Webinar: Cinema 4D MoGraph – Motion Graphics Made Easy

all right welcome everybody welcome to this mograph webinar it's called cinema4d mograph motion graphics made easy my name is Yama's Phil's I work for Maxon since two years I'm in the marketing team and I'm responsible for presentations mostly in Europe and also for workshops and yeah stuff like webinars and quick tips and so on and yeah before I started at Maxim I worked as a freelancer for a period of almost 5 years and well I worked mostly in industrial visualization so you might ask yourself why is this guy doing a mogrify we now now mm-hmm the reason for this is the following um in industrial visualization I had many jobs were needed to to distribute many objects through the whole scene and yeah I always was afraid of using more graph because yeah as I said it I was afraid really of having that many objects in the scene because I couldn't imagine that you can true I can control them that easily and yeah then a colleague of mine said well we have a scene here where we need to have many new objects many same objects and just use a more graphical owner for this and use it and in the next job I did some landscaping so I cloned some trees and distributed them randomly over a landscape and so on and so forth and I used many cloner objects or generators and I used many mograph effectors and in the end it turned out that I know mograph quite well although I never used it within the motion graphics context so I'm using McGrath in the motion graphics context since I started working for Maxim actually and I really enjoyed McGraw is one of my favorite parts of cinema 4d because you can achieve starting results within a short amount of time that's what always fascinates me okay having that said let's start with some more graph basics and I hope you all used cinema 4d before because then I can dive into mograph directly so let's start with some more graph basics and they are basically well three types of of objects so to speak first is the generators and the generators are there to create clones or to create mograph objects so to speak and those objects which can be many like thousands or millions can be controlled by using effectors and here you can see that we have a whole bunch of effectors and every one of them does something completely different so one effector is there to do or to affect all the clones in the very same way the other effector is there to to randomize the clones in position rotation scale whatever you want color also yeah you can align objects onto other objects or make them look at other objects you can use sound for modifying the clones and so on and the third type of well it's not really object as shaders yeah is how you can colorize all of those clones there is a con shader that will that I will show you later there's also a multi shader which is quite powerful the beach shader and also a camera shader that you can use as yeah and as a camera within your scene and you can directly render the view of that camera onto another screen for example all right so the mograph workflow what you see in the middle here is the icon of a mograph cloner and what you need to do in order to clone an object is you need to make it a child object of the cloner and what will happen then is you will get many copies of that object so in this case it's a cute and now here comes the interesting part as soon as you assign an effector like in this case it's the random effector guess what will happen of course this will randomize the whole thing so you can randomize the positions the scale the rotations whatever you want and this is the basic concept you have the cloner you have an object input you will get many objects out of it and as soon as you apply an effector like any effector this will have an effect on the clones okay keeping that in mind I will show you what we will be creating in cinema 4d so let's start with this one which is a countdown and with this example I will show you the the basic concept of of mograph inside of cinema 4d and yeah we will create that whole set up within 10 minutes or so okay this set up here all the video that you see here is rendered in physical renderer and yeah we will do that later the next one also rendered in physical renderer is an example for playing around with dynamics which is what we will do as well and I will also show you how to use the exact same setup for visual effects alright the next one this was also the key visual for for this webinar yeah it's a very abstract animation and it's very easy to to to create it's also rendered in physical renderer here then the next one because it is Christmas time we will have some Christmas animation going on this one is rendered in with the viewport so this is a hardware OpenGL rendering and you see many cubes and some of them scale up like like yeah like popcorn but that pops up and in the end there will be the shape of a star then I will introduce you into fracturing and I will show you the basic concept behind the the algorithm so we won't create this scene here but I will show you the basics behind fracturing because it's very easy to understand this so you can yeah you can really unleash the potential of more annoy right through inside cinema4d then what we will also create using fracturing so this is also a fracturing setup and this is also a call for you to think outside the box just because a feature is inside of a specific menu it doesn't mean you can only use it within that context and fracturing which is normally therefore yeah breaking up objects which is already a lot of fun fracturing is such a such a feature that you can use like anywhere you can use it in visualization and you can also use it in motion graphics this setup here is completely based on four parameters within the or no fracturing object and I will show you that later and here's the last one done by Simon Fiedler and it also feels a very cool way to use Voronoi fracturing because as you can see here you can really animate the fracturing pattern and this comes with a lot of potential I actually don't know what Simon used here but yeah all of the other renderings were done using physical renderer except for the one where I told you that this is Hardware OpenGL okay so now you have seen what we will be creating and let's go back to to this example here again because this is what we're gonna be creating first and I want to analyze the whole thing a bit with you so what we have here is we have a few clothes and those are shaped like the number 5 and as soon as I put hit play here all of the clothes fall down and then they are being sucked up again and a form like the next number so it falls down now the end it's zero and yeah this is what we're gonna be creating but first let me show you the basic concept of mograph so here is the starting scene so we're almost starting from scratch I just yeah prepared those very complicated objects here in the beginning and yeah maybe let's make the cube and the Platonic invisible here for now and within the mograph menu I will create a cloner and what do you have to do in order to clone an object is you have to make it a child object simply by dragging and dropping it underneath the cloner here and now you see all right now we have three spheres let's have a look at the at the attributes of the cloner in the object tab we see the mode is linear this is the reason for the spheres being like straight out because the linear cloning happens here like every clone is 50 centimeters up okay then we can create a lot of them we can also use another mode like radial grid array or even the very cool honey camp array like this and yeah what we want to do here is we want to clone all of those clones onto an object but first let me show you what will happen if I add some other objects also as a child object to the cloner you see we have the sphere the cube and the Platonic and here we have the sphere the cube platonic sphere cube platonic sphere cube platonic and so on and so forth and this is because the clones parameter here is set to iterate we can also set it for example to random and this will randomize the yeah the clones distribution in terms of you have the order here all right now let's make this invisible and let's create our shape because what we want to do is we want to clone all of these clones into the volume of a specific shape and this shape should be a number okay so let's go to the mograph menu and let's go to the mo text object the cool thing about the mo text object is that all of those letters here are mograph objects as well so they are mograph calls and you can also modify them by using effectors on them okay but first let me align those clones to the middle and let's also adjust the text to be fine we want it to be a countdown let's also move it up a bit we need that for later because we want to do the simulation okay now let's go to frames 0 and let's add some key frames if somebody of you is not familiar with the concept of animating within cinema 4d there is a small circle right left to left to the to the parameter names and once you click this circle it turns red and this means I have recorded the number 5 here at frame 0 so in the very beginning and as I move forward to frame 50 for example I type in 4 and set another keyframe so now from here to here the number will adjust okay let's move on to frame 100 type in 3 set a keyframe and this is pretty straightforward it's a very repetitive process so let me do this without much commenting and the last one frame 250 and the text is number zero and we set a keyframe so now we are at 25 frames per second so you might ask yourself why did he use like two second steps in order to to make the countdown work and the answer is well actually although it's a countdown it doesn't need to be accurate in terms of every number has to be there at one second because it just needs to countdown right and we need the timing or we need the time in order to have a an appealing timing in the end to make the animation work at all all right okay the problem here is with with the mo texts that you cannot clone on to the mo text directly I can show that to you if we select the color adjust the mode to be object and we input the mo text here you see nothing right now because it's invisible but now you see that there is just one object and it's not cloned onto yeah the shape here so instead what we have to do is we use a connect to make this whole object polygon object internally simply by dragging and dropping the more text underneath the connect and instead of linking the more text to the cloner we use the connect and now you see that all of the clones here are distributed onto the vertices of that object that's basically not what we want so maybe let's adjust this a bit first of all I want the connect object with the mote X included to be invisible and we also want to make those clones render instances because this works a bit faster a bit more fluent in the viewport and we also want to adjust the distribution here as I told you all of those clones are distributed onto the vertices of the object and this is the reason why here we have straight lines though we have a point here and a point there and then a point here and here in the rounding we have a lot of points and this is the reason for this many clones being here in this running so let's adjust the distribution we have many modes here we can clone to the vertices which is the default we can clone to the edges which I will do later with another set up to the polygons Andrew to the surface to the volume and to the axis and what would what we want to do is we want to use the volume as the distribution mode and yeah that looks quite good let's crank this up to 100 and whenever you see that a slider is not going further here you can always crank it up or most of the time crank it up using the arrow keys here or by just typing in the higher number okay maybe let's select the close and let's make them a bit smaller something like this should work okay and now before we start the the dynamic simulation I want to randomize the initial rotations and scales and therefore we need an effector and the effect that we want to use is the random effector so first make sure that you selected the cloner because then the effector will be assigned to it automatically if you don't do that the effector will just be created and I will show you later how to assign it then to the clone so first of all let's create a random effector and then you see that the positions are randomized now this is because of the defaults within the random effector so let's go to the parameters tab and here you see the things that are randomized so right now it's the position in x y&z it's 50 centimeters randomized the patient and there is no scale randomization and no rotation randomization so let's uncheck position and let's check the scale let's also check uniform scale and let's type in maybe 0.5 so now we randomized the this game and now we also want to randomize the rotation by 90 degrees in every direction and as you can see now it looks quite interesting now because the rotations are randomized and yeah that's a pretty cool thing okay next we want to apply dynamics to the whole setup so first of all let's create a floor object because we need something to collide with okay now we have those two objects the cloner with all of the clones inside and the floor object and what we want to do is we want to select both of them so we select the cloner and the floor and then we right click go to simulation tanks and apply a rigidbody tech to both of them and the cool thing is if you use a floor this will immediately create a Collider object because yeah cinema4d knows it doesn't make much sense to let the floor fall down and being a part of the gravity simulation but here we have a rigid body tag and as soon as we hit play now the whole setup falls down but it falls down as a whole thing okay how can we make every single clone yeah a separate part of the simulation and this is pretty easy let's go to the collision tab here and there is an individual individual elements parameter that is set to OFF and we adjust it to be all and as we hit play now I tell you the whole thing will explode and the reason for this is because we have intersections here and intersections are not allowed so there is a big force and yeah let me show you I play and the whole thing explodes okay so now what can we do about this because of course at some point all of the clones are meant to fall down but in the beginning it should keep the 5 and later it should also keep the 4 for a while and then the 3 and the 2 and there is a very cool parameter or you know two parameters within the forces tab or the for step within the rigid body tag here and this is the funnel position and follow rotation parameters so look at this I set this to 1 so follow position to 1 and you see that gravity has an effect but the clones are fell down much slower and this is because they are trying to keep their original position but just by a factor of 1 and as soon as we crank this up to be like 10 you will see that we will have the of the numbers now and because we animated this shape and we will get ya dynamic transition between those numbers okay let's also increase the follow rotation parameter in order to to make the rotation animation a bit slower and more ya quiet maybe we are also a bit too big with the clones here so maybe let's scale them down just tiny bit more and here we go so this is already a cool effect but yeah as I showed you in the example I want those numbers to fall down and then to go up again and we can do this simply by animating these parameters here so let's go to frame 20 and let's set two keyframes one for follow position one for follow rotation and then let's go one frame further to frame 21 and let's set a keyframe for a value of 0 for both parameters and if we go to the start and press play you see here's the 5 and then it falls down okay next we know that at frame 50 there will be the 4 so let's go to frame 50 set another set of keyframes and go a bit further to may be frame 65 and let's crank it up to 10 again and this way we will have the 5 in the beginning it will fall down and then being sucked up again to shape the 4 so now you saw that there was that there was a as fear created up here and we want to get rid of this simply by going to the cloner and adjusting the seed of the random distribution here to some other value it doesn't matter which will you it's just important that there is no um more popping up or the Cologne here okay now it works okay now we need this animation of the clones falling down and being sucked up again for every single number so let's bring up the timeline and you can do that by going to window and let's use the timeline in dopesheet mode which is this year and here we see our keyframes those are the keyframes for the numbers so here we have 5 4 3 2 1 0 and those are the keyframes that we set up for them for the dynamic stack and by holding down command on Mac or ctrl on PC and dragging those keyframes you create copies of them so let's do that a few times holding down command or control depending on the system and the system to work with and yeah let's just drag and drop them over like so ok now let's have a look at the animation let's go back here that we have the 5 it falls down shapes the four oh but this is already yeah this is pretty fast so you can see the numbers for yeah for a minimum of a second but this is way too way too fast so let's select those keyframes here those those those and those and let's move them a bit further to the right so maybe let's make 15 frames instead of just 5 and this should be much better timing now so all of the clones fall down being sucked up for fall down 3 fall down to fall down oh there are some more clones appearing here but that's just a matter of the seat okay so this was the first set up I don't want to lose time here so I want to jump right into the next thing and the next thing was we want to play around a bit more with dynamics like in this example here so let's jump into cinema 4d and let's change the scene so by pressing the V key you get this this menu here and I use it very often for jumping between projects because here you see all the projects that are opened and let's jump into the dynamic spheres set up here so this is pretty much the same setup as I built before you see there's a cloner with four spheres in it and the dynamics tag is applied followed position and photo rotation are set to ten and as I hit play you see this is what happens okay now let's create another sphere and let's maybe scale it up a bit and let's make it right-click and go to the simulation tags and make it a Collider body all right as soon as we hit play now all of those spheres here what - or try to keep their original position but we have a big sphere here as a Collider and the cool thing now is that I can move the slider here the other sphere and all of the clones will react to it and this is already something that I can play with like all day long because it's so much fun and but the other thing that you can do is you cannot only move the collider object you can also move the cloner itself and this is quite important because if you know that you can for example or maybe let's get rid of the sphere here and let's create a ground floor and let's apply a collide body here so what you can do now is you can use the spheres here let's get rid of the plane effectors okay and now you can use this and move it around and as you can see the spheres will stay at the surface and this is quite interesting if you know that because what you can do now is you can use that for a visual effect set up and I prepared one for you which is the Avalanche and as you can see here I created an avalanche and this is a dynamic simulation running here but it's also very controllable it's following a spline um yeah and this line makes like a slalom in between those pylons and none of these piles gets hit this is pretty cool and if we change the camera you can see it from above so here's a dynamic simulation but it's very controllable because we use exactly this setup now this is a this is a cached animation so maybe let's go back to frame 0 and let's delete the cache so I can show you what you can do with that or how you can adjust it to to be less controllable or more controllable so now it's not cached anymore we changed the collision shape here from moving mesh to automatic that will speed it up a bit because now we are running a live simulation not a cached one and yeah let's see we go to the forces tab and you see the full position parameter is set to for view if we bring it down to 2 you will see that there are some pylons which are also part of the dynamics simulation so they are also rigid bodies you see that they will be hit by the rocks and yet taken with them and once we we crank this up to let's say 10 you see that there is a yeah really this bunch of rocks and it's staying together pretty well so my favorite well you hear was for there was a bit more natural yeah so this is this set up and as I told you before I really want to encourage you to use mograph yeah in many other branches or in many other projects than just motion graphics objects because this is a part of cinema 4d which is so powerful and you can use it like everywhere ok so let's go to the next one which i think is the key visual setup here yeah exactly so what do we have here well let me drink first sorry ok what we have here is many objects that look a bit like cylinders but they are concave so maybe let's pause this animation here you can see it good um it's a cylinder but it's it's a cockade and it also seems to follow a shape that was defined before and also animated and yeah we will recreate this from scratch so let's jump back into cinema 4d and let's create a new file and we will start by creating one of this cylinders so let's create a cylinder let's make the radius 3 and the height 100 centimeters and we also need some height segments and the reason for this is maybe let's turn the lines here we need this resolution here those lines here in order to deform this whole thing in a concave way like I showed you okay what we also need is fill it so we have round ends here and yeah let's deform the whole thing to be concave so what we need for this is a deform to be most specific it's the Bulge deform and the former's work like that you can apply them to your scene then you have to make them a child object of the object you want to deform and what you can do then is for example you can press the fit to parent button and it will automatically fit to the parent but there is another cool thing where you can do exactly the same what I did now with just one click and the press of a modifier key okay let's select the cylinder that's important then let's go to the deformers menu and before you create the bulge here press and hold shift because as soon as you create it then it will automatically create it as a child of the selected object and it will also press the fit repair button automatically for you and now you can start right away with reshaping it and we want to bring it down to like so and let's also make the Bulge deform or invisible here at this is our let's say q-tip object now let's create the shape we want it to be cloned on yeah I will start with a platonic because I think the Platonic is the new cube and yeah first maybe let's directly clone all of those or this object onto the edges of this object okay we select the cylinder and we go to the mograph menu and before we before we create the corner we press and hold alt and this will automatically create the cloner as a parent object of the cylinder here so it is cloned automatically this is what you can see here but by default it's of course again the linear mode here let's adjust it to be object mode and we want to apply the Platonic here and now you see that those clones are distributed onto the vertices again that's not what we want so let's adjust them to be edge and here you see that it's working pretty well okay but what we also want to do is we want to make the q-tips fit the whole length of the of the object here or off the edge here and this can be done by the scale on edge checkbox so by default it's set to 50% but you can also set it up to 100% now we have that okay now as we play nothing happens so what we just created is the basic setup for it now here comes the interesting part we want to deform the Platonic here and there are multiple ways to do that of course you can use one of the deformers here but you can also use and that's very cool you can also use an effector so let's create the random effector as a child object by pressing and holding the shift key and here you see it's now a child object of the Platonic but nothing happens and this is because you need to tell the random effector or any effector to work like at a former and this can be done in the de former tab of the effector so let's go to the de former tab there is just one parameter that you can adjust which is deformation and let's send it to point and bam you see now the whole thing is deformed but as I hit play nothing happens again and this is because if you go to the effector tab here the render mode is random and random creates redness but just for one time and then it keeps this randomness unless you and he made the seat here so there is there are a couple of random modes random and coercion are static modes I think soldiered is also a static mode and noise and Tribune's are animated mills so let's use noise and let's press play and here you see that it now works perfectly maybe let's get rid of the font tag here okay maybe let's also make the Platonic invisible and this is the animation we have now so yeah it's a bit too fast for my taste so let's go to the effector to the effector tab and let's bring down the animation speed to something like 20 and maybe let's also check this indexed this will create a randomness for every single parameter so also the split up positions like position is split up into XY and z and every single part so to speak gets its own randomization all right so that's basically the setup here so for my taste it's also a bit too less of movement here so it could be a bit stronger and as I told you many sliders provided with values that are higher or lower than what they are showing here so here we can go from 0 to 100% but we can also go higher or we can even go lower whatever you want I 32 is something like 250 that should be good and that's the the full the full set up alright yeah maybe let's apply some basic shading and to finish this scene up okay first of all maybe let's read a background first I crawled object then make a double click here in the in the material manager another double click to open up the material editor and let's uncheck the color and the reflectance of just go with luminance that's create a gradient we wanted to make like a like a circular gradient invert the dots and yeah make the color a bit brighter let's assign it to the background it rendered for one time here and now we just need to to apply a glass material to this thing here ok let's create another material and this this will be very basic though so let's also deactivate color and reflectance and let's just activate transparency it should be a glass material so normally you would need to know the refraction index of a glass material yeah but cinema 4d comes with with this refraction preset parameter and you can use glass from here so this is the correct refraction index for glass and now all we need to do is we need to apply it to the cloner or to this one and then hit render yeah and this is pretty much the whole setup that I use of course you can crank up the reflectance and you can also use physical renderer for example and use a camera in order to get a depth of field effect that's also what I what I did in this example here you can the depth of field but I won't go into this because I want to continue with the next setup which is this one so let's analyze this and let's take another sip of water okay what we have in the beginning is a twenty by twenty grid of cubes and then some of the cubes are scaled up and push everything else to the side so there is a dynamic simulation and yeah looks like something like like a popcorn effect all right so let's recreate this and therefore we will jump into suma 4d and we will start with an empty scene again and yeah let's create a cube because it's cubes that we want to close let's set it to 20 by 20 by 20 and let's also create some sort of fill it like so and now let's clone this using a mograph cloner so let's go to the mograph menu and while holding alt create the cloner this way it will be created as a parent and let's set the mode to grid array mode now we have a three dimensional grid but actually we just want it to be two-dimensional and maybe let's do it like this oh wait we said we want to set it to 20 by 20 so let's set it to 21 20 this is our grid and now we want to use an effector on it to get the popcorn effect so we will use the plane effector for this and the plane effector basically does the very same thing to all of the clones by default so once we create this you will see all of the clones moving up by 100 centimeters and this is because yeah it said like this in the defaults so if we go to the permit parameters tab position is activated and all of the clones are moved up by 100 centimeters but what I want to show you first is how you can bring some power into the plane effector and this is via fall off every single mograph effector comes with a fall off and we can yeah adjust the fall of shape for example so now let's set it to linear and this way we can't blend between the affected state of the Clones and the non affected or the original state of clones and this way we can create effects like this or we can also set it to sphere for example so now we have a spherical fall-off but we can also set it to source and this is what we want to do here with the source fall-off shape we can define an object that should be used as the fall-off or the distance to the to this object should be used as a fall-off that's why we have a source link field here and yeah we need an object here and the cool thing is you can pretty much use any object so yeah let's go to the simulate menu because we will use a particle emitter for this let's create a particle emitter and let's rotate it to be aligned the same as our clone is set up here let's scale it up so it's the same size it's nothing like this and for setting it up let's also move it up and let's press play and there you go we have many particles being emitted from this particle emitter and what we want to have is that the particles are emitted but they should stay in the same place as where they were creative so let's select the emitter and let's bring down the speed to zero and when we hit play now you see that there are these small white dots here and those are the particles which are created but those are too much so let's bring down the birth rate here in the editor and the renderer and now you see that there are just a few particles created here okay let's leave it like that but move it down to be in its original position again so now the particles are created in the same or at the same height as the MS the clones here and we will go to the plane effector to its fall-off tap and drag and drop the emitter to the source link field and once you play you see nothing happens and this is because we need to set the distance the sample distance that is used to create a fall-off from the from the object or the particle in this case yeah to its outer yeah let's say rim like here let's say the radius is 20 centimeters then we will have an effect like this that's a bit it's too less so let's set it to 40 and what you can see here also is that now all of the clones are moved up where a particle is created so here in the middle you can see the particles and all of the clones here around the particle are moved up so let's set up the plane effector to do what we wanted to do we don't want them to be moved up we want them to be scaled uniformly scaled and let's set the scale parameter to 1 and let's also set up the color mode here therefore we want to adjust the original color of the whole set up so let's go to the cloner let's select it and let's go to its transform tab because what you can do here is you can set an initial color and we wanted to bring and we wanted to to be black or almost black so if its darkest gray you can see better what you're doing and now let's select the plane effector and within the parameters tab let's set color mode to on and now those clones here are not only scaled up but also yeah colorized so now we have black and white representation of the effect of the plane effector onto the clones so let's go to frame 0 and let's go to the front view and let's move everything up a bit so it seems to be standing on the ground and maybe let's also create a floor object like so and now we can now start creating a dynamics simulation because what we have now is the setup here and yeah this is pretty straightforward what you've seen before so let's select the floor object and also the cloner let's make a right click simulation tags rigidbody okay let's hit play and you see the whole thing moves but it doesn't move the right way because what we wanted to move like is yeah every single clone should be a separate object in terms of the dynamic dynamics simulation here so let's go to the rigid body tag here - its collision tab and set individual elements to all again and now you see that something is happening here maybe we can deactivate or make the emitter invisible here and this is the effect we are having here which is already pretty cool but now let's make it a star shape in the end so what I basically did to create the star shape that we that we have here is I created another another collision shape and I used a sweep for that so let's create a star first let's adjust the plane and skåne it up like so and let's create another spline on the inside it should be pretty small this will be our profile and now let's create a sweep then both of the paths here or of the splines should be child objects of the sweep and now we created some new piece of geometry let's move that up a bit like so and let's also scale it up but just in y direction so we have a better collision shape or maybe let's set it to 20 here so this is our collision shape now let's create a simulation check for that collide a body and now you have to know that by default which is the automatic shape here the dynamics engine works with convex collision shapes only so it will turn the star here into a solid object where everything that is inside here will be treated as a collision and it will also get rid of of those corners here so it will basically create an end gun instead of a star so we need to adjust the collision shape here and this is what you can do with this parameter here we set it to static mesh a tip here if you have it as low poly as possible the dynamics calculation will be faster okay and now let's hit play and see what happens yeah that's exactly what we want the cubes are popping up and they end up yeah being in the shape of the star here so let's make this sweep invisible and maybe let's also extend the timeline a bit something like this and then we see that we have the star shape in the end okay one more cool thing we were talking of a popcorn effect so what if we wanted those cubes to be to be like the kernel of the of the corn and those white cubes here at the popped version and this can be done pretty easily um maybe let's create another object like let's create a plutonic for that and let's set the radius to 12 and let's place it underneath the cloner as well and now as we go to the first frame you see that those two clones are represented here it's always the cube platonic cube platonic and so on and yeah this is because the clones mode here is set to iterate but we can set it to sort this way it will use the first one unless it is told by an effector to use another object so this object so what we can do within the plane effector is we can bring up the modify clone parameter to 100% and this way it will use the second object here instead of the first to be cloned in those areas where the plane effector has an effect so let's have a look at this and you see the stuff is popping up and here we have the Platonic s-- so this is the popped version yeah okay now let's colorize the whole thing and we will use the color information from the plane effector in a material so let's create a new material create new material and let's also assign it to the corner double-click on it to open the material editor and what we want to do now is we want to get rid of the color and we wanted to be based on the reflectance only let's get rid of the specular and let's create a ggx reflection and yeah now we want to adjust the color therefore we go or we select the the triangle here and go to more graph shaders color shader I told you before that we want to use the color shader in one of the setups and here we go we use the color changer and what happens now is it looks at the cloner looks at what effectors are affecting the cloner is there any effector affecting the color then picking the color and linking it into the color shader and now we have those two colors black and white in our colorization of the reflection but what we actually want to have is for example red cubes and white platonic and the way we can achieve this is by using a color riser so let's go to the car riser and there you go you see that there's something happening with open up the colorizer and we will get rid of the black here and we will set the yellow side to be white maybe the red want to be a bit darker just like that and this is how you can colorize clones and yeah this is basically the whole setup for this so what we did here is we colorized the frame then we colorized the clones we made this popcorn effect with with different objects and we created collision shapes and yeah I think this is a pretty cool setup so have fun with it all right let's go to the next one which is a fracturing setup okay first I want to explain to you the basic principle behind fracturing okay let's [Music] let's go to the model sculpture here so we have a statue here the stator of David and we want to fracture him so maybe let's rotating first like so and let's apply a Voronoi fracturing object which can be found here in the mograph menu because every single fragment here will be treated as a clone present hold alt and as you created and then you will see that David's body is already broken up in this case we have to optimize and close the holes to make the the result more reliable and just to show it to you we'll use the rigid body tag and press play and it falls down and smashes okay but what you can also do as I told you all of those clones are actually mograph objects maybe let's go to the sources tab this is the heart of the fracturing object because here you can set up the sources and I will show you in a minute that the way how you set up the sources brings the power with fracturing with this you can unleash the full potential of it once you know how the algorithm works but first of all I want to show you that the clones are also reacting to effectors so here you go and if you use let's say a linear fall-off here linear maybe let's rotate it and move it you can see what happens here right okay so this is the proof that this is part of the mograph context and now to explain the basic concept to you let's bring the point amount down to two and what you can see here is that the algorithm works as follows within a volume there are points that will be scattered and right now we have two points this point and this point and as you can also see there will be a cut directly in the middle between those two points and this is important because this is how Warren Roy fracturing works so let's bring the point amount up to three now we have three points here so one here and here here's the cut in the middle then we have here and here and the cut in the middle is that all right maybe let's change the seat okay that's that's a good example here so now let's have a look from above you see that we have three points one here one here this is the cut directly in the middle one here one here this is the cut in the middle and one here one here and the cut that is referring to those two points is this one okay so keeping that in mind we will create the next thing so I will just create the basic setup for this not the whole animation because it involves quite a bit of expresso and yeah let's hit play so everything that you see here is done with Voronoi fracturing so in the middle we have this baseline so to speak and then there is another set of lines this is all geometry this is not a shader and another one and another one and so on and so forth and so forth and yeah we will create that now ok let's create a new file and let's create a platonic okay here we go platonic and we want to fracture it so we go to the more graph menu Voronoi fracturing present hold alt to make it a parent object immediately and yeah this is how it works ok now let's use another source so this year is a source list of course you can use many sources but we want to use just one in this example and what we want to use as a source is another platonic and we'll call this the source platonic and now with the Voronoi fracture selected we drag and drop the source platonic into the sources field here and now look what happens so maybe we should also bring out the offset fragments so we can see better what happens now the Voronoi fracture algorithm will use the points of the source platonic which are the same points as in the platonic here and as the yeah as the fracturing points to create the pattern so we have a point here we have a point here this is the cut in the middle we have a point here and we have a point here but this is the cut in the middle here and here this is the cut in the middle and this is how this parent is created only by cuts in the middle and this concept as I told you before is very important to understand it's it's not very complicated you just need to know that because then you can yeah you can do whatever you want using fracturing because you understood the concept behind it okay let's get a bit further so maybe later we may want to change the source and we will create a few more more no fracture objects using the very same source so what we will do first is we will create a connect object place the source plutonic underneath it and instead of linking the source platonic here to the sources tab we building the connect object okay I will show you what is this for later okay now let's go to the object tab and when fracturing was introduced to cinema 4d with release 18 and we already had the offset fragments parameter and the hull only parameters there but what was added in release 19 where the invert checkbox here and the thickness for the hull only and the whole setup here relies on those four parameters so first let's increase the fragment offset which will create just a bigger gap between those fragments and let's invert this and what this will do is it won't show the fragments themselves but it will make geometry out of the gaps in between the fragments and this is a really nice effect even now but what we can also do is we can check hull only and imagine you can do this with any kind of object and we will set the Signet thickness not the thickness the thickness to four and this way we created our inner line so to speak okay now let's create some more of them let's make a duplicate of this one simply by holding down command on the Mac or control on a PC and let's also make the old one invisible and with this Illinois fracturing we crank up the offset fragments to 10 so this way we create a wider line here and now what we need to use or what we need to do is we need to cut directly here in the middle of those lines and guess how you can do that it's very simple you can do that simply by creating another Voronoi fracture object and using the same source again and yeah let me show you so with this more annoy fracture object selected we will create another one as a parent and yeah by default you know there is this random point generator let's get rid of that and let's bring in my Kinect and see what happens so now it uses the very same points that are that are in the middle of the holes here and to fracture this again and the cool thing is that this creates those parallel cuts and we can also again use the offset fragments here let's set it to 6 and this way we created a pair of lines for every single line and maybe let's now make the Voronoi fracture here the base line visible again and now everything you need to do in order to make this more complex is just copy this over and adjust the values here so this must be 18 and this must be 14 and this way you create a gap like this okay now um yeah let's let's say we want another source here not the Platonic so maybe let's get rid of that first let's make it invisible and let's create a cube instead and place it underneath the underneath to connect the core thing is that we now use the connect in every single Voronoi fracturing object here and whatever you place as as a child of the connect object will now be the source for the fracturing and this is really really useful to know that okay let's go back to the source platonic because another thing that you can do is you can animate this for example again you've seen it before by using a random effector present hold shift to make it a child of the source platonic and let's make it at a former and there you go and of course this whole thing can also be animated the same way as I showed you before so as I hit play you see that the whole pattern follows the animation of the source platonic here yeah that's the basic concept behind it and then you need some expresso and wire it all up in order to create this here in the end okay so let's go to the to the last set up here that I want to show you which is this one done by Simon Feder I will play it again and we will analyze it so what we have here is one piece in the beginning and there will be many pieces that will be created out of that and then it starts randomizing everything here okay and this is what we want to create so first of all first of all we want to create this here more more more more to that point then we want to create this yeah random pattern and also make it animate automatically and then we will also move those fragments separately okay um let's jump into cinema 4d again and create a new file and let's create another cube let's make it really flat for the beginning I will I will bring it up again later and let's fracture it for no fracture press and hold alt to make it a parent then let's get rid of the random point generator and now let's use an object which is the matrix object so if you might ask yourself what is the matrix the matrix object is pretty much the same as the cloner but the cloner really clones objects and the matrix object doesn't clone anything but it creates all of the positions rotations and scales for all of the objects that normally would be cloned and the cool thing about this is first you can use it in fracturing and second it is very fast and you can apply effects to it also getting rid of clothes and such things and then you could use the clutter and say to object mode and clone onto all of the matrices and then you need to calculate less clones which will make cinema 4d faster ok so now let's create a matrix object and let's set it to one in height and maybe let's also scale it down a bit just like so and let's make it a source object and now you see look at this let me set the offset fragments parameter to one so we can see it even better now you can see that there is a cut between all of those matrices and this creates a very geometrical pattern as well so we pretty much diced our individual plane here and yeah what Simon did was with the matrix object selected he had just one in the beginning one matrix set a keyframe and then he brought it up to let's say 7 by 1 by 7 something like that and set another keyframe and now you see if you play mmm here we have a lot of fragments now and this was all animated okay the next thing is to randomize the whole thing and I think you already know what I'm doing next I'm going to randomize not the fragments themselves but I want to randomize the positions of the matrices here so that's important you have to select the matrix object first and then you go to effector random and as soon as those matrices are randomized you also see that the pattern here is randomized um yeah so let's go to the parameters tab here and let's bring Y down to 0 and you know maybe this is the time where we can make the matrix object invisible um and where we can also set the render mode to noise and create another animated noise pattern fragments pattern here let's bring it down to 28% in speed and also 20% in scale and also set this to indexed and let's see now this is our animation all right maybe let's bring down the scale of the matrix a bit more all right so now if we hit start we see that we immediately create those ran movements all this random yeah pattern and what we want to have first is this very geometrical pattern and then let's turn it into the random pattern and the way how you can do this is simply by animating the strength parameter here so using the strength parameter in the random effector can make a soft transition between the way out like perfect parallel cuts and the random stuff so let's go to frame 60 set a keyframe at 0 and then let's go to frame 70 and let's bring this up okay let's go to frame 1 and press play and here you see that we first create this pubes or dices and then the whole thing will any made to be randomized and yes let's have a bit more time here something like that and then it moves all right this is cool and I want to create another random effector but this time for the Voronoi fracture object and in the beginning I promise you that I want to show you how you can assign an an effector to a mograph generator also if you forgot to select it first so let's create a random effector without selecting the Voronoi fracture object and now we have it here let's call this random fracture and now you see that nothing happens because this random effector is not linked to the Voronoi fracture object but within the Voronoi fracture object there is another tab that is called effectors and here we have the effectors list and as you can see nothing is inside of that list but you can use or you can drag and drop the random you're a factor here and just drag and drop it into that list and then you see that it works okay then let's go to the factors parameter tab and let's just use the scale here let me set it to two and let's also bring up the scale of the of the cube here in y direction and now you see that it works like that oh it's randomized from the beginning so let's do the very same as we did before so we go to the random effector to the effector tab and set two keyframes one it 100% and let's go a bit more to the previous frames and let's bring it down to zero okay so here we go randomization and also randomization in Y scale okay so that's it for the setups so let's jump back into the into the keynote and as you might know cinema 4d has a very tight integration with in After Effects and both applications are very good in the motion graphics context so if you want to do tooi motion graphics then After Effects is your tool but as soon as you want to create 3d parts within your motion graphics you will need to have cinema 4d anthems to work really well together using our sin aware plugin so to speak so you can import some over d files natively into After Effects which is pretty cool and you can export the cameras and lights and so on and use them within After Effects and one thing that you could do with that is something like this so the spheres all the balls were inside of this thing and I animated the BMX rider no I'm just kidding of course all of the here are a bunch of mograph clones with a variation shader and yeah also using scenery construction for reconstructing the whole parkour here and yeah that's that's the setup here and here are some other things that you might want to know mograph good to knows okay so first mograph works very well with dynamics and particle forces once they are dynamic so I showed you the dynamic when I didn't show you is that you can use the particle forces on that so things like turbulence for example yeah or attractors then the next thing effectors in point mode work like deformers that's what I showed you two times with the random effector and with render instances your viewport gets faster I already told you that as well there are some mograph notes in expresso so if you are expressive people feel free to use them to use the demo graph nodes within expressive because you can do very cool stuff with that and for programmers with PI to a Python and coffee mograph gets even more powerful so if you create a Python effect you can really create any effect that you want so now this is the time for questions how to make spheres bounce here after falling so this is also pretty easy and straightforward so all you need to do is use soft bodies instead of rigid bodies so maybe let's create a new scene let's create a floor object and also let's create one sphere using hexahedron because what you need to know is that soft bodies work best if you have like quads as here and now let's bring down the segments because soft body dynamics can really slow down your setup pretty fast let's go to simulation tags richard body or actually we need some body so let's go to soft body and let's turn them on so this would be the soft animation here this is how you make them wobbly but there's also another tip if you want to deform a high poly object using soft body dynamics it is always good to maybe let's let's create this so let's say we have a few here this is low poly and we want we actually want a very high poly sphere let's set this to to a higher segment count and let's place it in the same position as this one let's copy this over to that so now they are in the same position and what you can do is you can use ma former which is the mesh deform in order to deform the high poly object using the low poly object and you're running the simulation on the low poly object because then the simulation will be faster but you will deform the high poly object in the end so let's go to the mesh object and the cage for this one will be the low poly sphere and we need to initialize this once and then let's go and make the sphere the low poly sphere here invisible and let's play the animation yeah I know that it works I know that it works maybe let's say yeah we had you have to set this to surface then it works so what we see here is the high poly sphere and it is deformed using the low poly sphere so that might be a cool tip if you want to do soft body animations always use low poly objects to run the simulation and then deform a high poly object with it how did you get the right position of the boss going away from the biker in the aftereffect cinema4d example okay let's jump back into this so what I did was I filled the whole geometry here with the balls and then I had another object a Collider object which I animated at the position of the biker here it was really in some cases it was afraid my frame adjusting it but yeah that's a Collider I created within cinema 4d and I also used it as a mask so what you can see here is that there are some balls in front of the of the biker and some behind him and yeah this is this is because I I used this Collider which was like the size I I always try to have it bigger than the biker actually is so I could get this mask yeah that is the answer for this question okay there was another question that I want to answer which was how can you gain control over a single clone independently from the others and well there are two answers the first is via Python so if you know programming you can get really full control over a single clone and there is also a way to use the formula effector yeah in order to gain control for a single clone and yeah maybe let me show you how to do this let's create another cube and make it smaller and let's clone it maybe let's also adjust the distribution here and increase the count okay so first of all what you need to know is that every single clone comes with its own name so to speak and this name is a number which is called the index and what you can do within cinema 4d inside of the cloner is you go to the transform tab and within the display options you choose index and this way you can see the numbers so it starts at 0 that's yeah we're counting starts in programming in general you always start at 0 so if you want to count or if you want to have the fifth clone you count 0 1 2 3 4 actually so this is the fifth cloud clone but it has the index 4 because it starts at 0 all right so now keeping that in mind we get rid of the index display that was just for basic explanation and let's apply a formula effector and yeah maybe you wouldn't expect the formula effector to be capable of picking out a single clone because by default it has this yeah weird sinus animation and this formula which is well quite complicated but yeah yeah maybe it makes you also afraid of using it but what you can do is you can unfold this variables thing here and there you see all of the of the variables you have and there is one called the object index which is ID and it's also here in that formula but yeah if you adjust the formula to something like ID equals and let's say we want to pick out the fifth frame we need to type in four because it starts counting at zero and then it it uses the fourth frame or the fifth clone here and as you play nothing happens anymore because there is no sinus attached to the to the formula here or part of the formula okay let's go to the parameter tab and here you see what you can set up so let's for example move it up and maybe let's also get rid of the scale okay so if we want to use another clone or if we want to gain control over another clone for example the tenth clone we go to one two three four five six seven eight nine ten it is this but the number is nine because it starts counting at zero so let's type in nine and hit enter and then we address this clone so maybe let's move the effector because I want to show you something else here so what if you want to attach the clone directly to the effector for example this is also something you can do and within the parameters tab you set the transform mode to absolute and the transform space to effector and now it will jump to the effectors position but plus 50 here so let's reduce this to zero and now we can move the clone by moving the effector which is quite powerful but right now we cannot rotate it so let's rotate the effector the clone stays the same unless we also activate the rotation here and now here comes the funny thing you have to type in at least one change here so if we if you type in one degree in heading you will also get the rotation of the of the effector and can use it for the clone so yeah and if you want to have another clone being applied to this factor you just go to maybe let's say ID equals 15 then it is this clone yeah exactly so that's how you can gain control over a single clone using the formula effector thank you for joining this webinar and yeah I hope I really hope that I see you next time I hope you enjoyed the webinar

Channel: Maxon

Views: 471,386

Rating: 4.9779305 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r19, release 19, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, webinar, vfx

Id: rF0Py5ynk3I

Length: 91min 59sec (5519 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017