xpReel Tutorials, Strange Cloth - X-Particles - Part 1

[Music] hi it's Bob walmsley here again from in Cydia with another official technical training video so in this tutorial we're going to be looking at recreating this cloth animation which was featured in the X particles reel so we're going to bring in multiple planes here and use only one cloth performer to make them all dynamic cloth simulations will then bring in some modifiers to get some of that fluid movement including a strange attractors which is going to pull them away from the camera we're then gonna set up some dust particles and these two are going to interact with a cloth to make it look like they're being pulled around by the turbulent air pressure the cloth movement is causing so all of that to come so let's get started let's build the scene so what we need to do is start off with a plane which is going to be our piece of cloth obviously let's just press ND Tov look at the lines so the plane wants to be it doesn't want to be a square shape so let's give it more width let's just say a thousand centimetres width so it's a nice long huge piece of piece of cloth great so what we need to do is try and get these subdivisions as even as possible so let's start off with we're probably going to make these subdivisions even tighter later on but we'll start with the lower amount of subdivisions which means it's gonna run and simulate much more quickly so let's just up this to say 50 width segments and slightly fewer everything let's say 80 and just just get a guesstimate some of my masters are very good so that's looking pretty good even subdivisions on this plane right so let's just look at how we create cloth so these we you can create cloth manually and bring in all the various different elements you require in a manual way or there's an automatic function so what we can do at this stage is create our cloth now when we only have one plane in the scene and then we can create multiple planes and use the existing cloth system so it'll be an easier and quicker way of doing it so what we'll do is have the object selected go to X particles dynamic objects cloth effects and create cloth hit that and automatically we get five elements added actually we have these four constraints object a gravity and emitter and a cloth modifier and then as a child of the plane we have got a cloth deformer so you'll only get a cloth to former in your scene if the object to which you're applying the cloth is a parametric object and therefore it needed a former to identify where the vertices are if it's a polygon object you won't get this cloth the former you'll just get the cloth tag on the actual object itself but this is useful and that we have this cloth deformer because we're going to be able to utilize one of the advantages of that a little bit later so the cloth surf is very briefly the cloth how it works I'm just going to if I press play now the cloth is going to float away and fall off and that's because we have a gravity in the scene so I'm just going to disable the gravity so what this cloth system is doing is it is created an emitter and the emitter in the object tab is set to object emission and it has the plane as that object this plane here it's set to emit from the points and it's set to only emit from one particle per source elements or one particle per vertex and the emission is set to shot and the radius is set to three but actually these these elements are irrelevant at this point so in the advance in the display settings I'm just going to change it from dots to circles and then hit play again and now you can see what's happened so it's created a particle for every vertex of this plane and it's set a particle radius so that they will slightly intersect with each of them and this is going to help with the collisions and it's the particle position that is then deforming the plane and making it look like cloth the constraints object everything is off on this constraints object apart from the collisions and this will stop the cloth from intersecting itself as it kind of wafts and bends around the place that's what the constraints are doing and the cloth modifier doesn't have any settings but this is the engine this is what you need in your scene for it to work good so then all of this stuff is controlled it controls the cloth modifier which deforms the plane so in this little cloth tag you can see that it has the emitter in the emitter slot this is the emitter that's being created and with that in there that means that the way in which these particles move are going to deform the plane and make it look like cloth so what I'm going to do let's just bring in a turbulence modifier hit play and now we can see that the turbulence is moving the particles which in turn is deforming the plane and that's it that's how cloth works now I'm going to actually delete this gravity so we don't need it in the scene so that's the thing to remember with cloth and what makes the X particles cloth really powerful is that it's particle driven it's the particles that are doing the work which means that we can use all of the control we have over particles normally with with modifiers and questions and actions and all that kind of stuff we can use that and that will have an effect on our cloth which is which is really cool so in our scene we need our turbulence to be stronger and much bigger so let's just bring this up to that and let's whack the strength up so it's really starting to waft to this cloth around the place so that's good but we don't quite want it to react as quickly so I'm just going to go into my cloth settings and I'm gonna just dampen the movement not by much let's just try with 5% first and you see how that's dampened that movement slightly and that is giving it more of a slower more languid waft which is gonna work well for us a little bit later excellent that's all we're gonna do with a cloth so really simple setup but we need more than just one piece of cloth we need a whole tier of them so what we're going to do is we're going to use mograph to do this so what we're going to do with our plane selected I'm gonna hold we need to hold the Alt key go to mograph and hit cloner and it makes the plane a child of the cloner all right now it's cloned this plane but if I hit play it's not working the cloth modifier isn't working so what we need to do is just use the cloner to create all of the planes that we want and to position them in a nice random way and then we're going to make that editable which will actually make individual planes so let's do a instead of a linear cloner we're going to go to grid array and gonna have only two on the X and the Z and three on the Y this is how many copies we've got of the clones so then if I increase the Y distance a bit and then increase the X distance a lot and the Z slightly less because they're obviously thinner than they are long so now we have made all of these clones we've got 12 which will probably do is for this so now we want to give them a little bit of random position so we can do that with mograph really easily with the effectors so with the cloner highlighted I'm gonna go to mo graph and we need to go to the effectors what we're going to use is a random effector so pick that one okay so the random effector by default is affecting the position of these planes randomly on the x y&z accessing scene a slightly being offset so that's actually quite good what we want so let's increase how much they randomized on the Y and the other two we can kind of keep let's just add up we can put a little bit here just to randomize it but it doesn't have to be too much okay maybe a bit more on the Y and now we can randomize the rotation so we'll select rotation and we can just add a little bit of random rotation to these so they're not looking uniform and what we want to do is avoid these intersecting if possible so if you can see here that we've got one intersection and a big intersection here so this little one where was it there this little bit of intersect air and probably just tweak one of these to get rid of that okay and we've got one here so cloners if you do this we're always going to intersect with each other but that's fine because we can make these small adjustments now let me just show you a trick with this one so we've got a really big intersection here which isn't looking very good and it's gonna be very difficult actually to make push and pull this to try and make sure that that isn't intersecting so let's sort that out and the way we're gonna do it is we go to the cloner and we go to the transform tab of the cloner we want to make visible the weights of these clones so let's go to show weight and can you see each one now has a red dot excellence and they all have uniform weight these clones they all have a weight of zero and this means that when we bring affect is in the effect will have an equal impact on every single one of these clones because they all have the same weight but what I'm able to do if I go to my mograph menu and I pick my mograph wait to paintbrush let's hit that put the strength up 200 and what I'm going to do with one of these intersecting planes I'm going to paint that yellow so now it has a 100% weight and can you see on the cloner we've got this a weight map which is saying it's basically a bit like a selection really so now if I bring in a plane effector into my scene what's happening is if I got a plane effector you can see my weight map has automatically been put into the selection so that means if I go to my parameter and to my rotation this is only going to affect the one that we painted with weight and that means I can adjust this this clone on its own I'll do whatever I want with it without affecting the others which is pretty cool maybe that's have it rotated the other way so it's slightly different to that one and then kind of getting okay good so no intersections fantastic I mean it doesn't really matter how careful you are here because we're not going to be rendering from this point we need to allow the simulation to develop and the cloth to get the wrinkles before we're going to get to anywhere near the render point anyway so this initial stage isn't actually that important but it's a good idea to try and prevent those intersections if possible great so we've already discovered that if we put this in a cloner and then have this cloth the former act if it doesn't actually clone doesn't respect it and and nothing happens it doesn't work so what we're going to do instead is we're going to make that editable and that's going to create separately all of these different all of these different planes as individual objects which is going to work really well for us so let's do that so what we're going to do is let's go to the cloner drag out this cloth to Faulkner and just stick it down here for now then what we're going to do is we will take the cloner object and I'm going to right click and I will state to object which makes a copy and it kind of makes it editable so now we have a null called cloner and underneath we now have all of these planes so what I'll do is let's just switch that cloner off make its contents invisible move that to the top of the scene and we can ignore that for now we can go back to it should we need to make any adjustments but now we have these objects so these are now editable these are editable polygon objects and they all exist they're not just clones so here's what we're going to do we're going to place all of these into a connect object so if you hold alt when you've got that selected and let's go to this menu here and click on connect ah no that doesn't work now there is a shortcut where you are able to do that and it doesn't produce a new connect object for every plane but I can't remember what it is so let's just doesn't do that I'll bring in a connect object next make the connect object a child of this null and then will take all of our planes and stick them into the connect object so that's what we want okay good so then what we are going to do is we're going to make this cluster former a child of the clone a null and so now we have our planes back but because this is a de former this works like any other de former in cinema 4d and it will now affect all of the objects that it is as a sibling or child of so now if we hit play nothing happens why not well we need to make one change if you remember at the beginning when we first created our cloth on our single plane we looked in the emitter that was automatically created and in the object tab the plane was put in there and we got the particles on the plane and this is still in the emitter so at the moment all of our new planes that were created aren't emitting any particles and so they can't interact with the cloth and so they won't work so we just need to make that change we need to change it from this plane to our new connect object which is housing all of our new planes so let's just drag that connect object in I'm just gonna deactivate the constraints because there's lots of collisions going on now and that'll slow it down at this point and now if we hit play there we go we're getting it so we've got one cloth tag one cloth performer but it's affecting all of these 11 planes excellent and they're all kind of acting independently of each other and they're being affected all by the turbulence in our scene so that's looking good excellent so we're there with our basic setup for the stuff that we want to manipulate so in the scene that we're recreating obviously we have the first part of the scene where these cloths and surfaces are just nicely floating around the place but then suddenly there is as if they're pulled into a circular motion and they kind of cause turbulent pull into the atmosphere which pulls all of the floating particles along with them and it all looks very cool it kind of almost looks like they're being jerked into this into this motion so what are we gonna do to create that look well we're going to use a modifier which I'm a little bit underutilized really is a very interesting modifier and it's called these strange attractors modifier so let's just do a little bit of housekeeping here we can collapse this and let's rename it this null from cloner will do we'll call this class objects so now we know that that's our cloth objects and this and these two effectors we just made that to create our objects and we don't actually need to be using these anymore so I'm just gonna hit alt G which will group them in a null and then let's rename this null [Music] cloth I call it cloth generator and I know not to use them so I'll just make them invisible all right good so that's looking a little bit more tidy now excellent so we're going to be using the strange attractors so let's go to the X particles menu will go to modifiers it's a motion modifier and here we have strange attractors and if you don't know what strange attractors are if you just google them you'll find loads of information and lots of videos explaining exactly what they are but they're they're kind of mathematical equations fractals I think and they are supposed to be chaotic but as they move the particles in this chaotic manner they kind of form these interesting patterns and these interesting patterns via the velocities and there's lots of different modes and so you can see here we've got these different versions let's just set up an emitter so we can see these actually working I might just let's just deactivate the cloth deform er let's deactivate the cloth modifier and the turbulence okay and I'm just going to make invisible of those so they're still in the sea we'll just we'll just switch them all off so now I'm going to bring in a fresh emitter and this is just to demonstrate what the strange attractors modify it does so by default if I press play this happens to the particles and that's it so the particles even if I switch the speed off completely makes no difference the strange attractors modifier grabs them and sends them off into this pattern and this is the Lorenz strange attractor Lorenza is a person that discovered the equation or whatever they had mathematical entity is that discovered this but there's lots more different models Rossler as a different version and depending on the plane it'll change the way in which these attractors look let's go to more spiegel it's an interesting kind of circular one so these strange attractors provide all these different and chaotic patterns and as I say read opponent and Google it's very interesting stuff so let's pick we're gonna use a Chen Mei Chen's quite a good one because we get this this whipping circular motion and then and then we also get this kind of concentric circle cone that that appears so that's quite interesting I think that's good this is going to give us the initial whip of the cloth going into this circular motion so within the strange attractors we've got a few different controls the scale is like an overall size control so I'm dolly right out it's made this huge huge panelist let's put some more frames on our timeline let's go to 300 so the the scale is an overall scale for the entire scene so this is an incredible formation at Delta is like a speed control so it'll develop more quickly if we have more Delta let's just put that down I'll put the scale back down to what it was five and then the strength of obviously it self-explanatory the strength so if you reduce the strength we can now start seeing that this is going to start making our cloth move in this way which is pretty cool so we have max speeds and iterations are the settings that we don't necessarily need to think about now the various different attractors have these things called constants some of them have only three constants like Chen only has an AP nasi others have six constants and if we make adjustments to these you'll just see that it slightly changes the way in which those particles are moving it's kind of like individual scale controls for different parts of the fractal and the way in which the noise works so we put those right and we don't need to be scientifically accurate about this we're not we're not saying we need these precise settings to get this precise look all we are doing is using this modifier to make our our cloth material suddenly be whipped away in an odd kind of hopefully organic but circular motion so we don't need to be that precise but this one's looking quite interesting so let's see how this is going to work in our scene so I'm just gonna delete that new emitter that I made and I'm gonna switch the strange attractors off for now let's make our cloth visible again let's us the wrong one that's our cloth generators let's stick that at the top so we'll put the turbulence on in the cloth objects we'll make this visible and we'll switch on our cloth the former I will switch on my cloth modifier now we have got our turbulence happening and if I then switch on the strange attractors let's see what happens and then suddenly they're whipped into a circular motion by doing very little we're getting kind of the look that we want now we haven't got our constraints active at the moment so they're intersecting but this is kind of the thing that we're after so we're gonna start with the strange attractors switched off let's switch it off there so we're just having them float in the turbulence oh it might be right really close into these when it comes to render time and then we're gonna have suddenly a switch on form and they get wished away and then so that's one and then we might have another camera angle where they they're kind of let's say they're coming towards the camera in a circular motion like that so that's going to work well and as I say we don't need to be particularly sophisticated with this strange attractors we're not using it mathematically we're just using it to make these these these cloth objects go from that's the technical expression right so let's just animate that and we're gonna animate this strange attractors on and off in the most basic way let's go to the basic tab appropriately named and we will go to frame I don't know let's say we'll go to frame 60 maybe let's say let's say frame 50 so frame 50 and I'm going to keyframe it in an unannounced eighth let's go forward one frame and keyframe it on so now we have got this has given us some developmental time before with we we get our wrinkles and then from the strange attractor happens okay so let's try that with the constraints active which is going to be a lot slower let's just take those lines off so this will animate more slowly because it's having to work out possible collisions between all of the particles on the same pieces of cloth and the independent pieces of cloth but there we go and then they start flying around the place and that's looking great and let's just have a look at that turbulence our turbulence settings I think we could increase the strength of this turbulence up a little bit let's try that again so we're getting more kind of wrinkles now that's good and then here comes this strange attractor and then they get whipped away and start forming this pattern okay very nice and let's just have a look at our pieces of cloth and see how they're doing now these aren't very high-resolution this cloth so the the fewer subdivisions you have the more likely you are to get intersections but if you look here these collisions are doing it the constraint object is doing a pretty decent job we've got one collision here and that's about it really so not doing too bad right so let's do our dust particles now then just before we go on to that if you can see we've got these kind of not very nice kind of wrong errors going on here as our plane has being deformed we'll sort this out a little bit later but this is due to the fact that our way if I hit nd for the lines it's a very low resolution object this and so it just doesn't have enough polygons to make a nice deformation and we're getting all of these horrible Phong shading weirdness but we'll sort that out a little bit later a very quick and easy way of doing that which isn't going to slow down our render times so before we do that let's sort out our dust particles so in the scene from the real what we had we had these bits of cloth floating around but we also had some really nice floaty dust particles floating around as well and what was great was when the strange attractor kicked into force form grabs hold of the cloth and whips it round into this into the circular motion and the particles were jerked in that direction as well and it really it was an illusion but it made it feel like the cloth was creating a change in kind of the air pressure and it was forcing the particles to were to flow around with them it's like sucking them in almost it looked really good and it's mercifully it's very very easy to achieve so what we're going to do we'll bring in a new X particles emitter and this emitter we're going to set it in the object tab to be a box and the box were going to make very big let's just guesstimate 3000 by 3000 by 3000 so that kind of looks all right you wanted to encapsulate all of your cloth I want to go wee bit bigger because the more I've got in the fall in the background the better it's gonna look once we get some shallow depth of field in there so let's make that slightly bigger so there's our box that's going to be emitting our particles great so let's go to the emitter emission tab and we want to take away all the speed we don't want any speed to these particles and we only want them to be born on the first frame so let's change the emission mode from rate to shot and it's just gonna shoot a thousand particles in one frame I'm not entirely sure what quantity I want just yet I'm just going to put 10,000 for now make sure we've got full lifespan ticked so it'll last the whole the whole 300 frames and the radius again I'm not entirely sure the radius yeah I'm gonna guess at 5 and I'm gonna give it some radius variation of 5 as well so we've got loads of different sized particles so before we hit play to see those I'm just gonna go on my display tab and I'm gonna change the editor display the particles from dots to circles and this is going to give us a good idea of the variation of sizes so the last thing we want to do actually before I press play is this in our scene already we have got two modifiers the strange tractors and the turbulence and we've also got these two cloth objects we have got the cloth modifier which is a bit like a dynamic object really and we've got the constraint object which is a dynamic object too and we don't want these dynamic objects interfering with our floating dust particles it won't it won't won't work it's not right so what we need to do is is disclude the constraints and the cloth modify modifier from these particles so let's go to the particles menu and we'll go to the modifiers tab and in the exclude box we're going to drag in the cloth modifier and the constraints right so now we're ready to hit play so there we are we've got our particles and they're being moved around by the turbulence at the moment and then when this strange attractors hits they're going to be pulled around by that - okay good so I think we've got way too many at the moment so let's go into our emitter settings into your mission I want to put this down to a thousand which we may adjust later but I think that's going to be a better number yeah that's looking much more just like floating bits of particles so let's have a look a bit closer in so hopefully when our strange attractors hits it then pulls the particles in the same direction and that's going to give this a lusion that the movement of the cloth is is this messing around with the the air pressure and causing its own turbulence which is dragging these particles around which is gonna look really cool so what we're gonna do is we're gonna give these particles a color so in the real scene mario gave them some really nice colors i'm pretty sure these are Mario's favorite colors we're gonna go gradient parameter and we're going to map the colors dependent on the speed of the particle and we're going to make it an automatic adjustment which means the slowest particle will be made blue and the fastest particle will be made white and dynamically change as the speed of all of those particles changes but let's just change this up slightly so I think we will on this not will go with an orange color and on this not will go with a blue and maybe a bit too vivid at the moment but let's just see so now we've got this variation of particles and then as soon as it starts going quickly they're all going to change blue very quickly from there and they will become very very similar in speed okay and if you notice there was a little bit of flashing there let's just bring in I'm going to bring in a cinema 4d sky object and I'm gonna color it as black just so we can see these particles a bit better all right so let's just do that again and let's just pay attention to these colors so they're changing as the particles are changing their speed as dictated by the both the turbulence and the strange attractors modifier and then as that as this happens they suddenly get whipped and they all become the same color but they're kind of flashing a little bit and that's because they're all changing speed at virtually the same time and traveling at a very similar speed and in the emitter we've got it set to auto which means it's always trying to map these colors got a frame by frame to every particle so instead of having auto let's just give us a bit of wiggle room and we'll put a max speed of I'm not sure what it'll be let's just try 500 and let's just see if we just got a slightly smoother result with this so that most of them have turned blue which makes me feel like most particles are moving at this max speed so let's boost that to 600 and let's increase the minimum to 300 all right so we've got a bit more variation now let's see what happens when the strange attractors kicks in and then they all go blue but we haven't got the flashing okay so that's looking nice and that's fine and they're all kind of following this same movement of that our strange attractors so that's going to look really cool when it comes to our final rent a camera angle well we have our cloth that's kind of doing its thing with our floating particles moving around doing their own thing and then as this suddenly jerks the particles move along with that cloth and that's gonna look really good okay so that's very quick and easy particle setup so the final thing I want to do let's just get rid of that sky the final thing I want to do now is I'll just disable the visibility of those particles as well so remember I said that if we just dolly in once these start to become deformed quite considerably we're starting to get these jagged errors and this is because we haven't got enough geometry to smoothly deform it this vigorously and with all deformations the more geometry you have the more polygons you have the smoother and nicer the deformation looks the problem with that is that it obviously has a cost in simulation time and we are have that we've got this running quite smoothly let's just say that we don't want to have to mess around simulating with a really dense mesh so what we'll do is we'll just do the old trick of using a subdivision surface and so the way we'll utilize it is we will put this entire cloth objects null inside a subdivision surface so to do that I'll just bring one into the scene bring it down here and then drag the cloth actually let's just put this on one and then one so it doesn't have to make any berserk calculations as soon as we drag this in so let's drag my cloth object in and then immediately you can see look those jagged lines have been hugely reduced with the inclusion of subdivision surface and if I go nd to display the lines it's because we have more subdivisions even though the cloth object isn't haven't calculate all of the cloth dynamics on these these many subdivisions it's just kind of smoothing it out after the event which is really nice so let's just hide those lines again and let's give two subdivisions and now we've got an even smoother mesh and it's even denser and now they've all but disappeared at all of those errors and we're getting this really nice smooth mesh which isn't moving much more slowly than it was when we had hardly any subdivisions so it's a great trick and what we can do is in the editor we can have 0 subdivisions so we don't see it so we're still going to get this working in real time whilst we're editing and and sorting out our scene but then when it comes to render time we're going to get the nice smoothing effects so it's going to look decent right so I think we're about there really we have produced a cloth we've animated it we've created all of these clones we've got it working with one cloth performer and then we're making it interact with the turbulence object and this strange attractors and we've created those nice floating dust particles as well which are going to move with a similar movement with our cloth so this is where we're going to leave part 1 of this tutorial in part 2 we'll set up some camera angles will look at some materials built in cycles for D and we'll then get some really nice super crisp and beautiful looking renders so that's it for part one so part two of this tutorial will be available from the in city of YouTube channel so please go ahead and subscribe then you'll get it as soon as it's released in part two we're going to take this cloth scene and we're going to open it up in cycles 4d to create some stunning renders so until next time I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: INSYDIUM LTD

Views: 60,367

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: Ypi_fWn79EY

Length: 38min 24sec (2304 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018