IntroductionWelcome| 00:03 | Hi! I am Rob Garrott and I'd like to
welcome you to CINEMA 4D R13 New Features.
| | 00:08 | We're going to explore some key changes to
my favorite 3D animation package CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:13 | We'll start off by looking at the
interface and how it's changed from version 12.
| | 00:17 | Next, we will take a look at
the render engine enhancements.
| | 00:19 | The Physical Render Engine is a huge
addition to R13 and it allows for very
| | 00:23 | realistic camera effects like
motion blur and depth of field.
| | 00:28 | The character tools have been
dramatically enhanced with a new Character and
| | 00:31 | CMotion objects that help you create
character rigs and get them moving in no time at all.
| | 00:35 | We'll also explore cool new shaders
like Subsurface Scattering and important
| | 00:40 | workflow enhancements
like stereoscopic rendering.
| | 00:43 | There are a lot of exciting elements in
this updated CINEMA 4D and I can't wait
| | 00:47 | to show them to you.
| | 00:48 | So let's get started with
CINEMA 4D R13 New Features.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a premium member of the lynda.com
Online Training Library, then you
| | 00:04 | have access to the exercise
files included with this course.
| | 00:07 | I have placed them on the desktop, but you
can work with them from anywhere on your system.
| | 00:11 | The files are organized by chapter
into subfolders, in most cases there is a
| | 00:15 | specific start file associated with each movie.
| | 00:17 | However, Chapter 1 is empty because
I didn't use any pre-created assets.
| | 00:21 | If you don't have access to the assets,
you can follow along from scratch or
| | 00:24 | use your own assets.
| | 00:25 | Now let's get started.
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1. Interface and Navigation Changes Introducing the R13 interface| 00:00 | The CINEMA 4D R13 interface has gone
through what I would like to call a subtle
| | 00:04 | redesign from version 12.
| | 00:06 | But that subtle redesign really is
very important, because it's given us some
| | 00:11 | intuitive new groupings of icons
and menus that make for a much more
| | 00:15 | interesting workflow.
| | 00:17 | So you'll notice that if you are
familiar with CINEMA 4D already, you'll see
| | 00:19 | that most of the stuff is in the same
locations, but it looks subtly different.
| | 00:23 | The Menu bar is still in the same
location across the top, the Tools are right
| | 00:27 | below it, we have got Modes on the left
-hand side over here, we have got the
| | 00:30 | Object Manager here.
| | 00:31 | But you'll notice immediately that
the Object Manager -- the tabs are gone,
| | 00:35 | they've moved over here to the right-hand
side, and I can switch between the Object
| | 00:39 | Manager, the Content Browser and the
Structure Manager by clicking on these tabs
| | 00:42 | on the right-hand side.
| | 00:43 | Same thing for the Attribute,
as well as the Layers Manager.
| | 00:47 | The Modes icons have gone through a
redesign and you will notice that the Object
| | 00:52 | mode is now gone from the interface,
but it's still there, it's underneath the
| | 00:55 | Model mode, which takes precedence.
| | 00:58 | The Texture tool now has one icon only,
and the Modes icons for modeling have
| | 01:04 | gone through a redesign as well, that make
them much more easy to understand I think.
| | 01:07 | In addition, right below that we've
got the Axis mode, as well as a Snapping
| | 01:11 | Enable button that's defaulted into
the interface now, which is really nice.
| | 01:14 | There's also some changes to the
Menu options here in the viewport.
| | 01:18 | Most importantly is the Options menu,
which allows you to change between
| | 01:21 | different types of viewport options,
and these redesigned menus make it much
| | 01:26 | easier to find key tools in the viewport.
| | 01:29 | Probably the most significant
change in CINEMA 4D 13 is the navigation.
| | 01:34 | I'm going to add a cube to the scene.
| | 01:37 | First of all you will notice that the
object handles look different, I will talk
| | 01:40 | about those in just a second.
| | 01:41 | But using the 1, 2 and 3 keys is now a
very different experience than it was before.
| | 01:46 | If I hold down the 3 key, which is the
orbit, I can now click on a part of my
| | 01:50 | object and orbit around that part of the object.
| | 01:53 | And if I want to orbit over around
that corner over there, if I want to
| | 01:55 | orbit around that corner right there,
as I hold down the 3 key click and
| | 01:58 | drag, I am now orbiting around
those specific points, this is called
| | 02:02 | cursor-based navigation.
| | 02:04 | If I use the 2 key and drag left and
right, you see it drags in to wherever I
| | 02:10 | happen to click the cursor, if I happen
to click on the cube, it drags into that
| | 02:13 | portion of the cube.
| | 02:14 | If I happen to click away from the
cube, it drags into that area as well.
| | 02:19 | And that's very important,
it's much more intuitive.
| | 02:21 | The other thing you'll notice is
that, that dragging is much, much faster
| | 02:25 | than it was in R12.
| | 02:27 | The axes for R13 are redesigned as well.
| | 02:31 | You will notice that the axis bands are
gone and that we've got these permanent
| | 02:34 | axis handles here that provide the
same function, when I highlight this band
| | 02:38 | here, it will now allow me to move this
cube on these two axes at the same time
| | 02:44 | and those are always visible,
which is really helpful.
| | 02:46 | The other thing you will notice is that
wherever I move the cube to, as it gets
| | 02:52 | close to edge of the frame, instead
of going off the edge of the frame, the
| | 02:56 | handle for the object will squish down.
| | 02:58 | And it will try to display them as
long as it can before going off the screen
| | 03:03 | and you will see them resized just like
that, that's a really helpful feature.
| | 03:07 | The other thing you will notice is
that if I go off screen, as soon as that
| | 03:11 | object goes off screen, I get this
little blue arrow saying, the object that you
| | 03:15 | have selected is off the screen in
this direction, and if I click that blue
| | 03:19 | arrow, it pops the object right
back to the center of the display.
| | 03:23 | Another really helpful feature is
something called a Gimbal rotation, and if I
| | 03:28 | select the Rotate tool under the
Object Axis properties is a Gimballing
| | 03:32 | rotation, if I turn that on, when I
rotate the object I now get this gimbaled
| | 03:36 | rotation option and you see that it
rotates down toward the handle and shows me
| | 03:41 | the point where those two axes crossed.
| | 03:44 | In a character set up where you are
working with the constraints, this is a
| | 03:48 | very important feature.
| | 03:49 | I am going to undo Command+Z, Command
+Z to get back, and I will turn that
| | 03:53 | Gimballing Rotation off for now.
| | 03:55 | Another really helpful feature
is something called sticky keys.
| | 03:58 | Sticky keys allow you to
quickly shift between tools.
| | 04:03 | For example, if want to get to the Move
tool, I'm currently in the Rotation tool,
| | 04:06 | if I hit E on the keyboard and hold it
down, it switches to the Move tool, when
| | 04:10 | I let go of the E, it switches back
to Rotation and that's a really great way
| | 04:14 | to move quickly between your objects.
| | 04:16 | If I switch to this Scale tool, T on
the keyboard, it goes right back to the
| | 04:22 | Rotation tool, when I let go off that.
| | 04:23 | Another great keyboard shortcut for
sticky keys is the L key, L key allows you
| | 04:28 | to switch into Axis mode and then jump
right back out again, very, very handy.
| | 04:34 | Another really important change
is to the Spline Graph interface.
| | 04:38 | Now I am going to add a Collision
deformer to the scene, and the Collision
| | 04:42 | deformer under the Object
properties has a graph for Falloff.
| | 04:47 | Now when I switch that Falloff to
something like Distance, I now get a Spline
| | 04:53 | and I can move that Spline around, hold
down the Ctrl key and add points to that
| | 04:57 | spline to modify it.
| | 04:59 | Now this interface is much more
easy to navigate than it was before.
| | 05:04 | The other beautiful thing about it is
that I can right-click in this window and
| | 05:08 | tell it to show in a separate window.
| | 05:10 | So if I need to make very subtle
changes to my curves, I can do those here in
| | 05:15 | this much larger window, and I can even
switch between interpolation methods, so
| | 05:19 | I can switch to a Linear mode
there, I can switch back to Cubic.
| | 05:22 | This larger window makes it much
easier to make Spline changes on-the-fly.
| | 05:27 | So as you see the interface in
CINEMA 4D R13 is subtly redesigned, but
| | 05:32 | majorly improved.
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| Comparing the main menu bar| 00:00 | In this movie I want to compare the
CINEMA 4D R13 interface to the R12 interface
| | 00:05 | to give you a feel for what kinds of
things have changed and how they've
| | 00:08 | reorganized information.
| | 00:10 | Now this will help with people that are
transitioning from CINEMA 4D R12 to 13.
| | 00:16 | In addition, it'll help
with watching older tutorials.
| | 00:19 | If you're watching an R12 tutorial,
most of that will still apply in R13, it's
| | 00:24 | just that things have subtly changed
position, and so this will help get you
| | 00:27 | oriented if you're watching an older course.
| | 00:29 | I've got R13 and R12 open at the same time.
| | 00:33 | So you can see I'm currently in 13.
| | 00:36 | Now the menu bar is still in the exact
same place as it was at 12, but it's been
| | 00:41 | subtly redesigned and some
things have been combined.
| | 00:43 | So let's switch over to 12
so we can see what's happened.
| | 00:46 | When I switch to 12, the icons look
a little bit different, the menu bar is
| | 00:50 | still there, but I've got a few less
options, that's because they have combine
| | 00:53 | some things and then moved
some other things around.
| | 00:56 | Most importantly, the Structure
and Function menus, which are used for
| | 01:00 | manipulating the components of objects, have
now moved to something called the Mesh menu.
| | 01:05 | If we switch over to R13, you can see
now we have got a Mesh menu and things
| | 01:09 | have been combined under this Mesh menu
and then placed into submenus as well.
| | 01:14 | So all the same options are there,
it's just that they've now been
| | 01:17 | combined into a single menu.
| | 01:19 | Another important change is the Create menu.
| | 01:21 | If we switch back over to CINEMA 4D R12,
you notice that there was an Objects
| | 01:27 | menu, and the Objects menu allowed you
to create different types of objects.
| | 01:31 | Well, what they've done is they've
changed that idea now to the Create menu in 13.
| | 01:36 | And let's switch over to 13 and take a look.
| | 01:38 | In 13 now, we've got the Create menu.
| | 01:42 | So all the same options are here in
the Create menu, I can create Objects and
| | 01:45 | Splines and NURBS, as well as
other types of objects like XRefs.
| | 01:50 | The Create menu allows you to
create different types of objects.
| | 01:55 | Next up for refinement was the
Simulation menu, and if you look at the
| | 01:59 | Simulation menu in 13, you can see
that we can create different types of
| | 02:03 | physical simulations, things like Cloth and
Dynamics and Particle Simulations, as well as Hair.
| | 02:09 | If we go back to 12 and look at what
that looked like, I will switch to 12.
| | 02:14 | The Simulation menu between R12
and R13 has not changed much at all.
| | 02:18 | If we switch between the two, we can
see that we can still create different
| | 02:22 | types of simulations, things like
Cloth, Dynamics, Particles, Thinking
| | 02:25 | Particles, Hair Objects, all of the
stuff is still the same in 12 and in 13.
| | 02:31 | Another important change is the Script
menu and here in 13 the things related to
| | 02:36 | coding inside of CINEMA 4D have
all been grouped under a single menu.
| | 02:40 | So we can generate user scripts and
we can load and run them, we can also
| | 02:44 | activate the console for writing
coffee code, we can also activate a Python
| | 02:49 | generator and the plug-in manager as well.
| | 02:51 | So all of these things have now
been grouped under a single command.
| | 02:54 | So as you can see, even though it
might seem like things have changed
| | 02:56 | dramatically between 12 and 13, really
what's changed is how they've organized
| | 03:00 | the information in the menu bar.
| | 03:03 | All the same functions are
still there, they are just in subtly
| | 03:05 | different places.
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| Comparing modes and tools icons| 00:00 | The goal of this movie is to help you
understand the differences between the
| | 00:05 | Modes and Tools icons in CINEMA 4D R13
and R12.
| | 00:09 | If you're watching an older course
that uses R12, much of the information is
| | 00:13 | still exactly the same, it's just
that things look subtly different.
| | 00:16 | So I want to help you understand the
differences between those two, so you can
| | 00:19 | navigate through and get some useful
information out of those older courses.
| | 00:23 | So I'm in 13 right now, and I've got 12
open in the background, we will switch
| | 00:27 | over there in just a second.
| | 00:28 | And on the left-hand side we still
have got all of the same Modes icons,
| | 00:32 | they have been subtly redesigned and shifted
a little bit, but they are all still there.
| | 00:36 | We've got the Model mode and in R12,
the Model mode was still in the same
| | 00:40 | location, but now in 13 they have
moved the Object mode right below it.
| | 00:45 | If I switch over to R12, and then Model
mode was up here, Object mode was down
| | 00:49 | here, and that's been
combined into a single icon.
| | 00:52 | You will also notice that the icons
have been redesigned and they look a lot
| | 00:56 | more sleek in 13, let's switch back to 13.
| | 00:58 | So here we are in 13 and we've got
the same mode icons for Point, Edge and
| | 01:04 | Polygon modes, but they have been redesigned
and are a lot easier to see and understand.
| | 01:09 | They've also combined the Texture tools
into a single object, and now call that
| | 01:13 | the Use Texture Axis mode.
| | 01:15 | Axis mode is still on the left-hand
side as well, in addition, they've added a
| | 01:19 | Snapping shortcut here.
| | 01:21 | So you can see they've really done a
good job of cleaning up the left-hand
| | 01:24 | side of the interface.
| | 01:25 | If I switch back to 12, you are
going to see a lot more icons here.
| | 01:28 | And you can see a lot more icons, but that
doesn't necessarily mean more information.
| | 01:32 | They have done a really great job of
giving us the same amount of information
| | 01:36 | with much fewer icons.
| | 01:38 | The Toolbar across the top looks very,
very similar, but there has been some
| | 01:42 | subtle changes there too.
| | 01:44 | The most obvious are the changes to
the Render icons, and if I switch to 12,
| | 01:49 | you will see that in 12, there were
these clapboards here, and there's three
| | 01:54 | clapboards, one for active view render,
the render and picture viewer and the
| | 01:58 | render settings, and if I switch back
to 13, those are still in the same order
| | 02:03 | and location, it's just that they
have been redesigned and are easier to
| | 02:06 | identify that clapboard, it's a much
larger icon and a cleaner design to look at.
| | 02:11 | All the same features are still there,
it's just that they been subtly changed.
| | 02:16 | The other important grouping
has been in the scene objects;
| | 02:19 | let's switch over 12 so we can see
what I mean.
| | 02:21 | In version 12, all of the scene
objects were essentially under one icon, in
| | 02:27 | this light, and we had all the
different types of lights, the floors, the
| | 02:30 | cameras, all under one location.
| | 02:33 | In 13 what they've done, is they split
those icons out and they've made it much
| | 02:38 | easier to find stuff.
| | 02:39 | So we've got things like the floor and
sky and environment under one icon, we
| | 02:43 | have got different cameras under their
own icon, and we've got the different
| | 02:47 | lights under their own icon, and the
icons for the lights have been cleaned up.
| | 02:52 | The other thing you will notice is
that we are short a few icons here in the
| | 02:55 | interface and they've moved those things,
the Content Browser for example, which
| | 02:59 | used to be in R12, right here, this
globe shaped icon, that is now switched to a
| | 03:06 | permanent tab over here on the right-
hand side, so we can switch to the Content
| | 03:09 | Browser at any time.
| | 03:11 | So once again, all the same information is
there in the interface, with the
| | 03:14 | subtle changes in R13, I think it's
a lot easier to navigate through and
| | 03:18 | understand where things are.
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| Comparing Object Manager tabs and layout buttons| 00:00 | The Object Manager in CINEMA 4D R13 has
really gone largely unchanged, but what
| | 00:05 | has changed is how the Object Manager
is arranged with the Content Browser and
| | 00:10 | the Structure Manager.
| | 00:12 | I am in 13 right now, and you'll notice
on the right-hand side of the interface,
| | 00:16 | I've got these tabs and the tabs have
moved from 12, let's switch over to 12,
| | 00:21 | and take a look at that.
| | 00:22 | In 12, the tabs were here at the top,
and the Content Browser had its own icon
| | 00:26 | right here that when you clicked on it,
it brought up the Content Browser.
| | 00:30 | The Structure Manager was tabbed
right behind Object Manager vertically.
| | 00:34 | In 13, those tabs are now on the
right-hand side.
| | 00:38 | The Structure Manager is still there,
the Content Browser now is permanently
| | 00:42 | attached to the Object Manager, it
could be detached any time and rearranged
| | 00:46 | in the interface, but now it's here on the right-
hand side, and the Object Manager is still there.
| | 00:50 | All the same menu items are
available in each of these managers;
| | 00:53 | it's just that the tabs have been moved.
| | 00:55 | The other thing that's notable in
13 is that they've moved the layouts.
| | 01:00 | Over in CINEMA 4D R12, the layouts were
over here the left-hand side and you can
| | 01:05 | see that's the Layout button right
there and these are all my layouts that I
| | 01:07 | can switch between.
| | 01:09 | In 13, the layouts are now
over here on the upper right.
| | 01:14 | So it's all the exact same types of
layouts, it's just they've moved the icon
| | 01:19 | and changed it to a pulldown.
| | 01:21 | This makes the layouts much more discoverable.
| | 01:23 | The icon was a little bit hard to understand.
| | 01:25 | and so they feel that having just a
pulldown marked layout was much easier to read.
| | 01:29 | The differences between R13 and 12 are
subtle, but important, and hopefully this
| | 01:34 | movie will give you an idea of how to
navigate through the different tabs for
| | 01:38 | the managers on the right-
hand side of the interface.
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| Comparing contextual menus| 00:00 | The contextual menus in CINEMA 4D,
the menus that you see when you
| | 00:05 | right-click on an object in the Object
Manager for example, have gone through
| | 00:08 | a subtle redesign as well.
| | 00:10 | Certain things have been shifted in
position and grouped together in order to
| | 00:14 | make things a little bit cleaner.
| | 00:15 | I've got a cube here in CINEMA 4D R13,
and when I right-click on that cube, I see
| | 00:21 | the contextual menu for the commands
that I can run in the Object Manager.
| | 00:25 | I can add tags and actually unfold
objects or group them together, but the
| | 00:31 | important change has been in the
Simulation tags, and those Simulation tags have
| | 00:35 | been all grouped together.
| | 00:36 | Now before these were grouped out
separately, the Cloth and Collider tags and
| | 00:41 | the Soft Body and Rigid Body tags,
were in different menus, and some of these
| | 00:44 | commands were up in the Simulate menu in R13.
| | 00:47 | And here in 13 they have grouped them
all together and given you the ability
| | 00:51 | to make a Rigid Body or Soft Body or
Collider, just by adding a simple tag right here.
| | 00:57 | Now in R12, let's switchback over
to 12, and see what that looks like.
| | 01:01 | In 12 when I right-click on this cube,
you will notice that the Dynamics tags
| | 01:05 | and Cloth tags are separated out.
| | 01:07 | You can only add a Dynamics body here in 12;
| | 01:10 | you can change that Dynamics body in
any type of Dynamic body you would like, a
| | 01:13 | Collider, or a Soft Body or Rigid Body.
| | 01:16 | But you don't have separate tags, so
that's really the big difference there.
| | 01:20 | They've given you those additional
tag options just as their own separate
| | 01:24 | commands, so it makes it much easier to
right-click on an object and get that
| | 01:28 | dynamic tag right where you needed
to, without a lot of extra clicking.
| | 01:32 | Let's move back to 13 and re-look at that.
| | 01:34 | That's really what this redesign
between 12 and 13 was all about;
| | 01:37 | making things easier to get at and
giving you the ability to do things like
| | 01:42 | create a Soft Body with much fewer clicks.
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| Comparing viewport menus| 00:00 | The viewport options in CINEMA 4D R13
have gone through a bit of a change.
| | 00:06 | What they've tried to do is to group
things in a slightly different way and make
| | 00:10 | them easier to discover.
| | 00:12 | The most important change
is this new Options menu.
| | 00:15 | When I click on that, what these are,
are ways of changing how you're seeing
| | 00:19 | information in the viewport, things
like Isoline Editing, which previously was
| | 00:23 | under the Tools menu, is now here.
| | 00:25 | This makes a lot more sense because
Isoline Editing really changes how you view
| | 00:30 | a hyper NURB object and having it under
the Tools menu was always very strange.
| | 00:34 | Stereoscopic workflow has
also been added here as well.
| | 00:37 | Activating this allows you to preview a
stereoscopic effect right here in the Editor view.
| | 00:42 | In CINEMA 4D R12, let's switchover to
that, you see that there is one fewer
| | 00:47 | option, we have the Filters which are
the same in 13, but before the Display
| | 00:52 | options, were all grouped together
under one, and the Cameras were all grouped
| | 00:57 | together under their own, and the Edit
menu had some of the features that are in
| | 01:01 | the Options menu as well.
| | 01:02 | And if we go back to CINEMA 4D R13, you can
see it's much easier to find things and
| | 01:08 | it's just a lot cleaner look.
| | 01:11 | A big change that they've also
included in this Options menu is the
| | 01:14 | Linear Workflow Shading.
| | 01:15 | If we turn this off we now deactivate
the Linear Workflow Shading on our objects.
| | 01:20 | If I bring up the Documents settings,
Command+D or Ctrl+D on the keyboard, I am
| | 01:24 | going to raise this up, so
we can see a little bit here.
| | 01:26 | Linear Workflow is still turned on, but
what's happened is we've turned off how
| | 01:31 | the viewport is showing it, it doesn't
actually turn off Linear Workflow, it
| | 01:34 | just turns off how we're seeing
the shading here in the viewport.
| | 01:38 | For a lot of folks, this isn't a big deal,
but these subtle shading cues tell us
| | 01:43 | a lot about what's going on with
lighting and texturing of our objects.
| | 01:47 | As always though, you never want to
rely on the shading in the viewport, you
| | 01:51 | always want to do a render here in the
Editor window, so that you can really
| | 01:54 | see what's going on.
| | 01:55 | The viewport option is really just
for preview purposes, but that Linear
| | 01:58 | Workflow Shading helps out a lot in
understanding what's going on in the scene.
| | 02:02 | The redesign of the viewport options in
R13 really helps to clean things up and
| | 02:08 | make things easier to discover for
changing the settings in the viewport.
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2. Render Engine EnhancementsWhat is the Physical Render Engine?| 00:00 | If you have the Broadcast or the Studio
versions of CINEMA 4D R13, then you've
| | 00:04 | got access to an entirely new
render option, Physical Render.
| | 00:07 | This new option is designed to make the
3D render engine behave much more like
| | 00:11 | a real world camera that has controls for
exposure that affect how your image looks.
| | 00:15 | Now there has been a lot of hype
surrounding the Physical Render Engine,
| | 00:18 | but really what is it?
| | 00:19 | Well, what it is is two things.
| | 00:21 | It's a camera object with a new set of
controls and it's a new render option.
| | 00:26 | The camera object, which we'll go into
more detail later has a new Physical tab
| | 00:32 | and it's got some different object
properties, and these object properties
| | 00:35 | combined with the Physical tab allow it
to behave in a much more realistic way.
| | 00:39 | Now when you combine this realistic
camera behavior with the new render
| | 00:43 | options, if I hit Command+B or Ctrl+B
on the keyboard, there's now a new
| | 00:46 | pulldown here in the Render settings and I
can select from different rendering options.
| | 00:51 | Now there's Standard which is
the default and then Physical.
| | 00:54 | When I select Physical, nothing special
happens except that I get a new option
| | 00:58 | down here, and this new option now is
the Physical Render, and the Physical
| | 01:02 | Renderer combines with the camera
settings to determine how your image looks and
| | 01:06 | that's really what it's all about.
| | 01:08 | The render engine combines with the
camera object to determine how your image
| | 01:12 | looks in a much more realistic way.
| | 01:14 | Now that doesn't necessarily mean that
you're using photorealism, it just means
| | 01:17 | that the camera and the render engine
behave in a more realistic way, using
| | 01:21 | things like shutter speed and exposure
to determine what your image looks like.
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| Physical Render: Physical Camera| 00:00 | At the heart of the new Physical Render
Engine is the revamped camera object, it
| | 00:04 | now has lots of options to make
it work in a very realistic way.
| | 00:08 | I have a simple scene here that is
just a bunch of cubes tumbling down. I've
| | 00:12 | frozen their motion so there's no
animation in the scene at all, it's just the
| | 00:15 | cubes themselves locked in time.
| | 00:17 | And we're looking through
the camera object right now.
| | 00:20 | Let's back out, I'll uncheck the active
camera icon and we can back out a little
| | 00:23 | bit to see what the scene looks like as a whole.
| | 00:26 | I've got a single light object in here
in an Environment sphere that's
| | 00:30 | surrounding my scene, and
let's look back through the camera.
| | 00:33 | And so I'm going to hit Command+R to
render the scene, and you can see that
| | 00:39 | the lighting in here is a little bit harsh, and
that's one of the things I want to stress upfront.
| | 00:43 | The Physical Render Engine is not
necessarily Global Illumination;
| | 00:47 | Global Illumination
simulates the bouncing of light.
| | 00:49 | And you can see that I haven't
activated the Physical Render yet, but my
| | 00:53 | Physical Camera is not showing me
any kind of light bounce in the scene.
| | 00:57 | So you don't get that light bounce
unless you specifically ask for it.
| | 01:00 | So let's talk about the Camera options
themselves, and I'll select the Camera,
| | 01:04 | under the Object properties,
we've got some revamped items here.
| | 01:09 | The Focal Length and Field of View
options now behave in a more predictable
| | 01:12 | way, and the Focal Length refers to the focal
length of the lens that the camera is using.
| | 01:18 | There're some presets here and we can
switch to a wide-angle, we can switch to a
| | 01:23 | super telephoto 300mm, we're zoomed in
really close to one of those cubes now.
| | 01:27 | I'll bring it back to the Classic 36.
| | 01:29 | You'll notice that as I scrub that
value the field of view changes, this
| | 01:34 | field of wiew change is based on the
aspect ratio that you've established in
| | 01:38 | the Render settings.
| | 01:39 | If I hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on
the keyboard, I go to my Output.
| | 01:42 | You can see that I'm set for an
aspect ratio of 1280x720, which is 16x9.
| | 01:47 | Let's close that window up, based on
that aspect ratio, as I adjust these
| | 01:52 | values, the focal length will change
and maintain that same aspect ratio.
| | 01:56 | It does effect how much
information the camera is taking in though.
| | 02:00 | Let's switch this back
to the default Classic 36.
| | 02:03 | The Sensor Size (Film Gate) refers to how
large the sensor is in the camera that
| | 02:08 | you're using, and the default 35mm
photo approximates a 35mm camera, and I'm
| | 02:14 | going to leave that alone.
| | 02:15 | In practice, I don't normally touch
that, but it does come into play when you
| | 02:18 | start messing with exposure
and depth of field later on.
| | 02:22 | The Focus Distance is another important
element I want to point out, it's going
| | 02:25 | to affect the depth of field, but we
haven't turned that on yet, but we'll cover
| | 02:28 | that in more detail later in this chapter.
| | 02:31 | White Balance as well is a new
option that allows us to switch the color
| | 02:35 | temperature of the rendered image.
| | 02:36 | In practice I normally leave this alone,
but there are times where this is important.
| | 02:40 | For example, all of these tools: the
Physical Render Engine, the Physical
| | 02:44 | Camera, they're designed for us to be
able to capture a 3D image that matches or
| | 02:49 | approximates an actual shot image, and
it's very useful in visual effects work.
| | 02:54 | The Physical tab has a bunch of
options that are all grayed out, and that's
| | 02:57 | because I have not yet
activated the Physical Render Engine.
| | 02:59 | So let's do that, before we do though,
let's bring up the interactive render
| | 03:02 | region, Option+R or Alt+R on the keyboard.
| | 03:05 | Let's make the image size
much larger, here we go.
| | 03:10 | And let's turn the quality up, and you
see that once again we don't have any
| | 03:14 | kind of light bounce over here so
there is no global illumination going on.
| | 03:17 | Let's bring up the render settings
Command+B or Ctrl+B, and let's go to this new
| | 03:21 | pulldown here that allows us to
choose which renders we're working with.
| | 03:24 | And if we go to Physical,
we'll see our render change here.
| | 03:29 | It actually got a little bit better,
and that's one of the things
| | 03:33 | that's a little bit confusing
about the Physical Render Engine.
| | 03:35 | In some situations it's better
than the standard renderer, and in other
| | 03:38 | situations it's worse, and it depends entirely
on how your scene is made and experimentation.
| | 03:42 | There isn't any kind of hard rule of thumb.
| | 03:45 | But now that I've activated the
Physical Render, I've got these Physical
| | 03:49 | properties here that become activated.
| | 03:51 | I've got Movie Camera, and this
relates to how the shutter behaves and will
| | 03:56 | affect the motion blur.
| | 03:57 | F-Stop will affect the exposure, and
in order for it to affect the exposure I
| | 04:01 | have to activate the Exposure option.
| | 04:03 | So if I turn on Exposure, it's going
to redraw the screen, and that 200 ISO,
| | 04:09 | doesn't affect anything.
| | 04:10 | What ISO is, it relates to the sensitivity of
the film and how much light it can capture.
| | 04:15 | Higher ISOs capture more light,
lower ISOs capture less light.
| | 04:20 | Now if I take my F-Stop now that I've
activated Exposure, now I would drop it
| | 04:23 | down, a lower F-Stop lets in more
light, so my image should get brighter.
| | 04:28 | So let's bring this down to F-2.
| | 04:29 | You'll see that our image becomes much more
overexposed, let's bring that back to 8,
| | 04:33 | which is the default value.
| | 04:37 | You'll see that it gets much darker.
| | 04:39 | The Shutter Speed is now
expressed in terms of seconds.
| | 04:41 | There are some presets here, you can
also input a custom value, and these options
| | 04:46 | will be much more apparent when we work
with motion blur, but they also affect
| | 04:50 | the exposure of the image.
| | 04:51 | The longer the shutter is opened,
the more light comes into the image.
| | 04:55 | So if I bring my exposure to say, 1
second, I'm going to see my image get
| | 04:59 | completely blown out, that's because
too much light is coming into the scene,
| | 05:03 | and it is overexposing the image.
| | 05:05 | Let's bring that back down to the
default which is 1/30th of a second, and that
| | 05:09 | will get us back to our regular rendered image.
| | 05:14 | So let's go to the Details tab, the
near and far clipping are very useful for
| | 05:18 | cutting off pieces of your rendered
image, and they can be used to create a
| | 05:21 | cut away effect, like the kind
you'd see in a technical illustration.
| | 05:24 | I'm going to leave them off for now.
| | 05:26 | The other thing I want to talk
about is that the depth of field,
| | 05:28 | front and rear blurs.
| | 05:30 | Those things are carryovers from the
old standard render engine and they can
| | 05:34 | be activated and used to fine tune
your depth of field, and we'll cover those
| | 05:38 | in more detail later.
| | 05:39 | The last option is the Stereoscopic,
and this isn't directly related to the
| | 05:44 | Physical Render Engine, but it's a
really exciting new feature that we'll cover
| | 05:47 | in more detail later.
| | 05:48 | The Physical Camera is key to helping
your 3D renders look more like the real
| | 05:52 | world, and it's the foundation
of the new Physical Render Engine.
| | 05:54 | So just to recap, all of these
controls are really there to help you simulate
| | 05:59 | the kinds of looks you would get with
a real world camera, and that Physical
| | 06:02 | Camera is key to helping your 3D renders
look more like the real world, and it
| | 06:06 | really is the foundation of
the new Physical Render Engine.
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| Physical Render: depth of field| 00:00 | depth of field refers to what portions of
an image are in focus relative to the camera.
| | 00:05 | In a real camera, this selective focus
is controlled by factors like the size of
| | 00:09 | the sensor, the focal length of the
lens, and the size of the aperture.
| | 00:12 | Thanks to the new Physical Render
Engine, you now have the same level of
| | 00:15 | control in the 3D world.
| | 00:18 | Before I start this I want
to -- a word of disclaimer.
| | 00:21 | Normally when I'm working with depth of
field, I don't commit depth of field to
| | 00:24 | the 3D rendered image.
| | 00:26 | I would render my depth of field as a
depth pass and actually add it in After
| | 00:31 | Effects as part of the compositing process.
| | 00:33 | The advantage to that is that you can
change it, without having to come all the
| | 00:36 | way back over to CINEMA 4D, but there
are certain times when the rendered depth
| | 00:39 | of field in CINEMA 4D is going to be
far superior to what you'd get from a
| | 00:43 | plug-in like ReelSmart Motion Blur,
and so for that we've got this new
| | 00:47 | physical depth of field,
which really looks great.
| | 00:50 | So I've a got a scene here, of a
bunch of tumbling cubes, and I've got three
| | 00:53 | cubes identified in color, stretching
out from the camera, and they're a little
| | 00:58 | hard to identify here in the Top view,
so the first thing I want to do is to
| | 01:02 | hide the background cubes, and I want
them to show up in the render still, but I
| | 01:05 | don't want them to be visible in the
Editor window, so I'm going to make the top
| | 01:09 | dot red on both of these cloner groups.
| | 01:12 | Now I can see my three cubes
and how they relate to the camera.
| | 01:16 | Now what I'm going to do is to bring
up the interactive render region, which
| | 01:19 | is Option+R or Alt+R on the PC, and
let's bring that up here and make it the
| | 01:23 | same size as this perspective view,
and I'm going to crank up the quality, so
| | 01:29 | we get a much better looking image.
| | 01:31 | We're still using the standard render
engine, let's hit Command+B or Ctrl+B
| | 01:35 | on the keyboard, and you can see the
render is set to its default which is Standard.
| | 01:40 | Let's move the Render Settings down here so
we can see what happens when I change this.
| | 01:43 | I am going to switch this from
Standard to Physical, and you're going to see
| | 01:46 | that rendering changed just slightly.
| | 01:49 | Now we're using the Physical Render
Engine and the Physical Render Engine
| | 01:53 | has its own set of properties
independent from the other Render Engine and
| | 01:56 | now they're active.
| | 01:58 | Depth Of Field is currently active, and
if it's not on yours, just go ahead and
| | 02:01 | activate it right now.
| | 02:02 | And when I do that, it looks like
nothing's happened, that's because we're now
| | 02:06 | dependent on the Physical settings of
our camera in order to see that depth of
| | 02:10 | field, and so these Camera
settings are now more important than ever.
| | 02:13 | So let's close up the Render settings
and go back to our camera object and take
| | 02:17 | a look at the factors that are
involved in determining the depth of field.
| | 02:21 | Now under the Object properties, let's
raise this window up so we can see
| | 02:25 | things a little bit better.
| | 02:27 | Under the Object properties, we've got
the most important feature for our depth
| | 02:31 | of field, which is the Focus Distance.
| | 02:32 | This determines how far from the lens
the in focus part of the image will occur.
| | 02:39 | Right now, that is expressed by this
area of the camera right here, and I can
| | 02:44 | click on this middle dot
and drag it left and right.
| | 02:47 | You can see that value changing interactively.
| | 02:49 | I'm going to leave it parked right on
that middle cube, so that the middle cube
| | 02:53 | will always be in focus.
| | 02:55 | Now the next factor that relates to the
depth of field is both the Focal Length
| | 02:59 | and the F-Stops that you're using.
| | 03:02 | This is where the Physical
Render Engine is not quite realistic.
| | 03:05 | If I go to my Physical tab, you can see
that my F-Stops are 8, now let's bring
| | 03:10 | the image to full screen, middle
mouse click in the Perspective view.
| | 03:15 | I've got a 50mm lens, and if I go
to a Physical Render and I change the
| | 03:21 | F-Stops, I know that normally in a real
35mm camera, if I change the F-Stops to
| | 03:25 | 1 for example, let's wait for
that to finish cooking here.
| | 03:29 | Things did get a little bit softer, but they
didn't get nearly as soft as they should have.
| | 03:33 | In an actual 35mm camera, if you're
using a 50mm lens combined with a 1 F-Stop,
| | 03:40 | it's almost impossible to get
anything in the image in focus.
| | 03:43 | If you've ever tried taking images with a
lens like that, you'll know what I mean.
| | 03:46 | This should have incredible depth
of field in there, but it doesn't.
| | 03:50 | So what I have to do is I have to
dial down the F-Stops even more.
| | 03:53 | Let's bring it to .1, and then I
start to see a lot of depth of field.
| | 03:58 | Now it's very important that they
separated out the Exposure option, because I
| | 04:02 | don't want the F-Stops to affect the
exposure, I only want them to affect the
| | 04:05 | depth of field and that's one of the
nice things about what's going on here.
| | 04:09 | If I were to activate the exposure
with a .1 F-Stop, you're going to see my
| | 04:13 | image blow out completely white.
| | 04:15 | So I'm going to turn that off again.
| | 04:18 | The beautiful thing though that's
going on now is that I'm getting very
| | 04:22 | nice depth of field.
| | 04:23 | If I go back to the Object properties
for the camera, I can adjust the Focus
| | 04:28 | Distance if want to have more or
less of this green cube in focus.
| | 04:33 | I could also adjust the Sensor Size or
Film Gate, and if I bring the Sensor Size
| | 04:37 | and make it larger, the larger your
sensor size, the more shallow your depth
| | 04:41 | of field will become.
| | 04:42 | So if I take this and bring it up to say
70mm, the downside of that is it affects
| | 04:48 | the field of view of the camera,
and so I don't normally change that.
| | 04:53 | So let's undo that, Command+Z, get
that back to 35mm, so we still see our
| | 04:58 | original rendered image.
| | 05:01 | Under the Details for the
camera, are the front and rear blur.
| | 05:05 | If you're using the Physical Render
Engine, you kind of don't normally want to
| | 05:08 | use this, because you want it to behave
in a more realistic way, but if you want
| | 05:11 | to get a very precise adjustment of your
depth of field, you can activate these and
| | 05:15 | these will override these
settings in the Physical Render Engine.
| | 05:18 | So I'm going to leave them off for now,
but I just wanted you to know that they
| | 05:21 | were there, so that you can
get a more precise adjustment.
| | 05:24 | Let's go back to the Physical properties.
| | 05:26 | We can take a look at
Chromatic Aberration, Vignetting.
| | 05:29 | We can also adjust something
called the Diaphragm Shape.
| | 05:32 | The Diaphragm Shape controls how the
bouquet, or the Depth of Field effect is
| | 05:37 | expressed in the back of the image.
| | 05:38 | And the Diaphragm Shape by
default looks pretty decent.
| | 05:43 | The Diaphragm Shape option allows you
to control how the Bouquet effect is
| | 05:48 | expressed in the render engine.
| | 05:49 | Now if I activate it here you won't
really see any changes, that's because the
| | 05:53 | values here that are expressed in there,
are basically related to the defaults,
| | 05:57 | and so nothing changes, but you can
experiment with these to get just the right
| | 06:01 | look for your Depth of Field effect.
| | 06:03 | The Depth of Field effect goes a
long ways towards making your images
| | 06:06 | artistically interesting and physically real.
| | 06:09 | Normally in motion graphics, you'd
want to be able to control your depth of
| | 06:12 | field in compositing, so you'd always
want to render without this effect on,
| | 06:15 | and generate a depth map for your scene.
| | 06:17 | There are plug-ins in After Effects that can
use this pass to generate depth of field.
| | 06:21 | It doesn't look as good as the Physical
Renderer, but you also have the ability to
| | 06:25 | dial it up or down without
having to wait for a long render.
| | 06:29 | Keep in mind that the depth of field
for the Physical Render is really useful
| | 06:32 | for simulating real-world depth of
field and matching footage in a visual
| | 06:36 | effects scenario, or just
creating beautiful stylistic renders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Physical Render: motion blur| 00:00 | When the shutter opens on a real
motion picture camera, or a video camera,
| | 00:04 | objects that are moving to the frame during the
time that the shutter is open become blurred.
| | 00:08 | This artifact is called motion blur and
it's huge it making your 3D images look
| | 00:12 | less computer-generated.
| | 00:13 | Now before I get started, I want to say
that the effects that I'm talking about
| | 00:17 | are part of the Physical Render Engine,
which is built into the Broadcast and
| | 00:21 | Studio versions of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:24 | If you only have the Prime, you can
still get motion blur, but you can't get the
| | 00:27 | physically correct motion blur.
| | 00:29 | The scene I have here is just a
bunch of blocks that are falling down and
| | 00:33 | hitting the camera and bouncing
off as they come through the frame.
| | 00:38 | I'm going to park the rendering
right about here and let's make this
| | 00:42 | perspective view full screen.
| | 00:44 | Before I get started, I want to talk
about the camera, and if I go to the
| | 00:50 | Physical settings on that, the only
thing that we're going to be concerned with
| | 00:52 | right now is the shutter speed, and
it's at the default of 1/30th of a second.
| | 00:57 | Let's bring up the render settings,
Command+B or Ctrl+B, we're going to go to the
| | 01:03 | Render pulldown and activate the
Physical Render Engine, and when we do that
| | 01:07 | let's make the Render
window quite a bit smaller.
| | 01:10 | We're going to click on the Physical option.
| | 01:12 | The only thing we're going to be
concerned with for this movie is the Motion
| | 01:15 | Blur setting and these
Motion Subdivisions down here.
| | 01:19 | So before I activate motion blur, I'm
going to hit Command+R in the keyboard or
| | 01:23 | Ctrl+R on the PC to render the active
view, and then I'm going to turn on Motion
| | 01:28 | Blur, and when I do that, I'll hit Command
+R or Ctrl+R again, and you'll see that
| | 01:32 | nothing really happen, that's because
the motion blur effect is not previewing
| | 01:36 | in the editor window.
| | 01:37 | I have to do a render to the picture
viewer to actually see that effect, so I'm
| | 01:42 | going to go Shift+R on the Mac or Shift
+R on the PC, and that's going to bring
| | 01:47 | up the Picture Viewer.
| | 01:48 | Now I have some stuff preloaded in
here on the Picture Viewer, and we'll talk
| | 01:53 | about those in a minute, but this is
the current render that we're looking at
| | 01:55 | right now, and you can see that we already
have a pretty nice-looking motion blur effect.
| | 02:00 | So this is the default value for the
motion blur, we have the default value for
| | 02:04 | shutter speed at 1/30th and we've got
the default number of subdivisions for the
| | 02:08 | motion blur in the Render
Settings, so this is the default.
| | 02:12 | Let's make this window a little bit
smaller, and we're going to go back to the
| | 02:17 | Motion Subdivisions, and we're going to
change the Motion Subdivisions from 4 to
| | 02:22 | say 6, and then we'll go Shift+R once
again, and you're going to see that it's
| | 02:27 | preparing the motion, and it's going to
take a moment to think about that motion
| | 02:32 | and it's going to render the frame.
| | 02:34 | And now we can compare these two images.
| | 02:35 | Let's bring that a little bit larger
and go right back and forth between
| | 02:40 | the two, and you can see that there is
almost no difference between those two renders.
| | 02:44 | What this Motion Subdivision is doing
is, it's helping CINEMA 4D calculate how
| | 02:49 | objects are moving through the frame.
| | 02:51 | The time where you'd want to turn this
up is when you're using objects that are
| | 02:55 | moving in a curved fashion through the
frame, like, say for example, a propeller
| | 03:00 | or if I'm waving my hand through the air,
my hand is moving in an arc, anything
| | 03:04 | that's moving in an arc is going to
need more motion subdivisions than things
| | 03:07 | that are moving in a straight line.
| | 03:09 | These cubes are moving mostly in a
straight line, so we're not seeing the
| | 03:12 | effects of the motion subdivisions,
so we're going to leave this back to 4.
| | 03:16 | So now with that set to 4, the only
things we're going to be concerned about with
| | 03:20 | are going to be the Sample Quality, and
then the Shutter Speed, so let's take a
| | 03:25 | look at the shutter speed.
| | 03:26 | The shutter speed right
now is a 30th of a second.
| | 03:28 | The longer the shutter is open, the
more motion blur I'm going to get, so let's
| | 03:32 | take this and change it
to say 1/8th of a second.
| | 03:35 | Now we're going to hit Shift+R on the
keyboard again, and you can see now we have a
| | 03:40 | much more pronounced motion blur effect.
| | 03:42 | So if I compare that with this first
render, this is the first render at four
| | 03:46 | subdivisions, and a 30th of second, and
this render is 1/8th of a second with
| | 03:51 | four subdivisions, you can see the
motion blur effect is much more pronounced.
| | 03:56 | You see that there is quite a bit of
grain going on in the motion blur and
| | 03:58 | that's because of the sampler.
| | 04:01 | Right now, in the Render settings
we're using the Adaptive Sampler, which is
| | 04:05 | fine, but you can see that we have it
set for low quality, so that we can get
| | 04:08 | a really fast render.
| | 04:09 | If I turn this up from low to high,
and then hit Shift+R on the keyboard,
| | 04:16 | I'm going to speed this render up in post,
so that we don't have to wait so long for it.
| | 04:19 | So you can see that rendering took
almost a minute for a single frame.
| | 04:26 | If you compare that with the previous
render where it was only 8 seconds, you
| | 04:28 | can see that that sampling quality has
a huge impact on the render time, but it
| | 04:35 | also has a huge impact on
the quality of the render.
| | 04:38 | If we look at the grain, especially in
this area here, you see that it's much,
| | 04:42 | much smoother, and this is a very good result.
| | 04:46 | It's the unfortunate fact, the higher the quality
render, the longer the rendering is going to take.
| | 04:50 | I've pre-rendered some different motion
blur tests here for us, so that we can
| | 04:54 | see these previews in the Picture
Viewer and I've got them already loaded in
| | 04:58 | here and these are QuickTime movies
that I have loaded in, let's take a look at
| | 05:02 | these and play them back.
| | 05:04 | So I've got number one here, and I'm
going to hit play, when I hit play we're
| | 05:08 | going to see a green bar start to form,
I need to let it play through all the
| | 05:11 | way through one time and it's
going to cache the green bar.
| | 05:15 | Once it gets done playing, then it'll
playback in real time speed, so let's hit
| | 05:19 | play here, and you see it's chunking along
there, and those gaps are frames that have
| | 05:24 | not been cached, and so this is the
default settings for the motion blur.
| | 05:30 | Looks pretty good, it's not a bad looking
motion blur effect, but it could be better.
| | 05:34 | So the next thing I did was to up the
shutter time, so that now the shutter
| | 05:38 | is open longer, still the same number of samples,
and I'll hit play and let it cache through.
| | 05:51 | So now you can see we have a much
more pronounced motion blur effect, but
| | 05:55 | it's very grainy.
| | 05:56 | So now let's take a look at the additional
motion subs, and you'll see that they
| | 06:00 | have almost no impact on the rendering.
| | 06:05 | Once again, I'll let it cache
all the frames, there we go.
| | 06:12 | And lastly is the high sample
rendering, this is 1/8th shutter, 4 motion
| | 06:17 | subdivisions, but on high sample
quality, and I'll hit play there and while
| | 06:22 | that's caching I'll just take a moment to
talk about the render times for these movies.
| | 06:25 | The default movie took about 12 minutes
to render, the 1/8th shutter speed took
| | 06:30 | about 14 minutes to render, the 6
subdivisions took 29 minutes to render, but
| | 06:34 | didn't look any different
than the 1/8th shutter before it.
| | 06:37 | The high-quality rendering with 4
subdivisions took 2 hours and 10 minutes, it
| | 06:42 | was a hugely different render time,
but it's a much better looking render.
| | 06:46 | So you can see the biggest factor in
the render times for the physically
| | 06:50 | rendered motion blur is the quality
setting, keep it low for test, and then turn
| | 06:54 | it to high for your final render.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Physical Render: progressive rendering | 00:00 | The progressive render option in
R13 provides a very interesting option
| | 00:04 | for artists working on still images and
artists working on animations with some settings.
| | 00:10 | It starts with the very low-quality
image and than it allows you to let your
| | 00:13 | render cook and improve quality
for as long as you'd like to wait.
| | 00:17 | So I've a scene here, and it's got a
bunch of blocks that are tumbling down and I
| | 00:21 | have frozen them in time, and they're
sitting on a white plane and let's hit
| | 00:24 | Command+R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard to
see what the clean render looks like.
| | 00:27 | It looks all right.
| | 00:29 | Now the place where the progressive
render shines is with things like blurry
| | 00:32 | reflections that require a lot of
intense calculations in order to get right.
| | 00:37 | The problem with blurry effects is
that they really dramatically hurt your
| | 00:41 | render time, so I'm going to do
something in the scene that I don't normally
| | 00:43 | ever do, and that's turn on blurry reflection.
| | 00:45 | So before I do that let's
make all the cubes reflective.
| | 00:48 | So I'm going to go down here to the
picture viewer and select all the cubes at
| | 00:51 | the same time, and then in the Basic
properties I'm going to activate Reflection.
| | 00:57 | Now that's going to make all of our
cubes reflective, and if I look at the
| | 01:00 | Reflection property, I've it set to a
brightness of 50%, and let's hit here and
| | 01:05 | go Command+R or Ctrl+R, and take a
look at that, you can we've got decent
| | 01:09 | looking reflections, but one of the
hallmarks of reflective objects, especially
| | 01:14 | rough objects like these cubes, is that
the reflections get blurred out based on
| | 01:18 | the roughness of the surface, and so
what I want to do is turn on blurry
| | 01:21 | reflections, let's do this.
| | 01:23 | We're still in the standard render
engine right now, let turn on the blurriness,
| | 01:27 | change that from 0% to say 10%, and I'll
hit Command+R, and you're going to see that this
| | 01:33 | rendering is going to take quite a bit longer
to render, and the reflections look pretty good.
| | 01:39 | Let's take a look at the Physical Render Engine
and see how much better we can get
| | 01:42 | these blurry reflections, and
also how much faster they can render.
| | 01:44 | So I'm going to hit Command+B or Ctrl+B
on the keyboard to bring up the Render
| | 01:48 | Settings, and let's change the renderer
from Standard to Physical, and we'll leave
| | 01:54 | the Sampler on default right now, and
then hit Command+R or Ctrl+R one more time.
| | 02:00 | You can see we haven't turned on the
progressive render yet, but look how much
| | 02:03 | faster these blurry reflections go
and that's the difference between the
| | 02:07 | physical renderer and the default renderer,
is that the physical renderer does a much
| | 02:11 | better job of calculating those blurry
reflections, but you'll notice that they
| | 02:14 | don't look quite as smooth.
| | 02:16 | So let's go to the Render settings
now and change the sampling method from
| | 02:21 | Adaptive to Progressive.
| | 02:23 | In order to see this work, we're going
to have to hit Command+R again, and when
| | 02:27 | we do, we're going to see a very fast
draw of a very bad image, and then the
| | 02:33 | progressive renderer will continue
refining the image and you're going to see this
| | 02:37 | image get better and better and better.
| | 02:39 | Now I'm going to step back and
let it run for about a minute;
| | 02:41 | we're going to speed up that minute in
post, so we don't have to wait so long.
| | 02:45 | So now I'll hit the Escape key to stop the
rendering, and you can see that compared
| | 02:51 | to what it first started and compared
where it's looks now, it looks fantastic
| | 02:55 | and so that's really one of the big
benefits is you can really let the
| | 02:58 | Progressive Render Engine
crank on very complex scenes.
| | 03:01 | There's one other thing I want to
talk about with the physical renderer, and
| | 03:05 | that's the Indirect Illumination.
| | 03:08 | Indirect Illumination is a type of
global illumination, but the beauty of the
| | 03:13 | indirect illumination in the physical renderer
is that it's very stable for
| | 03:17 | animation and for net render purposes,
which the regular global illumination is not.
| | 03:22 | The downside to it is that it does take
much longer to render, so let's turn on
| | 03:27 | Indirect Illumination, and hit Command+
R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard and you're
| | 03:32 | going to see our scene change dramatically.
| | 03:34 | Now what's happening is, we're using
the illumination from that sphere that's
| | 03:39 | surrounding a scene, it has a beautiful
sunny day on it, it's changing the color
| | 03:43 | and we're simulating the light bounce,
so the scene is being illuminated by the
| | 03:47 | colors in that image and the light is
now bouncing off of the other objects, but
| | 03:52 | you can see from the Diffuse Depth
down here, it's only bouncing one time.
| | 03:55 | Let's change the Diffuse Depth up,
that's the number of bounces that we'll
| | 03:59 | get, and I'm going to change that from 1 to say 3,
and then I'll hit Command+R or Ctrl+R again.
| | 04:04 | And this time we're going to let the
Progressive Render Engine cook on it, so
| | 04:08 | we're going to hit Command+R or Ctrl+R,
and then we're going to see it draw a
| | 04:12 | very bad image relatively fast, and
then we're going to let it cook for about a
| | 04:15 | minute, I'm going to hit Escape
here now to stop that rendering.
| | 04:19 | The beauty of the Indirect
Illumination is that it does a very good job of
| | 04:23 | simulating that light bounce.
| | 04:25 | As I increase the diffuse depth,
it got quite a bit brighter.
| | 04:28 | The downside of that of course is that
it took quite a bit longer to render, so
| | 04:32 | there is a trade-off there.
| | 04:33 | If you're going to be rendering an
animation and you want to have a global
| | 04:36 | illuminated look, a very much more
realistic look that looks like simulated
| | 04:40 | light bounce, then the Indirect
Illumination is the way to go, you don't have to
| | 04:44 | use it with the progressive renderer,
you can simply use it with the standard
| | 04:48 | sampling method in the Physical Render
settings, and then you can just run it
| | 04:52 | through net render, and you get a
great looking result that won't flicker.
| | 04:56 | So just to recap, the progressive
renderer is an option that allows you to
| | 05:00 | start with a very low-quality image
and let the render engine run for as
| | 05:04 | long as you'll let it.
| | 05:04 | Of course there is a point of
diminishing returns, but that will vary from scene
| | 05:08 | to scene, you can
experiment and have a lot of fun.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. New Character Tools and ImprovementsUsing the Character object for building and applying rigs| 00:01 | Creating the controls to make a character move
is known as rigging, and it used
| | 00:05 | to be one of the most laborious and
intense processes in all 3D animation.
| | 00:09 | The new Character object in R13
makes this process almost too easy.
| | 00:13 | This is a very simple character;
| | 00:14 | it's just a single mesh inside of a hyper
NURB, creating the smoothing for the geometry.
| | 00:20 | Let's zoom in on him real quick here.
| | 00:21 | And you can see that he's got a head
that is separated from his shoulders and
| | 00:26 | body, and that's not necessary for the
rig, that's just simply a style choice that
| | 00:29 | I made for this character.
| | 00:31 | Now I want to make a note about the size of
the character, that's very important here.
| | 00:34 | The Character object produces rigs
that are based on an approximately 6
| | 00:38 | foot high character.
| | 00:39 | Now they can be scaled and resized to
any shape at all, but I've sized my
| | 00:44 | character to about 6 feet in order
to make this process much easier.
| | 00:48 | Now what I want to do is to create a
set of controls that will allow this
| | 00:51 | character to move, it's not flexible
at all right now, it's simply a piece of
| | 00:54 | geometry, and the character controls
are going to allow this character to bend
| | 00:57 | and move just like a real person.
| | 00:59 | So the first step in that process is
to add something to the scene called
| | 01:02 | a Character object, so I will go to the Character
menu, and add in the Character object.
| | 01:07 | And the Character object is the heart
of the new character rigging system and
| | 01:11 | it's got an Object Property that has
the modes across here, and these modes
| | 01:15 | correspond to the process that you
will go through when building a rig and
| | 01:19 | binding it to a character
and then animating that rig.
| | 01:21 | So you can see you have got a Build,
Adjust, Binding and Animate, and those are
| | 01:24 | the steps in the process.
| | 01:26 | So the first thing I want to do is
select a template and there's a bunch of
| | 01:30 | different templates here that ship
with CINEMA 4D, also I wouldn't be at all
| | 01:33 | surprised if at some point very soon
you'll see templates springing up for
| | 01:36 | download and purchase all across the Internet.
| | 01:39 | The Character object is really a set of
tools for building these kinds of templates.
| | 01:43 | And those templates are what make
it easy for regular people to use.
| | 01:47 | So I am going to select the Advanced Biped rig.
| | 01:50 | Now I could choose any of these guys
for my character, but you want to choose
| | 01:53 | one that corresponds to the structure
of your character, and this is the bipedal
| | 01:56 | character, he has got two arms and two legs.
| | 01:58 | So I wouldn't really want to
choose the Fish or the Insect.
| | 02:00 | Now the regular Biped rig is a little
bit half-baked and some of these guys are
| | 02:04 | not quite finished or have
different issues with them.
| | 02:07 | So I am going to choose the Advanced Biped
rig because I know that this one works great.
| | 02:11 | Select that, and the first step in the
process is to add something called a Root,
| | 02:15 | and that's the base of your characters.
| | 02:16 | When I click this, you are going
to see -- let's back out just a little bit
| | 02:19 | here so we can see what's
going to happen here in the window.
| | 02:22 | When I click this, I am going to get
a set of controls at the very bottom of
| | 02:25 | the character, and these are the
root controls that allow me to move the
| | 02:28 | entire character around.
| | 02:29 | Now they're not bound to the character yet,
that's going to happen later on in the process.
| | 02:32 | The next step in the process is that I
want to add a Spine, and the Spine, when
| | 02:37 | I click that, adds all the controls
for the spinal column of the character.
| | 02:41 | Now they are not lined up of the
character yet, I am going to do that next as well.
| | 02:44 | Now the legs I am going to add by
clicking on this, and I have two different
| | 02:48 | choices, and you'll see there is a
pulldown for the arms and legs, and I can
| | 02:51 | choose either a Bendy arm, which allows
the arm to bend and flex like it's made
| | 02:55 | out of rubber, or I can
choose an IK/FK Only arm.
| | 02:58 | Now I am going to keep it simple this
time and choose IK/FK Only for the arm,
| | 03:01 | and when I do that, it adds in the arm, now
you notice that the arm doesn't line up
| | 03:05 | with the character either, and once again,
we are going to adjust that in just a moment.
| | 03:08 | Now I am not going to worry about hands for
the simple examples, we will skip that step.
| | 03:12 | Now to get the next arm, I want to
go back to the spine and then select
| | 03:16 | arm IK/FK Only again.
| | 03:17 | I can just click on it this time, and it
knows automatically to add the right arm.
| | 03:22 | Now if I go back to the Spine
object, I want to add the legs.
| | 03:24 | Now if I add the legs one at a time
like I did the arms, that's cool, but there
| | 03:28 | is a really great shortcut, I am going
to select an IK/FK Only leg, when I hold
| | 03:32 | down the Ctrl key and I release on that,
it's going to add both legs at the same
| | 03:36 | time, and that's really a much better
way to do it, rather than clicking back
| | 03:40 | and forth between these objects.
| | 03:42 | So that's pretty much all the
components that I am going to need for this
| | 03:44 | character rig, I have got two arms, two
legs and a spine, and some head joints as well.
| | 03:49 | Now what I need to do is to adjust it,
so I am going to click on the Adjust
| | 03:52 | button and watch all of this stuff change.
| | 03:55 | Now I'm seeing a simplified version of
the rig with all of these control points,
| | 03:59 | and these control points can be moved
around and there is a very important
| | 04:02 | button here, Symmetry.
| | 04:03 | You want to make sure this is on,
especially when you're moving the arms and legs.
| | 04:07 | What that's going to do is move the
objects on either side of the axis, and you
| | 04:11 | can see when I highlight one, it highlights the
other on the other side of the axis.
| | 04:14 | So let's start off by
moving the legs into position.
| | 04:17 | And I'm going to middle mouse click to
get to a four-way view, and middle mouse
| | 04:21 | click in the right-hand view
to get to the right-hand view.
| | 04:23 | I am going to select the legs and move
those guys up into position, put it right
| | 04:29 | about where his hip should be, right about there.
| | 04:31 | Then I can grab a knee joint and use
the axis band, and put it right there about
| | 04:35 | where his knee is going to go.
| | 04:36 | Now I can grab the foot and put it
right down into position, I will put
| | 04:40 | it right about there.
| | 04:41 | Now I can also take this left leg and
move it, I am going to tuck it right down
| | 04:45 | here at the back of his
foot where it needs to go.
| | 04:47 | And now what I want to do is switch
to four-way and show you that it has in
| | 04:51 | fact adjusted all of those points.
| | 04:54 | Now in the Perspective view, you'll see
that the knees don't line up with the
| | 04:57 | knees of the characters.
| | 04:58 | So what I am going to do is select the
knee joint, and then use the X handle and
| | 05:02 | slide it over into position in front of
the knee, and you see that it takes the
| | 05:06 | feet right along with it.
| | 05:07 | I can't tell you how hard this process
used to be before this tool was created,
| | 05:10 | it is amazingly easy to adjust these rigs now.
| | 05:13 | So now what we want to do is to work on
the spine, and we are going to work our
| | 05:17 | way up from the base.
| | 05:18 | So I will grab the Spine object right
here, and I'm going to grab the Axis band
| | 05:22 | for that, and move it up into
position right about there.
| | 05:25 | Then I'll grab this guy right here,
which is labeled as the hips, and the hips
| | 05:29 | are going to take part of the spine with it.
| | 05:31 | And I am going to put those right up
into position, right about there.
| | 05:34 | Then I can grab the middle of the Spine
object, which is the chest, and move that
| | 05:38 | in the position, that's going to
take the arms and legs with it.
| | 05:41 | This guy right here is the controller
for that, and I moved that a little bit out
| | 05:45 | of position, that's one of the dangers
of working in the Perspective view, and I
| | 05:48 | accidentally moved that too far, so I
am going to put that right back down
| | 05:50 | there into his torso.
| | 05:52 | Now I am ready to move these arm parts
up, and before I do that I am going to
| | 05:56 | grab the base of the spine and neck and
use the -- once again the Axis band to
| | 06:00 | move it right up into position.
| | 06:02 | Now I can grab the collars and use
this Axis band and move them up in the
| | 06:06 | position, put them right at the base, and
then I'll grab the shoulder and move
| | 06:12 | that up and that takes the entire hand with it.
| | 06:15 | Now what I want to do is move it so
that it's closer in to where the actual
| | 06:19 | shoulder on the character will be.
| | 06:20 | And you know there is no right or
wrong answer for this, it really depends
| | 06:23 | entirely on how your
character is built and shaped.
| | 06:27 | Now what I want to do is grab the elbow,
and let's use this Axis band right here,
| | 06:31 | and I'm going to drag that in position.
| | 06:33 | Now it might be a good idea to look at
this from the top view, and as you can
| | 06:36 | see, I don't have things quite lined up,
and so I am going to switchback to a
| | 06:40 | four-way view, and I'm going to grab them one
at a time, and then move them in the top view.
| | 06:45 | So I will start off with the collar here,
and I'm going to grab that collar and
| | 06:49 | in the top view, I will switch to the
Move tool and I will move it right into
| | 06:52 | position with the shoulder.
| | 06:54 | Let's move it over toward the center just a bit.
| | 06:56 | Now what I'm going to do is grab the
Shoulder object, and move that one into
| | 07:01 | position as well and that one I am
going to move forward just a bit, there we
| | 07:04 | go, so now I can see that in the top
view, it lines up nicely, that arrow is
| | 07:08 | going right down the arm.
| | 07:09 | Now I can go back and deselect that
and grab just the arm.
| | 07:12 | Now you notice, I'm accidentally
selecting the character, so let's go back in
| | 07:15 | the Perspective view and grab it here,
and I can move that back into position
| | 07:19 | for the elbow, now that's too far, and that's why
you want to do it in the top view, there we go.
| | 07:24 | Now I can grab the hand, and put that
right at the base of the hand where the
| | 07:30 | wrist would go, grab this last controller and
put it in, and that's the beauty of
| | 07:33 | the Symmetry selection that we had
turned on, is that now all of that work is
| | 07:38 | done for us on both sides the object.
| | 07:40 | Now, I have do to little bit of height
adjustment here, so let's switch to the
| | 07:42 | front view, zoom in here and I can take
this and just raise the whole thing up,
| | 07:48 | you can see that takes the entire rig
along with it, take this one and move it
| | 07:52 | up into position and take this one and
move it down into position, there we go.
| | 07:56 | And that's pretty much it, I want to
double-check my head, and so let's go into
| | 08:02 | the side view, and you can see that
that's not too bad actually, I will grab
| | 08:05 | that one and I'm going to move it right
to the base where the neck would connect
| | 08:08 | with the head, and that one is good to go
there, the jaw I'm going to move right
| | 08:12 | down about here, right where the jaw
would go for the actual character.
| | 08:16 | And that's pretty much it for the adjustments.
| | 08:18 | Now what I want to do is move to the
next step which is binding, and so if I
| | 08:22 | click on Binding, there is an Objects
field here, and the Objects field is asking
| | 08:26 | for what mesh should I bind this
character object to, and when I drag the
| | 08:31 | SPACEDUDE mesh into the binding field,
it automatically creates a skin object.
| | 08:36 | The other thing that it does is it adds
a skin weight tag, and the weight tag and
| | 08:41 | the Skin object are what bind
the skeleton to the character.
| | 08:45 | Now I can switch to the Animate mode and
double-check my work, and this is where
| | 08:49 | the magic starts to happen.
| | 08:51 | I can now switch into Animate mode
and I can move these rig pieces around.
| | 08:55 | Now there's a really handy display
function here, I don't need to be able to see
| | 08:58 | the joints, all I really want to see
are the Control objects, so I go to the
| | 09:02 | Display option and I can go in the
viewport, only show me the Controllers, and
| | 09:08 | that hides all of the components, the
joints and things like that, only shows
| | 09:12 | you the Controllers, that makes it a
much more simplified view, because I don't
| | 09:15 | want to ever accidentally select a joint.
| | 09:18 | So now I can click on this hand and
move it around, and I can see that I've
| | 09:22 | great rig here, and my arm moves
around just fine, I'll undo that, Command+Z
| | 09:27 | or Ctrl+Z. Now I can grab the foot
and double-check that, I accidentally
| | 09:32 | grabbed the mesh there, I want to grab
the foot controller, and I can grab that
| | 09:35 | guy and move it around, you can see
that we've got some great action there on
| | 09:39 | his butt and his feet.
| | 09:40 | And so that's working just fine.
| | 09:42 | And there may be times, depending on
your character mesh, that you'll need to
| | 09:45 | modify the weighting for that, and you
can do that using the Skin Weight tag,
| | 09:49 | double-clicking in that takes you right
into the Weight tool and allows you to
| | 09:52 | start painting on the weights, the
weights are what control how the joints are
| | 09:56 | bound to the mesh, and what joints
influence what parts of the mesh.
| | 10:00 | I have got a pretty good weight
here, so I am going to believe leave
| | 10:02 | these weights alone.
| | 10:03 | To get out of the Joint tool, I can
simply switchback to the move, hit E on the
| | 10:06 | keyboard, and I can grab my Character object
again, and I'm good to go.
| | 10:10 | So that's really how simple it is to use the
Character object, but there are limitations.
| | 10:15 | For example, it doesn't do facial rigs,
in that situation there really is no
| | 10:18 | substitute for true character rigging
specialist, but this exciting new feature
| | 10:22 | will get your creations
moving in no time at all.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the CMotion system for creating parametric movement| 00:00 | Once your character is rigged using the
Character object, creating walk cycles
| | 00:04 | is easy using this CMotion object.
| | 00:06 | CMotion is a system of actions or
animators that can be applied objects through
| | 00:10 | the interface in the CMotion object.
| | 00:12 | What I have here is a simple
character that was rigged using the Character
| | 00:16 | object, and the controls are all in
position and he's all bound up and ready to roll.
| | 00:20 | If I select the Character object and go
to the Object properties, there is a very
| | 00:25 | tantalizing button here called
Add Walk, let's click it right now.
| | 00:28 | When I do that, you see that the arms
and legs of my character have shifted, and
| | 00:32 | if I hit play, my character is walking,
it's awesome, it's literally that easy
| | 00:37 | to get your character walking.
| | 00:38 | Now there are some issues, the issue
that we have to deal with is that a little
| | 00:43 | bit of a bug here in the
positioning of these arm controllers.
| | 00:47 | Now you'll notice that they are down
below the ground plane and I need them to
| | 00:50 | be up here, you can see my arm is trying to
reach down towards there, that's the
| | 00:53 | IK taking over and pulling my arms down,
and what I want to do is raise these guys up.
| | 00:58 | Now unfortunately, if I grab them and
simply try to move them, I can't move them
| | 01:01 | at all because the CMotion
object is controlling their positions.
| | 01:03 | So what I have to do is make a tweak
to that in the CMotion object, so let's
| | 01:07 | select CMotion, and in the Object
properties let's raise this up, there is an
| | 01:12 | Object field, I need to scroll down
until I find the actual controller for that
| | 01:17 | object, and that is R_IK_Arm_nb, and
there's also an L_IK_Arm_nb and the
| | 01:23 | nb stands for non bendy.
| | 01:25 | When I select a controller here in
the Object window, I can now go to Vert
| | 01:29 | property and adjust the Vert property
and raise that up, and you can see as I
| | 01:33 | raise it up, there's a point where it
catches up with the arm, and it gives a
| | 01:36 | little bend in the elbow,
and that looks a lot nicer.
| | 01:38 | Let's find the L_IK_Arm_nb, and there
it is right there, and I'll do the same
| | 01:43 | thing, I'll adjust the Vert controller up,
and I'll just eyeball their
| | 01:46 | position, I don't want it to be
exactly the same, because I want it to be a
| | 01:49 | little bit more organic.
| | 01:50 | And now when I scrub through the
animation you see that the arms are behaving
| | 01:54 | correctly and it's really nice.
| | 01:55 | I could also adjust a little horizontal
movement left and right if I needed to,
| | 01:59 | undo Command+Z or Ctrl+Z. So the
interface here, there is an action pulldown
| | 02:05 | here, and these actions are all of the
different types of properties I can apply
| | 02:08 | to each of the objects
in the Object field here.
| | 02:10 | Now one of the things I want to do is I
want to tweak this Walk Cycle and give
| | 02:13 | him a little bit more hip motion, and
so what I need to do is add something
| | 02:17 | to the torso, this Torso object here,
and I am going to add little bit of twist
| | 02:20 | to it, so his hips rotate back and forth.
| | 02:22 | And the way I am going to do that is
by scrolling up and finding the Torso
| | 02:26 | object, and there it is, Torso controller.
| | 02:28 | And then I'm going to go to my Action
pulldown, and I am going to find the Twist
| | 02:31 | (R, Y), and it's going to
rotate it around its Y axis.
| | 02:35 | And if I select that, nothing happens,
that's because I need to apply it.
| | 02:38 | So I am going to click the Add button,
and make sure you have this selected
| | 02:41 | before you click Add.
| | 02:42 | So I click Add right here, and you notice
that there is a slight shift over here,
| | 02:46 | but I don't see the action added,
that's because it added it all the way down
| | 02:49 | here at the bottom, and that's just one
of the characteristics of that torso.
| | 02:52 | So let's select the Twist, and move it
up through the hierarchy, all the way up
| | 02:57 | to the torso and drop it right below
the lift, and that yellow line indicates
| | 03:01 | where it was going to go.
| | 03:02 | And now what I can do is hit play here,
you can see I have got a little bit of
| | 03:06 | rotation on that, and as I adjust the
twist, I can crank that value up and give
| | 03:10 | him a lot more rotation in there.
| | 03:12 | And just to show you what the interface
for the twist looks like, let's scroll
| | 03:15 | that down and let's stop playback.
| | 03:17 | We have got an incoming, and then the
trough of the motion, and an outgoing and
| | 03:21 | these two points need to loop,
otherwise we will get a hitch in our motion, and
| | 03:25 | this is the maximum value and that's
the minimum value, and it's based on this
| | 03:29 | rotation value here.
| | 03:30 | And I can also introduce little bit
variation, but that would break the loop,
| | 03:32 | and so I will leave it alone.
| | 03:34 | Now what I want to do is to
get my character really moving.
| | 03:36 | I have got a nice little twist in his
walk, and his steps are looking pretty
| | 03:40 | cool, but now I want to get him walking
off of his mark, he is stuck at ground
| | 03:43 | zero right now, and I want to
have him walk out into the scene.
| | 03:46 | If I go back into CMotion object and
go to the Object properties, there's a
| | 03:50 | Walk pulldown here, and you can see
it defaults to Static, that means the
| | 03:53 | character will stay in position.
| | 03:55 | I could change it to Line, and he'll walk off
his mark, and let's rewind back to 0 and hit play.
| | 03:59 | You can see he walks right off
his mark and that's pretty cool.
| | 04:02 | But there's a really even better
option, and that's the Path option, and path
| | 04:06 | allows me to generate a spline and
place it in this field and have my character
| | 04:10 | walk along that spline.
| | 04:12 | So let's do that, I am going to go to
the top view, and in the top field let's
| | 04:15 | back out just a bit.
| | 04:16 | I'm going to draw a B-Spline, and I
like to use B-Splines when I am making
| | 04:19 | motion paths, because it's very hard to put a
kink in a B-Spline, I want a very smooth path.
| | 04:24 | Let's draw out a path here, just
clicking with that, and it doesn't really
| | 04:27 | matter how long it is, and let's
switchback to the Perspective view here, and
| | 04:30 | let's get out of Point mode, we are
done with the points on that spline now.
| | 04:34 | Now if I go back to the CMotion
object, and in this path field if I drag the
| | 04:37 | spline, watch what happens to my character;
| | 04:40 | it jumps to the start of
this spline and when I hit play,
| | 04:44 | nice, my character is walking along
that spline. And I can have him walk all
| | 04:47 | the way to the end, it's just based on
the timeframe of my loop here, and I am
| | 04:51 | only looping 90 frames, so he stops at 90
frames and jumps back to the beginning again.
| | 04:55 | And one thing you will notice about it,
is that his feet are actually through the
| | 04:58 | floor and that's based on the relative
position of the control points in the
| | 05:01 | rig, and so in order to fix that I'm
going to go in to the spline, back to Point
| | 05:05 | mode, select a single point and hit
Command+A or Ctrl+A to grab all the points,
| | 05:09 | and then raise them up and
I'll do that in the side view.
| | 05:12 | What I want to do is to back out a
little bit, so I can see the handles, and I
| | 05:17 | am going to raise that up until
his feet are in the ground plane.
| | 05:20 | This blue line represents the ground plane.
| | 05:21 | And now when I scrub through you can
see that his feet will line up nicely
| | 05:24 | with the ground plane.
| | 05:26 | And then, I am going to orbit around a
little bit, and see his whole walk cycle,
| | 05:30 | and now his feet are touching the
ground plane and not going through.
| | 05:32 | There's one additional feature I want
to show you, let's select the CMotion and
| | 05:36 | go to the Steps option, and the steps
allow me to control exactly where the
| | 05:41 | character puts his feet on each of
the steps he makes along this path.
| | 05:44 | So what I want to do is, I am going to
expand the range of time that I've got
| | 05:47 | going on here, it's 90 frames right now.
| | 05:49 | Let's make this out to 600 frames,
and then expand the preview range.
| | 05:53 | Now you can see that I've got a
character, he walks all the way, he hits the
| | 05:56 | end of the spline probably around
frame 250 or so, it's right about there.
| | 06:01 | And so let's bring this down
to a 245 for the preview range.
| | 06:05 | And then that gives me enough time to get to the
end of the spline before it loops back again.
| | 06:08 | So now what I want to do is I want to
generate steps, now there are two options
| | 06:11 | here, generate Steps, Hubs, or Steps and
Hubs, and I want to generate Steps, and
| | 06:16 | I am going to generate all
the steps for his motion.
| | 06:20 | Now there's a slight bug, you are
going to notice, when I click the Generate
| | 06:22 | Steps option, it's going to create the
steps but I'm going to have a whole
| | 06:26 | bunch extra ones, and I am
going to show you how to fix that.
| | 06:28 | Now how many steps it makes, and how
long it takes, depends on how long your
| | 06:32 | spline is and how long your animation
is, but you could see that I have got a
| | 06:35 | bunch of extra steps out here.
| | 06:36 | Now, this may or may not
do this on your machine.
| | 06:39 | When I was working and preparing these
files on my laptop, it didn't do it. When
| | 06:41 | I got here on the
recording station, it did do it.
| | 06:43 | And so what I want to do is show you,
how to get rid of those steps, because
| | 06:46 | they're unnecessary.
| | 06:47 | So if you twirl open the CMotion steps
group here that was added when we clicked
| | 06:51 | the Generate Steps, there is this
Torso controller here and then these little
| | 06:54 | foot icon objects, and you can see
there's some for right and left.
| | 06:58 | And if I go through these groups, if I
get out of Point mode, let's click that,
| | 07:01 | if I get out of Point mode and select
these objects, and I am going to hold down
| | 07:04 | the Option key and turn both dots red at
once, and I'll turn this group red, and
| | 07:09 | you'll see that a part of the red steps on
that side disappeared, and I will make
| | 07:13 | this group red, I will make this
group red, and I'll make this group red.
| | 07:16 | You can see that cleans up and gets rid
of all the extra steps, and when I select these
| | 07:20 | guys, I will hold down the Shift key,
and grab them and then hit Delete, I don't
| | 07:23 | need those steps, they are just extras.
| | 07:25 | And now I have just a clean group of
steps for the right leg and the left leg.
| | 07:29 | Now the beauty of these steps is I
can move them around, and if I scrub
| | 07:32 | through my animation, you can see
the character is placing his foot where
| | 07:35 | those steps are in space.
| | 07:36 | What I can do now is I can come
into the window here, in the Editor view, and
| | 07:40 | I can grab one of the
steps and I can move it around.
| | 07:42 | I am going to raise it up as if my
character is going to step on an object or
| | 07:46 | step over an object, take this one and
raise it up a bit as well and have it be
| | 07:50 | just a little bit down, so he is going
to step up and then down, and then back
| | 07:53 | down to the ground again.
| | 07:54 | You can see as I scrub through the
animation now, when he hits this point, he is
| | 07:58 | going to raise up, down, and back down again.
| | 08:01 | Now you notice that his torso didn't
move, I'd want to go back and generate
| | 08:04 | hubs for this as well, in order
to get his torso to move correctly.
| | 08:08 | And I am not going to worry about that
right now, but just know that when it
| | 08:10 | comes time to make his
torso move based on steps;
| | 08:13 | you want to generate steps
and hubs for the character.
| | 08:15 | The CMotion object is not just for characters;
| | 08:18 | think of it much like the text
animators in After Effects, with the amazing
| | 08:20 | fact that they can be combined with
other object types to easily create cyclic
| | 08:25 | motion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The newly designed Muscle system| 00:01 | In animals and humans too, our skin is
stretched over muscles that give our body shape.
| | 00:06 | In R13, the new muscle system can give your
characters any kind of shape you can imagine.
| | 00:10 | What I have here is a very simple arm
setup. I've got some joints and an arm
| | 00:14 | mesh, so you can see that I have
animated it, so that at frame 30 the arm
| | 00:17 | curls up, and then it goes back down again
by frame 60, so let's rewind it back to time 0.
| | 00:21 | What I want to do is, I want to have
this bicep deform as the arm curls up and
| | 00:26 | that will be a much more natural
state than just simply the rigid movement
| | 00:30 | that it has right now.
| | 00:31 | So I need to use a muscle to do that,
let's go to the Character menu and add
| | 00:34 | in a Muscle object, and the Muscle
object, when I first add it, is going to be
| | 00:38 | huge, so what I want to do is I'm
going to need to model this muscle into
| | 00:42 | position on the arm.
| | 00:44 | Before I can do that, I need to move
these yellow balls called anchors, and
| | 00:47 | these anchors need to be in position on the
character where the muscle needs to start and stop.
| | 00:53 | So let's switch to the Move tool, and
I'm going to go to the side view, I'm
| | 00:57 | going to grab each anchor
and move them into position.
| | 01:00 | I want the muscle to start about
there and to stop about right there.
| | 01:04 | If I zoom in on that area, you can
see it's a good position for the bicep.
| | 01:08 | Now let's do that in a front view as
well, and the bicep should actually start
| | 01:13 | probably right about over there, and
they're about right there as well, there we go.
| | 01:17 | Now you can see our muscle is still
way too big and we need to tweak it now.
| | 01:21 | So I'm going to go into Point mode, and I'm
going to scale the points of this object.
| | 01:25 | Now adding muscles is a lot like modeling,
you need to manipulate points and the
| | 01:29 | Muscle objects have points.
| | 01:31 | You can actually add more segments as
well, we've got three rows of points and I
| | 01:34 | think that's plenty for this type of
shape, so we're going to start off by going
| | 01:37 | into my Selection tool, making sure that
Only Select Visible Elements is turned
| | 01:42 | off, and I'll grab the top row of points,
hit T on the keyboard, and I'm going to
| | 01:47 | scale them way down, almost
to a complete dot of points.
| | 01:51 | Now I'm going to do the same thing for
the base, grab just those points and hit
| | 01:54 | T on the keyboard and scale
them way down into position.
| | 01:57 | Then I'll grab the middle row points.
| | 02:01 | Make sure that I don't have any
additional point selected. Ooh!
| | 02:04 | I can see I made a mistake, and that's
why it's very important to orbit around
| | 02:07 | your objects, so I'm going to undo
until I find where I made my mistake.
| | 02:10 | You can see there is where I made my
mistake, when I was scaling those points
| | 02:14 | down, I accidentally selected some points
from the back side of my muscle.
| | 02:17 | So let's hold on the Ctrl key, deselect
those, and then now I know that I've only
| | 02:21 | got that top ring of points, so I can
hit T and scale them down, I can orbit
| | 02:25 | around just to make sure that
haven't messed up at all, and there we go.
| | 02:28 | Now I can grab those points, and I'm
using the spacebar by the way to get back
| | 02:33 | and forth between the Scale
tool and the Selection tool.
| | 02:35 | Now I can hit T again to get the Scale
tool back up, and scale those guys down,
| | 02:40 | and now I can grab just that middle row
of points, there we ago, and hit T and
| | 02:45 | scale those guys down into position.
| | 02:47 | So what I'm looking for is the relaxed
state of the muscle. What is the muscle
| | 02:51 | shaped like when the arm is at its
fully extended or fully open position?
| | 02:55 | And I'm going to move these points over
just a bit and back into position there,
| | 02:59 | and just scale them down just
a bit, and that's not too bad.
| | 03:02 | I'm going to grab the bottom row of points
also and just scale them down a little tighter.
| | 03:06 | Let's hide the arm skin a little bit,
so we can see our muscle better.
| | 03:09 | I'm going to hold down the Option key
or Alt on the PC, and click twice on these
| | 03:12 | dots to turn them both red.
| | 03:14 | Now we can grab just those points at
the top and scale them down, and now I can
| | 03:19 | grab just these points, I think
those are actually pretty good.
| | 03:22 | Now this next step is very important.
| | 03:24 | In the Muscle object, I'm going to go
into the Object properties, and this Length
| | 03:29 | field tells you what the relaxed
state of the muscle is going to be.
| | 03:32 | Let's hit Set, and you'll see that it
shifted dramatically down to 20 units from
| | 03:35 | 200, that now reflects the existing length of
our Muscle object, and that's very important.
| | 03:42 | Now what we need to do is to link the
muscle up to the joints that are going to
| | 03:46 | help it deform, and so in order to do
that we're going to take the joints from
| | 03:49 | the Object Manager and bring
them into these fields down here.
| | 03:52 | So I'm going to start with the forearm and
drag it down into this field, and when I
| | 03:56 | do that, I now have my forearm there, let's
get out of Point mode and back to Model
| | 04:00 | mode, so we can see our
anchor points a little bit better.
| | 04:03 | And now I can take the shoulder and drag
it into this field, and you'll see that the
| | 04:06 | axis shifted for that, now
I've got a linkage here.
| | 04:10 | Now this button right here is very
important, Auto Align, I'm going to uncheck
| | 04:13 | that button, and when I do that, now my
muscle is not twisting at all, doing weird
| | 04:19 | things, and if I leave Auto Align turned
on, you'll see that as the joint moves,
| | 04:24 | the muscle twists and does this weird
thing, and I don't want it to do that.
| | 04:27 | So I'm going to turn off Auto Align,
and now what we need to do is find
| | 04:31 | the compressed state.
| | 04:32 | If I go to Compressed and inactivate
that, I'm going to uncheck Auto Volume.
| | 04:36 | Auto Volume tries to automatically
figure out what the muscle looks like when
| | 04:39 | it changes shape, and we're going to uncheck
that, because we want to define that manually.
| | 04:43 | So when I do that, I now get this set
field here, I'm going to scrub forward to
| | 04:47 | the peak of the motion, and we're
going to model this muscle into shape.
| | 04:52 | So let's start off by going to Point mode,
and then we're going to grab just the
| | 04:55 | points in the middle of the muscle, and
we're going to rotate them down in the
| | 04:58 | position, they are a little bit twisted
right now, and then we're going to grab
| | 05:01 | the points that are at the base, you
can see that ring there, that shouldn't be
| | 05:04 | shaped like that either, that's
because those things move as the joint moves.
| | 05:07 | So now I've rotated those points down.
| | 05:09 | Now I can hit T on the keyboard
and scale them down into position.
| | 05:12 | Now I can grab the points in the middle
of the muscle, and we're going to scale
| | 05:15 | those up just a bit and then move them,
we want that muscle to shift position
| | 05:20 | and bulge outward like that, let's
rotate it up just a bit, there we go,
| | 05:24 | grab just the red handle and rotate
those guys up just a bit, that's pretty good.
| | 05:28 | Now we go back to the Muscle object, and
we're going to set that Compressed length.
| | 05:32 | Now when we switch over to Animate mode,
you can see that as we move the muscle,
| | 05:37 | it changes shape over the rotation of the
joint, and that's the behavior that we want.
| | 05:42 | Let's turn on our mesh for the arm again,
make it visible, hold down the Option
| | 05:46 | key to do them both at the same time,
let's scrub through the animation, you can
| | 05:49 | see that the muscle pokes up out of
the skin and that's very painful, we're
| | 05:53 | going to fix that in a minute.
| | 05:54 | More importantly though is that the
muscle isn't yet deforming the skin, and so
| | 05:57 | we need to fix that as well.
| | 05:58 | So let's rewind back to 0, and I'm going
to add into the scene something called
| | 06:03 | an MSkin object, so I go to the
Character menu and go to MSkin, and the MSkin
| | 06:09 | tells the muscle what mesh to affect,
and so we're going to take the MSkin and
| | 06:13 | add it into the hierarchy here, and
this is very important, you want to put it
| | 06:16 | right below the Skin object, and it
should go below the skin, so the skin gets
| | 06:21 | deformed first, and then the MSkin moves
the deformed skin, and because I had my
| | 06:26 | muscle selected already, the MSkin in
the muscle field already auto-populated
| | 06:30 | this field here, but if I hadn't had
my muscle selected, I would have to drag
| | 06:33 | that Muscle object in.
| | 06:35 | Now, when I move my arm, I get a
bulge in the bicep, and it pokes through
| | 06:40 | and that looks extremely painful, so to fix
that we're going to hide our Muscle object.
| | 06:45 | They don't need to be visible, so I'm
going to hold down the Option key and make
| | 06:47 | both dots red, so that my muscle
disappears, and now I can scrub that animation,
| | 06:53 | that's really all there is to it.
| | 06:54 | Placing the muscles is a lot like
modeling, and you really have to study your
| | 06:57 | anatomy well and then approximate
those muscle positions to get the
| | 07:00 | deformation you want.
| | 07:02 | Notice I've got a weird looking bulge
here, I can go back in and tweak those
| | 07:05 | settings easily and that's really the
beauty of the muscle process is that
| | 07:08 | it's nondestructive.
| | 07:09 | The Muscle object is not just for
characters, it can be used to deform lots of
| | 07:13 | different objects, and it can
be rendered with textures too.
| | 07:15 | Experiment and have fun!
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The new Collision deformer| 00:00 | Have you ever wanted to create a
trampoline-like effect where a ball or a
| | 00:04 | character causes a surface to cave
inward and then spring back again? Or how
| | 00:07 | about footprints in the snow?
| | 00:09 | Well, that's exactly what
the Collision deformer is for.
| | 00:12 | So I am going to create a very simple
scene here, I am going to add a Sphere,
| | 00:15 | and then I'll hold down the Ctrl key
and duplicate that sphere, and let's call
| | 00:18 | these Collider, and let's arrow
down and call this one Deformer.
| | 00:24 | Now the Collider sphere we're going
to move out off to the right, and what I
| | 00:28 | want to do is have this Collider
sphere collide with this Deformer object and
| | 00:31 | create an indentation in it.
| | 00:34 | Before I do that though, let's make the
Collider sphere just a little bit smaller
| | 00:38 | and let's bring it down in
radius, that's pretty good.
| | 00:42 | I want to be able to see the
deformation when it happens.
| | 00:45 | Now what I want to do is go to the
Deformer objects and add in a Collision object.
| | 00:50 | And the Collision object, it's a Deformer.
| | 00:52 | It has a purple icon that means it
wants to modify its parent or its peers, so
| | 00:57 | let's take the Collision and make
it a child of the Deformer sphere.
| | 01:01 | Now nothing really happened,
that's because we have to tell the
| | 01:03 | Collision deformer what object is
going to collide with this object to
| | 01:08 | create the deformation.
| | 01:09 | So in the Collider field of the
Collision deformer, I am going to drag my
| | 01:12 | Collider sphere into that field.
| | 01:15 | Once again, it looks like nothing has
happened, that's because the objects
| | 01:18 | aren't touching, so let's take the
Collider object and move it towards the
| | 01:21 | Deformer sphere, and you'll see as I do
that it moves the surface of the Deformer
| | 01:27 | sphere, and that's the effect we are looking for.
| | 01:29 | You can see as I move it in
there, it creates an indentation.
| | 01:32 | Eventually as it passes through, it
passes a threshold, then it pops on and
| | 01:37 | grabs that, and that's
actually really cool animation.
| | 01:39 | It looks just like a cell grabbing onto a
bacteria or a virus or something like that.
| | 01:44 | Now, I've got another simple
scene set up here, and this is a ball
| | 01:48 | bouncing across a plane.
| | 01:50 | And this ball bouncing across a plane, I
want to have it as it passes through the scene;
| | 01:56 | I want to have it leave
indentations in the plane as it passes through.
| | 02:01 | In order to be able to see the plane a
little bit better, let's hide the grid.
| | 02:04 | I'll go to the Filter
menu and turn off the Grid.
| | 02:07 | That way we are just seeing the plane object.
| | 02:10 | Go to the Deformers and add in a
Collision deformer, and remember the Collision
| | 02:14 | deformer wants to modify its parent or its peer.
| | 02:17 | So I select it and make it a child of
the plane, because I want the plane to be
| | 02:21 | deformed by the sphere.
| | 02:22 | Then I'm going to go to the Collider field of
the Collision deformer and add in this sphere.
| | 02:28 | Now when I animate it, you can see
that the ball creates an indentation, it
| | 02:33 | does some weird stuff as it moves through
the scene, but that's just about what we want.
| | 02:38 | We need to make a couple of tweaks to
the values in the field, so that the ball
| | 02:42 | doesn't get swallowed up.
| | 02:44 | We want it to leave the marks
in the plane as it goes through.
| | 02:48 | Let's go to the Advanced tab of the
Collision deformer, now first thing we want
| | 02:52 | to do is turn up the Steps.
| | 02:53 | The Steps control is really how
accurately the deformation happens, and the more
| | 02:58 | accurate the deformation, the harder it
is for the computer to draw it, so you
| | 03:01 | want to be really careful with that.
| | 03:02 | So let's scrub through to the first
indentation, there we go, and it's going to
| | 03:07 | pass through, so if we click right
here and let's crank the steps upward.
| | 03:11 | And I think 2, let's go 3, 4, 5, there
we go, that's pretty good right there.
| | 03:16 | And you can see now when the ball hits;
| | 03:18 | it doesn't pass through until
it gets further into the cycle.
| | 03:22 | Let's go farther through and adjust that upward.
| | 03:24 | We are also going to
adjust the Relax a little bit.
| | 03:29 | Bring that up to about 20 I think, and
let's grab the Stretch, and then adjust
| | 03:35 | that up just a bit, and now we want to
increase the size of the ball, and this is
| | 03:39 | the size of the Collider object, and this
creates a sort of invisible cage around
| | 03:44 | the Collider object, and you can see my
computer having a hard time doing that,
| | 03:48 | and you can see that's because of
the amount of steps that I have.
| | 03:52 | Let's bring everything back to the default.
| | 03:53 | So I am going to right-click on the
Stretch and go Reset to Default, and then I
| | 03:57 | am going to right-click on the Relax
and reset that to default, because I'm
| | 04:00 | having a little bit of a hard time
getting it to playback correctly, there we go.
| | 04:04 | Now what I want to do is I want to
have it leave these marks in the plane as
| | 04:08 | it bounces through.
| | 04:09 | So in order to do that if I go to the
Object field, let's bring this over here a
| | 04:13 | bit, I want to take the Restore Shape down to 0.
| | 04:16 | Restore Shape tries to get the
object a snap back to its original value.
| | 04:20 | And if I bring this down to 0, now
when the sphere comes through again, it's
| | 04:26 | going to hit its mark and leave
indentations in the plane, as it passes through,
| | 04:31 | and that is really an amazing thing.
| | 04:34 | So this is something I've always
wanted to be able to do, and it's one of my
| | 04:36 | favorite new features in R13.
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|
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4. New and Revised ShadersMograph Multi Shader | 00:00 | The Multi Shader is part of the Mograph
component, so it's available if you have
| | 00:04 | the Broadcast or Studio versions of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:07 | What it does is allow you to
take a series of images in a folder or
| | 00:10 | layers in a Photoshop file, or frames
from a QuickTime movie, and assign them
| | 00:13 | to individual Clones.
| | 00:15 | This gives you the ability to
create amazing mosaics in 3D space.
| | 00:18 | So what I have here is a very simple
scene, I've got an image here from the
| | 00:21 | beach on a recent vacation, and I've got a grid
of clones, I am going to zoom in on the clones.
| | 00:26 | You can see that's a very small plane
that's repeated over and over again and I
| | 00:30 | am going to use this Cloner group to
create my image mosaic, and if I select the
| | 00:34 | Cloner, you can go to Object properties,
and you can see that it's set to Grid
| | 00:37 | Array, a count of 36x36x1,
so it's no depth on the Z axis.
| | 00:41 | Now an Image Mosaic uses a bunch of
seemingly random images and crates another
| | 00:46 | larger image by averaging the colors
of the source images and mapping them to
| | 00:49 | their corresponding colors,
and that is a lot of math!
| | 00:52 | But luckily the Multi Shader does all
the heavy lifting for us, but first we
| | 00:56 | need a folder full of images.
| | 00:57 | So I am going to navigate out to the Finder
here, and show you my folder full of images.
| | 01:01 | Now I am in the assets for this
chapter, in the tex folder, and there is a
| | 01:04 | multishader folder here, and this is
just a bunch of random images that I've
| | 01:07 | taken over the years and
just pulled out of iPhoto.
| | 01:10 | And the type of images is not important,
what is important is the number of images.
| | 01:15 | The more images you have, the
more interesting your mosaic will be.
| | 01:17 | Now I've only got 103 images in here,
and I've done that just for size
| | 01:22 | purposes for the downloadable files for the
members, but the more images you have, the better.
| | 01:27 | If I had a thousand pictures, the image
mosaic would come out much more interesting.
| | 01:30 | So let's go back to CINEMA 4D, and now
that I'm here in CINEMA 4D, I am going to
| | 01:34 | go and do the first step of the process.
| | 01:36 | I need to create a material
that has the Multi Shader in it.
| | 01:39 | So let's go to the Material Manager,
I'll double-click in here, and I'm going to
| | 01:44 | name this material and call it Multi.
| | 01:47 | Now in the Color channel of the Multi
material, I'm going to load in the Multi Shader.
| | 01:51 | So I go to the Texture pulldown, and go
to Mograph, and then Multi Shader, and now
| | 01:56 | the material gets brighter
but nothing really has happened.
| | 01:58 | That's because the Multi Shader
doesn't know what images to use.
| | 02:01 | So let's click on this swatch here to
get into the Multi Shader properties and
| | 02:04 | there's some very important controls here.
| | 02:06 | So the Add from Folder is
a really great new feature.
| | 02:08 | It allows me to load in a whole
folder full of images all at once, without
| | 02:12 | having to do them one at a
time, that's really a timesaver.
| | 02:16 | The Add and Clear buttons allow you to
add or remove images from the stack here.
| | 02:20 | Now right now we've just got two,
we could also click in here and add a
| | 02:23 | separate image, but we are going to use
the Add from Folder to load in all the
| | 02:26 | images automatically.
| | 02:27 | So let's click on that, I'm inside of
the tex folder, in the asset files, and so
| | 02:32 | I go to the multishader and hit Open.
| | 02:35 | And how long it takes to do this
process depends on how large your images are
| | 02:38 | and how many images you have.
| | 02:40 | But mine loaded up really quick, because
I sized them down to about 306x512 and
| | 02:44 | each one is maintaining the aspect ratio.
| | 02:47 | So I automatically sized all these
images to be about 512 pixels large.
| | 02:51 | So they're all about the same
size, so they load in very quickly.
| | 02:55 | Now you can see that I've got all of
those images loaded in, I can scroll all
| | 02:58 | the way through those images.
| | 03:00 | Now if I find one that I don't want to
use, let's say this one for example, I
| | 03:03 | can make it Active, or I
could click the Remove button.
| | 03:06 | Also, if I want it to show up in a
particular place on the mosaic, or on a
| | 03:09 | particular clone, I can move it up
or down in the hierarchy, and that's a
| | 03:12 | very useful feature.
| | 03:13 | I'm going to leave this active
for now and go back up to the top and
| | 03:16 | there's one last thing I want to
talk about here and that's the Mode.
| | 03:19 | The Mode is how the Shader is going to
be using these images, and we want to
| | 03:24 | use the images to create an Average Color
(Euclidean Color Distance) and this is very important.
| | 03:29 | If you don't turn this on, the
mosaic feature will not work.
| | 03:32 | So we want to use Average Color
(Euclidean Color Distance) and that's what's
| | 03:35 | going to give us our average of all
of these images to create that mosaic.
| | 03:39 | Now what we need to do is to take this
Multi material and apply it to the clone,
| | 03:43 | not to the Cloner object, but to the
individual clone itself, and that's a very
| | 03:46 | important distinction.
| | 03:47 | We're going to take this, and drag it right
onto the plane that's underneath the Cloner object.
| | 03:52 | And when I do that, it shows up
on all of the individual clones.
| | 03:55 | Let's bring up the Interactive Render
Region, Option+R or Alt+R on the PC, and
| | 03:59 | let's size it up, so it's
covering the entire screen.
| | 04:03 | I am going to also raise the Quality
level up here as well, there we go.
| | 04:06 | So now you can see that one material
is showing up on all of the clones, but
| | 04:10 | it's not quite doing what we want.
| | 04:12 | The next step in the process is to add
in something called a Shader effector.
| | 04:15 | The Shader effector is a Mograph
component that allows you to modify clones
| | 04:18 | based on an image or color.
| | 04:20 | And so I go to the Mograph menu, and I
go to the Effector submenu and grab in
| | 04:25 | the Shader effector.
| | 04:26 | Because I have my Cloner selected
already, the effector went right into this
| | 04:30 | effector field on the Cloner object.
| | 04:32 | You can see that it has already started
to modify my clones, and that's because
| | 04:35 | the Shader effector, by
default, modifies the scale.
| | 04:38 | Now, we don't need to modify the scale
in this place, so we are going to turn
| | 04:41 | that off, and you can see my clones
go back to their original option.
| | 04:44 | Now the next thing I want to do is also
I want to turn off the Alpha/Strength,
| | 04:47 | that's going to cause the images to
appear a little bit faded, so I'll turn
| | 04:50 | that off for a second.
| | 04:51 | And you are not going to notice
an effect from turning off the Use
| | 04:54 | Alpha/Strength yet, but that's going to
be very important down the road, so we
| | 04:56 | want to disable that right now.
| | 04:58 | Next, we need to have the image that we
are going to be using as the basis for
| | 05:02 | the mosaic, which is this beach scene here.
| | 05:04 | We need to get that onto these clones.
| | 05:07 | And we need it to be the exact
same size as the entire Cloner.
| | 05:10 | So what I am going to do is take this
Base Image material, and I am going to drag
| | 05:13 | it across to the Cloner object.
| | 05:14 | Now when I do that, nothing happens,
and that's because I need to first resize
| | 05:19 | this image and then tell
the Shader effector to use it.
| | 05:21 | So what I want to do is go to the
Texture Tag that's on the Cloner, and go to the
| | 05:24 | Projection method where it says UVW
Mapping, and change that to be Flat.
| | 05:29 | Now before I do anything else, I want
to go to Texture mode here, and this
| | 05:34 | yellow grid that you're seeing here
represents how the texture is being
| | 05:37 | applied to the object.
| | 05:38 | I want this Texture grid to be the exact
same size as the entire range of clones.
| | 05:43 | So if I go to the Tag menu in the Object
Manager, and I go to Fit to Object, it's
| | 05:48 | going to ask me, Do you want sub-
objects to be included? Yes I do.
| | 05:51 | So now, this texture is now the exact
same size as the entire Clone Array.
| | 05:56 | Now what I need to do is to tell the Shader
effector to use this image to modify the clones.
| | 06:01 | So I'll go to the Shader effector, and
under the Shading option I am going to go
| | 06:05 | to the Custom Shader and tell
it to use the Color channel.
| | 06:08 | When I do that it's asking me
which Texture Tag do you want to use?
| | 06:11 | I want to use the one that's
applied to the Cloner object.
| | 06:14 | So I take this Texture Tag and drag it
right down in here, and as soon as I do
| | 06:18 | that we now get our image mosaic.
| | 06:20 | And you could see that there is an
average color happening here based on the
| | 06:24 | images in that folder, and the source image.
| | 06:27 | And it's really cool, if we zoom in on
this, you can see that all of the images
| | 06:31 | are showing up, and they are being
used based on their average color.
| | 06:35 | So wherever the Multi Shader thinks
that an image represents a color in a given
| | 06:40 | part of the source image, it tries to
find something in that folder that matches
| | 06:43 | that color and use it there, and this
is where that number of images comes in.
| | 06:46 | The more images you have, the more
interesting that Multi Shader will become,
| | 06:50 | and the more closely it will resemble
the source image that you're using as the
| | 06:53 | basis for the mosaic.
| | 06:55 | Another great use for the Shader
will be creating the pages of the book.
| | 06:58 | The Multi Shader can control exactly
which clones get assigned to which texture,
| | 07:01 | making it an incredibly useful tool.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Subsurface Scattering shader | 00:00 | Subsurface scattering refers to
the simulation of the transmission of
| | 00:03 | light through an object.
| | 00:05 | The classic example is a small jade statue.
| | 00:08 | When you shine light on it, the figure
seems to glow from the inside, that's
| | 00:11 | because the light is penetrating into the
stone and bending and bleeding to the outer edges.
| | 00:15 | C4Ds newly redesigned Subsurface Scattering
shader makes this effect much more intuitive.
| | 00:20 | So what I have here is a very simple
scene, there is a 3D character that I
| | 00:24 | created for this movie, and it's just a
simple low poly mesh underneath a hyper
| | 00:27 | NURB object, and let's close
that up and I'll deselect it.
| | 00:30 | Then I've also got some lights in
the scene, so let's back out so we can
| | 00:33 | see what's going on.
| | 00:35 | My character is sitting on a sort of
a coved backdrop that I created using
| | 00:38 | this extrude NURB here, and the lights --
I've got a key light coming in from the
| | 00:42 | object's left-hand side and a fill light
coming in from the object's right-hand side.
| | 00:46 | And Subsurface Scattering works best
on objects that are being illuminated
| | 00:49 | either from the side or from the rear.
| | 00:51 | And so that's why I've got
the lights in this arrangement.
| | 00:53 | Let's zoom back in on our little guy
here, and I am going to deselect that light.
| | 00:57 | Now what we need to do is to apply a
material to this object, and so let's
| | 01:01 | create a new material down here,
and go in the Material Manager, I'll
| | 01:03 | double-click, and let's call this
material SSS, for Subsurface Scattering.
| | 01:08 | Now what I want to do is apply this
material directly to the hyper NURB object,
| | 01:12 | there we go, and our character turns white.
| | 01:14 | Now let's bring up the Interactive
Render Region, so we don't have to keep
| | 01:17 | rendering this scene over and over again.
| | 01:19 | So I'll go Option+R or Alt+R on the PC,
and you can see that I've got the shadows
| | 01:24 | turned on the lights and that's
casting an area-shadow here on the right-hand
| | 01:27 | side, let's turn the Quality up on
Interactive Render Region so we get a little
| | 01:30 | bit better representation of the scene.
| | 01:32 | And now I can deselect
that object in the background.
| | 01:35 | Now, the way Subsurface Scattering
works is, it's best on small objects.
| | 01:40 | You wouldn't want to put
Subsurface Scattering on a building say.
| | 01:43 | Objects that are small in size and partially
translucent allow the light to pass through.
| | 01:47 | That's the kind of object you want to do.
| | 01:48 | So we always want to use it on very small
objects like little statues or things like that.
| | 01:52 | The angle that you photograph it from,
the light that you put on it, all
| | 01:55 | contribute to communicating a very small size.
| | 01:57 | The next thing I want to
talk about is the Render Engine.
| | 02:00 | Right now, I am using the Standard renderer.
| | 02:02 | We are going to switch this over to the
Physical renderer, because that gives us a
| | 02:04 | better result for Subsurface Scattering.
| | 02:06 | Let's go Command+B or Ctrl+B on the
keyboard to bring up the Render Settings and
| | 02:10 | the Render Settings, by default, are set
to Standard, and we're going to switch
| | 02:13 | this over to the Physical renderer.
| | 02:15 | And when I do that you're going to see
the rendering update here, and it gets
| | 02:18 | a little more chunkier, that's
because of the Sampling Quality and the
| | 02:21 | Sampling Method here.
| | 02:22 | And the next thing I want to do is we're
going to turn this from Adaptive to Progressive.
| | 02:27 | And what Progressive does is,
Progressive starts off by giving you a very bad
| | 02:31 | initial image, and then it
continuously refines the image as long as you
| | 02:34 | don't change anything.
| | 02:35 | And so you start off with a very bad
image that gets much better before your eyes.
| | 02:39 | So let's switch this to Progressive
here, and you are going to see that the
| | 02:42 | image will get very, very grainy and
chunky, and then as I go, you can see that
| | 02:45 | the rendering progress down
here is continuing to run.
| | 02:48 | And you can see that the longer I let
this go, the more refined my image becomes.
| | 02:52 | And so we are just going to leave that.
| | 02:53 | Every time we make a change it will go
back to chunky and then refine itself.
| | 02:57 | So let's close up the Render Settings now.
| | 02:58 | Now we need to add the
Subsurface Scattering effect.
| | 03:01 | So let's go to the SSS material, and
we're going to go to the Basic properties
| | 03:06 | and the Subsurface Scattering effect
works best in the Luminance channel.
| | 03:10 | So let's turn on Luminance, and I see
our object is going to go completely
| | 03:13 | white, and the Luminance channel
normally kills shading until you add the
| | 03:16 | Subsurface Scattering into it.
| | 03:18 | So let's go to the Luminance channel,
and in the Texture pulldown here we are
| | 03:21 | going to go to Effects and
then Subsurface Scattering.
| | 03:24 | And as soon as we do that, we are going to
start to see our object come back in shading.
| | 03:28 | So what's happening is the Subsurface
Scattering filter controls what happens in
| | 03:32 | the Falloff areas of the Luminance channel.
| | 03:34 | So you can see now our object appears
to glow a little bit from the inside.
| | 03:38 | Now let's talk a little bit about the
color and the properties of the Subsurface
| | 03:40 | Scattering shader itself.
| | 03:42 | Now I want to make a jade statue out of this guy.
| | 03:44 | So let's go to the Color channel and
start off by making our object green.
| | 03:48 | Now I want to change these values, I am
going to do this about 45 on Red, I'll
| | 03:52 | tab twice to get over to the Green
channel and hit 81 or so, let's do 80 there
| | 03:56 | just to round it off, and I'll hit tab
twice again to do another 45 and that's
| | 04:00 | going to get me a nice rich green color.
| | 04:02 | Now what's happening right now is it
doesn't look very green yet, that's because
| | 04:06 | the Subsurface Scattering is
set to be white by default.
| | 04:09 | And so we need to change
that color next as well.
| | 04:11 | So let's go to the Luminance
channel here, and in the Luminance channel
| | 04:14 | let's raise that up.
| | 04:15 | I'm going to click on the Subsurface
Scattering swatch, and that takes me into
| | 04:19 | the Properties for the Subsurface Scattering.
| | 04:21 | So what I want to do is to change the
color of the Shader first and foremost.
| | 04:25 | Let's take this and bring it down to 0
on blue, and 0 on red, that's going to
| | 04:29 | give us a nice rich green
color for our jade statue.
| | 04:32 | And you can adjust this to taste if you want.
| | 04:35 | We can bring this down if we don't want
quite as much saturation in it, you can
| | 04:37 | see it gets a little bit darker.
| | 04:38 | So I'll leave it about there, 0, 149, 0.
| | 04:41 | Now, the next thing we want to
talk about is the Path Length.
| | 04:44 | The Path Length controls how far
into the object the rays will go.
| | 04:49 | The shorter the Path Length, the darker
the object becomes, the longer the Path
| | 04:52 | Length the brighter the object becomes.
| | 04:54 | So I want this to be a little bit darker here.
| | 04:56 | So I am going to take this Path
Length and adjust it to about 5 cm, that's
| | 05:00 | going to darken my object up just in
the areas on the other side of the object
| | 05:03 | from the key light.
| | 05:05 | The next thing I want to do
is boost up the Strength Value;
| | 05:07 | how intense is the Subsurface
Scattering effect, and that strength is
| | 05:11 | expressed in percentages, and like a
lot of percentage values in CINEMA 4D, it
| | 05:14 | can go beyond 100%.
| | 05:16 | The slider peaks out right there, but
you can input a value here manually, and so
| | 05:19 | I'll go to 200, and that's going to boost
up that effect and that's going to give
| | 05:24 | me a much more intense
Subsurface Scattering effect.
| | 05:27 | There are some advanced effects here
that allow you to tweak the values of the
| | 05:29 | Subsurface Scattering effect, but
in practice, I don't mess with them.
| | 05:32 | There is some great presets here.
| | 05:34 | I've started off with a custom one and
input my values manually, but you can
| | 05:37 | switch to any of these guys and
they make great starting points.
| | 05:40 | I am going to leave mine set to Custom,
and leave the Advanced shaders alone, and
| | 05:44 | now want I want to do is
refine the material a little bit.
| | 05:46 | This object is going to look a lot
better with a little bit of reflection on it.
| | 05:49 | So let's go back up one level,
I'll click on this up arrow here.
| | 05:52 | This takes us up to the main level of
the material, and in the Basic properties
| | 05:56 | on going to activate Reflection.
| | 05:58 | And when I do that, I get a 100% reflective
object, and my little guy turns into a chrome guy.
| | 06:03 | Now that's not what I want,
although it does look kind of cool.
| | 06:06 | I want to dial down the reflection a bit.
| | 06:08 | So let's go to the Reflection property,
and take the Reflection Brightness from
| | 06:11 | 100% down to about maybe 20% or so.
| | 06:14 | You can experiment with this value.
| | 06:16 | What that's going to give us is
a nice little highlight on there.
| | 06:19 | The reason I can see this highlight is
because I've turned on a property in the
| | 06:22 | lights, and I want to explain that real quick.
| | 06:24 | In the Key Light there is under the
Details property, a very important button, and
| | 06:29 | that's this Show in Reflection button.
| | 06:31 | Because I have this light set to be an
area light, I can tell it to show up in
| | 06:34 | the reflection, and that's why you're
seeing this white rectangle here, show up
| | 06:37 | on the surface of my object and it's
very useful for creating these types of
| | 06:40 | reflections on objects.
| | 06:42 | I have the same property
turned on on the Fill Light.
| | 06:44 | So you can see the Subsurface
Scattering effect gives us a very unique look and
| | 06:49 | makes the object feel incredibly small.
| | 06:51 | Now what I am going to do is let the
Progressive Render engine run and refine this image.
| | 06:54 | So you can see there is a point of
diminishing returns with Progressive Render engine.
| | 06:58 | We've hit it in this particular scene
at about the minute and a half mark, we
| | 07:01 | can let this run all day and it would
literally run all day if we let it, but
| | 07:04 | the image won't get much better.
| | 07:06 | But the advantage to using the
Progressive Render engine is that it gives you a
| | 07:09 | very poor result that continuously
refines over time, making it very easy to see
| | 07:13 | changes in a complicated scene.
| | 07:15 | To get back to the Subsurface Scattering,
if you're creating any kind of object
| | 07:18 | that is translucent or allows light
to pass through from the surface to the
| | 07:21 | inside, then the newly redesigned
Subsurface Scattering shader is the way to go.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Brick shader| 00:00 | The Brick shader is one of those
features that really doesn't seem all that
| | 00:02 | interesting, until of course you
actually need to make a brick wall.
| | 00:05 | The redesigned Brick shader in R13
makes this repeating pattern super easy.
| | 00:09 | So I have here a very basic scene, it's
just a Cube object, and it's sitting on a
| | 00:13 | plane that has a stone material
applied to it, and what I want to do is to
| | 00:17 | create a new material for
the brick pattern to reside in.
| | 00:21 | So let's go down here to the Material
Manager, and double-click to create a new
| | 00:24 | material, and I'm going to name this
material Brick, and let's apply this brick
| | 00:30 | material directly to the Cube object.
| | 00:33 | Let's bring up the Interactive Render
Region, Option+R or Alt+R on the PC, and
| | 00:37 | the Interactive Render Region, I've got
the Quality slider turned all the way up
| | 00:40 | here, and I've sized it, so that
I can see my entire brick wall.
| | 00:44 | Let's deselect the cube, so we don't
see these arrows and handles, and then
| | 00:47 | let's select the actual material.
| | 00:49 | I'm going to start off from the
Color channel with the brick material.
| | 00:52 | So let's go into the Color channel, and
in the Texture pulldown go to Surfaces
| | 00:56 | and then Brick at the very top.
| | 00:58 | You can see a pattern of bricks
immediately show up on our object.
| | 01:02 | Let's zoom in just a bit here, just dial
in so we fill the screen little bit more.
| | 01:06 | You can see that the pattern is very
regular and we've got an alternating row of
| | 01:10 | darker bricks everywhere and that's
due to the settings in the Brick shader.
| | 01:13 | Let's go into the Brick shader
by clicking on the swatch here.
| | 01:16 | The Shader has four basic
categories to it, the Shader properties which
| | 01:19 | control the size and shape of the
bricks, the Color properties which control
| | 01:23 | the colors of the bricks, and then
the Gaps which controls what happens in
| | 01:27 | between the bricks, and then the Dirt
property which allows you to make the
| | 01:30 | bricks less pristine.
| | 01:31 | Let's start off in the Shader property,
and I'm happy with the size and scale,
| | 01:35 | but I could also adjust if I wanted to
make my bricks smaller, I could bring the
| | 01:38 | Scale down to say about 15%.
| | 01:40 | You can see that the brick pattern gets
a lot smaller, let's bring it back up to
| | 01:43 | about 20% so we have some
nice large bricks there.
| | 01:46 | You can also make the Height
and Width a little more uneven.
| | 01:49 | The part that I'm interested in though
is the Shift and Reset, and the Shift and
| | 01:54 | Reset allows me to
randomize the pattern a little bit.
| | 01:56 | I'm going to adjust the Shift to like 75%
and you can see that's going to offset
| | 02:01 | the pattern and then the Reset Every
nth Row, if I turn that up about 3, you'll
| | 02:07 | see that as I turn it up, the pattern
offsets and starts to reset itself every
| | 02:12 | six rows, and that gives me a
much more randomized feel to it.
| | 02:15 | So let's go down to the Color options,
and in the Color options I don't like
| | 02:19 | these dark rows that are showing up, and so
what I want to do is change the Alt Brick Color.
| | 02:23 | I can twirl open the properties for the
Alt Brick Color, and select the gradient
| | 02:27 | knot here, and I am going to take this
gradient knot color and I want to make it
| | 02:31 | the same as this gradient.
| | 02:31 | So I can click on that, and in the
Color Picker I can bring that up to about
| | 02:36 | here or so, maybe get a little more
red in there, and then close that up.
| | 02:40 | You can see that blends those
alternate colors in a little bit more.
| | 02:44 | Let's twirl close the Gradient
property here, and there is a Brick Noise
| | 02:47 | scale, and let's zoom in on that.
| | 02:49 | And the Brick Noise Scale controls how
much noise you get in the actual bricks
| | 02:53 | themselves, let's zoom in really close
on that, that's one of the great things
| | 02:56 | about this being a shader is that you
can zoom in very close, and I can adjust
| | 03:00 | the scale, let's bring it down to about 25%.
| | 03:01 | You'll see the pattern of noise on
the bricks get a little more dense.
| | 03:06 | I can adjust the details, let's bring
that up to say 15%, and you'll see that
| | 03:10 | pattern get even more intense.
| | 03:11 | That's a little too heavy so
let's bring that back down to say 5%.
| | 03:15 | Now let's move over to the Gaps.
| | 03:17 | The Gaps control what happens in
between the bricks, I can adjust the color
| | 03:20 | using this gradient here, the one I'm
really concerned about is the Noise Scale,
| | 03:24 | I want to tighten that up.
| | 03:25 | Let's bring the Noise Scale down to about .5;
| | 03:28 | you're going to see the noise pattern
in between the bricks really tighten up,
| | 03:31 | and you can see it got a lot more dense there.
| | 03:33 | You can also adjust the size and variation,
but we're going to leave those alone right now.
| | 03:37 | The Dirt option we're going
to come back and adjust later.
| | 03:40 | So that's it for the Color property for
these bricks for now, and let's back out
| | 03:43 | a bit, so we can see the whole wall.
| | 03:45 | I'm going to go up one level in the
Material, now what I need to do is these
| | 03:49 | bricks look okay, but they don't feel
very realistic yet, that's because we need
| | 03:52 | to give the bricks some dimension,
and we're going to do that using the
| | 03:54 | Displacement channel.
| | 03:55 | So let's go back to the Basic
properties and let's add in displacement, and one
| | 03:59 | of the cool things that we can do is we
can use this exact same brick pattern to
| | 04:03 | modify the displacement of this cube.
| | 04:05 | So let's go to the Color property,
and we're going to click on the Texture
| | 04:08 | pulldown and go to Copy Channel, and
the Copy Channel, when I select it, copies
| | 04:12 | the properties that I have here in this
Brick shader to the clipboard, and then
| | 04:15 | when I go to the Displacement channel,
I can click on this Texture pulldown and
| | 04:18 | I can paste those very same
properties back down again.
| | 04:21 | When I do that, you're going to see my
material modify dramatically here, but
| | 04:25 | you don't see anything happening here,
that's because the Displacement channel
| | 04:29 | is resolution dependent.
| | 04:30 | It's based on the resolution of the
surface of your object and it's based on the
| | 04:33 | resolution of the material.
| | 04:34 | Right now, our Cube object is just one
large rectangle, and one polygon can't be
| | 04:39 | displaced, so we have to subdivide it.
| | 04:41 | So I'm going to take the X and Y values
and let's bring that up to about 20x20,
| | 04:45 | and when I select the Cube, you're
going to see -- let's turn off the
| | 04:50 | Interactive Render Region for just a second.
| | 04:52 | You can see that I now have more
polygons on the surface of that cube, whereas
| | 04:55 | before I had one polygon.
| | 04:56 | Let's bring the Interactive Render Region
back up, Option+R or Alt+R on the keyboard.
| | 05:00 | Now if we zoom in, you're going to
notice we still don't see very much
| | 05:04 | displacement, that's because if we go
to the Material, let's click back on
| | 05:07 | Material and go into the Displacement property.
| | 05:09 | The Height right now is set to only 5
units, so let's crank this up a bunch.
| | 05:13 | Let's bring it to say 25.
| | 05:15 | It's about 5 times larger, you see that
the bricks got a little bit lumpy in
| | 05:18 | spots, and that's because, once
again, we still don't have quite enough
| | 05:21 | polygons, but rather than keep cranking
up the density of the polygons and the
| | 05:25 | cube, I'm going to turn on something
called Sub-Polygon Displacement, which
| | 05:28 | will virtually subdivide the polygons
at render time, and give me a much more
| | 05:31 | interesting result.
| | 05:32 | So let's turn on Sub-Poly Displacement and
instantly you'll see the brick
| | 05:36 | pattern reveal itself.
| | 05:37 | Now what's happening now is that the
mortar in between the bricks is protruding
| | 05:41 | through, and we want to reverse that
so that the mortar goes into the bricks,
| | 05:44 | and so we take the Strength and
we're going to reverse that to -100.
| | 05:48 | And you see now we have the
brick pattern coming in there.
| | 05:50 | Let's bring the Subdivision Level up
one more value, let's bring it up to 6,
| | 05:55 | that's going to tighten that
pattern up for us a lot more, there we go.
| | 05:58 | Now you can see that we have very
clearly defined bricks, and we have a very
| | 06:01 | clearly defined gaps in the bricks.
| | 06:03 | It's a little too thick right now, so let's
take the Height down about 15, there we go.
| | 06:08 | That makes the gaps a little less
pronounced, and makes the brick pattern a
| | 06:10 | little more subdued.
| | 06:12 | So that's it for the displacement.
| | 06:13 | The next thing we want to do in the
Basic properties is to turn on the Bump,
| | 06:16 | and the Bump map is going to allow us
to give a little more personality to
| | 06:20 | these bricks, and so I'll turn on
Bump, nothing happens at first, that's
| | 06:23 | because the Bump value needs to have
a grayscale image in order to work and
| | 06:28 | we're going to use Noise for that.
| | 06:29 | So let's go to Noise, we'll
click on that and add a noise filter.
| | 06:32 | Now the default noise is not what we
want, you can see it's added in this kind
| | 06:36 | of wavy looking pattern.
| | 06:37 | We're going to click on the Shader here,
and there's a great little pulldown on
| | 06:40 | here that allows you to see some
interesting pictures, and those represent all
| | 06:43 | the different Noise types.
| | 06:44 | We're going to grab one called Poxo,
and the Poxo one is this little guy right
| | 06:48 | here, and it looks a lot like asphalt
or brick, and when we add it in, you're
| | 06:50 | going to see that Bump
pattern changed dramatically.
| | 06:53 | There we go, that starts to
look a lot more brick like.
| | 06:55 | It's a little too heavy now, let's go
up to the main level of the material and
| | 06:59 | bring the Strength down to about say 15%.
| | 07:02 | Now the last piece of the puzzle,
our bricks feel really shiny right now.
| | 07:05 | We need to make them a lot less
shiny, but we don't want to make them
| | 07:09 | universally less shiny, we want to
make them less shiny based on a random
| | 07:12 | pattern, so they feel little bit more weathered.
| | 07:14 | So on the Basic properties, I'm going
to activate Specular Color, and the
| | 07:17 | Specular Color channel controls where
the specular highlight shows up, and what
| | 07:20 | color it is when it does show up.
| | 07:22 | In the Specular Color channel we're
going to, go to the Texture pulldown and add
| | 07:25 | in Noise again, and you're going to see
our specular highlight change a little
| | 07:28 | bit, and it's that same default
pattern, that's not very interesting.
| | 07:31 | Let's go to the Noise parameters again,
and let's click on this little image and
| | 07:36 | let's grab Stupl I think will look
really nice, add in the Stupl effect and
| | 07:41 | you see it breaks up that Noise pattern nicely.
| | 07:43 | Let's make the Stupl much larger,
Global Scale of say 1000, that's going to
| | 07:47 | distribute that pattern a little
more interestingly across the surface.
| | 07:50 | There we go, let's back out so we
can see our wall in all its glory.
| | 07:54 | It starts to look much more
interesting and much more realistic.
| | 07:57 | The last piece in the puzzle is the
Dirt parameter in the Brick shader.
| | 08:00 | Let's go back to our Brick Material, and
in the Color channel, click on the Brick
| | 08:04 | Swatch, and let's activate the Dirt.
| | 08:06 | We're going to enable that, and we can have
all kinds of different dirt patterns here.
| | 08:10 | What we want to do is we want to have
it go darker, and the way we're going to
| | 08:14 | do that is by adjusting the Brick Blending.
| | 08:17 | We're going to bring this Brick
Blending down to -100, and that's going to
| | 08:21 | multiply that back into the
brick pattern. There we go.
| | 08:24 | Now our brick wall looks really, really nice.
| | 08:27 | So as you can see, the Brick shader
is a great resource, and the repeating
| | 08:29 | patterns that it makes have a lot of
really great graphic possibilities, not
| | 08:33 | just brick walls, but all kinds of fun stuff.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Terrain Mask shader| 00:00 | Building realistic outdoor
environments can be a time-consuming and computer
| | 00:03 | consuming task, but the new Terrain
shader gives you the ability to create
| | 00:07 | snowcapped mountains in no time.
| | 00:08 | So we've got a clean scene here.
| | 00:09 | I'm going to start off by creating a
mountain, and I'll go to the Primitive
| | 00:13 | objects here and add in a Landscape object.
| | 00:15 | In the Landscape object, I'm going to
start off by making a little bit taller
| | 00:18 | here by grabbing that orange
button there above the Y-handle.
| | 00:21 | Let's bring it up so it's above the ground
plane, and I think that's pretty good right there.
| | 00:25 | You can adjust the width segments and
height segments to give it a little more
| | 00:29 | detail or less detail.
| | 00:30 | I'll crank that up a little bit on the
width and height, and then adjust the
| | 00:33 | rough and fine furrows to get a little more
detail in my mountain, there we go. That's nice.
| | 00:39 | Nice craggy peak.
| | 00:40 | So now what I want to do is
to apply material to this.
| | 00:43 | Now, let's go in here and create a new
material by double-clicking the Material
| | 00:47 | Manager, let's call this one Terrain and
let's apply it to the Landscape object.
| | 00:52 | Now I want to turn on the Interactive
Render Region, Option+R on the Mac or
| | 00:57 | Alt+R on the PC, and let's bring that
Interactive Render Region up larger and
| | 01:01 | let's turn the quality up to full, there we go.
| | 01:05 | In the Terrain Material, the Terrain
Mask shader can be used in just about any
| | 01:08 | channel, but it works best in the Color.
| | 01:10 | So let's go to the Texture pulldown here,
and go to Effects and then Terrain Mask.
| | 01:15 | As soon as I do that, we're going to
instantly see snow on the peaks of these mountains.
| | 01:19 | Let's click into the Terrain Mask
shader to just take a look at its options.
| | 01:23 | So here in the Terrain Mask shader,
we've got basically a Gradient property that
| | 01:26 | controls what color we have on our
snow that's showing up on the mountain.
| | 01:30 | We're going to leave this at black and
white, and we've got basically Altitude
| | 01:34 | Masking and Slope Masking.
| | 01:35 | Altitude Masking controls how high on
the object the snow appears, the Slope
| | 01:41 | Masking controls the angle at which the
snow appears in the object, and you can
| | 01:45 | adjust the minimum and maximum slope
values, and then soften the minimum/maximum
| | 01:49 | slope values as well.
| | 01:51 | So if I turn this maximum slope up a
bit, you'll see more snow show up on the
| | 01:55 | sides of the mountain.
| | 01:56 | Let's bring -- that's a little bit too
much snow I think, let's bring that
| | 01:58 | down to say 50, there we go,
maybe 55. There we go.
| | 02:03 | And now the softness, if we adjust
minimum/max softness, you'll see that it
| | 02:07 | creates a much softer transition for
the snow, and I'd adjust that to about 55.
| | 02:13 | This Use Bump feature is very important,
we're going to leave this turned on,
| | 02:16 | but it's not having an effect right now
because we don't have a Bump channel in our terrain.
| | 02:20 | In order to take advantage of this
effect, we're going to add in a Bump channel
| | 02:23 | to our terrain material.
| | 02:24 | So let's go back up one level to the
main Material properties, and go to the
| | 02:28 | Basic and add in Bump.
| | 02:30 | In the Bump channel, we're going to go
to the Texture pulldown and add in Noise.
| | 02:35 | Now as soon as we do that, it makes
our mountain look a little bit strange.
| | 02:38 | We're going to change that noise
pattern, and the way we're going to do that is
| | 02:41 | by clicking on the swatch here, and
going into the Noise properties and click on
| | 02:45 | this little guy right here.
| | 02:46 | This is a pictorial representation of
all the different noise patterns, and
| | 02:49 | we're going to choose Poxo.
| | 02:50 | Here we go, let's add that in, and
you can see that now we get a very
| | 02:54 | interesting distribution of noise.
| | 02:55 | Now that's doesn't look very natural.
| | 02:57 | So let's pick a different one.
| | 02:58 | Let's go back in and grab Luka,
yeah, that feels a lot more natural.
| | 03:03 | And as we zoom in here on the mountain,
you can see that this bump pattern is
| | 03:08 | now being used to accentuate where
the snow collects on the sides of the
| | 03:12 | mountain, and that makes it much more realistic.
| | 03:14 | We have great snow showing up on our
mountain, but now we need to have some stuff
| | 03:17 | underneath the snow and a little
bit of a more of a granite texture.
| | 03:20 | So let's go up one level back to
the main properties, and in the Color
| | 03:24 | channel, we're going to go to the Texture pulldown
and we're going to add in a layered shader.
| | 03:28 | Now the layered shader
behaves a lot like Photoshop;
| | 03:30 | it's going to take our existing Terrain Mask
and stack it up inside of a Layer property.
| | 03:35 | Now it looks like nothing has happened
but in order to see the Layer shader, we
| | 03:38 | have to click on the swatch here
and that takes us into an interface.
| | 03:41 | Now this interface behaves just like Photoshop.
| | 03:43 | We've got blending modes, we've got
eyeballs, and a transparency option the same
| | 03:47 | way we would have in Photoshop.
| | 03:49 | What I want to do is I want to
add in a noise shader and have it be
| | 03:52 | underneath this Terrain Mask.
| | 03:53 | So if I go to the Shader properties
and add in noise, that noise pattern is
| | 03:57 | going to overwrite the Terrain Mask shader.
| | 03:59 | So what I'm going to do is move that
Noise pattern down by dragging it below
| | 04:03 | the Terrain Mask, and then I'm going to change
the blending mode on the Terrain Mask to Add.
| | 04:08 | What that's going to do is that's going
to make the terrain blend into the noise
| | 04:13 | underneath it with an Add blending mode.
| | 04:14 | Now this Noise pattern is not what I want;
| | 04:17 | I'm going to go into the Noise
properties here and I'm going to change this from
| | 04:21 | the default noise pattern
to let's try the Poxo again.
| | 04:24 | I think it's going to give us an interesting
look and kind of granite feel to it.
| | 04:27 | I'm going to tighten that up by changing the
Global Scale from 100 to about 50, there we go.
| | 04:32 | And that starts to look a lot
more like a granite snow-capped peak.
| | 04:36 | Let's back out just a little bit so
we can see our whole mountain, there we
| | 04:39 | go, looking awesome.
| | 04:40 | Now I use the shader on a Terrain object,
but you're not limited to that at all.
| | 04:44 | The Terrain Mask is a great way to
control where objects appear on Mograph.
| | 04:47 | When you combine it with the
Shader effect, you can get some really
| | 04:49 | amazing results.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Workflow AdditionsAfter Effects Exchange improvements| 00:00 | One of the main reasons that CINEMA 4D
has become the go-to application for motion
| | 00:04 | graphics is that it works
really well with After Effects.
| | 00:08 | R13 makes this relationship even stronger with
the new free export plug-in for
| | 00:11 | After Effects that creates a project
file that can be opened in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:15 | This is a big deal because it
means you can start your project, your
| | 00:18 | animation, your camera moves, in After Effects
and then move that information into CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:23 | Previously, you could only go the other
direction from CINEMA 4D to After Effects.
| | 00:28 | So here we are in After Effects
and I've got a composition here.
| | 00:30 | It's not pretty, but it's got some very
specific examples of the kinds of things
| | 00:34 | that will translate well from After
Effects and the kinds of things that won't
| | 00:37 | translate from After Effects.
| | 00:38 | So let's do a RAM preview here.
| | 00:46 | This is very simple camera move and
there are some very specific layers that
| | 00:49 | I've got going on here.
| | 00:50 | I've got a 3D light casting a little bit
of vignetting on the edge of that picture.
| | 00:54 | You can see that light will go into CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:57 | The Camera Parent and the Camera, that
will translate in the CINEMA 4D, I've got
| | 01:01 | a pre-comp here that's the type along
with this fake reflection right below it.
| | 01:06 | The composition will not
translate in the CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:10 | However, the representation of that comp will.
| | 01:13 | So I'll end up with a solid layer
inside of CINEMA 4D in the same location as
| | 01:17 | that, and that can be very useful.
| | 01:19 | The other thing I have going on is a
very simple JPEG here of me at the beach
| | 01:23 | and a fake reflection below it.
| | 01:25 | The JPEG will come across as
a texture applied to a plane.
| | 01:29 | The reflection, which is just a copy
of that JPEG, flipped over and inverted,
| | 01:34 | that will come across but
the gradient layer will not.
| | 01:37 | Neither will these blue solid
layers because they're not 3D;
| | 01:39 | they're just 2D layers.
| | 01:41 | Now it's very important to note the
parenting relationship here because that
| | 01:45 | will determine how the
hierarchy is drawn inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:48 | You can see I have some layers
parented up to each other here and the
| | 01:52 | relationships that I have here parented
will show up exactly inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:56 | So the way to get this information from
After Effects to CINEMA 4D is to go to
| | 02:00 | the File menu and then to Export,
and I've got CINEMA 4D Exporter here.
| | 02:06 | Now the reason I have that Export
command there is because I've installed a very
| | 02:09 | special plug-in for MAXON in my
After Effects plug-ins folder.
| | 02:13 | I'm going to show you
where to download that from.
| | 02:15 | So let's go over to Safari, and here
in Safari I'm on the MAXON homepage.
| | 02:19 | I'll go to Downloads and then Updates, and on
the Updates page, I'll on click on plug-ins.
| | 02:27 | And on the plug-ins page, this first
item is what I want to download.
| | 02:31 | Now there's a Windows and Mac version.
| | 02:33 | Depending on which operating system
you're on, you'll need to put the correct
| | 02:36 | file into your After Effects Plug-ins folder.
| | 02:39 | It's very important in your After
Effects Plug-ins folder is where that goes.
| | 02:42 | Once you have that, you'll need to re-
launch After Effects, and then you'll
| | 02:45 | have that command in the File > Export menu.
| | 02:48 | Let's go back to After Effects now, and I'm
going to go to File menu, and this is very important;
| | 02:53 | you want to make sure that you're
actually in the composition that you're
| | 02:55 | going to be exporting.
| | 02:56 | I'll go the File menu > Export,
and then the CINEMA 4D Exporter.
| | 03:01 | And I'm going to navigate --
| | 03:04 | now where I am at is inside the
Project Files for Chapter 5, and I've got a
| | 03:09 | EXPORT folder here that I've made ahead of time,
and I'm going to export this as 05-01-EXPORT.
| | 03:18 | And when I hit save, it goes really quick.
| | 03:20 | Now I can move back over to CINEMA 4D,
and here in CINEMA 4D, we don't need to
| | 03:24 | do anything special except for open.
| | 03:27 | So I'm going to go to the File menu >
Open, and I'll navigate to the Chapter 5
| | 03:32 | files to the START EXPORT
folder that I created earlier.
| | 03:36 | And this is the file that I
exported from After Effects.
| | 03:38 | So I'll select that and hit Open, and
now what I've got going on is a hierarchy
| | 03:44 | here, and this is the hierarchy as
it's been interpreted from After Effects.
| | 03:48 | And if I scrub through the timeline,
you can see that I've got some planes
| | 03:53 | here, and when I let go,
| | 03:54 | there it redraws the screen and I can
see my picture there, and you can see there's
| | 03:57 | that fake reflection that I
talked about with no gradient on it.
| | 04:01 | And also, you can see that I've got a
light in there, and that light is in the
| | 04:04 | exact same position.
| | 04:05 | It's got a light target with the Target
tag on it, and that's how it interprets
| | 04:09 | the spotlight from After Effects.
| | 04:11 | The other thing I want to
point out is the REFLECTION PRE.
| | 04:14 | This is a representation of that pre-comp.
| | 04:16 | What I ended up with is a plane object
that is the same size as the composition
| | 04:21 | was from After Effects.
| | 04:23 | Now that information can be useful
but you can see that the contents of that
| | 04:26 | composition doesn't come across, that was
type and CINEMA 4D can't handle that information.
| | 04:30 | So you can see this is a big deal.
| | 04:32 | For anyone that has 3D tracking data in
After Effects, or is simply more comfortable
| | 04:36 | working with the camera in AE, this new
workflow is a huge addition for artists
| | 04:40 | that want or need to start their
workflow in After Effects and then move their
| | 04:44 | camera move into CINEMA 4D.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Stereoscopic workflow| 00:00 | Creating stereoscopic images is becoming
more and more popular and CINEMA 4D R13
| | 00:05 | has a new set of tools
ready to meet that challenge.
| | 00:08 | A new stereo camera, rendering options,
and picture viewer make this process
| | 00:12 | much less intimidating.
| | 00:13 | So I have got a very simple scene file
here to kind of illustrate the concepts
| | 00:17 | that we are going to talk about and
there are three components to stereo, there's
| | 00:20 | the camera, the render settings, and the
picture viewer.
| | 00:23 | Let's start off with the camera.
| | 00:25 | Now in order to understand what's going
to happen in this 3D scene there's a
| | 00:29 | couple of things I need to turn on first.
| | 00:31 | The first thing I want to turn on is
under the main Edit menu, Preferences.
| | 00:35 | I want to select OpenGL and make
sure that Use OpenGL is turned on.
| | 00:40 | This isn't strictly necessary for
rendering, but it is necessary to preview the
| | 00:45 | 3D effect in the viewport.
| | 00:47 | So you can have OpenGL off, but you won't
be able to see the 3D effect in the viewport.
| | 00:51 | So I've got mine on.
| | 00:52 | So I will see a 3D effect in the viewport.
| | 00:55 | So let's close that up.
| | 00:56 | Now the next thing I want to
turn on is on the Camera itself.
| | 00:59 | It's under the Stereoscopic option.
| | 01:02 | There is a Mode here, and the default
is Mono, that means a single camera.
| | 01:07 | I am going to set it to be Symmetrical
and when I do that, it looks like nothing
| | 01:11 | special happened except that the icon
on my camera changed and I now see these
| | 01:16 | options here for the Stereoscopic effects.
| | 01:19 | Now in order to be able to preview
these effects in the viewport, I have to go
| | 01:23 | the Options menu and turn on Stereoscopic.
| | 01:26 | Now that I do that, the color shifts
and that's because I am now looking at an
| | 01:29 | anaglyph or red and blue
passes of the image in the viewport.
| | 01:35 | Now in order to see this 3D effect I
have to have those crazy glasses and I
| | 01:39 | am actually wearing some right now, and I can
tell you that the 3D effect looks awesome.
| | 01:42 | It's not very pronounced yet.
| | 01:43 | So I'm going to go to my Eye Separation,
that's the distance between the cameras,
| | 01:48 | and I'm going to adjust that to about 20 units.
| | 01:51 | How far you adjust that depends
entirely on your scene and experimentation.
| | 01:55 | So there is no right or wrong answer here.
| | 01:57 | You are going to have to do some tests
with the glasses on in order to understand
| | 02:01 | how pronounced the 3D effect is.
| | 02:04 | Let's switch to the Top View here,
and I've got a four-way split here.
| | 02:08 | In the Top View I want to be
able to see just my three cubes.
| | 02:12 | So I'm going to go to the two Cloner
objects here, and I am going to turn the top
| | 02:17 | dot red for each of those Cloners.
| | 02:19 | So now I can see just my three cubes here.
| | 02:22 | Now let's zoom in on the Top
View and take a look at our camera.
| | 02:28 | Now the camera itself looks different.
| | 02:29 | We have got some separate planes here
that have appeared now, but you notice
| | 02:33 | that it doesn't really look
like a stereoscopic camera.
| | 02:35 | I don't see two sides of it,
a right or a left side.
| | 02:38 | In order to see that I have
to click on Show All Cameras.
| | 02:41 | When I do that, I now see both cameras
and if I zoom in, you'll see that I
| | 02:45 | can see those cameras there, and the
distance between these cameras is dictated
| | 02:49 | by the Eye Separation, and I can split
those cameras farther apart or bring
| | 02:53 | them closer together.
| | 02:54 | So I will leave them about 20 units
like I said before, and the Placement I am
| | 02:59 | looking at Parallel, Off
Axis, On Axis, or Radial.
| | 03:03 | This will be dependent on the type of 3D
that you are creating, and then the next
| | 03:07 | most important value is this Zero Parallax.
| | 03:09 | The Zero Parallax is the plane of the
screen that the projection will be shown on.
| | 03:16 | Now anything in front of that Zero
Parallax will appear to leap off the screen,
| | 03:19 | anything behind that Zero
Parallax recedes back into the scene.
| | 03:24 | So in order to understand what's going
to happen, I have to make some tweaks
| | 03:27 | to these values here.
| | 03:29 | So I want to have the plane of
my screen be on this middle cube.
| | 03:32 | So what I need to do is I need to move that
Zero Parallax to this middle cube right here.
| | 03:39 | So as I scrub this value up,
you can see that it stops.
| | 03:43 | It won't let me go past this far plane value.
| | 03:46 | The Near Plane and the Far Plane allow
you to preview where the forbidden zones
| | 03:51 | of your 3D scene are.
| | 03:53 | There is an effect that happens, the
closer something is to the camera, the
| | 03:56 | farther way it is from the camera,
the less pronounced the 3D effect is.
| | 04:00 | So through experimentation you can
figure out where those zones are relative to
| | 04:04 | your scene file, and you can use these
Near and Far Planes to help you identify
| | 04:08 | that forbidden region.
| | 04:10 | But the problem with this setting
right now is that it won't let me move
| | 04:13 | beyond that 1200 values.
| | 04:15 | So I am going to take this Far Plane
and I am going to move it way back, I am
| | 04:18 | going to scrub this value until it's
well outside the scene, and you can see if I
| | 04:24 | back out here, there is my Far Plane now.
| | 04:27 | So that's the forbidden zone.
| | 04:28 | Everything beyond that I want to make
sure all the major components of my scene
| | 04:32 | are ahead of this plane.
| | 04:34 | Now I can take my Zero Parallax and
move it forward and put it right on top of
| | 04:40 | the cube, and then I could take my
Near Plane and just adjust it so that it's
| | 04:46 | just the other side of the cube.
| | 04:48 | Now where those planes are has
no affect on the rendering at all.
| | 04:51 | It's simply a warning, a way for you to
see where your objects are going to show
| | 04:56 | up in the 3D effect.
| | 04:58 | So that's it for the important camera settings.
| | 05:00 | Now the next step in this
stereoscopic process is the render setting.
| | 05:05 | So I am going to go Command+B or Ctrl+B
on the keyboard to bring up the Render
| | 05:09 | settings, and I am going
to activate Stereoscopic.
| | 05:12 | I just selected it right now.
| | 05:13 | You can see everything is grayed out.
| | 05:14 | When I activate it, it looks like
nothing special happened except now I have all
| | 05:19 | these extra options.
| | 05:20 | Now I have the ability to tell it how
to calculate the stereoscopic images.
| | 05:25 | I am going to select Individual Channels.
| | 05:27 | This option is going to let me both
preview the Stereoscopic effect in the
| | 05:32 | Picture Viewer, and switch between the
right and left eyes in the Picture Viewer.
| | 05:36 | If you used a Merged option, then you
will only be able to see the 3D effect
| | 05:39 | in the Picture Viewer.
| | 05:40 | You won't be able to switch
between the right and left eyes.
| | 05:43 | And sometimes it's very important to
understand what's happening between the
| | 05:45 | right and left eyes.
| | 05:46 | So I want to leave it on Individual Channels.
| | 05:49 | So now what I want to do is to go
back to my Render settings here, I'm not
| | 05:54 | going worry about saving this image,
and I am going to render just from the
| | 05:57 | Output option just a single frame.
| | 05:59 | So I've got it set from 0 to 0, so
it's going to do the current frame.
| | 06:02 | I am going to hit Shift+R on the
keyboard, and that's going to render the Picture
| | 06:09 | Viewer and the Picture
Viewer is a little bit large now.
| | 06:11 | Let's go here and I am
going to tell this to Fit to Screen.
| | 06:16 | Now this rendering is going to take
twice as long as a normal rendering, because
| | 06:19 | it does have to render
both the left and right eyes.
| | 06:22 | So now it's finished rendering the left
and right eyes, but you'll notice that
| | 06:26 | here in the viewport, if I go to Stereo option,
right now it's showing me just a Single Channel.
| | 06:32 | Now if I do an Interactive Merge, I
now see a preview of what that 3D effect
| | 06:37 | is going to look like.
| | 06:39 | I can also control how it's done here,
and if I go to the Additional Parallax, I
| | 06:44 | can adjust and add a little bit more or
less parallax into that image, and it's
| | 06:49 | limited by the boundaries of the
image so you'll see a chopping there.
| | 06:52 | I will bring that back to 0.
| | 06:53 | That's just so you can do
some testing on your own.
| | 06:56 | You would always want to go back to
the Render settings and put that value
| | 06:58 | in and re-render your image, but this is a
great place you can do some testing with.
| | 07:02 | You can also swap the left and right
eyes here, and you can also determine what
| | 07:07 | type of colors you are using
to preview the anaglyph here.
| | 07:10 | And I am going to leave it on red for now.
| | 07:12 | The Picture Viewer allows you to preview
your animation, or still image, with the
| | 07:17 | 3D effect turned on.
| | 07:18 | CINEMA 4D does have the ability to
render a lot of different types of 3D images,
| | 07:23 | and where you determine what type
of 3D images in the render settings.
| | 07:27 | And if I close that up, I can go back
to my Render Settings to the Stereoscopic
| | 07:30 | effect, and under the Mode, if I switch
it from Individual Channels, I can do a
| | 07:36 | Merge Stereoscopic Image, and I can
set to Anaglyph, or Side-by-Side, or
| | 07:40 | Interlaced, and I can do a Merged Stereoscopic
Image which is what I am looking at right now.
| | 07:46 | I can do Individual Channels, and I
can render as many channels as I need to
| | 07:50 | based on the type of 3D
effect I've got going on.
| | 07:53 | And it's very important to note,
| | 07:55 | there are no optimized settings.
| | 07:57 | Every 3D projection system is different
and that's one of the troublesome things
| | 08:01 | about working with 3D.
| | 08:03 | But the great part is, CINEMA 4D has
provided you with options that will allow
| | 08:07 | you to work with just about any type
of 3D projection you can come across.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Multipass OpenEXR files| 00:00 | OpenEXR is an image format developed
by Industrial Light & Magic and released
| | 00:04 | to the public in 2003.
| | 00:06 | It offers a much higher degree of
precision for high-end compositing as well as
| | 00:09 | the ability to store
multiple passes in a single file.
| | 00:12 | The workflow can be a bit more challenging.
| | 00:14 | So it's much more appropriate
for experienced compositors.
| | 00:17 | So what I have here is a very simple project file.
| | 00:19 | It's just a bunch of blocks tumbling
down out of the sky and hitting the camera.
| | 00:24 | There's two groups of blocks here,
and what I want to be able to do is to
| | 00:27 | control each of these individual blocks
with Object buffers in After Effects, as
| | 00:31 | well as the reflective floor.
| | 00:32 | And I will just show you
what the scene file renders like.
| | 00:34 | Command+R or Ctrl+R on the PC.
| | 00:37 | You can see I've got my stone
blocks here on a reflective floor.
| | 00:41 | So the OpenEXR format, working with it
in CINEMA 4D is pretty straight forward.
| | 00:46 | There's just a couple of
little tricks to remember.
| | 00:48 | I am going to bring up the Render
Settings, Command+B or Ctrl+B. You can see I
| | 00:50 | have already got a Multi-Pass set
up, and I will go to the Output mod,
| | 00:55 | you can see I am running 120 frames.
| | 00:56 | In order to save dialog is where I
am going to focus on the OpenEXR.
| | 01:01 | You can see that I have the regular Save
disabled, and I'm not worrying about an
| | 01:04 | Alpha Channel in this case.
| | 01:05 | Under the Format, I have
already selected OpenEXR.
| | 01:08 | You can see that there is
the file format right there.
| | 01:10 | Under the Options for OpenEXR, I
have selected Lossy 24-bit float.zip.
| | 01:16 | This file format gives me a good
combination of high precision and low file size,
| | 01:21 | and so I have selected it.
| | 01:22 | There's other file formats within
this OpenEXR option that will give you a
| | 01:27 | much higher degree of precision with 32-
bit floating point, and also much larger
| | 01:32 | file size, but that can be really
cumbersome in a lot of workflows.
| | 01:34 | So I have chosen the 24-bit Lossy float.
| | 01:38 | So I'll hit OK there, and that's
pretty much it for choosing the format.
| | 01:43 | There's a very important
button here, Multi-Layer File.
| | 01:46 | We have to make sure this is turned on.
| | 01:48 | If you render this out of CINEMA 4D
and this is not turned on, what you are
| | 01:52 | going to get is a separate EXR file for
each of the multi-passes, and that won't
| | 01:56 | do us any good at all.
| | 01:57 | It defeats the purpose of having on EXR
if they're all separated out like that.
| | 02:01 | So we have to make sure this
is on, but there's a problem.
| | 02:05 | If I turn on the Save Compositing Project File
here, which I normally would when
| | 02:09 | I am rendering a regular
PSD sequence for example.
| | 02:11 | When I turn that on, watch what happens
to the Multi-Layer file. It gets disabled.
| | 02:16 | That's because After Effects cannot
natively import an EXR format as a
| | 02:23 | Compositing Project File.
| | 02:24 | So what we have to do is, we are going to
have to come back to CINEMA 4D and save
| | 02:28 | the 3D camera data out manually after we render.
| | 02:32 | So it can't be automated process.
| | 02:34 | I have to uncheck this radio button here
and check this radio button in order to
| | 02:39 | make sure I get a correctly formatted
EXR file with multiple layers in each
| | 02:43 | frame of the rendered image.
| | 02:46 | Other than that, it's pretty
much a standard render process.
| | 02:49 | I've already got this scene rendered out.
| | 02:51 | So what I am going to do is switch
over to After Effects and show you how to
| | 02:54 | work with that EXR file inside of After Effects.
| | 02:57 | So let's go down here to the doc and move
to After Effects.
| | 02:59 | I have got an empty project file here.
| | 03:01 | So I am going to go to File > Import >
File, and I am going to navigate to my
| | 03:06 | 05-03-START folder, and
there's my openEXR render.
| | 03:10 | And I'm just going to grab any one of
these guys and tell it to be an OpenEXR
| | 03:14 | Sequence and hit Open.
| | 03:16 | Now what we see from the OpenEXR is
what's called the beauty pass, or in CINEMA
| | 03:21 | 4D terms, it's the RGBA pass.
| | 03:23 | So I'm going to take this and put it
into a new composition based on itself.
| | 03:29 | You can see I see the rendering there,
and I can scrub through it and
| | 03:33 | that's the RGBA pass that I am seeing there.
| | 03:35 | But I've got all these other
passes in here and you can actually see
| | 03:39 | when you click on the file inside of
the Project Window, it shows you all this
| | 03:43 | other information that's leading out.
| | 03:45 | It's trailing off to the side here.
| | 03:46 | I can make it much larger and see
that I have got this information here.
| | 03:51 | So what I want to be able to do is to
extract that information out of the EXR
| | 03:54 | file, and there is a very
special effect to do that.
| | 03:57 | So I will select the EXR layer in this
BlocksEXR image, and I will go to Effect >
| | 04:02 | 3D Channel, and EXtractoR, and when I do
that, I get the information on my image
| | 04:08 | changes subtly, and now I have
got this EXtractoR effect on here.
| | 04:13 | I want to click any place in this
area here, and I'm going to get a dialog box.
| | 04:17 | And what this dialog box is asking
me is what information do you want to
| | 04:22 | pull out of this file, and when
| | 04:23 | I click on each of these channels, I now
see each of the rendered passes for the
| | 04:28 | red, green, and blue channels.
| | 04:29 | So let's start off by
extracting out the reflection.
| | 04:33 | So I want to grab the reflection
and I want to grab the Reflection red,
| | 04:37 | Reflection green, and Reflection blue.
| | 04:40 | You noticed I am mapping the red,
green, and blue channels to the red,
| | 04:43 | green, and blue channels of the EXtractoR, and
I will just leave the Alpha alone and hit OK.
| | 04:48 | Now what I see is just the reflection.
| | 04:52 | Now what I can do, is I could go back to
the Project Window and I can rename this
| | 04:59 | comp and call it Reflection.
| | 05:03 | Now I can duplicate this by hitting
Command+D or Ctrl+D, and I am going to rename
| | 05:08 | this one and call it RGBA, and the RGBA
pass, I will just select EXR layer here
| | 05:18 | and I'll delete the effect off of it.
| | 05:21 | And now I can see there's my rendered
image RGBA.
| | 05:24 | The next thing I want to do is go back
to the Project Window and let's take the
| | 05:28 | Reflection pass and duplicate it.
| | 05:30 | We are going to pull out the Object buffer.
| | 05:32 | So let's duplicate that, select this
Obj Buff 1, and in this Obj Buff 1
| | 05:40 | comp, I am going to select the EXR file,
and go to the EXtractoR, and let's pull
| | 05:45 | out Object Buffer 1.
| | 05:46 | So I go to the Red channel, and I'm
going to do Object Buffer 1, and I'll put
| | 05:53 | that in each of these channels and
then hit OK.
| | 05:58 | You can see there is my
Object Buffer all ready to rock.
| | 06:01 | Now I will go back to the Project
Window and I will repeat that process
| | 06:04 | for Object Buffer 2.
| | 06:05 | You can see it automatically named it for me.
| | 06:07 | So I will go into this composition,
select the EXR, go to Effects Palette, and
| | 06:12 | then click on that again and this
time I'll identify Object Buffer 2.
| | 06:15 | Object Buffer 2, Object Buffer 2, hit OK.
| | 06:19 | And you can see at this point the
animation Object Buffer 2 is not visible.
| | 06:23 | So I will scrub forward.
| | 06:24 | You can see, there it is Object
Buffer 2, for the second set of blocks.
| | 06:28 | So now what I want to do is, back in to the
Project Window here, I want to take all
| | 06:32 | of these guys and use them in a pre-comp.
| | 06:34 | So I'm going to treat them as if they
were individual movies and just drag
| | 06:37 | them onto the New Composition window,
and then tell them all to exist in a
| | 06:41 | single composition.
| | 06:43 | So now I have got these layers here.
| | 06:44 | I have got my RGBA pass on top, and
my Reflection and my Object Buffers.
| | 06:48 | So let's take this Object Buffer and move
it up here, and this RGBA pass I am going
| | 06:53 | to tell it to use this
Object Buffer as a Luma Matte.
| | 06:57 | And as I scrub through it, you will see
there's my blocks, and if I solo that out,
| | 07:03 | you can see it's just those block layers.
| | 07:05 | Now what I will do is duplicate this
layer, and I'll take this Object Buffer, move
| | 07:09 | it up here, and it's automatically
going to use it as Luma pass, because it's
| | 07:12 | still has the command there.
| | 07:14 | I could turn off this set of eyeballs
and now I've got the Reflection pass and
| | 07:18 | the RGBA pass separately.
| | 07:20 | I can take the Reflection pass and
dial it down, and now I have got total
| | 07:24 | control over my image.
| | 07:26 | To really take advantage of the OpenEXR
format we need to change the bit depth
| | 07:30 | of our project file.
| | 07:31 | And I am going to go to the bit depth
here and click on that, and I am going to
| | 07:34 | change the bit depth from 8 bits
to either 16 or 32 bits per channel.
| | 07:40 | I am going to leave on 32 bits per
channel so I get a lot of control and
| | 07:44 | precision over my color correcting.
| | 07:46 | And that will give us all of the information
that's buried in that OpenEXR format.
| | 07:51 | I know this seems like a very
cumbersome way to work inside of After Effects,
| | 07:54 | but this OpenEXR workflow is
not for the faint of heart.
| | 07:58 | There is some good news though.
| | 08:00 | There's a really cool plug-in out
there call ProEXR that simplifies
| | 08:04 | process tremendously.
| | 08:05 | And I am going to switch over to Safari
here and show you what that page looks like.
| | 08:10 | And this ProEXR plug-in, that you can
get from this web site, will automate
| | 08:16 | much of the process and there's a
great After Effects script that will break
| | 08:20 | your OpenEXR file apart for you automatically,
and pre-compose all of the passes within it.
| | 08:25 | And this is an excellent plug-in for
everyone looking to work with OpenEXR as
| | 08:29 | inside of After Effects and
well worth the investment.
| | 08:32 | So once you're use to the quarks of
this high-end workflow, the OpenEXR format
| | 08:36 | provides easier file management and
lot of flexibility in compositing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Xrefs format rewrite| 00:00 | Creating an efficient and flexible
workflow is crucial for every project.
| | 00:03 | The newly redesigned XRef object in R13
allows you to reference a C4D file as a
| | 00:08 | single object, and manipulate it
within an entirely different scene.
| | 00:11 | This allows for distributed
workflows where one person is modeling while
| | 00:15 | another person animates.
| | 00:16 | Changes made by the modeler will be
automatically updated by everyone using that
| | 00:20 | scene files in XRef.
| | 00:21 | I've got this Character object here and
this is just a little guy that I modeled
| | 00:26 | and animated with the
Character object and CMotion.
| | 00:29 | And if I hit play here, you can
see he's walking along this spline.
| | 00:32 | Now what I want to be able to do is to
use this character in another scene file.
| | 00:36 | So if I go to the Window menu, I happen
to have that file open, and this is just
| | 00:40 | a really simple scene,
| | 00:41 | it's just a bunch of blocks in the
background and I'm zoomed in down here on the
| | 00:46 | world center and I'm going to
zoom in a little bit closer.
| | 00:49 | I want to add that character as an XRef.
| | 00:52 | So if I go to the Create menu and go to
XRef, and then do Add XRef, it's going to
| | 00:59 | ask me what file do I want to use as
an XRef, and I'm going to navigate to my
| | 01:03 | Chapter 5 assets folder and grab the
05-04-Xref object, and I'll hit Open.
| | 01:09 | And what I now have is a hierarchy, and
this hierarchy is the XRef object.
| | 01:15 | If I twirl it closed, you can see that
the file name is referencing the actual
| | 01:17 | XRef file that it's being pointed to.
| | 01:19 | If I select this XRef object, I can now
orbit around it, and if I click on it and
| | 01:26 | go the Object properties,
I've got some options here;
| | 01:29 | Show Objects, that will enable or disable
the hierarchy here inside of the object
| | 01:34 | manager, I'll turn that back on again
so I can see the objects underneath it.
| | 01:38 | And Loaded is a way of switching the XRef
on or off, and then the reference tells me
| | 01:43 | what file is the XRef pointing at.
| | 01:46 | Now the Namespace is a way of naming
the objects in the XRef, and you can
| | 01:51 | have that as a default which is the
project file, or you can change it to
| | 01:55 | be anything you want.
| | 01:56 | Typically though as a good convention, it's best
to leave it as the name of the project file.
| | 02:01 | There are some other options here
that I want to talk about in just a second.
| | 02:05 | Let's say, for example, I wanted to
be able to manipulate this object and
| | 02:10 | change the parameters.
| | 02:11 | For example, if I click on the CMotion
object, there's this little Lock icon
| | 02:16 | and this Lock icon tells me that I
can't manipulate any of the parameters of
| | 02:19 | this CMotion object.
| | 02:21 | But if I want to be able to do that,
I have to go back to the XRef object
| | 02:25 | and under the Options button, I want
to go to the Modify property, and to
| | 02:29 | activate Parameters.
| | 02:31 | When I do that, that's going to give me
the ability to go back and change this.
| | 02:34 | Now, a word of caution;
| | 02:36 | if you're working in a distributed
environment where one person is doing
| | 02:39 | animation and modeling and you're doing
the final scene assembly, you want to be
| | 02:44 | careful about changing these parameters.
| | 02:47 | That sort of defeats the
purpose of the distributed workflow.
| | 02:49 | You want to rely on the person doing
the distribution to make the changes.
| | 02:53 | That way it propagates everywhere.
| | 02:55 | If you make changes in this scene file,
it may not propagate everywhere where
| | 02:59 | the scene file is being used as an XRef.
| | 03:01 | And so, you want to be really careful with that.
| | 03:03 | I'm going to Cancel out of that right now.
| | 03:05 | Now the other button that's really
important is the Open for Edit, and what I
| | 03:08 | want to do is I want to
make this little guy purple.
| | 03:11 | So let's twirl this closed here, and
I'll deselect him so that we can see the
| | 03:15 | actual geometry, and let's zoom in on it a bit.
| | 03:17 | So if I go back to my XRef now, I'm
going to click Open for Edit, and that pops
| | 03:22 | me over to my scene file as it existed before.
| | 03:25 | I'm going to select the material that's
on the character and I'm going to change
| | 03:30 | the color to purple.
| | 03:31 | There we go, and then I'm going to save,
| | 03:33 | Command+S or Ctrl+S. If I switch back
to my START file, and if I go to the XRef
| | 03:40 | object and I click the Reload button,
that is going to reload the file and any
| | 03:45 | changes that were made to it, and you can
see my character has turned purple here,
| | 03:49 | and that's really a great example
of the power of the XRef object.
| | 03:53 | The XRef object allows you to make
changes in an existing scene file, and import
| | 03:57 | them, and have them propagate
everywhere that scene files is being used.
| | 04:01 | The other great thing about the XRef is that
you can manipulate it here as a single object.
| | 04:06 | The way to CMotion object works,
I don't want to just simply grab this XRef
| | 04:10 | and move it around.
| | 04:11 | If I do that, watch what
happens to the character animation.
| | 04:14 | I'm going to hit play here.
| | 04:16 | As I move that around, you can see that
it jumps off the spline, and he's no longer
| | 04:21 | walking on the spline the way it
should have, and I'll undo that for a second.
| | 04:25 | The reason for that is the
way the CMotion object behaves,
| | 04:27 | and so, what I want to do instead of moving
the whole XRef is I can click into the
| | 04:30 | hierarchy here and I can grab just the spline.
| | 04:33 | Now I'm on Point mode now, but I'm going
to switch out to that to Model mode and
| | 04:37 | I'm going to take this XRef spline
and move it over, and you notice that the
| | 04:42 | character sticks to the spline perfectly.
| | 04:45 | The other awesome thing is
I can duplicate this XRef.
| | 04:47 | If I take this XRef and hold down
the Ctrl key and duplicate it, I've now
| | 04:51 | got two characters.
| | 04:52 | You can see my scene is
chunking just a little bit;
| | 04:54 | get a little bit heavy for it to
manipulate all these polygons, but I can take
| | 04:58 | this spline now, and once again I can
rotate it and I'm going to end up with
| | 05:03 | two characters, and I can move it out of the
way, so that they don't intersect each other.
| | 05:09 | Now you can see that I've got two
characters, both referencing the same scene
| | 05:14 | file inside of one additional project
file, and that's really a powerful way to
| | 05:18 | work especially when you're
working in a distributed workflow.
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ConclusionConclusion| 00:00 | I hope CINEMA 4D R13 New Features has
helped you understand the important new
| | 00:04 | additions to what is my
favorite 3D animation package.
| | 00:07 | If you are starting out from
scratch with CINEMA 4D, you can watch the
| | 00:10 | Essential Training course for Version 12.
| | 00:12 | Even though it's using an older version
of the software, the fundamentals of how
| | 00:15 | the application thinks and
works haven't changed at all.
| | 00:18 | The first chapter of this New Features
course should help you understand the
| | 00:21 | interface differences and allow you to
watch the Essentials course for R12 and
| | 00:25 | apply the lessons to the newer Version 13.
| | 00:28 | If you're an experienced C4D user
looking for a project to test your skills,
| | 00:32 | you can check out two courses.
| | 00:34 | CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics
for After Effect explores the deep
| | 00:37 | relationship between the top two
tools in the motion graphics industry.
| | 00:41 | In addition, CINEMA 4D: Designing a
Promo, walks you through the process of
| | 00:45 | creating a complete television style promotion.
| | 00:48 | Remember, even though the courses were done in
earlier versions of CINEMA 4D, the
| | 00:52 | project files and techniques
will work just fine in R13.
| | 00:55 | Thanks again for watching!
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