The Take System in Cinema 4D R19

I learned everyone in today's episode I'd like to talk about cinemas take system takes is this tab up in the corner over here now essentially the take system is a way for you to make multiple versions of the same project so a fairly typical example would be maybe you're making a perfume bottle and your client has said hey right we want a pink version an orange version a blue version and we want a small 50 ml bottle a larger 100 mil and maybe a 175 bottle so you've sort of really got to make six different products now normally this would have required you to make either six projects or put all six things in the same file and try and sort of a hide them and reveal them as needed but the tech system makes this general process much easier so what I'm going to show you is how to use a takes and then I'll show you sort of a couple more advanced little things which you can do so first of all how do we do the basics well let's say I have a Taurus let's just pretend this is our product if you come over to your takes over on the side here the first thing you want to know is how to do the basics so the basics are just making different versions of the same thing so let's say we want to do a thin Taurus and a thick one two different sized Donuts what we have here is our main take the main take is where you store all of the main basic information about the sea and you then have sub versions underneath where they have alterations so to do the basics click on this plus button and it will make you a new take so give this a name which is going to sort of mean something to you so double click and I'll name this one thin I'm going to click the Add button once again this version we'll be thick so in order to adjust these and make our different versions you first have to select which take you actually want to work on now please do keep in mind this is not as simple as clicking the name and making it highlight orange unfortunately what you've got to do is activate it it's a bit like turning on a camera if I had multiple cameras in a scene just selecting the camera name doesn't make you look through the camera you have to tick this little black and white box over to the side well the take system is the same activate one of these takes by clicking that little box you see so let's say we want to make a thin version of this object turn on the thin take and we have a couple of choices at this point in the same way that with recording you can hit this record button or use these little recorder icons to the side or you can just turn on auto record well we have something pretty much exactly the same it takes you can either specify a setting you want to change in this edition of the file or you can turn on the automatic system which just generally makes it a bit quicker and easier to work with so let's assume we're going with the automatic mode first because it's the most straightforward one at the very top we have this round orange icon this is the auto take button basically turn this thing on everything will turn blue this is letting us know that any adjustments we make will actually be saved into the file so for my thin edition of this object I'm gonna go to my object list I'm gonna go to my Taurus and the thing I want to actually change on this is probably going to be the duty to do the pipe radius this is basically the thickness of the tours so if I knock this down from say five hundred to two hundred that has our thin version and that's it it's done it's saved it's recorded all I've got to do now is go to my takes choose a different take choose a different of the project file let's say go for the thick one and I'll say right okay in the thick version this pipe radius should be 800 and in theory that's it if I go back to my main version this is this was the original file I've now got my thin Edition and my thick Edition the beautiful thing about this though is anything you do to the original object in the main take will flow through into the others so for example if I go back to my main version and I say are this ring should have been this large and there should have been a material and the material should have been blue for example you can do whatever you like because in these sub takes all those changes will remain so I have a thin blue large donuts and I know if a thick version so that's the general sort of simplicity and beauty of the tech system you can just have lots and lots of different versions all within one file now let's take a look at the other options we have for making these takes so this is the automatic mode and it's the one I'd use probably most of the time but if you're the kind of person who doesn't like automatic keyframing because you accidentally keep recording things you didn't mean to you may not be a giant fan of this so if you don't like that turn it off and you can just do these things manually so let's say I go to my list of objects have a look at the torus and I want to change let's say how many how many polygons it uses for the size I'm just sure which take them on okay so I'm on the thick take you can just right-click on any parameter and selects doo-doo-doo-doo override override basically tells this take this version you should be different click on there it now sort of lights up it's available for change and I can type in anything alike so maybe I'll go for four to a super low poly version and that will have been saved into the take so my main version is nice and smooth with all those polygons so it's a thin version because we didn't change that but my thick one that's no low-poly you can see the things you've changed over to the side if you unfold this it will start showing you which parameters which settings you've changed and what their actual value is so you can see what's going on and usefully if you decide it will wait I didn't actually want to change how many segments how many polygons this object had you are free to delete these just click on the thing it delete and it will now get rid of that particular setting okay so those are your two main options for actually making the takes in the first place let's look at something a little bit more powerful like so yes we've got these takes but you can also do child takes so I mentioned before with the perfume bottles maybe we have three different colors and we have three different sizes well I don't necessarily just want to make stuff six or nine different takes it'd be nice if I could sort of make a child to take a sub take well we can just choose one of these takes right click and say new child take a child take is going to have sort of a sub selection of things so maybe I could have within this thinner version I could have one which is red I said another one one which is green and one more another child take we'll go one which is yeah okay well I'm going to go back to my automatic mode and I'm gonna say look yellow one material should be yellow for the green one it should be green and for the red one yeah you guessed it it should be red but that's it it's done everything I've done has just been recorded as I told flees I have my yellow version my green one my red one well I can go back to so for like the main parent and it sort of revert back to that blue color I had so they go that's sort of the basic gist of this I'm just put of advice as far as materials go if you're just tweaking with a color what I've just done here is fine you can take your one material and adjust some of its settings but what if you want fundamentally different materials what if I want to have a gold bottle and a see-through plastic bottle and maybe a cardboard bottle maybe ID you don't necessarily want to change all those settings within one material because it's maybe you've already got these three materials already made well keep in mind you can change sort of links to materials as well so let's go for this thick one maybe I have my silver my plastic let me go back to my main take for a moment so ideally you set these things up in your main version and then you apply them in the tech otherwise these things would only exist in the sub take and I wouldn't be able to get back to them from the main version trust me when you're making things go back to your main take it helps quite a bit but in this main take I'll say look I'll have one plastic material I'll have another which is going to be wood I'm going to be super lazy I wouldn't actually use this in real life generally but let's add the super quick wood shader and one more new material let's make a glass off your northern English guys let's add a glass material so did you do transparency choose a glass preset so that there's my three my three materials what you can do as an alternative so I'll do this on the thick version is I'll make those child takes again one two three and we have plastic we'll have wood and we'll have glass you can't just change the links so on my glass version when I choose my torus or at least rather when I select the material which is applied the material it uses is a link it's literally the very first setting it's not something you tend to change much yourself manually but it's there so I can drag this which one was I changing glass okay so I can't just drag this glass material over there so it replaces it you could also drop it on top of the existing tag that would also work so there's my glass one and for my wood I'll drag on the wood material so there you go there's my set of three versions plastic wood and glass now just a word of warning because this is something which I've seen people do before and I understand why but don't what you mustn't do when you're making a take is make something new what I mean with that is let's pretend for a moment that I didn't drag those materials onto the existing tag we just undo those adjustments okay so let's say I'm trying to adjust my wood version my would take what you mustn't do is drag this wood material onto the object because when you do this have a look over here right now I have one blue plastic material applied if I drag this wood onto the object I now have a new material I haven't changed what's there which is really all techstars eight weeks what's already there I've created a new item and the problem is you can't have something which exists in a sub take but not in the parent so when I've dragged this wood on what I've also done is I have actually also added it to the main take it still exists in there as well so yeah in a nutshell don't try and make anything new just adjust what's already there that is your sort of safe bet for working with the tech system okay so let's see so that's the main take other areas other things you might want to know about there are a couple different views this is the dual tree view where you can see all your takes and you can see all the settings which have applied to be brutally honest this is pretty much the view you're gonna want to use all the time the other two modes just let you see essentially the left hand side column or the right hand side column I don't see much massive use for seeing just one side or the other you really kind of do need to see both to work with this effectively you know if you do need a bit more space by all means ripped menu off on docket or docket in somewhere else larger or throat on a second screen art I understand this area here might be a little bit claustrophobic but you know what it actually does kind of work for the most part okay so that's that part another thing you can do is override cameras and render settings maybe when I render the glass version I want a slightly different camera view because the glass only works from a certain position as far as the cameras concerned or maybe when I'm doing the wood one all that wood grain needs some higher quality render settings well if you like you can click either of these sort of ghostly icons and choose different cameras and render settings so if I happen to have a few cameras in here and in my render settings if I happened to have a few different render options which I'd sort of set up previously in your take system you can tell any particular take a look you use this camera here and you use this particular render setting so you can also override these per take so you could actually use takes for having a quick rough default test render or you could use a take for setting up a high quality setting so don't just have to be full Bunny objects change you could use the take system for switching cameras switching render settings is it's quite versatile in that way now what about this other icon this sort of circle here um it's not the best icon it looks a bit like a record dots or maybe the solo button which you've seen elsewhere it's neither of those it is a check box the check box is for you to quickly render specified takes so let's say I want to render out plastic wood and glass and also the green version I don't want to sit there queuing these up one by one or rendering them off one by one so what you can do is make use of these render icons at the top these first two are just sort of standard renders so this first icon says look just render every single take one after another into my picture Europe the second one is pretty much the exact same thing but it now only does the marked takes in other words the ones I've enabled here so you can specify them to the side there's two more icons and these are really the same thing except these are for team render so team render everything or team render just the marked things but there is actually a third way of rendering and to be honest this is actually my preferred way of doing it the problem with rendering all the stuff to the picture viewer is cinema just launches one render after another you don't get to see them in a list you don't get to reorder it you can't sort of check it off before you hit render it just cues them up and off it goes but you can't see the cue anywhere and it's a bit annoying so there is actually another way of doing this if you come over to your render menu and you look at your render queue in here we do have under file add project with takes so these first two icons sort of all takes and marked takes there is another version of this in your render queue so I can add everything into my queue in scene or I can add everything I have marked in my scene to the queue so these are actually probably the more useful render buttons for you because it's nice to see things in a queue check their right check the file names before you actually commit and hit that render button okay so that's the rendering at the way what else am I missed well there's this icon here now this is something called override grips and I will just preface this and say this is not the most useful thing you will ever find I'm going to mention it just for completeness but I've never personally had any a need for it I see why it exists but it's not something you need to often override groups it allows you to just sort of mass change certain specific tags without having to change them all individually so let me just get a new scene without all this stuff in here and let's just throw something else in here so let's say I've just got a few objects did you do a few those and maybe I've got a pink material and a yellow material one there one there and actually one more because I just want to show you what happens when you have a certain specific situation okay so I've got three cubes one with no materials one with the pink material and one with two materials applied with a selection tag now override group so let me just first of all make a take okay override groups if I add one what it does is it gives you this section over here which if you unfold it you'll see it says new group and there's nothing really in here except for this plus mark and this is the key important bit and so of course that's gonna go slightly out of screen so I'll throw up a screenshot for you and move it over a bit there yeah okay so in here you can choose specific tags so this list it's just a list of tags texture tags compositing tags display tags things you would normally find by looking under this tags menu but specifically just eight of them again they're not massively useful but the most useful one really is the texture tag the texture tag allows you to quickly mass apply a certain material to certain objects so let's say I have a fourth material this one oops this go back to our main take that's what you should always add things and edit them let's say this fourth material is going to be bright solid red in my takes on this take here I'm going to tell the override group that it should override something it should sort of overpower whatever else is there and the thing I'm going to overpower it's going to be a texture so what you'll see is this little question mark because it doesn't know which material it should be using or reply so you drag and drop your new material onto there and that's basically assigned it so what happens is any object I place into this group will have all of its materials overpowered so I'm just going to undock this because it's a bit annoying bouncing back and forth between these two tabs so let me just undock my tics okay so what I'm going to do is say look this this object here cube number two this has no materials but if I drag and drop this into the override group it will suddenly have a red material applied you can see the material there and it's got a little T on there to show it's the take system but this material it doesn't sort of properly exist it's not permanently there if I go back to my main take you can see it disappears and I'm just left with this blank object so it's just a sort of temporary take material it only exists for this take here but you can put anything you like in here if I put my pink Cuban air with one material drag and drop chuck it in oops missed you can see that my pink material has now sadly turned red and the same thing will happen with objects with multiple materials if I put this sort of a two colored cube number one in there missed both of its materials have turned red so this override group will completely overpower all tags of a certain type with something so if I go back to main take you can see yeah they all revert back but on this take that will been overpowered and been told to turn red now you could have largely done this by just turning on the take system and then put that red material onto all of those materials you know it would have worked and to be brutally honest would have been massively different from what's already here but it is just a slightly different way of doing things I guess if you've got a big hierarchy where you've just textured up like something at the top of the hierarchy so let me give an example where it might actually be useful so let's say I've got this group this null and in there we've got cubes and we've got tour is all right we're tall right Tauruses and we've got a sphere and all grouped up because this is a big old hierarchy I've created this nice reflective golden material there we go so well it's a nice gold material SAP on the group but I just want a certain specific object in here to be different and for whatever reason that I don't want to give it a material well that's where the override group would come in use you can add a take turn on the override group and say look you should have a texture override and the texture override is gonna turn whoops back to the main take so you can actually edit it the texture override turns everything red I can tell a certain object even though it doesn't have a material I could say hey look mister Taurus you should be part of this red group nao you can overpower it temporarily add a material and that's what the override group system does so again these are the options you've got you can do it with display tags compositing tags so the first or probably the most useful ones compositing tags and texture tags the rest of them it's probably pretty rarely eyes you're gonna use these but they're there if you do if there if you want them right one of the last things to mention then is the mysteriously awfully named lock overrides bottom now this has got to be the most badly named setting the software house and I'm sure police said that once or twice before already but I promise you this time this is the most badly named setting cinema has what does lock overrides do it has nothing to do with locking and it has nothing to do with overrides thanks for that one what luck ho Brides does is it allows you to edit the main take whilst looking at a sub take so let me give you an analogy from moments sometimes let's say I've got a light source and I've got a cube with some rounded edges sometimes you want to edit one object whilst looking at the settings of another so maybe I'm trying to work out how to get the best highlight on the edge of this cube here so I'm gonna need to move this light but I'm gonna need to make me change the settings of the cube well what we traditionally do is go to the cube lock the display with this little padlock and I can now freely select the light and move it around but I can still see my cube settings I'm not looking at the light I'm looking at my cube so I can fiddle around with the settings and great brilliant I can sort of do two different things at once and really that's what lock overrides is so let me show you so if I have an object and I have a take and I've got Auto Tech turned on because I'm editing something within this take here maybe let's say I've told it to be squished this way right what if I want to change the height of this cube whilst looking at ake but I want to change that height for all tanks so ultimately what I want to do is I want to go back to my main take and change the height and then see how it looks in my sub tank but the problem is I want to look at the sub take I want to see this thin version whilst changing the height and problem is if I change the height here it's only going to change it on this take that's what luck overrides is for it allows you to look at a specific take turn this thing off it's on by default and now what happens so long as this thing is disabled luck overrides all my changes won't be applied - this take they'll actually be applied to the main take so I am free to change the height that won't have just changed it here that will have also have changed it fingers crossed in the main take so that's all it is luck overrides means only affect the main take so hopefully you can see why it's the most badly named setting ever because well I certainly didn't know what he did till I started asking about it and I don't think most other people did either anyway um we're kind of almost done on this really um the only other little teeny tiny thing to mention is just the fact that once you've got these different takes and all these doing versions if you need to for any reason perhaps sending off to a render farm or giving the file to another person you can have a take and then save it out as a file just go file current take - new document there you go you can save it out as a separate file for some reason all right there you go that's the take system I hope that's been useful hope that's filled in any questions if you do have any questions about the tech system feel free to do to do to answer them ask them down below and I'll see if I can answer them as soon as possible and as ever if you have any questions drop me an email contact at 2 3 D fluff comm we'll get it through to me and I'll see if I can make you a video ok this has been mushroom 3d fluff cheers for now you

Channel: 3DFluff

Views: 11,535

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, maxon, 3d fluff, gsg, greyscale gorilla, cineversity, digital meat, nose man, mash, tutorial, training, guide, lesson, how to, matthew oneill, takes, override, lock, group, r19, dual tree, auto take

Id: EQPN2pBnuJo

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/3dfluff]

Good heavens it's new video time! Today I decided to tackle the takes system, this is quite a good one for those who have been using C4D for a few years. If you ever find yourself saving out multiple versions of essentially the same project just so you can make a few variations for a client, then you really should be using takes instead.

eg. 3 different bottle sizes, 2 different labels, 3 camera angles. You can have this all in one scene.

[u/mynameisollie]

Keep in mind that if you have a very large project with 100s of takes, each with their own edits, the project will become unusably slow.