xpReel Tutorials, Strange Cloth, Cycles 4D - Part 2

[Music] hi it's Bob Rubin Sid iam here and we have got a part two of our strange cloth simulation this is how the original scene looked in the X particles reel so we'll open the scene we built in part one in cycles 4d and we'll create a custom material we'll set up the camera with some depth of field and we'll have a look at some optimum render settings so it'll rent it quickly with no noise so there's a lot to get on with let's get started so here's how we left our scene from part 1 of this tutorial and let's just break down what we've got so we can see these cloth objects floating around the place they are underneath this subdivision surface which I've just got switched off at the moment in fact let's do some housekeeping to make this make more sense or rename this subdivision surface cloth elements alright that's better so underneath here we have a couple of things going on we have all of our individual planes and they are sitting within a connect object now the connect object is what the cloth emitter is referencing to make all of the particles which are driven by the cloth so that's this emitter here and if I go to the object tab we can see that the object it's referencing is the Kinect and what's that what that means is that this emitter is spawning particles onto every vertex of these pieces of cloth so let's just visualize that and now we can see it so there all of the particles and these particles are being manipulated by this cloth modifier and the cloth deform er is what's deforming them and given them all these nice wrinkles so at this stage we can forget about all of that but I just wanted to describe what our scene is doing here so I've got constraints are switched off at the moment and that's just so we get a bit faster feedback now the constraints are what stops our cloth from intersecting itself it's enables kind of particle to particle collisions so it's really good and we'll be using this in the final renders but just whilst we're settling scenes that will switch it off and that means it will play much more quickly in the viewport so as you can see we've got our cloth floating around and then at a certain point we've got our strange attractors modifier turns on here about frame 50 and suddenly they get washed away into the direction of that strange attractor very good and then just finally I've got one more emitter in my scene here let's do a bit more housekeeping these are the dust particles so let's just rename that as we'll call it emitter dust now these are spawning out these particles which are being moved by some initial turbulence the same one that's doing the cloth and then they're getting dragged around by the strange attractors as well which is really nice because that means that when we get this shot when the cloth starts to move those dust particles are going to get look like they're being sucked along with it because of the difference in air pressure that they're causing so that's gonna look really nice right so what do we need to do to get this set up to render well first of all we need to make a decision from what angle are we going to render this now if you remember from the X particles real what Mario did was he shot this from various different directions and and cooked those different camera angles together after rendering to put the sequence together and it was to great effect so what we're going to need is this would probably need three camera angles for this the first camera angle just wants to be of the piece of cloth floating before the strange attractors is switched on so we can probably worry about that one after we've done the other two so the other two camera angles we want is this we want one cam angle where the pieces of cloth are suddenly being jerked away from the camera so let's have a look as the strange attractors is activated you want to see it jerking away ok so there's it jerking said I think these ones are going from down in this direction kind of away from the camera so something like that let's just come in and we want to be quite tight and quite close up initially which will really give us a sense of movement as its pulled away from the camera so and then pulled away so this this is the sheet that I'm looking at specifically and this one's looking quite nice and we're getting some decent movement so we're just gonna keep coming in close to this sort of seeing where we get until we get an angle that's kind of looking as we want it to so let's just move back a bit so I think this is the one I like here but it's been obscured somewhat by this plane here I think we can just get rid of this one for now because we're getting really tight into the shot so it doesn't matter if we lose one of the pieces of cloth for this render so let's just find out which one this is it's this one within our connect object now here's something I can't just disable this from the view because it's the connect object that we're actually looking at not these individual planes so what I need to do to get this out of our simulation is to drag it out of the connect object and then it should disappear okay good so now I can get in tight into this plane this is the one I'm interested in I want to get a decent angle of this and let's just have a look something like that maybe okay so we have the initial development and then we want it whooshing away from the camera and then [Music] good I think that's fine I'm not going to do anything so let's save that camera position for our first angle so the way we'll do that is let's create a cycles camera which automatically does it from this from this angle and I'm going to go to tags cinema 4d tags and get a protection tag on it so I can't accidentally move it so my first camera angle is fine so this is going to develop develop develop and then it's going to be dragged away from the camera into the distance excellent so then in this point we're going to cut away from this camera angle and we're going to almost go from the reverse I think so at this point when we cut away it moves away moves away stopped about there and then when we cut away we want it to then be coming towards the camera it doesn't have to be the same part of cloth it could be any part of cloth here just the bit that looks the nicest going towards the camera and a nice kind of circular motion would be good coming towards the camera and then coming past it so maybe these bits here coming past like this so when we're picking these obviously we're not being particularly scientific we're just looking for a bit that looks like so these ones are looking good and then they come past all right so we're getting there not quite right yet but somewhere around here is going to be looking okay I think so we wouldn't even be looking at this camera at this point and now cut to it possibly here so that's and then we want the whooshing past the camera for okay let's try that again so the first part they're coming away from the camera and then we'll cut to this and they'll be here form and then go past all right so that'll probably do for our second so it's got a cycles 4d camera create another one and I'll just control drag that protection tag and now they are both locked off excellent so I kind of two camera angles are kind of there okay good so we can forget about cameras for now so let's talk about rendering this with cycles 4d so what I'm gonna do is let's go into my cycles 4d layout and so here we go so this looks slightly different I'll just walk you through it very quickly what I've got is my viewport here tiny little viewport but I don't need to worry about that specifically cuz we're locked our cameras down I have my material node editor here where we'll build our cycles textures I've got the real-time preview here where we'll see the render and then here's my object list on the right hand bottom right of our screen and the attributes manager here where we can make adjustments to the nodes and alter the elements within our scene very nice so at the moment we can't see anything if I hit render we've got a blank real-time preview and that's because there are no lights in the scene so let's start by bringing in a cycles 4d environment which is like a physical sky I'm just gonna zoom in a bit all right and by default as we know by now we get a background texture applied to the environment here's the background texture and it's just two nodes and output node which all of these materials have and this background texture here and all it is is a color and a strength but what we're going to do is we're going to we want to light this with kind of like a sky object so it's almost like a physical sky in cinema 4d so if we right click and go to texture we can go to sky texture and I can feed this into my background and now we have got these bits of cloth being lit by the sky so let's just get some wrinkles in so we'll run it through okay so we're getting a little bit of colorization from this sky which is great what we don't want is we don't want to actually see the sky in the background and this is going to be on very dark - black black ground so to do that we go to the environment object and in the attributes all we need to do is go to the rave visibility section and this is like a compositing tag and we can just say we want the sky to affect all of these different channels but we just don't want the camera to see it all right so there we go so this is looking very flat very bland at the moment but the we need this sky because we want some contrast in our pieces of cloth with nice wrinkles but we also want them to look fairly well illuminated so that's what this sky object is going to to give us now you can also see at this stage now we've put some lights in the scene our cloth you can't really see that many wrinkles in them we haven't really gotten of wrinkles for the detail now if I switch on you see we've got this stepping here because we had not got enough geometry for this deformation so let's just go to the cloth elements switch it arm this is the subdivision surface and give it some subdivisions and it'll smooth out those okay so that's better but we still haven't really gotten of wrinkles so what we're going to have to do eventually is create more subdivisions in our planes that's the only way we can get more detail and more wrinkles we'll do that in a bit because at the moment they're not that heavily subdivided and that means that we get really quick playback but as a result we haven't got the run really got the resolution to get the nice the nice wrinkles so we are at one point going to fix that and we're going to subdivide all of these planes but at the moment we as a resetting look lights and we want things to run nice and quickly we we won't bother with that right so what do we need to do we have got our basic sky set up so let's set up some more lights so what I'll do so we can view these lights going in a little bit more easily I'll go back to my standard layout and we're going to put some lights in the scene so our cameras are pointing this direction so what we're going to do is just use a couple of plain objects to become scene lights so the way which we're going to do that is let's go to the object list here and bring in a plane and I'll just move this to the side so there's our plane and I'm going to slightly increase that let's rotate it round and move it we'll move it up to illuminate slightly from above okay so this is going to be a light so to create a light all we need to do is give it a cycles emission material so we'll go to create our cycles 4d surface a mission here it is and we'll pop it on the plane so I'm going to hold control so when we do that and we drag on one of these axis arms it makes a duplicate great I'm just going to let's drag that down okay and I'm gonna control to copy this emission material and stick it on replace that on there hang on it's just deselect that so the new one one of them is going to go there so now we have a different material on each so now we have our two light objects let's go back to our cycles layout and now you can see in the real-time preview that these are illuminated and these are actually having an effect they are lighting they're adding to the lighting of the scene it's not very noticeable just yet because they're not bright enough so let's make some adjustments so in one of them I'm just going to give it a warmer color so this one's become warmer actually let's reverse that because this one's lower down so you would naturally make the warmer more sun colored one the one that was higher up in the scene so this one we're gonna make it a cooler color we're gonna give it a subtle blue give it full brightness and I'm just gonna increase the strength slightly so you can now start an Italian that's Dalian if I increase the strength slider you can see that it's starting to have an effect on these on these planes okay so just leave it there for now and then on the other one I'm gonna give this one a warmer color and again so I put the strength up you'll see this warmer color coming here so that's just alright so we have a blue and a warmer more Sun colored light okay so that's that now another thing which works very well for this and you'll notice in mario scene this is what he is done if your let's just go back to my standard layout if your rendering elements onto a very dark or black background there is a trick that you can employ which gives you a nicer light fall-off and what it means is you're gonna get slightly more nice contrasted areas in the dark parts of your object and a more realistic looking light fall-off kind of going off into infinity and then way we're going to do that is we're going to put in a huge plane object whose going to be black which is going to kind of suck in the light and not reflect it backwards so the way we'll do that is let's bring in a big plane I'm going to bring it down to the bottom of our scene hit T for scale and scale this way up so it's going to be huge you're not going to see this but it's just going to be there okay there we go so then let's go to create cycles for deep surface and we're just going to make a diffuse and put this on the plane okay so then let's go back into my cycles for day layout and in the diffuse I'm going to set it to black okay so if I Dalian now there we go if I switch off that plane you can see we've got much more light reflecting here and that's because the light from the sky object is going off into infinity creating a very very gradual fall off whereas with this huge plane reacted when it gets to the plane the light is being sucked in and it's not bouncing back and so we're getting this slightly nicer shadowed effect and that's because we've got a better light fall-off since this is a good technique if you're rendering on a black background this this works very well so let's have a look at this what can we do now let's go to our blue objects increase the strength a bit all right and I think for now that we'll probably do is for our lighting okay so now what do we need to do well we need to make a cloth texture actually don't we so let's switch our subdivision surface on and let's make the material that's going to be our cloth so let's pull this down so we've got a bit more room so let's go to create and there's a fantastic default shader in the surface shaders called velvet it's just off your screen here actually but that's velvet right at the bottom and it brings in this velvet node so if I put that velvet onto our cloth elements we get this nice satin looking looking material which which looks very nice but what we would like to do is manipulate this a little bit more because what this nice satin material doesn't have it doesn't have any texture so you don't see any kind of any kind of weave whatsoever no matter how close in you get you don't it's just it's just shiny almost becomes like a smooth metallic so we don't have that and we also don't have any transparency so we can't actually see through any of these cloths so what would be nice would be if these were slightly transparent so we could see behind some of those so let's have a look at how we might achieve that view that look so in our velvet texture let's bring in a mix shader' and we're going to mix together some of these materials so we'll put the velvet in the top and we'll put the output from the mix shader' into the surface so now what we're going to do is we're going to put a transparency into the other input of the mix shader' so let's right click and we'll go to texture I'll just move that up a bit sorry texture and we will sorry it says shade it and it is transparent so we'll take this transparency and we'll put this into the other input and now you can see all of a sudden we have transparency which is interesting and what the mix shader' is doing is at the moment if the factor is on point five it is equally mixing the velvet and the transparency node together in equal quantities if I slide this to the left it's taken more from the velvet so the transparency is reduced and if we drag it more to the right it's taking more transparency and the the velvet is reduced so that is one way of sorting out the transparency and that started to look better another thing that we can do is we can and change this color and the color basically goes from white to being fully transparent or black to have no transparency so we can make adjustments to their transparency amount by changing that color value you can see if we drag it this way it's gonna gradually get more and more opaque and that transparency is going to disappear all right so just leave it leave it on white for now so we can see what's happening so that's all very well and good but we can do something much better and give a much more realistic looking cloth by using this factor input so what we're going to do is get a black and white cloth looking weave pattern and feed it into this factor and that's going to give us a kind of a weave holy looking looking cloth surface so let's get that set up what we're going to do we're gonna actually use one of the cinema 4d tile surfaces for this so how do we access those normally you could access it from a cinema 4d a cinema 4d material but we can access it right in cycles as well so what we're going to do is right click and we're going to go to texture image texture so what the image texture node allows us to do is bring in a photograph an image whatever you want but this is the beauty of the image texture node if I just highlight it here are its attributes just bring this up so you can see we can as an image texture use any of the cinema 4d inbuilt noises gradients color eise's effects all of these shaders that we have access to as an image which is fantastic so what we're going to do is go to surface and just off your screen is I'll just lift that up so you can see that menu if I go to surface and it's just off there's below some but it's called tiles and we get this tiles shader alright and this obviously doesn't look like cloth but if we click into the tiles settings we're able to adjust the pattern so first of all let's just change these colors we want these three to be white right good we want I don't think we really want bevel well we might have maybe a tiny bit of oval and a tiny bit of grout width all right so there's the squares we don't want squares because that's not gonna look like cloth let's just see what happens if we put the color from this into the factor now that's interesting so wherever it is black we have no transparency and wherever it is white we have full transparency and what has been created from that are these interesting like nets which isn't quite what we want but it's an interesting look and so obviously this will animate through and that's looking pretty cool that's not what we want so we need to reverse these colors so what I could do is go into my tile settings and change all of these and change this one to white and this one to black but actually there's probably an easier quicker way if I just invert this output so if I go to color node invert stick it in there and it's just gonna switch it around so now this is looking interesting what have we got here we've got our piece of cloth with transparent bits here again not what we want but this is an interesting effect so let's make some changes to this tile pattern so let's click back into it and I'm gonna change it so if we go to the pattern we can change it from squares and fantastically there are three weaves that we have access to so let's have a look at this one so that's one of the weaves which is this look which is starting to get a little bit more cloth like so that's one that's not right for as yet though still I don't think although it's pretty nice let's have a look at the other weaves we've one there's a wavy pattern that the wavy is actually a wave misread it there is only one weave these two a waves so ignore those completely cuz I'm not making C let's go back to our weave pattern right so all we need to do now obviously the weave is far too is far too big so just bring down this global scale to I don't know let's say 10 all right so now we're starting to get something that's looking quite interesting let's bring that down even further to 2 that's perhaps four actually too much five okay so we're getting there this is starting to look quite interesting so what else could we do to make this look slightly better well we could perhaps use this same image texture and we could put a bit of bump into our mixture so let's take the output of the IMP of the invert node and put it into our displacement so now we've been given some bump it's way too much but you can see that that bump is really making this look like a much kind of rougher textile material which I really like so what we need to do is just turn down the power of that bump and the way we'll do that we need to basically create a power slider and we could do that just by bringing in a multiply node so let's go to converter and math let's change this to multiply we'll put the color from the invert into the value and the value into the displacement which is just bump and now we couldn't we can lower this effect by bringing down this number to a smaller decimal so let's just say I don't know point to okay so this is looking pretty interesting now I think arguably we have a little bit too much transparency so let's change this color to a darker color and the transparency node to give us less transparency all right so at this point we've basically put this material on one thing that we haven't done is that we haven't provided it with any mapping information we haven't told this texture how to be applied to all of our different planes and what we could do because if I just go to my object list here because all of our planes have UV coordinates that this is the UV here we can make sure that this material is mapped perfectly to these planes by using these UV coordinates but how do we do that because our material is on the subdivision surface so here's how we're going to do it I'm going to drag this onto my connect object instead and then I'm going to right-click on the tag and what we need to do is put copy tag to children so now they all have a tag and I'm going to remove the tag from the connect object okay and if we look in the connect object settings we have got textures tit which means it's going to use all of these textures great so now that we've put the texture on all of these planes we can now tell cycles to use the UV coordinates and that's dead easy all we do is we in our material add to a right click and we go to input texture coordinate which brings in this node here and we've got all these different texture coordinates and we have UV and because all of these objects have UV coordinates it'll be able to read those UVs so what we do is we pipe the UV into the vector of that image texture which means this is going to be mapped perfectly to our planes all right good so let's just have a look at these lights that I think arguably would we now that we've got that kind of bump in the scene and we've got this image applied it's arguably a little too dark now we're not really getting quite enough light it's got one of our camera views this one so what we can do let's make some adjustments to our scene lighting now so I'm gonna get my background object let's just try up in the strength of that sky okay and thinking this textures a little bit too too dark here early and maybe not zoomed out enough so let's go back to my velvet we'll reduce that bump by even more let's just put oh it's on value too that's why I've got way too much bump it should be a decimal this one's a B point two there we go all right that's way better okay all right and I think we could perhaps go a bit smaller on that image texture let's give it a more resolution as well that's better case we'll go back into the tiles let's move this space up a bit we'll just make some adjustments a it and let's go down to say two three okay good so I think we could perhaps benefit from let's just play this through and see I was looking all right and our last adjustment I just think this grout with is way too thick so maybe this needs to go way down to let's just try a decimal ah that's looking better let's go lower yeah this is what I'm this is what I'm wanting okay good so it's the grout width is hugely important that for me now is looking like a nice textured material that is looking pretty decent excellent right I'm going to call that material kind of doom we can tweak it should we need to but this is looking really nice now we're getting a little bit of transparency so we can see other parts of it just poking through but that's looking pretty nice we're getting these weird stepping shading errors blast because we're working on low resolution planes but that's looking nice right good so that's that so let's just let's just recap actually what's in this material so what we have done we have taken the UV texture coordinates from our objects and placed it into the vector of our image texture we have then in the image texture we have used a cinema 4d tiles shader and we've done that in the weave mode to get this really nice looking weave pattern we're taking the color of that and we've we've inverted it and then that is dictating how this mix shader is shading together the velvet material and the transparent material which is giving the illusion here that this is actually a weaved bit of cloth which if you dolly right in has got these nice holes in it and really nice bits of texture and then we're using the same inverted output of our image texture to give us a bit of a bump as well which is just giving this kind of a more shadowed area and a little bit more detail to these bits of weave and we'll just put that through a multiply node because we wanted to reduce the effect of that so if we put it in a multiply node and multiply it by a decimal value and it's going to reduce the impact of that bump so that's looking really nice right let's just go back to my regular layout because what we need to do now is start thinking about and getting more resolution in these planes because at the moment we just we just don't have enough so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to frame 0 and then I'm going to select what we need to do is let's select all of our planes which we want to adjust and now we want to subtract these further so the way we'll do that is we've got them all selected let's go to mesh commands and then subdivide now subdivide like a lot of the commands you can either just click it here and it will subdivide by the default amounts or if you just see view if we move to our cog wheel here we can increase how many subdivisions we require now we don't need anything more than one but it's always worth clicking on that subdivision amount because earlier in a scene if you had subdivided something and there be subdivide it by 10 it'll kind of retain that setting of 10 and so you might end up creating geometry with millions and millions of extra polygons which might not be what you wanted so as always it's not a bad idea to click on the cogwheel just to see exactly how many subdivisions you'll be subdividing by so if we click OK now we have all this more detail look how many more polygons we have so now if we play through the scene it's going to play an awful lot more slowly because now the emitter is having to emit so many more particles and it's having to make so many more calculations but what you'll see is that we will get loads more detailed wrinkles look at these it looks fantastic already and basically with cloth the more subdivisions you have the more fantastic detail you're gonna get in your renders but obviously you're going to have a hit on simulation time but this is looking look way more detailed already so let's just jump back to our cycles view you and see what difference that makes in the in the render so now we've got so much more detail here let's go into one of our cameras and this is looking much much nicer because we're getting we're just getting more to play with okay so let's have a thing I think arguably we haven't quite got enough contrast so this may be because our sky material is just a little bit too powerful now if we reduce the sky material strength for the sky object and then increase the light of the object we're going to introduce a little bit more contrast into the scene which may accentuate these these wrinkles a little more so let's just see if we can do that we'll go to the background object and we're on a strength strength of five let's just bring that down to three so there's yeah I mean there's more contrast now here so once we've done that then let's go to our emission nodes maybe increase our hot emission all right okay so then we're gonna do these nice creasing cloth and we have a little transparency not too much I mean we could we could perhaps even let's go in can we we can up the transparency by just making this a little whiter and it's just gonna make it slightly more transparent so we can start seeing the cloth through it but these are obviously tweaks that we can we can make forever but let's play this through a little bit more so we're also going to get some nice and wrinkles once we reactivate our and constraints object as well but I think I mean this is really starting to look nice I think I love this cloth material once we as I say get the constraints in and we start doing some depth of field effects this is gonna look great good okay so let's get let's look at some depth of field now so this is our first camera angle where the cloth is going to be whooshing away from the camera so let's go into our cycles 4d camera tag and we'll pick before we set the depth of field we'll pick a focus area so hit on the camera go to the object settings and the focus distance we've got a little picker here so this allows us to pick you can't obviously do it in the real-time preview window we do that in the in the object in the in the viewport so that where we want to be in focus is maybe somewhere about here and then go to the cycles 4d camera tag and let's just bring up this size a bit not too much just enough to push it back into the background a wee bit okay so then as it moves away from the camera is going to go out of focus it's a look okay right so now we've got that set up I think it's time to activate our constraint now you'll see that this is going to have a big impact on the playback performance let's just go back to our normal layout so we can see our so here we go we've got our animation developing and we'll probably start the scene from just after this piece wrinkles over on itself so probably about here and we'll get some nice floating cloth with a bits of transparency and then as our strange attractors kicks in it's going to wash away nicely so here comes the whoosh okay and there it wishes away into the distance nice so let's go to our cycles four-day layout alright there we are so what else can we do to this before we start to render obviously we need to render our setup and texture our dust particles go at the moment they're not rendering because they don't have any material of course so that's we could we could do that now actually so what we're going to do is we're going to go to create and we'll go to cycles 4d and we'll go to surface and we'll make an emission shader and the emission shader we're going to put on our emitter dust and he sees in in immediately instanced these circular shapes onto our dust particles okay so that's fine so now what we want to do is we want those who remember we colored our dust particles dependent on their speed and slower particles were going to be orange and the faster particles blue so what we want to be able to do is access that color information of the particles in cycles and the way we do that is when a right-click and we're going to go to input and we have got a particle info node super helpful so let's pick that and what we want to do is take the color from the particles and put it into our emission texture and now you can see that we have got that color so I'm going to switch off constraints for a minute so now we've got our particles so what are the problems so far with this well first of all they're - they're just way too big aren't they so what we need to do is make some adjustments and we can do that we can adjust the size actually in cycles we don't need to readjust in X particles and so the way in which we do it let's go to the dust emitter and I'm gonna go to tags this is slightly off your screen but I'm going to go to cycles forty tags and there we can see them again and we're going to do a cycles instance tag now this instance Tagus is telling us various different things so what it's doing is for every particle it is instancing a sphere which has 24 segments we probably don't need that money here actually so we'll just reduce that and it means they'll render more quickly and then we have a size multiplier not the moment the size is they're just too big I think these ones are near the camera but they're just too big so we could perhaps we could reduce that by 50 and we could also maybe give it some size variation may be even more size variation okay good I can increase the strength of my material all right now arguably I would say that these particles the colors are a bit vivid incredibly vivid oranges here so what can we do well we can just tone down the color that's coming from our particle information with the color note really easily so let's right-click go to color hue saturation value drag it in and all we can do is just turn down the master saturation now we've got particles which are far less intrusive I think actually I've gone way too strong on the emission value they're too strong there's good on a3 all right and we play and now we've got our particles which are colored correctly okay very nice so I'm just a little bit concerned here I don't quite got enough particles in this area where we're actually looking at this piece of cloth I want to mean focus ones around here so let's just pause the real-time preview and I'm going to jump to my regular layout so let's come out of this camera so my start camera is this one and I'd just like a few more particles here so how are we going to achieve that well let's go back to the beginning of the timeline and what we're going to do is cheat so we will get our emitted dust which is creating those dust particles I'm going to ctrl or command click and hold and then drag it which makes a new one copy and this copy we're going to change it from being a box emission in the object tab to a sphere and then the sphere we're going to move it towards our camera let's make it bigger than our camera let's just make sure that we've got this so what we want is this kind of encapsulating our camera our basic camera areas or something like that and I can come down a bit right so this is where we're going to miss our new particles from so let's just hit play and out so now we've got way more in the view these look a little bit too big to me actually but let's just leave them for now so now we've got some more particles excellent so fingers crossed this is going to look okay now one thing that we perhaps should it on awhile back is kind of cash out or baked out our cloth objects so then once it's baked we're able to kind of scrub through and we don't have to choke through frame-by-frame and in hindsight we should have done this really whilst we were setting our cameras up because it would have been easier we could have scrubbed through and find that found those really nice animation points for our camera angles so not to worry let's just do that now so with cloth animations we found that it's better with cloth to actually bake these export them as an Alembic file it works really well so we're going to do both methods we're going to cache our emitter dust particles and we're going to export out our cloth object as an Alembic so let's do the cloth first so before I do anything I need to make sure what do I need to do we we need to make sure that our constraints is active because we don't want intersections okay and then what we need to do is select our thing that we want to bake out so we want this cloth elements which is our subdivision surface with our cloth the former and our connect object in all of our planes so this is what we want to bake out so have it selected and then we're going to go to file export Alembic and it asks you where so that's fine I'm gonna save it there and then we've got some settings so what do you want to save so the end frame is 160 let's say 200 just to be sure so we're gonna save the first I'll hang on let me cancel that so I pressed enter which immediately starts the exporting process which is not what you want to do because I want to show you the other settings so I've cancelled it and we'll let's try again so file export Alembic I'll just overwrite that mistake one that I've just made yep overwrite it okay so we've set the start and end frame so we have selection only ticked and this is really important so this means it is only going to export what we've got selected in our scene if we didn't have this ticked and we had cameras and hair and particles it would it would export all of those elements within the scene and we don't actually need that we just need the cloth so that's why we have got selection only so that's good I'll leave everything else as default and I'll click OK and this is going to kind of chug through a little bit like when you cash an object in Ex particles and that's because it's saving frame-by-frame all of that cloth information so as this is chugging through its kind of saving that to this file which means when we import that file back into our scene we're going to be able to disable all of the cloth stuff all of the cloth solver and the constraints and all the things that are causing this to to have slow playback in the viewport and we'll bring in this baked object which is gonna ruin nice and smoothly in the viewport and then all we're gonna have to do is is stick the same cloth texture on that we've built and we will be able to scrub through and everything's gonna be working okay so I'll pause this here and when it's finished exporting we'll combat I'll tell how long it took and then we'll get on with the rest of the scene so that files baked out to a lambic it took probably took about 10 minutes for that 200 frames and to get all that data in there so let's and continue so what we can do is minimize our cloth elements so now what we need to do is bring that geometry into our scene that we've just exported so the way in which we do that is we go to file merge let's find the doctor ABC file that we'll just create it and hit open and it asks us for some details now it's essential that you get the frame rate correct so I'm working at 30 frames a second so that's fine and everything else is okay so I'm going to hit OK and here now is my cloth elements file so let's just make my original one invisible all these bits we can't see them and now if we hit play we're getting pretty much close to what we want so I'm just going to let's do it so now we've got it in our scene and what I'm going to do is I'm going to file and save incremental and now I'm just gonna get rid of all this stuff that I no longer need so I don't need the constraints emitter the cloth modifier don't need it I don't need those original cloth elements they can go the cloth generators can go and that's it everything else that we need so I'm just gonna switch off my dust emitters for now so now I'm able to scrub through this scene and that's because this is the Alembic file this is our new cloth elements Alembic file that we exported and that's working excellently and now we can screw up so now if we go to some of our pre-recorded camera angles let's go to camera warm and now we can get a really good idea of when this gets whipped away and whether we've got everything as we want it so that's good and then whip okay good so we've got a little bit of you can see a little bit of kind of problem defamation here but that's really easily solved again that's just I'm gonna hold alt click on the subdivision surface and now that's that's smooth out so that's looking good right so that's excellent now we've got a much more manageable and quick scene a subdivision surface has slowed it down somewhat so that's just in those settings put that down to zero in the editor and one in in in the renderer so now in it doesn't make any difference in the viewport but when we render it's going to be complete these areas are going to be smoothed out lovely so we will put our velvet material onto our cloth elements right so let's have a go let's go back to our cycles for the view hit render there we go so this is working pretty well and we're getting much better feedback fantastic right so let's have a look what else do we need to do we were looking at those dust particles weren't we I think also an area need to address is earlier on we made the decision to reduce the intensity of our sky object and that was to bring a little bit more contrast but I think we've gone too heavy on that I think this cloth is looking too dull I think we needed to look quite vibrantly bright we'll do that by increasing that sky so we live and learn let's go to our background texture which is where the sky texture is plugged into and this strength let's put it back up to say six yep so that's in the right direction that's looking better already but it needs to be way more let's try eleven okay that that's more like it that's that's what we're looking for that's looking great so now we've got this and then as it chugs through it snaps away ok I'm not actually seen the full frame there are we let's reduce that to 60 okay that's better and and though it snaps away from the camera and that's looking excellent really really nice I'm very pleased with that good I think we could perhaps just increase the depth of field there make it slightly shallower yeah that's better lovely okay so that's the first one so where were we we were looking at getting changing our dust elements so let's get these cashed out well we'll make some adjustments first and then we'll cache the dust elements so let's activate those again and I'll just hit pause let's go to frame 1 because remember our just elements aren't cached so we need to play these through from the beginning to get an accurate representation of what they're doing hit pause let's restart our playback alright so we've got loads more particles here in the view which is what I wanted but obviously they're way too big aren't they so what what can we do to rectify that well as you see if we can get enough control in our in our instance tags so let's get that we'll start with the new particles that we made which were emitted just one let's go to this cycle so the instance tag and the size multiplier let's reduce this way down to say 20 and with less variation so still too big let's go ten all right so I think that's looking better so let's mimic these in our other tags so we'll go with what did we do 10 and 10 10 and 10 okay so that's looking a little bit more subtle I think so let's just find we'll go to our other camera angle this one now this one is kind of comes into force after frame 90 I think yellow it's these bits coming around and we've got these particles we haven't sorted out the shallow depth of field in this one so I think we actually need to do a little bit of work on this camera angle the cars now that I'm looking at it we haven't really got a particularly nice angle this is the movement that we want but this camera is not quite right yet so let's pause that let's go back to my regular layout and let's just adjust this camera angle so what I'll do is I'm just going to take off that protection tag and let's switch off the dust elements right so this we want this whooshing around but we're kind of not quite in the right place for it so we need it really start this part of the frame wash round like this so what can we do to get a better angle let's just see this going to work better when you'll be much closer oh that's quite nice all right bit higher up this bit wash yeah I like that I think we could arguably get even closer yeah that is better so let's just put I'm just gonna copy that protection tag onto that right so let's have a look at that so back to our cycles view yes now that's isn't that looking beautiful fantastic really nice so getting it coming through and whooshing past good so again we haven't let's gone to the cycles tag and we haven't got any depth of field sorted yet so we'll click the camera we'll go to the focus distance picker and let's I mean we want to we want the cloth to be in focus this is near the camera really so it may be this bit and then go back to the tag increase this okay and as it's all right so let's increase that some more okay move forward so I think our focus distance isn't quite close enough so that's just adjust that I want it to be nice and in focus as it's coming past the camera really so let's reduce that slightly all right okay good so let's go back now I want to cache my dust particles so then we can really scrub through and see everything in great detail so what do we do let's take let's go back to our standard layout and we need to bring in we'll activate these two emitters again dust and dust one and we'll go to X particles other objects cache here's our cache object now depending on how many X particles elements you have in your scene it may be a bit of a nightmare on a work out which things you do want to cache and which things you don't want to cache so if that's the case if you've got loads of elements so there's only a couple of things you want to cache there's a really quick way of ensuring you only cache the necessary items if you go to the cache object into the inclusion tab and in the mold if we change this to include then we can just drag in the two things we want to cache and I know that everything else in the scene isn't going to be looked at by this cache so it's a really good quick way of getting that sorted excellent so let's just go back to the beginning go to the cache object I'm just going to cache this internally to internal memory and hit build now this should fire through quite quickly but remember I only need to get to frame 200 because that's all all I cashed in the Alembic and I'm not going further anyway so as soon as it gets to 200 we'll press cancel and that will consign those first 200 frames to memory so cancel let's put this back down to 200 good so now we have particles which are cached great woosh got a bit nice a nice angle there for free as well didn't even know we had that one so it might probably render out all of that because it's looking at it's looking pretty cool all of that from I would say from here from frame 80 to frame 200 we've got loads of nice movement so we'll render all of that in camera one that's great so let's go back to our cycles layout and have a look at what we've got so now we've got the dust particles in as well and this is starting to look really cool excellent so we're getting close now to getting ready just to render this out so what we need to do now is establish how many samples we're going to need approximately to get a nice clean render for final output so let's in our subdivision surface let's activate it so it's the same as the render and I think we'll probably need to do that it would probably only need one subdivision really two might be a little bit like overkill yeah so I'll just stop that and let's reduce this down to one and one okay there we go way quicker and that's fine because it's sorted out all of those issues that we were suffering with with those jagged edges right so looking good so let's just see if we can make this a bit bigger let's get an idea of a full freight so we can use that real-time preview to judge what kind of samples were going to need in our final render to get the result that were happy with so this is rendering away at the moment and it's set to 25 samples and we can see that we've got it we've got a I mean the render time of I'm gonna say there's gonna be around a minute long I would say which isn't the end of the world but what we want to look at is for areas where we've got some noise and whether or not the amount of samples we have got is getting rid of that noise so areas to look at are shadowy areas so you can see some noise in this shadow area of the cloth and also if you've got highly defocused areas like these particles here you can notice that there are kind of dust noise elements in there so that's what we're looking to clean up with this and it's getting better as this is chugging through it's doing more and more samples it's taken longer a longer obviously and what have we got now we're down to almost finished and it's over a minute so a minute and 10 seconds so we've got a little bit of noise here and a little bit of noise in our kind of BOC aid dust particles but this may be sorted out with instead of increasing the sample so we could try some denoising so that's one come review so let's let's do that let's go to we'll go to our render settings and we will select cycles 4d and hit the cycles for the menu and then what we're going to do is change a few things so my device I'm gonna be rendering with GPU so I'm going to select CUDA leave everything else default in the integrator I'm gonna put my 25 samples which is what we tried in here which looked okay with a little noise remaining but not too much so I'm going to click my 25 samples then what I'm gonna do is we have a diffusion depth of two set here in our Ray depth we have a transparency depth of eight and we have transparency and I've seen so this is important and we have a transmission depth as well transmission depth this is gonna be relevant to us for this scene but transparency is so let's up our Max ray bounces to at least two so we're getting this diffuse depth of two okay so that's that and the last thing we're going to try to dien as sub denoising which will it will render through all of the samples like we did in our real-time preview but then once it's rendered it it's going to try and remove this noise with some very claret clever kind of blurring techniques so I'm going to keep it all default apart from the strength which I'm going to put way down don't want much of this to happen at all good so we're going to output this frame to the picture viewer so I'm going to uncheck save because I don't need to save this to disk and I'm going to go to my output tab and let's make this full 1080p current frame okay that's looking good so now if I hit render it's going to render this to the picture viewer so let's just increase the side of that a bit so you can see what's happening okay so what this is doing is rendering it and with with buckets that you you dictate how big the CPU GPU buckets are in the render settings its rendering all of the samples first and then after its rendered those samples its then applying the denoising effect so this is full view and this this cloth texture is is looking really nice and you can go more subtle with this obviously you don't need to have it as as kind of jagged as this but I think it's looking pretty decent I like an look of it so what we're looking for is again in the shadowed areas is that denoising managing to smooth this out at all and [Music] we'll be looking at these once it's finished I'm not sure if it's actually D noised them so here it's telling you it's D noised five of the of the tiles so arguably we might need a little bit more cuz I think the denoising is taking place in this tile here and we've still got some noise in these blurred out particles so maybe we could up that noise just a little bit you can see that this has it had significant impact on our render times we're already up to one minute and 40 seconds and let's just come out we're nowhere near finishing the the entire thing but it's looking fantastic so I'm saying we're gonna have a render time of around 2 minutes 30 for a 1080p frame of this which I don't know it might leave you weeping with your head in your hands but it's not too bad when we've got so much going on okay that's looking nice so yeah two minutes thirty to finish that let's just get the real size so look we've got noise here and you can see this this weird blobby spec leanness is the denoising actually so perhaps but this isn't the end of the world look we've got some really nice blurred out detail here and I think these settings are looking okay and in all honesty I don't mind a little bit of noise in these blurred out kind of bouquet effects because if you looked at stuff that was filmed on real film with with a shallow depth of field you'll see animated noise inside of those areas anyway so I don't think it's necessarily the end of the world so what we'll do let's go back to our render settings back to cycles so one thing I forgot to do actually which when rendering a still doesn't matter but if you're rendering a sequence using denoising you need to make sure that you pick a seed number here of anything greater than 0 if this seed is 0 it means the noise will animate frame-to-frame which is what you want really if you're not using denoising because it'll look realistic realistic noise on film animates it's it's it's it flickery but if using denoising you want that noise pattern to be consistent from frame to frame so by giving it a seed number it remains the same on a per frame basis which means the denoising you're not going to get weird kind of animated blurring artifacts so let's just stick that on to one and what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick up my samples to 28 so we've got some more samples and the final thing I want to do here is if you notice in my picture viewer these particles are moving now arguably we need a bit of motion blur on these but do you know what I'm going to try rendering without motion blur we don't want too much motion blur on these anyway because we want we want to see them being pulled along by the cloth when we get to those points so I'm going to risk it for a biscuit and and not render motion blur with these you may want to do a test render a few frames and render them with motion blur and without and see which one that you prefer but I'm just going to gamble and not render it with motion blur right so what we need to do is set up our frame ranges for our for our different cameras so let's do that so let's go to our I've got to render layout here actually which gives me a little bit more control so what have we got so let's go to camera one which is our first camera and this we want to render from a bottle let's just give us a bit of wiggle room so we've got some handles so let's render from frame 19 - it's gonna snap away and then we want enough time to that transition yeah so as its curving away maybe so 19 to 79 let's say 280 so in this one I'm going to go go to the frame range we want manual and we want from 19 to 80 and we want full 1080p okay that looks good so also what I want to do is before we save this I'm just going down to my cameras here I'm just gonna rename them so we've got a naming convention so we're not going to get confused so what we want to do is the first camera let's rename it just camera 0 1 and the second camera call it camera 0 2 and we want to look through our camera 1 okay good so then we're going to go to the save tab and this is where we're gonna save our file sequence to so we make sure that save is high checked here and we need a save path so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new folder and I'm gonna call this folder render scenes okay good and we want to save inside render scenes and I couldn't are gonna make a folder for each camera so new folder and this one we'll call it render cam 1 and go inside there and we'll call it the same we'll just call it cloth render cam 1 okay and save excellent so now we've done that we've saved the file path we've got the correct camera selected here yet so let's save this scene now as its own individual thing so let's go to file save as and we'll put it inside our render scenes and we'll call this one cloth and cam 1 so that scene saved now and that's ready to go for render time so let's create our new scene which we're going to do to render camera too so we'll get camera to active in the render settings it's a different output isn't it it's 90 frames through to 200 at 1080p and then in the save dialog we need to give it a different path so let's make a new folder and call this render cam to and go inside there and the file path wants to be cloth render com2 excellent and then we can file save as to save the scene and the scene we're going to call it the same boot camp - right so now we have two separate scene files one for camera one and one for camera two and we have the file path set correctly for each render that we're going to do so because we've got more than one cinema4d files to render now we can use the render queue to good effect so let's go to render and render queue it's gonna delete what's in there there were a couple of practice ones so now what we want to do is go to file and we want to open and let's open cloth render cam Wan open it and then come to as well so now we've opened those two different files in this render queue so now all we need to do is hit render here and it will render the first scene and when that's finished it will automatically start rendering the second scene so if you've got lots of scenes that you need to get rendered without having to reload them every time this is a very good very good way of doing it using the render queue so I'll start this rendering and then I'll get back to once they're both finished I'll tell you how long it took and we'll put them together to see how our final render looks so our first scene as they're finished rendering and I decided to stop the process there because I had this little niggling feeling that it wasn't a wise move to render these particle elements in here the dust elements without motion blur and I thought let's not render out the whole thing and then make that discovery once it's all finished and it's been hours and hours so add a quick look and unfortunately my concerns were right this is 3d never try and take shortcuts because it never works we've got this seed and it looks really nice the cloth looks fantastic I'm really pleased with it and I'm pleased with the texture we've got this nice flowing movement the the partial transparency I think works very nicely and then it one gets blown away by the strange attractors and that works really well so I'm very pleased with that it looks good but these particles are moving so quickly that that they do need a little motion blur because they they just they just don't quite make sense and they look a little bit too flickery so what I'm gonna do is we're gonna go back we'll set up some motion blur and the only other thing I'm gonna do is I'm also glad that I've discovered this is that I think we could probably do with rendering just a few more frames it's only supposed to be a very quick shot but we want it to be whipped away but I really like the way it's curving round and being whipped around here and I've just like a few more frames to play with in the edits so that would be good so let's put some motion blur on these particles and and we'll re render with a few more frames and then I think we're we're going to be in business so let's minimize that so here we are in cinema 4d and this is my cloth render cam one project so what we want to do is we want to put some motion blur onto these particles so what do we do to do that well let's just let's just disabled actually no disable the cloth for now so we're not going to be looking at the cloth so now we have a blank scene and if we just hit play we'll get these particles right so there they are in the real-time preview so what we want to do is activate motion blur so to do that we'll go to our render setting - the cycles 4d render settings and let's just come down here and we've got the motion blur tab and then not many options so let's enable motion blur but this is a key point and there it is immediately we've got it on our scene it's a little bit too much isn't it's too heavy and these trails look ridiculous frankly so we need to put a faster shutter speed on to reduce the effect of that but here's a setting that's important and we want to uncheck effect all objects and the reason we want to do that is that we only want the motion blur to be applied to the particles not to the cloth I want the cloth to remain crisp looking so we're going to disable that which means that motion blur will only be applied to objects which have the appropriate tag on them so let's just highlight both of our emitted dusts and we'll go to tags cycles 4d tags and object tags let's click that and they both get an object tag so now what we can do in that object tag it will got all of these different tabs there is a motion blur tab and if I activate it now we've got our motion blur back but this will not affect our cloth because that hasn't got the appropriate tag excellent so now how do we reduce the amount of motion blur well it's it's kind of it's real-world physics cycles 4d so we need to do what you do in the real world and to reduce motion blur you need a faster shutter speed on your camera so let's go to camera one and we'll hit it and you'll see that we have a shut a time of point zero three three so let's I think we could maybe go point let's go point zero zero eight let's see what that does yes that's reduced it's in significantly little just got a little bit of motion blur now on these faster ones I think that's enough I think needs to be a subtle effect this otherwise it's going to look a bit silly I could maybe go point I don't know I mean we could maybe go a wee bit more okay so that's going to do is for our motion blur excellent so that's fine let's go to our output tab in our render settings and we said we wanted a few more frames so let's just do ten more frames we'll make it 19 to 90 I'll just pause that let's reactivate our cloth okay so we've done our motion blur with reactivated cloth we've set to render a few more frames so that sort so let's go to file and save all right so that's okay now let's have a still got camera too so let's go to cloth render camera - and we need to do the same thing for this so let's just disable the cloth for now it's Rhys in there so here's our particles and we need to select both emitters and move over this you can see the tags so tags cycles 40 tags object tag and in the motion blur let's activate we need to go to the render settings cycles 4d and find the motion blur button great and we will uncheck effect all objects so it's only going to affect objects that's got the tag on with it selected and now we want to go to our camera and let's just reduce the amount so 0 0 9 that's what we did in the other one okay so there we've got some motion blur and even reduce it fraction anymore alright so that's much better so the frames were okay in this one so let's just reactivate our cloth and switch that real-time preview off because we don't need to see it whirring around so that is us we're on the right camera yep so let's save this file okay excellent now there's one more thing I need to do before we hit render I'm gonna go back to my cloth render cam one project file and I just need to give it in the save box I need to give it a slightly different file path because if I give it the same it'll just overwrite this first render that we did so let's inside it just lets just put render OH - okay and I'm gonna copy this name copy go into the new folder and I'm just gonna put version two that's what it's gonna be called so now we're going to get all new files great okay so now I can go save excellent so let's bring open our render key once more then so render queue here you can see my one that completed that other got rid of because it wasn't right get rid of that okay so let's bring in our new files so open and we want cam ROM open it and we want cam to open it and now we're ready for business so let's start it rendering and that's it so I'll keep this going and then once it's finished I'll come back to tell how long it took we'll put these two parts of this sequence together and we'll have a look at it so here's our final render this took about five hours to render both of those cinema 4d projects which is it's pretty heavy I suppose for the amount of frames that were rendered but there was a lot of stuff going on in this scene and I'm pretty pleased with the results so I've just put together a very brief sequence from those two those two scenes that we had and it kind of works okay I mean it's obviously just a quick and dirty job but we get the effect so I think this this section really works well here this first floaty section I think this material is looking really nice here I'm pleased with this so what we've got is this obvious weave in the material which looks nice and then we've got this level of transparency so we can see the cloth behind it and the fault I think this is working really nicely and then we've got this section where it suddenly gets ripped away from us and gets washed around the corner there's a really nice bit of animation as this bit turns the corner then we cut to our the scene and again this looks really detailed and great coming up towards the camera some really nice folds and details in this cloth this shot was a bit of a cheat I've actually flipped it over so this is kind of a mirrored angle just to give us a little bit more bang for our book and then there's the final walls there's a beautiful kind of detailed in this in this wrinkled cloth here so all in all that's looking pretty decent so we'll end this one there that is rendering our cloth simulation using the strange attractors modifier with cycles 4d there are loads more free official training videos at the in Cydia so please go along hit subscribe and you can view those videos and get the new content as soon as it's released so until next time I'll see you later [Music] you [Music]

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 17,972

Keywords: MAXON, Cinema, 4D, C4D, X-Particles, xparticles, particles, simulation, cgi, vfx, mograph, motion graphics, motion design, design, cycles, cycles 4d, computer fx, fx, INSYDIUM, digital art, motion, motiongraphics, 3d, 4d, effex, visual fx, software, tutorials, tutorial, tip, hint, help, quicktip, trick, hints

Id: fHDNLCeYfGQ

Length: 91min 14sec (5474 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018