Thomas Gugel @ IBC 2019 | Maxon Cinema 4D

welcome to my presentation which is called creating a fashion brands corporate film and I will talk about a project I did over the last one and a half run about one and a half years it was for a fashion brand called Gani um I divided my presentation into three parts the first one is about the project itself about the concept about the brief the middle part is easy pison Python introduction because I used it a lot in the present in the in the project and the third part is about some scene files break down some some files and some stuff I did and how I used Python and approach it and how it helped me so but before we dive into we think we should watch the film first [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you very much thank you very much so that is the movies oh hello again my name is Thomas Google I am a designer mainly doing motion design and art direction and I work at a co-working space in Cologne in Germany and to give you a quick impression what kind of work I do over the last years I did more frequently some broadcast design and some channel rebrands this one is an example I did in 2017 it was for a German news TV channel called Phoenix and I pretty much like this kind of work because you don't you have to come up with not just a design concept you also have to develop design system what is easy adaptable to many different use case that the broadcast station needs that's another example was an explained a little explainer film for an applause and the app called mops another example I do also some illustration stuff this was for a magazine cover I did and the magazine was called perspectives so and if you want to what the movies haven't showed here so if you want to see it at my portfolio websites called three minus seconds dot de the project I wanted to talk about today is the Ghanian project and Ghani ohm is a fashion brand they mainly combine high-quality tailor-made fabrics with hand-drawn patterns and this looks like this that the kind of stuff they are doing this some pictures from the first collection they made it's called preloads another picture or what they did in the campaign they made some nice pictures this is the second collection they hired a guy called pada Gunda do these abstracts organic shapes on the faces and that's another picture what the cloth is looking like what they are doing so with this they came to me and contacted me and they because they they wanted to do the next step they did photos they did some 3d stuff and now they said we wanted to have for the next collection they wanted to have some video and the next collection was a permanent collection that I prepared some pictures so that's what they are doing it's pretty nice pretty high quality stuff what they are doing and when you buy stuff from them you get it in these nice little boxes just put it there because I'm a big fan of these boxes they're really Richard and I think when you buy stuff the you kind of expect that it comes in these boxes what was pretty much settled from the beginning is the pattern the pattern is the pattern from the permanent collection and alongside with this the colors were also pretty much set and the client was already heading into a certain style direction with the previous campaigns so they gave these pictures to me what they had in mind and I like when a client is coming up with pictures like this because he instantly have something to talk about the further development of the concept and that what I did I dived into the concept on the first step I took was I would took a deeper look at the cloth itself so usually when I buy a checkered like this one you have a black checkered you have kind of a bluish inlay they don't do it they combine it with their hand-drawn patterns and this is something really unique I think for Gani this this color clash that they have these loud patterns combined with these discreet colors white black and white colors and they the clashing against each other and that was something I wanted to transfer into the film so I came up with dividing the film into four parts so the first part should be the black part with the material stuff got introduced and the second part was the white part the white part were this kind of finding shape stuff as is happening the third part was a colorful the creative the pattern part and the fourth one is when everything comes together so the next step was to looking into the pattern itself and but just staring at it it kind of reminded me of some things because I do a lot of hiking and I was always fascinating fascinated about these rock formations naturally evolved over time and became some kind of pattern by itself and I grasped through my photo library and tried to substitute these patterns with the pictures I've made and I came up with this one and I pretty much liked what I saw because I think it really fits the main pattern and just to give you another example you see final shot and where the inspiration is where where it was coming from and with this in mind I dived into the scene development by just scribbling first ideas and but what me got me really started was playing around with some office supplies and a colleague of mine had these foam material laying around and by just bending it done kind of patent arised and I thought there why not hopping into cinema 4d and try to rebuild exactly these material and we tried some stuff tried to play around with the with the sliders and tried what I can do with it and I wrapped up all what you saw earlier and I presented it to the client and the client was pretty heavy they liked what what the concept is heading to and they pretty much like this a lot because they they like this natural and random movement and it's this realistic movement and they said for all further development what what you're doing we're making one restriction we wanted to have every of these objects of these art objects to be reproducible in real world so it has to be attached to some some wall or there has to be a connection to something it had some kind of mechanic inside so that was the research neck I kind of liked it and I came up with this animatic there have been a lot of other animatics but this is the one with a goal from the client [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and that's wraps up the first part of my presentation now we could dive deeper into the scene first but first I wanted to introduce my little helpers the subtitle of my presentation because I will this project I started using Python a lot and it was a big help for me and I wanted to share this little journey I took and I used Python mainly because I have kind of basic knowledge in scripting and by using scripting it it forces you to have a more problem-solving and structural approach of working and it's kind of fitting my personally way of working so that was maybe the main reason the the other reason was when you start using Python and use it more frequently and it gets more of second nature to you it it doesn't slows you down anymore instead you can automate tasks and you can even concentrate even more on the creative part of your project so what I wanted to say is I wanted to encourage everyone to use Python even if you're not a coder I'm also not a good coder that definitely better guys out there but give it a try use it it will it can I should will show you next some little little examples it really can speed up your workflow also with with little stuff so just to give you a short hair tub is there some things you have to know about scripting there are a lot of other things but that's maybe that what you get started so you have to know something about datatypes what a string is what an integer is you have to know something about basic coding stuff so what an if condition to make decisions what is the for iteration what is a for loop to automate some stuff the good thing is you don't have to right everything on your own there's pre-made stuff it's called functions there is the C for D Pisan documentary and in the documentary is every every function is written in they can look it up there the the function I wanted to that you remember it is the print function because is your big helper because with the print function you can print out your variables and you can see what your script is doing and it's a big help and the thing what got me started is the predefined variable Opie it stands for current operator and that is kind of your starting point from there you can move to other objects can grab data and that what for me to realizing that was my starting point so now way I wanted to hop into cinema 4d and wanted to script with you a little renaming tools so imagine we have a scene file looking like this with a lot of objects and they all have random names and do you want to rename in a proper way so we are starting by adding a python tag to it there are a lot of other ways to use Python this is the one I wanted to show to you here so what we wanted to do we wanted to exit the object so we write in variable object equals o P that the first thing I wanted to say I told you that the operator and the operator is the current Tech where we are on now so this is a script so and by using a function called get object we are now pointing on this null object here and what not that the one we wanted to change we wanted to change the cube here so with a object equals object get down so now we are really pointing on this object and we wanted to rename it and that's another thing you have to know how do I access data in my script within cinema 4d so you can do that by wetting of this you can do that but just drag and dropping everything what you what you can see here into your script so I wanted to change the name of this object you can choose any one of these it's just it doesn't matter so you push it drag and drop it in here and cinema is trying to give you a direct connection to this but we don't need that we already have our own pointer so with a object equals and maybe with a hello and by executing this script hey we renamed our first object here that's great but it's not that fancy because we wanted to rename all of the objects we need a for loop so we say for E in X range 200 so and by pushing this in there now we are doing the renaming thing 200 times by executing this now it's not that fancy because it will rename the first object two hundred time that's not that what we want we need object equals object get next so now he's renaming taking the next object and doing the same stuff again and by executing now we have renamed all the object that's great but and now I wanted to introduce you in your next little helper because you have to know what the console is and the console is this little thing yeah I will just push it up here and the console is printing out every mistake you made and you can see we running into an error and this is also seen by this little X over here that the script is telling you we have an on type error and this is happening because we are trying to rename 200 object and they are not 200 objects so we have to do this to tell Python what he should do when there's no object anymore when we do that by writing a if condition in with a if object equals none then please break and when you look at the little X and I'm executing the X disappears pythons happy and happy to and we wanted to exit we wanted to extend this little script by because now they are named with have all the same name and we wanted to extend this by adding a number next to the to the object and we do that by using the variable and we execute and we run in another arrow because python is telling me you trying to push a integer a the data type integer into a field what's supposed to be a string so that's not that we can change this by saying okay we know it is kind of wrong but we know what we are doing so we are saying that is a string that's fine for me and then executing and now we have a renaming tool but now we can copy this stuff and Python is doing that for us so you don't have to care about it anymore and I want you that you remember do this little script because I will show you some more examples and also where I use it in the projects so this is just one first example I wanted to want to show you just changing my viewport here and show you a another one I prepared and this is something what was always bothering me when you're working with thinking particles thinking particles always lay laying on top of you of everything so if you say this is a matrix object was which is generating these thinking particles and by hiding this object they are still there and when you are navigating through this kind of this optical illusion that they are still still there so you have to dive into the thinking particle settings you have to go down there choose your particle group and say none then they are disappearing and maybe when you have a complement complex scene than this one then it really can bother you so what I made is a little script what is doing this for me and I will show you by just copying this script on the matrix object and this little thing has some user data and I have to feed this script with a part of the group I feed it in here and by making this object invisible it does the clicks for me the way I don't have to care about anymore it doesn't look that fancy but when you do have to do it a thousand times it can bother you so this is kind of a little helper I wrote myself and it was not that that complicated when you look at the script itself it's pretty pretty simple stuff so this is another example I wanted to show you and that's also another one we used the Python check but you can use Python in another ways and by using the Pisan generator you can mainly generate geometry and what I did here I generated a spline and I did that by grabbing the position of these first null object and the other null object and stared to python please generate a spline in between and by moving that we basically made a simple tracer and I combined this with the in renaming tool so I can duplicate these null objects and by grabbing them around and pushing them around I made even points in between this can come in handy and to show you that in a more practical example I want to jump to the first scene file at the stone swing scene file and that's another example the stone swing the the basic setup is pretty simple it's a stone connected to some spring connectors I have here and by increasing the rest length I pushed them I can start this here where while I'm talking so by I'm increasing this they are pushing them into the center and by really releasing the value it's just swings back to its initial position but what I wanted to show you here but because we are talking about peyten yes that I combined these with my little already seen renaming tool and I did another renaming tool what is taking care of that this structure here all the object underneath got renamed in a way I wanted to have them so by just duplicating this object it Python renamed all the objects exactly how I wanted to have it so and by playing this I have two objects and I can duplicate them even more and I have done this by renaming it and the great part is I can now reef refer to these objects because I renamed it in exactly the way I wanted to have it and I extended us with my script for with connect with where with which I generated splines and in this script it's it looks a little bit complicated but it isn't it does all what this script is doing is connecting this point as this null object with this null object and this null object with this null object and that's everything what what this script is doing and I scripted it that way that I wanted to push in the amount of stones I have and by saying this are five stones the script is taking care of connecting the splines to the points where I wanted to have them and by just duplicating the null object and the stones I don't have to care about it anymore and can really start uh directing my scene and Python and cinema is doing the rest for me that's pretty neat which back into the presentation that's pretty much it what I wanted to show you with the stone swing scene the next thing I wanted to show is the level line scene and I'm not going going into you and going to and show you how I created the Alliance and all the stuff I will show we showed you was one thing I wanted to show you what I did with Python here so the basic setup is I have a cloner grid and a tennis player a soft body dynamics on it and by pushing them together yeah I have mainly the basic movement I wanted to have in this scene and because it has to be all kind of reproducible in real world so what what would I do I would put some sticks in every of these boxes and by making a thread between all the sticks and making them some lines I have basically the main setup what I wanted to achieve and I did that by having a null object with some sticks underneath you can see it here and I had a corresponding spline with 10 points so I knew had 10 columns and here's the expresso setup I made it's nothing really fancy is I just reading the the cloner grid with a data node and looking for the positions of every clone and putting a corresponding stick on every of these boxes but the thing what I wanted to show to you is when I am I show it first I used the name because I knew I had 10 rows and I don't want to care about the distribution this is something cinema can do for me and I used the name of the null object with my little renaming tool it was easy to achieve in the setter in the expresso setup and by feeding this number into the row of another little Python thing I did was just simple math and I'll show you that I have these feeding in there [Music] they are showing you the data nodes they are the stick where yeah and here's the little renaming tool and by chest duplicating the sticks got distributed because of the name of the null object so and I have to change a lot just anything the script was kind of versatile it could just expand and I did exactly the same thing with the lions and I had just to duplicate them and they were distributed the way I wanted to have it and that's just with the rename a tool and by referencing the name of the objects and that's the final result so python was a big help here as well the next scene file is the magnetic patterns scene file and they're also the the basic setup is pretty simple it's some pieces of the of the main pattern and I had some spring connectors connected to the whole setup and I could move it around and the main thing I did here I connected every of these pieces with some hinge connectors so they stick together they couldn't fall apart and I had a force also you can see here and the forces that's the main thing what makes drives this seen and by increasing the force the number of the force amount I couldn't it happened some kind of force around every object dust that they get attracted and so by pushing them up they attract each other by pushing it down they just wrap up and go release in the final position but what I had to take care of is because also what I told you it has to be reproducible in real world and if you try to rebuild stuff like this I imagined I had to take care of that some kind of rope or thread is in between all the objects and when I push it on the side it folds folds up and when I'm releasing it it releases it in its initial position that I was by thinking I don't know if it's really reproducible but it's not science so it's what it was fine for me and because I was already into Python I thought why not doing this with Python again because when I used the simple tracer I have the problem that I don't know where the objects are and I had all the time intersections between these because it was just going through the object and I made this little script it is the same thing it's just making it's generating a spline but in a certain way I wanted to have it and I fit in in these objects to clone to clone us giving the index numbers and when I'm showing the top view here you can see what the script is doing it's just creating points in between and when I am stopping here you can see this is what the script is doing exactly these corners when I use the tracer I have this point and this point and I had an intersection between the both of these objects and by doing this for 20 or 30 or 40 little pieces it is kind of a tedious way of working so this script was helping me a lot because it took care of all these stuff though I had don't had to care about it anymore it was a big help again so that wraps up the magnetic patterns scene and the scene I want to show you next is was the most intense scene concept-wise n production-wise concept-wise because we had no clue how this scene should look like what we wanted to be we knew we wanted to have some cloth reference in there we wanted to show the pattern borders that was also something we knew but we had no clue what the mechanic behind this this object and we started out by doing some stuff in Houdini and did came up with this one here and we liked it a lot and we thought that maybe a way how this scene could work but it doesn't fit it to the thing that it has to be reproducible in real world I don't know how to reproduce this so we killed the idea and started to play around in cinema again and did some simple stuff and by just playing around we came closer to something we we wanted to to have and these are just some examples what-what I tried and played around and that's really the fun part in cinema that you can easily play around and have something in your mind and just just playing and come up with new ideas and we came up with this amazing scribble I did it by myself and that should show you the the the basic idea we had so we had we wanted to have three levels the first is a ground level the mid level and the up level and by having kind of a hidden machine who is pulling the strings on the ground level the strings got bypassed to the mid level and on the mid level there are some sticks these sticks get pushed with some kind of magic mechanic I don't know and they got pushed up to the top level and by having another color the Bourdon Potter the the bore and petyr's will display on the top level of this cloth movement so I started out by creating the basic movement so I did this one just to have this realistic movement of cloth and I did some some other Python stuff I don't want to show you here but it that the basic movement I picked this house out as an Olympic so I had called could rely on and I can use it in the way I wanted to have it and so this is the setup I came up with so we're now I have here these three levels the ground level mid level and the upper level and I'm using your chest to show it to you an example mesh so this is the the cloth you have to imagine this is the cloth animation but in there are just matrix objects and I use the source mesh to distribute randomly points over the mesh and by using some effectors and I have here just a simple plane effect or what is doing this it's moving up the clones in positive y-direction and that's basically it almost because I wanted to have just the border the the pattern borders to be visible so I used to shade a effector to kill the other ones and by increasing the amount of clones you can even see though this was what the pattern borders you arise and I wanted to fill the holes with another matrix object so I just inverted the shader effect I made and had the other the holes filth of this the orange ones and by displaying the top level again oh yeah I did another thing I wanted to move them in negative y-direction so when you push it through these ones are going and negative wire the others and positive Y and by now displaying the top level it's basically the main setup I did but what I wanted to have is at the moment all the clones are lined up straight in one direction and I wanted to have that the clones got rotated in 45 degrees and minus 45 degrees degrees so that I they are kind of sharing displaying an X and because I was already into into Python I thought why not trying to achieve this was writing a Python effector and this one here is also I always say that it's not that it's not that difficult it really isn't but you can see it does exactly what it supposed to do it takes every second clone and rotates it in the the positive direction and the negative direction but I had one problem by rendering this it just doesn't work I don't really I don't know what I did wrong so I had to find a way around I killed the script because I had no idea what I did wrong if anybody knows it please please tell me and I just googled the problem and I came I found a a tutorial from a guy called Philip Pavlov and he achieved the same thing what I wanted to do with a simple formula effect and so I killed my Python script and by activating and this is the formula he is using so and by pushing the the effector through the clones you can see it just almost the same and the result I wanted to to have so when we are now hitting back to my initial scene fire I prepared it here so there see we both formula effectors and when we are activating them and going through and starting the animation you can see now they are rotating exactly the way I wanted to have it and I just in the final scene for that just increase the amount of clones and that's how we are came up with a final the final impression of this shot how these these things are look alike so and the next step was I needed these I needed these splines in between all of these clones and I had already a script what was what I can could use to produce plans so I just adjusted the script a little bit that it understands clones metrics objects I pushed them in and by activating the object it's just connecting every index of every matrix every clone and the matrix object with the corresponding of the other one so that's pretty simple it's just connecting two points and that's fine I made a little slider that I can easily reduce the amount of splines I wanted to have so that was pretty much the way I did that but I had one problem with the other one because I needed the connection from here to here and and on the ground level we have another point count as we have here and by activating my script with this my script is pretty much screwed because it's connecting the index and the index on the mid level and they got distributed randomly so the script couldn't handle with it and I came up with an idea and I thought why not pre-sorting the clones and I made a texture what is Grace has just grayscale values and when I so I could say if you are in the corner for fully white then you connect to this if you are less white then connect to this point if you are black then please connect to the point in the back and by doing so with a shader factor I shaded the the clones accordingly and though that I had have access to the color well you and I adjusted my script a bit though that is was pre-sorting all the stuff and reading the color out of it and that's the result of it so now I could say okay if you're here connect to the corresponding point and that's pretty much it and it's based on this simple simple script by how do I create a spline where they were in Python with the Python generator and by activating everything again we are almost done to achieve the final result of this scene the last step almost last there have been others but the last problem I had at the moment there's no geometry in the scene so if you want to render this it's black so it's because the matrix officer doesn't does not generate any any geometry and the spline generator generates splines but also no geometry and luckily with a matrix object you can also generate things in particles and that's that's what I did I you know it's generated I think particles pushed in a particle group you have to do that and you have to adjust the particle priority to aftereffect us then it's calculated after the effect effectors have done their work and so you have the exact same result as with with the effect asked and you feed this into a particle geometry object was what you see on the on the bottom and by doing so and activating them and hiding the original matrix object you have pretty much the same result with thinking particles and these you can't render you also can't render but luckily with redshift you can do this by adding a redshift object and it provides you with some possibility that you can render particles as spheres or as boxes but also with custom objects and in this example I pushed in these lists some pre-made geometry it's just a cube and by doing this and firing up the redshift friend of you you can see now we have a result and that's how I rendered the the final result so I had no geometry at all in the final scene it was all done with redshift and the possibility to render render the geometry on render time and I did the same thing with this spline generator adjusted this to showing it up at the Lynda's and now we are done that's the final result so and we are almost done with my presentations this is the last example for the conclusion slide I showed you some examples what I did with with Python it was it it was really simple stuff and it kind of evolved over time and I learned more and more and it started to getting fun and I could it automated my my workflow and this is kind of what came out of this and I haven't used it really in the final movie but I still like what it's able to do so I made my own little quadtree generator and it starts out by having a matrix object which is generating just some points and I take these points and distributing cubes over it and the quadtree is you have one cube and they divide the cube on a certain mechanism to in in eight other cubes and in eight other cubes and I that's the case I show you so this is the matrix object where I feed it in into my into my little tool it is a little bit more of code but it's not that complicated so I had a threshold and by pushing that down and making it a little bit more visible you can see here now on this when I'm pushing out the threshold it starts to divide these cubes and I made a possibility to push in dumb geometry and by saying okay use not it just these boxes use this geometry I could distribute it randomly and I also grabbed a turbulence field to to to organize these these distribution so I can use the well-known noises from cinema I couldn't scale the noise I could rotate the noise all the stuff you you use usually in in cinema as well but this I grabbed from the Python SDK the turbulence object and just used it within Python that's all and I made some other possibilities so I could randomly distribute the instances I have and I could randomly rotate the objects I wanted to have it had all the scripts I met they all have his flaws I'm not perfectly I'm not really the best coder at all but it that's what why I wanted to show it to you I want to encourage you just try a little bit of Python it can speed up your workflow it was really a big help for me and you maybe can can come up with some other crazy stuff that's just an example I I made so and now we are on the conclusions light because that wraps up my almost my presentation to say it once more I stressed Python scripting a lot in this presentation but this was just one piece of the puzzle there was a lot more so on one side having a good concept is for me the main thing in every project you have to have a good concept the animatic having an animatic in this stage is good for the client that the client knows what he's what he's getting and there you can rely on having a shot list helps you keep track of what it what you have to do and all these play around stuff these are indie stuff it is also important to come up with ideas that was was a big help for me more cinema wires using the Alembic workflow is I can I can recommend these it's just good to bake out your stuff open it up in a new scene it speeds up your viewport and you can rely on what your thing is doing and you still can change it afterwards the tech system I had in the most of the scenes I had 1 to 12 cameras and for each camera I had a different light setup so the tech system took care of it so I don't have to care about this I would've gone crazy if I have to render and change if you have to change one setting you have to change it if you have to separate when you have separated into different files and not using the tech system you have to change every in every single scene file we have to change one thing though that is a good big help the cinema 4d community is just amazing it's great what you can what how much help you get and if you have any question in in even with PI's and just google it you will find you will find help and you will find the enter and last but not least redshift I started redshift within this project and I became quite a fanboy it was it's just a solid renderer I liked it a lot and had no problems at all in rendering so I can really recommend that and thank you for that and that's it thank you very much for for your time and listen to my presentation [Applause]

Channel: Maxon

Views: 22,849

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, r21, release21, release 21, ibc, ibc2019, ibcshow

Id: oUByrtad4ow

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019