be sure to stay tuned for the end of this video where I created some different scene files now be so there we go

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 74,162

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, Cinema 4D, c4d soft body tutorial, c4d soft body, cinema 4d soft body, soft body dynamics, soft body dynamics cinema 4d, Chris Schmidt, Softbody, Soft Body, dynamics cinema 4d, Jello, Butter, c4d jello, softbody dynamics, cinema 4d soft, cinema 4d jiggle

Id: y4cHIo7mMWw

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2017