Tutorial: Fields in Cinema 4D in depth | Maxon Cinema 4D

welcome in this tutorial I talk about the new fields in max on cinema 4d r20 in this great example by the talented artist christian wolff you see which amazing effects you can now achieve with this incredible new technology but first take a look into his final animation [Music] Wow cool the scene itself is really complex but the use technique is due to the new fields and volume features in our twenty quite simple the creatures are built from sweep hair and the volume builder measure set up in the moment of contact of the tentacles with the balls a vertex map with an infection process is used to build a cool light effect you will see the work with the vertex maps and the infection process later in this tutorial but let's first talk about Christian Christian works as a V of X artist at pic solution and use a cinema 4d since ages he enjoys all kinds of VFX you find more information about christian on pic solution dot t-- before we dive into the tutorial i wanted to make a brief introduction of myself my name is Helga mouse and i'm a maxim certified lead instructor I work now since eighteen years in the industry as a 3d and visual effects trainer for my company pixel trained you find more information about me and my trainings on pixel trained dot t-- e-- so let's get started to dive into the world of fields and for this I prepared this simple scene here to first understand the principles behind fields so what are fields fields our great new feature inside of cinema 4d are twenty and offer us in 3d artists a whole new world of possibilities for me it's a little bit like mograph 2.0 they replace the old fall-off system in the effectors but that's not all but first try to understand what a fall of object is and how fields work from this fundamental point of view so for this I select him a matrix object and I add here a simply vector for example here a plane effector if you wanted to understand how this effect of works you have to take a look into the vector itself here under the tap effector you have the so named driver in a plane effector there's nothing here because it hasn't got a drive it only has a multiplier but if you have for example another effector which has a really obvious driver for example random or I can take your a sound effector you will see that in the effector here the driver for random effector here is a random formula and here you have turbulence and so on in this sound effector we can load here a sound file and we can select here parts of this frequency band to drive the whole effector the next step an effector normally does is it chains according to this value which you calculate in the driver a parameter so you drive the parameter and for mograph clones this is position scale rotation but also colors and some stuff more and then we had a third part and the third part is also multiplier and I explained it most of the times and trainings like a 3d mask and this was the fall-off that means at the moment all of my clones are moved by this 100 centimeter on let us take 150 centimeter in the Y direction if you now want to mask this out we normally go to the fall offs and you see that in our 20 the old fall offs now are gone and we have now the new field system here and also a new UI we have here fields list and here we have an SAP attributes manager and we have some pallets here to add stuff so let's get started with the simple new field and for this we can make a double click here in this empty area and it takes our first field which is a linear field here so if you have ever used in our 19 and linear fall-off you see that it looks really the same here you have this widget you can change here the length of it you can rotate you can move it but what's different now and this is one of the big advantages is that they are now decoupled from the object a mask that you can use them on more than one effector and you can mix and blend them and much much more so if you take now a look here you see that the field itself is an own object which is now a child of the plane effector so if you move the plane effector this field moves with it but you don't need to make this parent-child relationship you can drag it out and place it somewhere else in your scene and instead of moving now the plane effector I can move now this field object here in my scene and you get the change on your clones you also can add fields by menu so if you go here to the create menu there's a whole field create menu here and you can now for example say I wanted to have another linear field here and it comes here as a second object I delete the old one so that I can show you how to assign them and if you want now to add this field here to the plane effector you don't make a child of this you see nothing happens here you go into this plane effector here into the fall of tab and you drag it here into this list here and then it works so the parent-child relationship is only for your convenience if you want to move the effector but in the new workflow you don't have to move all the time the effector you have a separate field object now which you can move if you now select the field object itself you see it has some options here which we want to talk about and you also can change here the type of the field if you decide to want to have another type of field but the nice thing is that you now have with this field object the option that you can add the same field object too many effectors for example but not only that you can also add fields to deformers to selection text to weight maps for example from mograph to vertex colors and you can use them in more than one effector at the same time so it's much much more flexible but first we look now into the basic options here our linear field now is back and if you want to select now this linear field to manipulate it you can select it here in this list here and you see in the moment you do that all the options of this field here will be presented here in this SAP area of my attributes manager and that's really nice so I don't have to search for the object here anymore also the widget here is now the widget of this linear field and not a plane effector so I can move now here this linear field because I've selected it let's go through the list here is a little takeaway you can switch it on and off that's easy then here is a symbol for the field type you can change the field name if you like and then you have two or sometimes three ticks these ticks or buttons here are what you want to manipulate with the help of the field this year is the value and this year is the color and at this point I have to make a little side note also a new feature inside of cinema 4d r20 is the color workflow in mograph in r19 and before it was not so easy for everyone to understand directly how you change colors and clones in this new version it's much much easier because now if you go here to the effector under the parameters here is the kalam mode you have now a new color mode with the name fields color so you give the whole control about the color also to the fields object and so these fields here are now changing also the color if you like so we go back into this year if you want to switch it on and off you have now this button here and then we have blending options we talked about this in a moment let's take a look here into the tabs of a feared first is really easy it's planning and these options here are absolutely the same like you find here so you can enable and disable this here also can open this up and change value in color so these are these two option it's really useful that they are here because you can key them if you need this then you have the layer opacity and the blending mode same like here like I've set its for key framing then in the next step we have to field itself so we have all the options this field offers in our linear field it's really easy if the length of the field and also the direction in which direction the field looks and you can clip it to the shape itself sometimes useful then we have the hole remapping like I've said a field is like a mask and you multiply the values which normally this affected us by the output of this field list here and how you want to apply this this is done by the remapping and here's a remapping curve now if you take a look here and look onto this area here you see this is exactly the same if you now want to change here this fall over here you can go into the strength for example and multiply it up and down also you can clip it on the right side if you change the inner offset the word inner is more obvious if you have a symmetrical fall-off we take an example in a moment then we have a clamping for minimum and maximum values and also you can tell the system okay I want to have here a gap so I start with 20 percent or I want to end here with 80 percent if it's useful and then we have a contour an extremely useful thing because in the moment this curve here you can't change it here in the widget because it's changed here by the contour you have a hole multiplier again for animating and you have a country mode and if you open this up and you select for example quadratic you can have now a curve here let me make a little bit more space here on my view that means if I now go to the curve and bring it here down you see you get a quadratic curve upwards or downwards so this is a really nice function you also have two-step modes one is named steps you'll see it steps here or you can have a quantize if you like also with a step here and the last option we have is a really a curve mode so if you add this you see this is your curve and you can change the curve how this fall-off works I said that this year is sometimes symmetrical so let's try something I remove this field here so you can select it and press you delete button and if you now want to have a new field here you can use one of these buttons here and the first one here is the fields list so if you go over this here and hold down you see it has this little black triangle so it's a palette behind this and you see here these are the field objects and you see many fields which you know from other versions of cinema 4d but also some new ones and I take here a symmetrical one for example a spherical field I make this feel a little bit bigger and now you see this field here is symmetrical from the midpoint here to the outskirts and you see here under remapping now that this widget has changed and now you see what the inner offset here does it goes here to the midpoint here and then you can try all the other options again so if I want to have for example now a step in here and I want to tell the system okay I wanted to have a whole bunch of steps here you get something like that really cool and like I've said if you select your field you can move it and you get really cool effects okay now we want to talk really briefly about the color we've changed the values here in this moment but if I deactivate the values you also see that we also changed a little bit the color maybe we go back to something more easy to see if I open this you'll see yeah we changed the color here to this greenish tint if you want to change the color now to something nicer you can go to the calorie map here you have a color chooser where you can choose the color which you want to adhere to the Clones and you see that this remapping here also remaps the color that's really really useful so it fits but you also can add instead of a color a whole gradient that means that you don't have to live that this red he is always going here to white you can tell the system okay I want to have my own gradient here and I want to have for example rat in the outside and for example blue at the inside so it's the same fall off if you take a look here if I activate here the values again but you then get different colors that's the basic principle behind a field what happens if we now use more than one field for this we have this list so I have a spherical field and I want also to add another spherical field here and I place them at different areas of my plane [Music] now you see that both fields work at the same time and now you can start off mixing these two fields together so if you place them now together you will see that you always get the maximum value of these two and this is done by the planning if you have a blending mode of normal only this here wins because this year normal overlaps this field here if you want you also can subtract so this field subtracts now the other one you can have an overlay if you like and also some other modes also you have a opacity here which is really useful for some effects and like I've said you can use now these two fields also on other objects at the same time you only have to add them into the fall-off list here of the other objects these are the basics behind this fall off the side of the work with mograph you also can use fields now in the work with deformers and for this I have prepared this nice senior this is a torus and this torus is divided with the help of its parameters so that I now can use a deform ER in my case I want to use a displacer let's add it to the Taurus and first we have to displace now with the help of the displacer so go to the shading area and because I don't have a displacement map I use a noise here we now select something nice for example of turbulence make the global scale a little bit bigger I can clip it a little bit here to make it more aggressive and then we can change the height here so that we get something funny here backup set fields are the replacement for the four offs and our deformer set fall ups and so we now can also use the fields in them select now or displacive go to the fall-off and we see the same list field and so you can use the same fields which you used before inside of mograph so to add this we can for example now tell the system ok I want to use field object for example let's take a circle field here if we place it now over the surface you will see that now the field here decides where you want to see here the displacement effect and this is also useful for modeling purposes because it's much easier to really limit a display cell or another deformer exactly why you want it this is a first use but I want to use now the chance here to show you some of the other objects you can adhere to the field list for this we throw away the certain feel for a moment and instead of that we go here now to the fields layers what's the difference between these three areas mm-hmm if you look on the left side you see the names field objects are most of the times objects which are generated automatically by the system so these are really like the old full of things and they are also a little bit like the old effector objects so that's the way I think about this under this area here are few layers and these few layers are most of the time added if you drag something from the object manager into the system if you don't do it like that you have to show the system what you want to add but first we use here a layer which doesn't need anything and this is for example the time layer this time layer here generates for us an animation you have here right and offset and a shape and you see in the moment you add this the value which represents a zero so it doesn't work at all better to say it mask out the whole displacer and if you now press play you see over the 30 frames now the mask is gone and it is now opening the whole thing for us and you can play you with the rate and the offset there are also some nice functions here for example there's a sine curve if you want to use that really useful if you do something like that let's throw it away and we have here other nice options let me take another one for example I want to demonstrate you how to work with let's say a point object and like I said if you only select a point object now you see your mouse cursor wants to show an object and I don't have one so I press the Escape key and first do my homework I add an object in our case let's take notice here this time a cube I place it here and I make it unusable it's only in a helper object and then we can go into the field list now you can use if you like the point object again and now show it to the system that's one way of doing it and now you see it's added now to the list and here in the object tap you directly see here this object here the cube and you can change it here or you can be a little bit lazy if you have a field list open drag the object into the list and now you see it's the same result but we don't see anything what's happening if you now let's select the cube here and go back to the layer you see we are in the moment in points mode and if you see here our cube you see we only have this 8 points and around these 8 points we get a radius of 20 centimeters where the influences and it's too low if you yeah increase that a lot you see yeah one point is close enough here and another one here but in my case I want to use here for example surface this is one idea and also you have radius here you can restrict it nice and you can use the volume which is also working really nice and so you can now use your own objects here to tell the system where the field is and this works for many different kind of objects from mograph objects particle object point object splines and so on let's take for example a particle system only to demonstrate this I have a meter here and I place it here in front of that I want to have many particles let's take 50 and we are wanted to have different speeds here let's test okay crazy and I go here to the emitter and open up this angle here 50 degree that's it okay not the nicest particle system but it will work we now want to use this particle system as a field helper so go into the system and this time I drag it like I've said it's for the lazy people and now you instantly see that every particle has now a radius and if it comes close here to our surface in the radius of 20 centimeter we can change this now our displacement is shown and this is so cool so now you have really fast these cool effects here and it works really really well in this next example I can show you how to make a morph between objects for this I have prepared a sphere and a platonic object and we again use our deformers here for example this time we use a shrink wrap which we add to the sphere and we tell the target object of this deformer that it has to use here the Platonic we can have a subdivision surface over this and normally we can now animate here the strength but with the help now of the fields we can use the whole field system to do that for example if you AB now here linear field and you can move here the linear field over this here you see it now really changed the appearance controlled by this field here if you want to go into the opposite direction you can use one of this so named modifier layers modify layers are a little bit like the adjustment layers in other programs they change what's underneath it for example if you want to invert this effect take an invert here and if you now take this field and move it over this you get exactly the opposite direction because you change the values upside down so this is the invert but you also can make funny effects here if you for example tell the system ok I want to start here and then I want after 50 frames go over this now we have an animation and we want now to have a little bit more realistic jiggling and so on for this we can go into the stack and use here one of our modify layers for example we have a decay and a delay and the difference is decay is after the effect how it goes back into the original state and delay is really like the delay we had before so we take a delay here and I change it to spring mode and if you now press play it doesn't happen too much we see it but not so much and the reason for this is sometimes we need values which are bigger than 100% at the moment this deck here is limited to zero to 100% the reason for this is this I can here so it's a clamp and if you deactivate the clamping here you can really overdo the effect if you like and now you see how nice this jig effect now works you see and this area here you find some really useful options and you can play with this here to have cool effects let's switch to a new topic and this new topic is working with tax and selections with the help of the fields for this we take a new scene and as an example I take a simple plane object this plane is segmented it's 20 to 20 that's okay I press the C key and and B for changing here my viewport and now you see these are my polygons first I want to show you how you can work with fields with the help of selections so I select all of my polygons here and we generate here a selection tag and you see now in the selection tag that you now can use the fields in all kind of selections not only in polygon selections you also can use fields now in edges in point selections you can use it in mo ref selections in vertex maps in mograph weight maps vertex colors and also an expresso so you will find fields nearly everywhere let's try to do something useful I want to extrude my plane procedurally for this we can use the deform err so let's take a deform a year for example a battle deformer I place it under the plane and normally we get here the address babbled because the component mode here is on address I want to only extrude so I go here two polygons and now you see in this tab polygon extrusion I can tell here now cinema how much I want to extrude to limit that we normally use the selections and I have made this selection take soap drag it into that and because we have selected all of our polygons we don't see any change here and in the classic workflow we would now go into this selection tag make a double click here and then we change here the selection for example if I go here and hold down my control key I deselect that here then I have to override here my selection and so on and so this way is workable but I wanted to show you now a more modern way that they helper feels we have added our polygon selection here and now I go here onto the selection and say I want to use the field technology ticket and now we see we get a fields field and we have a new layer type it's also a modifier layer here it's freeze and Fries is a very flexible layer it stores values from the frame before and it can be also used as a simulation we will see this in the next example in the moment the job of freeze is it stores the values which are there from before so our selection and now we can add new fields to it I go here into the fields and I want to limit for example now my selection with a spherical field in the moment you do that here you will see that nothing happens why because freeze has stored the whole selection and our silikal field here sits on maximum which means it takes the maximum value and what we want to do is we want to override everything which is below so you can go here to normal that's one way of doing it or you can deactivate the free Slayer because here are a selection is stored and in the moment you do that you now see that our extrusion now is limited by this field here this is a extremely cool effect and this is the first step onto a really procedural modeling workflow which can also be animated and this is a really great new addition to cinema for these workflow so let's look into the work with vertex maps I switch into a new scene again and for this I want to have a little bit more organic shape so take a torus here and I want to make a volume out of that so we go here to the volume builder drag our torus under the volume builder we can increase a little bit the boxing size here then I need another Taurus so I make a duplicate hit over you rotate this here by 90 degree and now we can try to merge them a little bit so we select these two and we can increase here the pipe a little bit and decrease the radius so that they are overlapping now then we can start here to merge them and for this we can go into the volume builder we have Union here that's nice over that we want to have a smooth layer so that it get smooth and I want to have here this area a little bit smoother or so if you select the smooth layer here you have a woxall distance for the Gaussian operation make this big okay not too big I think maybe to voxel but you can do it more than one time so iteration to this makes a nice blobby thing then we mash this out again with the volume measure and we get a really dense mash if you press em B on your keyboard again you see this mash here is really dense and if we wanted to have a little bit a denser representation we can go here make here for example of exercise of three that's enough I want to have many points here on this surface so select the volume measure and press this C key on your keyboard now we have enough points here what I want to do now is I want to build a vertex map there are different approaches to do that one approach would be select here this volume measure go into points mode and then we can go here to the Select menu and here you find set vertex weight you'll select this and now you can decide which value you want to store on every vertex a vertex map is a map in which every point stores a value and you can change this value between 0 and 100% so it's a soft selection if you think about this and I store here the value of 0 which means every point has now the value of 0 and it's represented rat in the viewport this is one way of storing this another way of making a vertex map is you select here your mesh going through the characters menu and here's a paint tool instead of the painter you can decide what you want to paint you can have vertex maps or vertex colors RGB plus alpha in our case we want to have a vertex map but keep in mind you can use both so vertex maps and vertex colors with fields so in my example I take this one here the vertex map and then you can decide which opacity you want to paint I want to assign the value of zero against way lower the opacity to zero the mode is absolute so I write the values and then with apply all I don't need to paint it's now stored on every point of the mash okay if you want to now paint something you can make it double click here on the tag the first thing you have done is you see it in the viewport because these values are values which are stored on the points they are not color in the moment so if you only select the mesh you don't see the color at all but if you select here the vertex map you see everything is red and red is the indicator for zero if you like I've said wanted to paint make a double click here so you get the paint tool back I increase now the opacity and I changed the radius by middle mouse clicking and dragging and I paint here is some 100% areas now on to my mesh and the 100% is yellow in this color coated cinema4d users if I now want to use this information you with fields you have to do the same thing like we've done before select the tag and also here in this tech you have used fields click this and here's our freeze layer again because it has to store the information which we have painted now we can take a closer look into the free Slayer itself it has stored it you can freeze or clear it but here are some modes and if you open up these modes you have here extremely useful mode which is named grow and this is like a solver and other applications so in every frame it stores the value again depending the frame before that let's look what I mean I go to grow and I change my timeline a little bit so I have 300 frames here I rewind and press play and you see instantly now the solver works and my whole object is now filled with yellow so 100% if you want to change the speed you can change you the effect strength so I go down here to 30% and it asked the neighborhood points always in this radius year so if you are really dense mesh we can try to lower the radius a little bit and if we now press play yeah we get a nice effect if you watched a little bit about infectious systems which are really popular in the moment you will see that this is the basic of such a infectious system and we can use this infectious system for many different approaches let's try one I want to show you how you can change materials with the help of a vertex map because these are only values in the moment so at here PBR material this is our basic material which you want to add to the volume measure and then we dive into the material and in the material we have a diffuse and a reflection layer so nothing fancy I change the value here of the color for example to something blueish okay dark blue maybe that's it what I want now is I want to see the infection going on for this i duplicate now my diffuse layer you can hold down your control key make another diffuse and this time I name this infected and then I select this and the infection is for example red that's it in the moment they are layered together everything is infected so I now have to mask out this infected layer and for this we can use here the mask layer inside of the reflectance channel layer and instead of changing this year now by this value here I can use a texture for this now comes the cool part vertex maps and vertex colors are used inside of the shading system by your own shader and if you want to use this now you go here to the shader triangle under effects you find here the vertex map shader if you dive into this you can add now a vertex map here and I drag my vertex map now into this here and now because it's placed inside of the mask you will see that we have here at dots if you now press play you will see that now the infection grows over the whole surface you can use this mask approach vertex maps delivers always to values between zero and 100 for nearly everything for example you can use it for placing hair or whatever clones let's try something I want to place fur on my volume measure here so I go to the simulate menu under the hair objects and I use fur and the moment I get everywhere fur and if I only want to restrict it to the areas which are infected I can use here the density and density wants to have a map so I use the same map here again driven by fields and in the moment I press now play you will see that this fur here is driven by the fields inside of this vertex map you see how powerful this approaches so let's finish this year with another example I remove now the free Slayer because I want to show you how you can also manipulate this year from scratch for example I take here a particle system we have played with particle systems before and I place the particle system here on top of this and we make it bigger so that we really get particles on the surface I make it a little bit bigger and we want to rain for example sixty particles and we wanted to stop their mission after let's say 20 frames that's it so if we now take a look into our tack and press play nothing happens it's only our initial vertex map and to get rid of these colors here so let's try again go to the paint tool apply a new fresh vertex map that's it use the fields remove the fries and now we can override it with an emitter if we now select the emitter you see the radius around every particle it's 20 centimeters and in the moment the particles now touch the surface we will see this effect here you see now that every of these particles here will make a selection we see this in our material if we like and then they vanish directly because the particles are gone if you now want to delay this effect so that the decay here is slower we can use another of these modifier layers and this time we want to use the decay so that the vanishing is slower at this year - the system it works on all the layers which are underneath that and we have here maximum mode effect strength 50 and now you will see that you get these drops which are vanishing really slow we can increase this here much more and now you have a typical wet map look going on and this is another example how useful this system can be so if you now go back here to the system and show the material and we have to assign our vertex map again under in fact it masks here so that we use this vertex map again you now see that we now change the material appearance with the help here of a particle system and you can change here the drops with the help of the fields if you now want to have this year a little bit more natural so we can increase that you can use the next layer here for example I take let's search for it here under the field objects we have error for example random field which makes a random formula on everything we can use your own eyes noise change the noise type if you like to for example turbulence and now we only want to have this noise here where we have values so for this I use here a layer mode overlay and now you see that it looks a little bit more natural that you don't get these sharp areas here and then you see the drying so that's the work with the text like I've said take a look also in other texts like weight tax and vertex colors and so on and we make a last example which is the work with the help of the fields inside of volumes so let's switch into a new scene and we built now a volume from scratch go to the volume menu and we take care volume builder normally we drag primitives or polygon objects to the list also you can drag splines and particles and many other objects into the volume builder but in our case we want to start with the field and for this we have to add a field without having an object on which we can add a field and for this we go here to create and we have a whole menu here for making fields here you find the field options and also a group field and a group field is like group in other areas of cinema free so you can add a group here if you like and the group itself brings a list where you can add your fields if you like but in my case I want to show you a separate field so I go here and say I want to have for example a torus field the torus field alone here looks like that here you only get the information where the fit lies and space but you don't see anything and for this we now take our volume builder and drag the field into the Builder and now you see we get a representation here this is a volume now assigned distant field volume and we can decrease a little bit here the box of size so that trees see it better what strange is that it seems a little bit here clamped and the reason for this is that here the field doesn't know how big it has to be generated because of field normally is infinite big so if you want to change the size of the field you have to select here the field and we have two creation spaces one is a box mode where you can add a box size or you can tell make it dependent on the object itself which doesn't make sense in the moment because the volume object also doesn't know how big it is and you see nothing in this moment so we go to a box and then you can increase the box size here and then you get a fool Taurus field here which works like an object nice but a little bit more interesting is that we can use now this know-how with special fields for example like a random field here if we add now random field and see this representation in the viewport ray it shows you how this random function works and if you like you can go here to the field itself and say the random mode has to be a noise then you can select you the noise type it's a purlin noise in the moment or you can use here turbulence make it bigger and whatever and if you now want to make this year to a volume same principles like before you select the volume builder drag it into that and then you have to make sure that the box here is big enough for your taste so I can change now the size of the box and now you exactly see that this noise field is also infinite big you only get a chunk of this the surface threshold now tells you which value is used for the surface which it generates and now you can work with this random field here inside the volume like every other volume so you can smooth it if you like and so on but I want to show you some important informations about the workflow so I decrease here the voxel size a little bit more it takes a while because it's a complex thing and we want to measure it out so that you see the end result so we take a volume measure and drag it here now you'll see that we have really generated a volume here and we get here these caves and you can really look through the whole thing but in some cases you also will see that some of the stuff is scattered and the reason for this is that this volume builder here uses in the moment assigned distant field if you really want to have a full volumetric approach you can switch it here to and I thought looks different here in the volume blur you see a goes really through the whole space here and fills everything with the volume point here and a value and so for these kind of works with these fields is really useful also if you want to mash it here the box of range threshold is also really important so that you really can open up the structure a little bit more and now you see this really cool looking shape here like I've said now you can work with all the other things which are in the volume builder which I've talked about in a separate tutorial and this finished now my tutorial about working with fields you find more useful scenes in your content browser in the broadcast example scene section I hope you liked this tutorial my name is Helga mouse from pixel train have fun

Channel: Maxon

Views: 54,108

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: uA8jHBiC-cA

Length: 48min 38sec (2918 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 01 2018