TUTORIAL | How To Create A Dynamic Pillow Animation in C4D With Cloth

hey it's Nick here from grayscale gorilla and if you've been following us on social media you may have seen this render from Chad Ashley that he created to show off some of our beautiful materials in the brand new pattern canvas material collection we had ton of you out there asking for a tutorial on how to recreate this pillow stitching effect in Cinema 4D and I was definitely one of them so yesterday I decided to call up Chad Ashley and get a full rundown on how he created this effect so what followed was an epic two-hour call with Chad Ashley where he showed me all the specifics on how he set up this animation including some basic uving how he set up the stitching how he made sure the materials looked realistic on those objects and how he set up the lighting and final little details to make it look so warm so soft and so beautiful so what I hope to do today is give you a condensed version of that tutorial so that you can follow along and learn some of the tips and tricks that Chad showed me on how to make this render and I promise you there are things things in here that you'll be able to use in all of your renders moving forward all right so with that let's head on into Cinema 4D and let's get started all right here we are in cinema 40 and let's get started by building the pillow that we'll use for this cloth animation so head on into your Primitives and select the capsule and we want to make sure that as we build this pillow that is it is the correct scale and you always want to make sure you're using scale properly in your 3D scenes especially when you're using things like simulation and materials so how big is a pillow well to me I don't know head pillow is kind of like 15 inches so let's go to height and say it's 15 i n and uh Cinema 40 will convert it to centimeters which is pretty cool and then of course the radius does not need to be that big we could just shrink this down until we get something that looks yeah that should be good for now so uh let's do eight centimeters wide that should be fine let's duplicate this capsule by hitting uh control C control V and this second capsule I'm going to click the Z orientation and this is going to give us our plus and uh this is still a little bit too large so I'm going to go to this radius and move it down by one just to give it a little bit more space okay so this is our basic shape we also need to crank up the segments because we're going to use this in a volume and we want this to be as clean as possible so go ahead and grab your segments and crank them all the way up and you could even add more if you want um and so what do we do now how do we make this one continuous shape rather than two separate pieces well I'm going to use the volume Builder and measure so with my mouse over here I'm going to hit shift C to pull up my finder tool this allows me to find anything in Cinema 4D just by typing it so I'm going to type in volume and right there there's the volume Builder I'm just going to double click on it I'm going to say uh I'm going to open it up again and grab the volume mesher while we're here as well okay so next thing you need to do is with your objects selected make sure you drag them into the volume Builder now the volume Builder is a basically combining all of this into one shape and there's some settings here we got to dial in first is voxel size if you're working at a small scale like this you definitely want to turn down your voxel size even one centimeter is not enough to really get enough resolution here these voxels need to be even smaller so in this case I'm going to go to 0.1 that is looking better and we also want to smooth this out we don't want this to be the sharp uh edge here we want it to be pillowy it's going to be a pillow so how do we do that well we add a SDF smoother just click this right here it's going to add it to the top of the scene and if we turn up the voxel distance it's going to smooth that part of the pillow out this is already looking more comfortable all right so now that we have this how do we turn this into a piece of geometry that we can use in a cloth simulation well first we need to make it geometry by putting the volume builder in the volume measure and as soon as you do that it's going to make it real it's now real geometry uh and if we go to our display and turn on shading lines you can see it we have a ton of geometry and frankly this geometry does not work well with the cloth and soft body and the the simulations and the reason it it's because it's all um various sizes it's too dense there's a lot of things wrong with this geometry for for cloth so how do we make this uh more usable when it comes to the cloth and simulation well we're going to throw this whole thing in one more thing called a re-measure so so again I'm going to hit shift C and type in re mesh and it's going to be right there in our Search tool I'm going to hit enter this time it's going to add it right away and I could drop this whole thing in the remesher now the rematch sure is great uh it's going to look at this uh geometry and you can see it's calculating down here in the corner this blue line represents it calculating all this and if you just give it a second it doesn't take too long it will give you much better geometry if we zoom in now you're going to see this is much more uniform and you're starting to see some flowing between all of the the pieces here in a much uh much more organic way which is going to help when we use the soft body however this is too much too much density and you can see it's not symmetrical as symmetrical as I want it to be so how do we fix this well let's Zoom back out let's go to our remesh and instead of 100 mesh density let's go to something smaller like four percent and this is going to solve the density Problem by creating less geometry and if we let this calculate you're going to see it's going to automatically be much uh less dense and it's going to be easier to use in a soft body but it's still not symmetrical you can see right here we're not getting the flow in the Symmetry that we really want and so to solve that in our remesh you can select these symmetric axes now you have to make sure that your object is symmetrical in these axes so in this case we have a fully symmetrical object it's symmetrical X Y and Z we could turn all of these on however if you make a shape that is you know different on the top and bottom or not symmetrical you just want to leave that one off okay so in this case they're all symmetrical I could turn them all on and what's great is this will give us geometry that is perfectly symmetrical check that out and this is going to help when we start to add the stitching and the UVS and the other stuff we're doing to this pillow okay so that looks really good to me I love this I love it so much that I want it uh out of this whole system and just into pure geometry and so to do that I'm going to right click on a remesh come down to current state to object and click it this is going to take this exact object and just make it one solid piece of piece of geometry and I can just turn all this other stuff off for now and I could keep it if I want to make different pillows I could use the same rig but for now I have this piece of geometry that's ready to go in fact I'm just going to bring this into a new scene just to start from scratch here and paste it in and now look we got our bit little pillow here ready to go let's go to display lines and let's start now to set up some of the stitching effects and the UVS so that the materials will look good on this and we also get that nice stitching effect that is a really big part of the original animation so now we're going to go to our Edge mode by clicking on this on in your interface and you want to go to Loop mode so for Loop mode I always use the cube command U on your keyboard and then it'll show you all of your commands and L is right there in the menu I hit L and now I'm in Loop mode from here you can see as I start to hover around my object I'm getting different loops and what this is doing is kind of tying together different strings of edges to try to create a loop around your object and for this loop I want this front piece right there something like that and what this is is it's going to start to build our edges and our stitching that allow us to make this look like it was stitched together with real Fabric and if you think about it this pillow if you were to make it in real life you would make this whole front face out of one piece of fabric and then maybe you would make this section here out of a different piece and that's essentially what we're trying to do is build the lines of where the stitching would go in our pillow and so I want to start here by just clicking and as soon as I clicked I got my yellow line around this first piece and this is a good start I'm going to rotate around I'm going to do the same for the other side but this time I'm going to hold down shift and this is going to let us select both of them at the same time okay and now we're now we need to build the the stitches across the top and edges here and to do that I need a different tool for this I'm going to go over to our Loop selection and instead of loop selection I'm going to go to path selection and I'm just going to add more stitching across here don't forget to hold down shift and if you make a mistake you could always just undo and it will go back to wherever you were so I'm going to click right here and start to make stitching essentially where I would sew this now I messed up I actually didn't hold shift down so I'm going to hit Ctrl Z and I'm going to do it right this time by holding down shift and now I get that new Stitch I'm going to navigate down here and do one for all of these pieces I'm going to click and click Again by holding make sure I'm holding shift and you're thinking like you're stitching this together right like if you uh now I'm not I don't know a lot about sewing uh you know a homec class I made I made a bag I'm pretty proud of I think it's still still in my basement somewhere but I I what you're really trying to do is uh think about how you would make this with flat pieces of fabric because that's what we're that's what we want this to look like when we when we do the stitching effect okay so I'm going to do the other tip here and essentially this will be a separate piece of fabric again I'm holding down shift and did we get it all I think we got one more hold down shift boom let's move it up holding down shift and bang okay this looks good we got oh we got one more across the top there we go did it okay checking to make sure we got all the pieces we got essentially all the different pieces that we need to start this effect now I just got done selecting all this stuff and I don't want to I don't want to lose this selection and I want to keep this selection uh tied into this object so I could use it later down the road when we do uving and when we do other effects so I'm going to come up to uh select I think it is yep and then come down here to store selection and as soon as I do that it's going to add this new tag to my object now this tag allows me to uh if I if I had a different selection like this for example and I wanted to bring back that other selection I could just select the tag and click on select and it's going to bring back that selection okay so this is this is important so now that we have that we can also set this up with a little bit of um stitching geometry we're going to do that right now and then we're also going to make a UVS so that our our materials are applied properly to the pillow which is a major part of that effect okay so two things we need to do one is pull in this geometry just a little bit to kind of fake the stitching so it's already selected if you don't have all of the geometry selected go ahead and click on select and then just grab your scale tool and because this object is so symmetrical I could just pull in my scale just a little bit and now I get a little bit of pinching everywhere uh on this object that just sets it off a little bit differently and kind of fakes this um fix this stitching now with more detail you can actually make more creases and get really detailed in here but I think for this tutorial that should be enough just that little bit of of uh scaling for this should be enough for the next part we're going to do UV okay and this is important because with with if you don't do this your materials will not apply properly to your object and it won't give you that fake uh cloth feeling that um you'll need for this type of look so how do you do a basic UV this can be very daunting uv's known to be a little bit scary but I promise you it's not as uh tough as you think especially with an object that is uh straightforward like this so let's put some basic UVS together right now to do that uh we can with this selection already set up ready to go go into your UV edit tab it's right up here in your uh comes installed ready to go right inside of Cinema 4D and as soon as you're in here you're going to see what the UVS look like now and you'll see that if you just apply a material now it's going to be stretched totally differently over here than it is here and all these everything's different sizes and it will not look the way that you want um and this is really simple now that you have this selection here all you have to do is come up here to UV unwrap and go ahead and click it you can see now it took all of these uh pieces that we selected and pulled them into separate parts just like if we were to make this out of fabric it's now sitting here um in different Pieces Just Like fabric is and uh you can also just click this again UV unwrap and it's going to kind of pull them together a little bit more so this is pretty close you can just use this as is but I want to make sure that my patterns and my uh my cloth is straight on this Plus instead of on an X like this so how do you straighten this out well you could zoom in and I'm just using two on my keyboard to zoom in just like in 3D and you could select one of these uh um edges that are crooked and zoom out and then just click on align UV islands and this is going to straighten it out and you could do the same on this X and I'm going to select one say align UV Islands I'm zooming out again and we're going to go into our UV packing tab which is right down here and just click apply and it's going to straighten everything out and make sure nothing's off the edge okay so now that we've done all that we have what looks like a pretty good UV map this one's a little crooked as well you can see this one got a little sideways let's go ahead and select it there's probably different ways to do this like everything in 3D there's many different ways to do this this is just a really straightforward way I'm going to go again align UV Islands and I think we're good here okay so now when our material is applied you could think of it like when our cloth is being put onto here it will it will uh be uh straight and it will the patterns will look like they're being cut out of cloth just like this okay so I'm going to deselect everything up here just by going up to uh select and you can go to deselect all and now we're ready to go we now have UVS we now have our um stitching uh effect going on and now we can get into some of the fun stuff which is the uh cloth settings okay so let's go ahead and on our object I went back to my standard uh layout here just to start the cloth animation and we're going to go to tags simulation cloth finally Nick I mean come on it's a cloth tutorial why didn't we do this to start with well it's because we had to do a little bit of setup but you'll see since we did that setup we get a lot of power now okay so what do we do now well if we hit play you're gonna see uh I gotta unselect our object here let me go to object mode um it just falls to the ground why does it fall out of the ground well there's gravity going on so let's hit Ctrl D on our keyboard this is going to bring up our simula our attributes make sure you go to your simulation tab under scene go to gravity and set this to zero okay this means now when we hit play uh nothing happens well we want this to act as if it's a piece of cloth and not there's no forces there's no gravity so it's just sitting here waiting for uh us to poke at it and do something else with it so what can we do well we can go into the cloth Tab and go into the surface menu and go to this target length Target length we could shrink down here and we could hit play and now you can see it's um shrinking down uh our cloth and it's trying to make it much smaller than it originally is this is not the effect we want what we really want is for only the stitching to be shrunken down and for the rest of this object to kind of balloon up like a like a pillow or like a balloon so let's go ahead and set that up the first thing we need to do is make a a Vertex map based on this setting here so remember we made this Edge selection tool go ahead and click that click select and let's go back to our Edge mode so we could see it and you can see this selection we originally made came back and now we're going to use the selection to create a Vertex map so to do that you can go to select set vertex weight and then type 100 in value this is going to say hey wherever you have edges selected make the vertex weight a hundred percent click OK and you're going to see we now have a Vertex map that is exactly where all the stitching is this allows us to get really powerful now with our cloth settings so in our cloth settings under the target length if we open up this triangle you can see they added symbol40 added this area that we could pull in a Vertex map and now the whole object doesn't have to be controlled all at once we could tell the object which parts of it we want to be different and that this is what this map does so now if we pull in our vertex map into Target length and we go back to frame zero and we hit play and we unselect um let's go back to object mode so we could see it in action it is now pillowing up let's get a little bit more um frames here just so it doesn't repeat okay so these um stitching is trying to collapse down on itself and it's letting the rest of it pillow up so what are we missing now well we're kind of like we're missing the stuffing you know where there's it's not the very comfortable pillow it's just going to collapse down and there's nothing inside of it so how do we build a little stuffing into it well we can go to our ballooning and let's just turn it on and by default you're going to see it does pretty good job it blows up our our cushion from the inside um with a with a ballooning which allows it to will look a little bit more comfortable and more like a pillow it's a little too much though so we could dial this back so let's try something like .75 and that is looking much better and you could adjust this to taste uh it all depends on how comfortable you want to be you know what I'm saying so dial this up or down and I'm getting some pretty good results here maybe a little bit more like 0.8 could be a little bit more comfortable and you can see it's uh working pretty quickly here as well um the new simulation is very fast and it's very efficient and it's it's really beautiful um and and super powerful okay so now that we have this going um how do we start to incorporate more animation and and art direct it and start to push these things around rather than it just um essentially just clumping up into a pillow okay so let's uh start to um add more of these so we could take our remesh and let's go back to frame zero and uh you're we're going to just duplicate it so I'm going to hit Ctrl C and then hit Ctrl v v and let's do four of them sure why not I'm going to grab all four of these and I'm gonna grab our place tool you wanna make sure you're you're on object mode here and uh if you have this here your place tool should show up and uh it's actually called the dynamic Place tool this is Place tool Dynamic Place grab it and just simply click in your viewport and watch what happens all four of these pillows now are respecting uh their their boundaries okay and this allows us to maybe pull one up pull one down and again if we select them all go to Dynamic place and just click and drag around it's going to allow us to basically smush these together and try to create a little clump of pillows boom there we go that looks better that's a better way to start okay so what does this get us now when we back up and we hit play check out what happens oh look at the pillows there we go baby oh it's looking good okay so we have some cushioning we have some pillowing we have that stitching happening uh where do we go from here well this is when I frankly I S uh I don't want to look at gray stuff anymore this is usually the part of uh when I'm building something where I go okay let's set up some some uh basic lights some basic materials so that we could start to look at the IPR and kind of see where we are with the animation because right now we don't have a camera we don't have lights we don't know really anything here but we are starting to see some really cool results so let's go ahead and uh just leave it right here I think this is a good place to kind of start to build that so I'm going to go to my uh startup layout now this is my redshift startup layout and if you want to know how I built this and you want to learn how you could build your own layout we have a a YouTube video all about it I'll link it up in the um upper right here and down in the description um but essentially it gives me all the tools that I use all the time like the IPR some grayscale gorilla plus plugins in the library here all ready to go so that I can um texture light do things very quickly here in cinema okay so let's go ahead and turn on the redshift IPR if you're using a different third-party renderer um a lot of this stuff will work exactly the same just use obviously different lights and stuff like that okay so in redshift what do we do well first thing I want to do is set up some basic lighting so uh I don't see the redshift menu which probably means we haven't turned it on yet I'm going to go into my render settings and I'm going to go to render redshift and then this uh uh tab essentially should be there if it's not there go to edit go to preferences and go down to renderer redshift and you want to make sure that this is turned on redshift main menu turn that on okay that way this will pop up when you turn on redshift okay now that we have redshift turned on we can go to redshift and we can turn on a camera okay and this camera we uh probably don't want it default you never want a default camera you want to start to think if you were taking a photo of these pillows piled up on a couch let's say what lens would you choose and if you uh or haven't been a photographer or like switched lenses on a camera you might want to learn a little bit about that it does help in any 3D render understanding a little bit about lenses we also have these tools here that let you pick really common lenses so in this case I'm just going to use a 50 millimeter which is literally a standard lens and it's a good go-to if you're not quite sure what you need I'm going to click 50 millimeter this is going to give us a little bit um more control over our scene here and of course the next thing I need to do is set up some lighting not a fan of the default light let's go ahead up into redshift and under lights I'm going to click on dome light now dome light is already better than before but it's all white uh we don't want that we want to use an hdri so in your redshift dome light go to object and then under texture you can click on this uh file menu here and you can go on your hard drive and you can pick any hdri in this case I want to use our grayscale gorilla hdri's and be able to choose different ones so if you want to do that all you have to do is drag texture into Drop Zone which is another one of our plugins and this allows you to have a live link to our entire library of hdris so now you literally just can click on any hdri and it updates right here in the viewport in this case I want to use uh creative office which is one of my favorites what's one of my go-to's I'm just going to type creative office click it and you can see it automatically shows up in the viewport and I don't want it in the background so I could select my redshift dome light turn off background and I could go into the coordinates and rotate it around until we had some nice lighting coming from the left okay so uh next thing I'm seeing is uh we need to update the geometry here and uh we we obviously need some uh materials so the geometry issue let's solve that first if I zoom in you're going to start to see uh that the geometry like this is a good example is starting to pinch and it's making these really cool little pillowy marks but it's the geometry itself is kind of poking through and it and there's just not enough of it and rather than crank up the geometry here I want this to calculate very quickly but I do need to smooth this out so this is where I'm going to use the redshift tag and there's octane tags and Arnold tags that do something similar to this I'm going to select all of my pillows here I'm gonna go to tags go to render tags click on redshift object and this will apply that tag to all four objects then down here you're going to see the geometry Tab and under the geometry tab you want to turn on override you want to turn on tessellation enabled and in this case I don't need screen space adaptive that'll slow me down in this case let's turn that down or off Midge minimum Edge length I'm going to set this to 1 and maximum subdivisions I'm just going to say two I don't think we need a ton of extra subdivisions and if you do need more you can crank this up but I think this will work pretty quickly look at how much better that looks and now we're getting all this nice pillowing and it's uh nice and soft we don't have any more Jagged edges and it renders very quickly because it's doing it at render time rather than making it do all this calculation okay so let's zoom out let's get back to here and let's start to talk uh about the materials so I I want I don't want to just see the tops of all these things so I'm going to grab all four of these and rotate them around and so just so they're I'm still using this Dynamic Place tool you can see how cool it is that it respects uh geometry here okay something like that might may be a little bit better from here I'm going to hit play um and just let it go until I'm getting a little bit more cloth and somewhere around there I'm going to start to mess with some of our materials so I do want to set up a nice camera angle because it's always more fun that way and something like this might be just fine okay uh I also need to rotate our light around a little bit there we go and so of course this whole animation that Chad made right the the thing that started this whole tutorial uh was created to promote our new material collection and uh it's right here it's called pattern canvas and these are beautiful materials created specifically for cloth simulations and for beautiful detail and they come with all these awesome patterns that you can also change the colors of by the way we're not going to be doing that today but you can go in any one of these and change the colors to your brand or your your client's brand and they're really really beautiful patterns here and so this is what we're going to use uh let's um let's just go down to this polka dot one to start with and I'm just going to drag it up in into our viewport right on one of our little pillows here and you're going to see it updates in the viewport and if we zoom in just a little bit you're going to see all that awesome detail and because we did that uving that this looks like it's being created out of cloth uh there's no stretching in the material they all look like these little pieces of cloth that are puffing out and they have the stitching built in and so what's cool about this is any of these patterns even the ones that um have more like straight lines to them like this let's you let's use this one instead the patterns are going to be straight right because we took that time in the UV section to straighten everything out and make it a cross or a Plus instead of an X all these pieces look like they're coming from the material itself and made with real Fabric and this is a really big part of the look and so now we can zoom out and start to add um uh materials to all of these so let's just go ahead and add uh some of my favorites here on Geometry and I'm going to use a different one for each pillow because that's more fun Bang and I encourage you to do the same um and if you have more time to calculate the Dynamics you could add more pillows you could have different shapes you can go back and make your own but now you get the basics of how to set all of this stuff up um okay so now we have uh some basic materials here from the pattern canvas and by the way if you don't if you're not a grayscale gorilla plus member um you can just make a material right up here by going to create redshift material standard and in your material just go uh don't worry about nodes for now just go down here to your reflection roughness which is way at the bottom here and just turn this up and this will give you something that uh isn't a glossy material that you can then change the color of and this will be fine uh for your render it just won't have all these all this nice detail and patterns and all that stuff okay so now that we're here um what can we do next well let's add a background and then we're going to talk about caching our geometry uh and and simulation so uh let's go ahead and add a new redshift uh dome light and this is just going to act as our background so redshift lights dome light and by default we're going to get another white background and it's also adding all of this light to the scene first of all we don't want it to add light so we can go into details under that new dome light and turn down diffuse in fact you could turn all this stuff down and this is a nice way to have a background that is only affecting the background and and not your scene and uh if you want a little fill light actually you can just turn up your diffuse here and this will just fill in some of the gaps uh and basically give you like a like a big fill light that will kind of get rid of some of the Dark Shadows um you can also change the color so that it's not a pure white so go in your object go to color in this case uh let's pick something a little bit darker with a little bit more like a like a tan no not that bright but something kind of subtle but with a little bit of color just a little bit of warmth there we go this looks pretty good um okay so we're getting some uh good lighting I think I need to maybe even turn this lighting up a little bit so now let's talk about setting up our animation and making something a little bit more fun to look at so I'm going to turn off our IPR so we could look at the cloth itself and if we hit play you're gonna see um really all that's happening is uh it's turning into pillows and then they're just kind of hanging out here okay and if you want to just Place some pillows on a couch somewhere that's fine you would just you take a photo or do this animation but we want them to swirl around and bounce off of each other and have this nice uh beautiful simulated swirling feeling so how do we do that um well for that we're going to uh use a field Force and so over in your object menu hit shift C again and type in Field f-i-e-l-d Force there it is right at the top I'm going to hit enter it's going to add it to my scene and Field Force think of it kind of like the simulation forces menu but uh with a little bit more control and a lot and it allows you to kind of combine a lot of these together using Fields so how do you do it well for this animation in particular we're going to go to fieldforce under object and here are your Fields the first one we're going to add is a spherical field this one's going to make any object within that spherical field go toward the center of the scene okay so I'm just going to grab our different uh pluses here and move them away from the center okay and as soon as we hit play you're gonna see they're all going to turn into pillows but now they're also going to push toward the middle and start to collide with each other and okay so that that's more interesting already so let's go back and go to our Field Force and under this uh object tab you see velocity type add to Velocity I'm just going to turn up to the strength just just to make this a little bit more strong a little bit more violent a little bit more like they really want to go toward the middle now and when they hit they're going to do all this nice pillowy cushy a little too much actually okay so that is what the um spherical field is doing okay so that's that's one way to to add some animation well what if you want it to be a little bit more random well okay let's turn off this spherical field for now and go into random field and now we just added a random field and so now let's hit play and see what random field does random field essentially is pulling different parts of these pillows in different directions and it's almost like a turbulence um but it's uh right now it's not really animating as much as it is like pushing and pulling and poking in different parts of the pillows but we can combine these together by going to our spherical field turning it on and coming down to add on our random field and now they're being added together and more than that we could dial the them up and down we could say Okay I want less of the squish in effect let's tone that down a little bit we want more of the random effect and then you hit play and you see what happens so here we go they're being pushed in and there's one other thing I'm seeing right here we didn't really talk about the other settings for our soft bodies so let's go into our uh our balloon you can see we have the balloon icon the icons change as we turn on and off different things um but I'm going to go back to the surface tab in this cloth tag and under bendiness we're going to crank it up and I think Chad had something really high in his something like 200 and what this is going to allow it to do is be more bubbly more clot like let the cloth Bend more and I think this is going to give us some more interesting effects with the pillowing and more wrinkles and little stuff like that okay so now that we have that going on um what else can we add well in the field Force we can come down and we could add another one called uh radial field okay what does radial field do let's turn off the other ones let's do add radial field and you can see the field actually shows you what it's doing if we zoom out and we look from above we have these little markers in the field force that is like all right this is where the energy is going it's going in circles and if we hit play uh actually let's go back and hit play you're going to see now the energy is swirling energy okay now we're getting somewhere so what's cool is you can combine all of this to Art direct and create anything you want and the art Direction part of this is really the what what Cinema 40 does really well it doesn't just give you simulation like hey do whatever you want like let gravity just take it away with these tools with these um vertex maps with field forces with combining Fields together um we are now art directing and saying okay pillows listen here I want you to swirl around a little bit and then when I tell you to I want to crank up this spherical field and have you all smash together in the middle and then uh maybe I turn that down overall and then and then maybe you fling out into space or something this is all now art directable by you and controllable and now it's just a matter of dialing it in and and running the simulation and seeing uh what it what it does so I'm just going to dial this stuff in until I get something kind of interesting right now they're spinning they're all coming towards the middle and maybe there's too much spin so we could turn down the radial field and I do want them to squish together more so I can come in here and we can animate all this too you can uh for example use signal let's say and and go in to um uh your spherical field directly and just animate these uh strengths up and down so you could say okay with the strength off it's not really pulling toward the middle and you can see it's more moving around the side and then you could say okay right here I want to crank it up and then I want you to all fight for the middle and here they go they're starting to move towards the middle and they all crunch together and then maybe you let this run a few extra frames and then you say right around here I want you to ignore the strength and now you're more flinging out into space this can be combined with different shapes with different um uh forces and mix and matching all of this stuff to really help you art direct exactly what you want so as we get towards a final render I'm going to scale up some of these objects and down some of these just so we get a little bit of variation I'm also going to pull them out a little bit further and this is going to allow us to just get a little bit more pushing in pulling more swirling and more energy since they're further away from the center and from here again we're just dialing this up and down and before we cache all of this I also wanted to talk briefly about the simulation settings so hit Ctrl D on your keyboard this is going to open up your simulation tab under your simulation tab this is where we turn off our gravity you can also see simulation bam in here you're going to see things like subset sub steps iterations and these all have a huge impact on your final animation if you have collisions that are intersecting if if there's cloth that's intersecting you want to make sure you turn up things like your iterations and your passes collisions right here you want to say extra iterations turn this up if you have intersecting this is a great one to mess with in our case we just want to slow down some of this ballooning in this case I'm just going to turn up our iterations to something like five let's back it out and I don't think we need much more than that maybe a little bit of a little bit more damping uh I'm gonna set this to four this is going to um keep all the wrinkles but it's gonna make the kind of ballooning a little bit less and this looks actually more soft and more cushy to me so again very very settings dependent but um but it calculates quickly enough to where I think you could play with this and start to get looks that you like all right I already like this this Frame right here is like this big oop I moved it let me undo that this like this big plus is hugging the small plus I freaking love it let's hit play on our IPR and see what this looks like this looks really really fun uh let's move our lighting around just so we can get a little bit more lighting boom and there's just too much of the same pattern here I want to break it up a little bit so I am going to go to something like this here and just drag this on top of this giant plus this is going to lighten our our color palette a little bit okay that's great you can see the canvas texture this one's given this one's a nice big hug and now we can start to uh create our final render and it's at this point when you want to stop thinking like um a 3D Creator artist and start thinking like a um filmmaker where would you put the camera where would you put the lights what emotions are you trying to uh pull out of this animation and in this case I want this really um pillowy feel right like I know like Chad made this original one and we're trying to recreate it but what was what to me made that really beautiful is the swirling effect which we're starting to get and also the the little details of the lighting that allow this to show off the material right because this was made to show off materials we want to make sure that that is happening so there's a couple things we should do while we're here while we're kind of looking at this Frame um as we start to dial in the lighting and materials well to me the first one I see is the difference in scale of these different uh canvases remember we scaled this one up and then this one's smaller well now it's showing the differences in the canvas and if this was all made by a similar type of fabric well this wouldn't be so much larger see how big the pattern is compared to this one for example well we can adjust that just select that object and this is uh we just go to this texture and in this texture we can add more tiles so something like 1.4 1.4 in our tiles is going to shrink this down and you can just do this by eye you could say okay that's roughly the same scale and then you can do the same with this one as well so you just click it over here it's this one go into that material tag and under the tag you can add a little a little bit more tiles this probably needs less 1.2 1.2 and this is going to shrink it down just enough to try to match the canvas so that they all look like they're built from the same scale canvas and if we uh if if you if I exaggerated it for example and I I set this to 0.5 0.5 you're going to see a really a bad example of this see now how big that is this is what you're trying to avoid okay so as you uh slap different shapes and things together uh think about all of that okay so usually when I get something that's looking pretty decent I also start to save it folks so maybe we should do that I'm gonna go over here and go to uh save project as and uh I'm just going to call this uh a pillow uh to tutorial 001 all right and now now we uh now we got something okay so where do we go from here well this is usually when I'll start to Cache the animation and start to like I was saying earlier start to think more like a filmmaker uh like a like a director and less like a 3D artist and so how do we do that well let's cache this animation by going over to our cloth tags in this case they look like balloons because we turned on our balloon settings and we want to go uh make sure they're all selected go to cache and uh I usually go to frame zero I don't think you have to do that but I like doing that go to frame zero I'm going to turn off our IPR and I'm going to click on cash scene all right so the cash just finished it only took maybe a couple minutes but now that we have this we now can scrub through the timeline and we get our animation here without having to wait for it to calculate it is now baked and what this allows us to do now is now all we have to worry about is a beautiful camera angle and beautiful materials and beautiful lighting and and worrying about that part rather than the animation okay and if we're not happy with that calculation all we have to do is come in here say clear scene cache change our Field Force settings right come in here you can animate this stuff and dial it up and down and maybe add different ones experiment get to something that you think might look pretty good hit cash again and repeat until you get something that you love in this case I think we have a pretty cool kind of smash together effect and I wish we animated it kind of like separating here you could you could animate that if you want just like turn down the uh spherical field and that way they'll kind of fall apart but I think for this it's fine we have a nice little squishy this uh big plus is hugging the little plus I kind of like that Vibe and now we can worry about our lighting and our final details to get that extra little bit of sexiness in our render before we hit the final render so let's dial up our IPR and let's find a beautiful camera angle so this is probably my favorite part of the animation where they're all coming together okay right there and I want to accentuate that I want to make sure that this kind of cushiness is captured in a way so I want to frame essentially for this moment and say okay right there where they all kind of come together is a cool this is a cool moment and if you think of it this way you can you can now frame for this moment then dial in your lighting and this isn't this is really something I didn't think about until I was talking to Chad about it he's like worry about the lighting last worry about your camera first like where are you gonna put your camera okay this is a good place now that you have that let's adjust the lighting to um to make it as beautiful as possible right and so now that we have our frame that I think looks pretty cool we have our plus we have our big one our small one we can now go to our light go to coordinates and uh just use our sliders here to kind of pull a little bit more light around and try to get a beautiful moment now there's kind of too much light and not enough Shadow here so maybe there's another uh another camera angle we can play with here this one's kind of cool too where they both kind of smash into each other maybe here all right let's try that one and then again we're just gonna match the lighting by pulling the light over to the left and now we get a nice dark area and a and a bright area so now we can we can back this up and see what this looks like coming in so this might be pretty cool we got this Frame and then and then it's gonna smash together there and this could be a good place to kind of keep our camera boom okay that looks pretty that looks pretty nice okay um so we set up our camera let's start to dial in our final little tweaks that makes this go from a good looking render to a great looking render and by the way this is when Chad started showing me some tips and tricks that I'm really excited to show you I've never really done too much inside of uh redshift before that I think um may help you with some things just really give you those last little tips that uh make it look better so first one is obviously we need to add some depth of field we need to add some real camera detail um because we set up our scene with natural scale we can use natural camera lenses and f-stops to get realistic looks what this means is um we can we already chose a lens that we would shoot this with something like a 50 millimeter but now we can come in here to the physical tab inside our redshift camera and select an f-stop and if you're a photographer you know there are some common f-stops to use when you're indoor you have a flash to get a little bit of depth of field but not too much and in this case something like a four f-stop is usually what you would use in like a studio situation right maybe a six but let's start with a four so we set our f-stop the other thing we need to do is go into our redshift tag and this is also true with other third-party renders octane you got to go turn on the depth of field in this case we go to our bokeh tab click on override click on and enabled and uh you're done uh just kidding you have to tell it what to be in focus and what not to be um so you could do this right in redshift just by clicking this uh dot here and then just selecting what you want to be in focus and now you're seeing uh why we used real world scale real world lenses we get this beautiful natural uh bokeh and a little bit of blurriness here in the background and it actually makes the the canvas stand out even more because it's surrounded by slightly out of focus things right automatically gives it that that realistic feel very subtle but again we're going to do a few things here that are subtle but add to the realness Okay so we have our f-stop we have our Focus um and and you you can also use a focus null if you want to experiment with that we have a tutorial all about a focus null as well uh I'll make sure to link that up uh in the in the description and here on YouTube uh for that you could just click a null and I usually call it Focus and down in your redshift camera go to object and drag in your focus null right here on Focus object now instead of using this thing now you can just grab the focus null and you can grab the place tool which is right here and you can click on any part of this animation uh over here and it will stick this null directly to that object and now no matter where you put your camera whether it's far away or way up close this will always remain in Focus this is really powerful it's been a part of my workflow for a few months now and I can't live without it I had to include it in this tutorial as well um all right so now we have our Focus we have our lighting dialed in what else can we do to add these little subtle differences um this is where Chad showed me this menu right here so um if you don't see this gear icon in your redshift it probably means it's being hidden kind of like mine right there's just not enough screen real estate to get to this little gear icon so redshift included this little button to click this button and then right down here you're going to see this gear so this gear is going to open up a bunch of basically compositing and extra things that you could add to your scene uh things like color management uh and then the two things that we're gonna uh look at is Luts and color controls so first of all is Lut if you haven't played with lots we have grayscale Gorilla Luts that come with grayscale gorilla plus and essentially their lookup tables that allow you different lighting scenarios different film emulation diff uh different color grading for your renders that give you different looks in this case we're going to use one of the built-in redshift ones and this is one that Chad said he uses all the time whenever he wants a warm kind of feeling and with this um pillow animation we want a warm kind of feeling right we want we want to make this feel like you're at home and and that these pillows are comfortable and something warm so Chad showed me this he said uh I I he says he uses this Lut all the time um and I'm excited to show you guys so you turn on Luts you get a lot file and you go to Advantix 200. and you can see by default uh it's got this awesome warm look to it let's turn it off this is what it looked like before it looks great but now look at all the warmth and the extra kind of contrastiness that we get to on the scene and in fact it's a little bit strong for me I might even pull it back if anything's too strong but you like the feeling you just go to Lut strength and dial it down I'm going to go to something more like 50 and this already feels better especially with these colors I love how it just kind of makes these oranges pop out a little bit more um and then right below it we're going to play with curves man curves I love curves I've been a fan since my photography Photoshop days um and frankly I didn't even know this was here uh Chad showed me this and he says you know for a quick little adjustment and so you don't have to composite this later you can just dial this in right in the viewport and that way when you hit render it's done and you don't have to go bring it in After Effects or whatever to do your final little color so not for everybody you know sometimes you want to do a full composite but man when you're working fast it's really nice to have these curves right here so in this case I'm just going to click on the upper part and lower part of this curve curve and create a really basic s-curve now you can go too far with it but I just want to be really subtle here and just add a little bit more contrast in the in the black areas and a little bit more pop in the white and again you don't want to go too far but now let's a B test this um we could turn on and off our curves you can see the contrast right there and we can turn on and off our Lut and these things combine to make subtle differences that add warmth and a little bit of contrast and a little bit of style to your render so now if we turn this off I'm really liking how this looks uh let's check it in different frames so let's go back here love that I love how blurry this is and how sharp this is this is kind of coming into frame out of focus and because we cache this we can go pretty quickly now into this mode that's looking really beautiful um the the canvas looks good the patterns look good let's scroll forward that's looking good it's a little bit bright um but I think that's okay I think for this animation it's kind of like it's kind of like done as soon as we get here this is really the key part of it it's like the from here let's look at the start it's not quite pillowy but I think essentially we'll start this animation here that's going to come together they're going to collide bam it's looking nice and then right about here it's probably done and I think it's ready to go um okay so uh nope I moved my focus I'm gonna undo that I'm just going to click on my startup tab just to go back to my regular layout so because I messed it all up there I'm going to click my IPR one last time to just kind of double check our lighting make sure everything's looking good making sure we're ready to go and from here I think we're ready to render folks um you know this is really straightforward you can go to your output go to current frame and turn this to all frames you want to pick a place to save this here and uh instead of a tiff 8-bit I usually do a 16 bit especially for final renders and uh I think we're ready uh redshift medium is usually my first render no matter what um and if you start to see graininess and it's not high enough res uh or essentially you're just looking for grain and with a little bit of depth of field I think we could get away with medium I would start with medium keep an eye on it and if you are seeing uh graininess in your blurry areas Crank It Up to high now there's a lot more with settings and we have videos on all that stuff of course but for this uh render I think we did it folks and hopefully there's something here that has spurred some ideas and just really understanding the power of some of these new simulation tools and how you can use them to really quickly create some awesome beautiful animations here in cinema thanks again for watching everybody and if you end up creating something using this technique we'd love to see it down in the comments below and if you're new here at grayscale gorilla and you've watched this far then consider subscribing and hitting the notifications icon so that you're notified when we put out new tutorials just like this so with that I just wanted to thank you for joining us today in this tutorial and we hope to see you in another video really soon bye everybody [Music]

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 189,699

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, c4d tutorials, cinema 4d tutorials, greyscalegorilla plus, gsg, gsg plus, Greyscalegorilla, cinema 4D tutorial, c4d tut, cinema 4d tut, greyscalegorilla tutorial, gsg tut, cloth, fabric, simulation, canvas, redshift materials, cloth simulation, c4d cloth, c4d simulation, c4d softbody, UV, Field Forces, C4d Mograph, cinema 4d cloth, cinema 4d animation tutorial

Id: c_haELIyIus

Length: 60min 58sec (3658 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022