IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi, I'm Rob Garrott.
| | 00:05 | Welcome to CINEMA 4D
Essentials: Particles and Dynamics.
| | 00:08 | The Particles and Dynamics
components of C4D make up something called
| | 00:11 | the Simulation Engine.
| | 00:12 | In this course, the basic particle
engine is the first thing we'll examine.
| | 00:16 | It ships with every version of
C4D, and it's incredibly easy to use.
| | 00:20 | Next, we'll look at the more
complex Thinking Particles Engine.
| | 00:23 | It's based on Xpresso and is an
important part of the Studio bundle of C4D.
| | 00:27 | Finally, we'll have some fun with the
Dynamics Engine, creating rigid bodies,
| | 00:31 | soft bodies, and combining dynamics
with both Thinking Particles and MoGraph.
| | 00:36 | So let's get started with CINEMA 4D
Essentials: Particles and Dynamics.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a premium member of lynda.com,
then you've got access to the Exercise
| | 00:04 | Files for this course.
| | 00:06 | I'm working with them on my Desktop,
and the files are organized in the
| | 00:08 | subfolders that go with each chapter.
| | 00:11 | Inside each of these subfolders will be
files used in that chapter, and the files
| | 00:15 | in each chapter folder are organized
based on the needs of that chapter.
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|
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1. The Basic Particle EngineUnderstanding the Emitter object| 00:00 | Particles can be an amazing part of
both Motion Graphics and Visual Effects.
| | 00:04 | CINEMA 4D has actually two particle systems.
| | 00:07 | It has the basic Particle Engine
and Thinking Particles built into it.
| | 00:11 | In this chapter, we're going to take a look
at the basic Particle Engine and how it works.
| | 00:16 | At the heart of the basic Particle
Engine is something called an Emitter Object.
| | 00:19 | An Emitter Object spits
particles into the scene.
| | 00:21 | Let's go to the Simulate Menu, and go to
Particles, and add an Emitter Object to the scene.
| | 00:28 | An Emitter Object looks like a rectangle.
| | 00:30 | Now, it has a Green icon, that means
it's a generator. And it is an active object.
| | 00:34 | Let's hit Play and you'll see that it's
now spitting particles into the scene.
| | 00:40 | I'll just hit Stop.
| | 00:41 | Let's orbit around our Emitter
and take a look at those particles.
| | 00:46 | Let's zoom in on them.
| | 00:46 | You can see that the particles are
represented by a little dash line.
| | 00:50 | This dash line indicates
the speed of the particles.
| | 00:53 | These particles are going kind
of slow so the line is short.
| | 00:56 | The longer the line, the
faster the particles are.
| | 00:58 | The important thing to remember about
the Emitter Object is that by default, the
| | 01:02 | Emitter Object doesn't render.
| | 01:03 | And if I hit Cmd+R or Ctrl+R on the
keyboard, you see I have nothing in my scene.
| | 01:08 | That's because the Particle Emitter does
not spit out objects, it just spits out
| | 01:12 | representations for the
location of the particles.
| | 01:14 | We have to tell it what to spit out.
| | 01:17 | Let's hit A on the keyboard to redraw the frame.
| | 01:19 | Let's add in a Cube.
| | 01:22 | Now the Cube comes in
larger than the Emitter Object.
| | 01:24 | So let's scale it down, hit T on the
keyboard and scale it right on down.
| | 01:28 | Make sure that it's smaller than the Emitter.
| | 01:31 | It doesn't really matter how much.
| | 01:32 | Now let's take that cube and drag it
and make it a child of the Emitter.
| | 01:36 | Now let's render, Cmd+R or Ctrl+R.
And you see that now we see our Cubes.
| | 01:41 | There's a very important button on
the Emitter Object under the Particle
| | 01:44 | Properties, at the very bottom,
and that's called Show Objects.
| | 01:47 | We want to turn that on, so we can
actually see our particles here in the Editor
| | 01:51 | Window, as well as the Render.
| | 01:53 | Let's activate Show Objects.
| | 01:55 | And now you can see that our
particles show up in the scene. And as we orbit
| | 01:59 | around, there they are.
| | 02:00 | If I Rewind back to 0 and hit Play,
you can see that our particles are
| | 02:04 | spitting into the scene.
| | 02:06 | Let's advance forward in time to a
point where we can see more particles.
| | 02:10 | There are a lot of controls on the
Particle options for the Emitter Object.
| | 02:14 | The birthrate in Editor and Renderer
controls how many particles you'll see when
| | 02:19 | we're in the Editor Window, and how many
particles you'll see when we hit Shift+R or
| | 02:22 | Render to Picture Viewer.
| | 02:24 | So let's crank up the value here.
| | 02:26 | Let's change the birth rate
in Editor from 10 to, say, 20.
| | 02:29 | You'll see we have more particles.
| | 02:32 | Let's Rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 02:33 | And let's crank up the
Birthrate in Renderer to say, 50.
| | 02:39 | We're seeing about 20 particles emitted
per second here, and if I hit Shift+R on
| | 02:44 | the keyboard, to render to the
Picture Viewer, you'll see that I now have a
| | 02:48 | lot more particles in this
rendering than I did over here.
| | 02:52 | You can see there are more particles.
| | 02:53 | And that's the difference
between those two settings.
| | 02:56 | The reason for the setting is that you
want to have more control here in the
| | 03:00 | Editor Window, so by giving you fewer
particles in the Editor Window, it gives
| | 03:03 | you a better playback response.
| | 03:05 | Visibility controls the visibility of
the particles, and if I drag that down, it
| | 03:10 | looks like nothing happened here, but
when I hit Cmd+R or Ctrl+R, looks like
| | 03:13 | nothing happened there.
| | 03:14 | But when I hit Shift+R, you see
that we now have fewer particles here.
| | 03:18 | This is basically a way
of filtering out particles.
| | 03:22 | It's not something I normally
use, so I'll leave that at 100%.
| | 03:26 | Start Emission and Stop Emission
control when the Emitter is spitting out
| | 03:30 | particles, and these are very important.
| | 03:32 | You don't take keyframes for the
Particle Emission with the Emitter Object, you
| | 03:36 | change the Start Emission
and Stop Emission frame.
| | 03:38 | So right now our Emitter will
spit out particles from 0 to 150.
| | 03:41 | If I Rewind back to 0 and hit Play, you'll
see that it continuously spits out particles.
| | 03:47 | Let's rewind back to 0.
| | 03:48 | I'm going to change the Emission time for
the stop, down to frame -- let's make it 30.
| | 03:54 | And you'll see that at frame 30, our
Emitter stops spitting out particles.
| | 03:59 | If I wanted to have a little burst of
particles, here to start at frame 30, I've
| | 04:05 | changed the start time to 30 and the
end time to, say, 45, and you'll see that
| | 04:12 | when I hit Play, I get a little
burst of particles, and that's it.
| | 04:17 | Now when you do a burst of particles like that,
let's crank up the value on the Birthrates.
| | 04:21 | Let's make that, say, 50 x 50. I'll hit Play.
| | 04:27 | You can see we have a lot more particles.
| | 04:29 | The Seed allows you to randomize this.
| | 04:31 | If you're going to have multiple
Particle Emitters in the scene, you can
| | 04:35 | change the Seed value, that way you have no
two Particle Emitters that will spit out
| | 04:39 | the same particles at the same rate.
| | 04:41 | If the Seed value is 0, Particle
Emitters with the same settings will spit out
| | 04:44 | the same particles in the same way.
| | 04:46 | The Lifetime controls how
long the particles live.
| | 04:48 | Let's bring that Lifetime
down from 600 to, say, 30.
| | 04:52 | And I'll Rewind and hit Play.
| | 04:53 | And you can see that our Particle Emitter
spit out and then they all die at the same speed.
| | 04:59 | The Variation introduces
randomness into the Lifetime.
| | 05:02 | Let's crank that up to 100% and then hit Play.
| | 05:06 | You can see that now they
don't all die at the same rate.
| | 05:10 | The Speed controls how fast they're coming out.
| | 05:12 | Let's change that Speed up
from 150 to, let's say, 600.
| | 05:16 | Rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 05:22 | Now we got the particles
flying out of there really fast.
| | 05:24 | The Variation introduces
randomness into the speed.
| | 05:27 | Let's crank that up to
100%, Rewind and hit Play.
| | 05:30 | Let's back out a little bit.
| | 05:33 | You see we end up with one
little guy that's just stuck right there.
| | 05:37 | And so, I'll decrease the randomness,
and now we should get one little particle
| | 05:43 | that doesn't get stuck. There we go.
| | 05:45 | Rotation introduces rotation to the particles.
| | 05:49 | Let's crank that up and you'll see that
each of the particles now will rotate,
| | 05:53 | and by default the Rotation is random as well.
| | 05:56 | I really like that.
| | 05:57 | The End Scale controls how big the
particles are at the end of their life.
| | 06:01 | Let's change that down to 0.
| | 06:03 | What you'll see is the
particles now die off really tiny.
| | 06:10 | Let's scrub through that so you can see
what's actually going on. And Pause here.
| | 06:13 | You can see the particles as they come
out of the Emitter are much larger, and as
| | 06:19 | they die, they're much smaller.
| | 06:20 | We can actually increase the size of
the particles overall by increasing the
| | 06:24 | size of the object here.
| | 06:25 | So if I go to my Cube and change the size
from 13.6, let's make it, say, 40 x 40 x 40.
| | 06:33 | So now they're much larger.
| | 06:35 | When we rewind and play it back again,
you'll see that they'll start out much larger
| | 06:39 | and then die off really small.
| | 06:43 | The Tangential option relates to
animating the Emitter along a Spline.
| | 06:47 | And Render Instances is a way of saving memory.
| | 06:50 | Let's go to the Emitter options. And
the Emitter options, these control the
| | 06:54 | shape of the Emitter.
| | 06:56 | By the default it's a Pyramid, and we're
going to increase the size here and make
| | 07:02 | the Emitter much larger.
| | 07:03 | I'm scrubbing these values.
| | 07:04 | You can put in numeric values if you like.
| | 07:07 | And then the Angle Horizontal and the
Angle Vertical control the direction that
| | 07:11 | the Emitter is spitting out.
| | 07:13 | So by default, it spits all along the Z-axis.
| | 07:17 | And if we want to have it spray out in
all directions, we can increase the Angle
| | 07:22 | Horizontal and Vertical.
| | 07:23 | The Angle Horizontal maxes out at 360.
| | 07:27 | So now, what's going to happen is the
particles are all going to come out in an
| | 07:31 | arc around the Y-axis. Let's hit Play.
| | 07:33 | You'll see that, boom!
| | 07:35 | They all come out in an arc around the Y-axis.
| | 07:38 | Now if we change the Angle Vertical,
| | 07:41 | that maxes out at 180, you'll see that
now they're flying up along the Y-axis as
| | 07:45 | well, so now it's flying in all directions.
| | 07:49 | If we change the X-Size and Y-Size to,
say, 1 x 1 we're going to end up with a
| | 07:54 | little tiny point source.
| | 07:56 | Let's Rewind back to 0 and hit Play. Boom.
| | 07:59 | And now we've got a great
little burst of particles.
| | 08:02 | We'll talk about the
Include options in the next movie.
| | 08:05 | The Include options allow you to determine
which Particle Forces affect the Emitter.
| | 08:10 | In the next movie, we'll take a look at
the Particle Forces and how they can be
| | 08:13 | used to modify your particles
after they come out of the Emitter.
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| Working with particle forces| 00:00 | The Emitter Objects spits out
particles into the scene, but they pretty much
| | 00:04 | just go in a straight line or whatever
direction they were going in when they
| | 00:08 | came out of the Emitter.
| | 00:09 | Particle Forces allow you to modify the
particles after they come out of the Emitter.
| | 00:14 | Let's create a Particle Emitter.
| | 00:15 | Let's go to the Simulate Menu and under
the Particles, let's tear off this Menu.
| | 00:20 | I'll Highlight those double lines and
then remove that and let's just park
| | 00:23 | that right over here.
| | 00:25 | Now what I want to do is to add an Emitter to
the scene and let's spit out a lot of particles.
| | 00:30 | I'll hit Play on the keyboard.
| | 00:32 | You can see we've just got a few particles here.
| | 00:34 | Let's go into the Particle Menu
and change that to, say, 500 x 500.
| | 00:38 | Now we've got a lot of particles coming out.
| | 00:40 | We're not going to be using
an object under here for now,
| | 00:43 | we just want to see what the
particles themselves are doing.
| | 00:46 | And this will give us a good visual indicator.
| | 00:48 | These objects underneath the Emitter
are the Particle Forces, and the Particle
| | 00:51 | Forces can be used to modify.
| | 00:52 | They're Operator Objects, and
they modify the Emitter Object.
| | 00:55 | Let's start off with the easiest
to understand, which is the Gravity.
| | 00:59 | I'm not going to cover all of
these objects in this movie.
| | 01:02 | But they all work in
essentially the same kind of way.
| | 01:04 | So I'm going to cover the ones
that I think are the most important.
| | 01:08 | The most important one in my opinion is the
Gravity Object, and let's add that to the scene.
| | 01:12 | And when I add that to the
scene, let's rewind and hit Play.
| | 01:16 | You'll see that our particles
immediately are forced downward.
| | 01:18 | The gravity has an acceleration, and that
controls how fast particles are pointing downward.
| | 01:23 | Let's stop Playback, Rewind back to 0.
| | 01:26 | And let's go to the Acceleration
and change that to a higher value.
| | 01:29 | If I make it a higher value, say 500,
you can see that our particles now
| | 01:34 | are drawn down faster.
| | 01:36 | If I rewind that and change it to a
lower value, say 50, you'll see that our
| | 01:41 | particles will draw down slower.
| | 01:44 | By default, the particles have zero gravity.
| | 01:47 | So if I wanted to I could turn the
Gravity Force Object off by clicking its
| | 01:50 | green checkbox, and then I'll rewind
back to 0 and hit Play again, and you can
| | 01:55 | see that my particles are unaffected.
| | 01:58 | Let's rewind back to 0, turn on Gravity.
| | 02:01 | Now let's talk next about the Deflector Object.
| | 02:05 | I'm going to add the Deflector Force
Object to the scene, and the Deflector Force
| | 02:09 | Object comes in as a rectangle.
| | 02:11 | And it's in the same
location as the Emitter Object.
| | 02:14 | Let's drag that out here, and
watch what happens when I hit Play.
| | 02:19 | Our particles come out and then the
ones that strike the Emitter are bounced
| | 02:23 | off in a new direction.
| | 02:25 | Let's rewind back to 0.
| | 02:26 | Let's make the Deflector
Object a little bit larger.
| | 02:29 | Let's make it, say, 500 x 500.
| | 02:32 | That way there's no chance
that our particles will miss.
| | 02:34 | And let's angle them upward. And I'm going
to rotate this, that's the wrong direction.
| | 02:38 | Now let's rotate it back up this way,
and I'm going to slide this down into
| | 02:43 | the particle stream.
| | 02:44 | Now the Deflector has a Bounce option, that
controls how much of the energy is returned.
| | 02:50 | By default it's 100%.
| | 02:54 | You can see that the particles bounce
off the Emitter with the same speed that
| | 02:58 | they approach the Emitter.
| | 03:00 | If I change that Bounce
down, let's call it, say, 75%.
| | 03:06 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play again.
| | 03:08 | You can see that now they'll bounce off slower.
| | 03:10 | So let's leave it like that and crank up the
Gravity back to, say, 250, which was the default.
| | 03:17 | And now, we're going to get a
nice little stream of particles.
| | 03:20 | The interesting thing about the
Deflector Object is that we can duplicate it.
| | 03:23 | We'll hold down the Control key and make a
copy, and let's rotate it into position,
| | 03:29 | and drag down the Z-axis.
| | 03:31 | And now you can see we have multiple Deflectors.
| | 03:34 | There really is no limit to how many
of these you can have in the scene.
| | 03:41 | You can do a lot of
redirection with your particles.
| | 03:44 | I can rotate this around this way.
| | 03:46 | Let's slide that forward just a bit.
| | 03:48 | And then let's increase the amount of
time that our particles have to live.
| | 03:51 | Right now, it's looping back at 90 frames.
| | 03:53 | Let's change the frame range from 90 to
300, and then adjust our Preview Slider here.
| | 03:59 | And then rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 04:01 | So you can see that it's splitting
when some of the particles strike the
| | 04:09 | Deflector and others pass on.
| | 04:13 | So the Deflector Object can be really useful.
| | 04:15 | The next most important
one is something called Wind.
| | 04:18 | And let's turn these Deflectors off by
killing their checkboxes, and let's rewind back to 0.
| | 04:24 | And when I hit Play, you'll see my
particles are just being affected by Gravity.
| | 04:29 | Let's disable the Gravity too for just a
moment, so that we're only seeing the particles.
| | 04:34 | Now let's add in a Wind force.
| | 04:37 | When we add that, we get this cool looking little fan.
| | 04:40 | The way the Wind Object works is that it
directs the particles along its Z-axis.
| | 04:44 | So if I hit Play right now, you'll
see that the Wind Object is spraying the
| | 04:49 | particles, making them speed up,
because they're traveling parallel to the
| | 04:53 | Z-axis of the Wind Object.
| | 04:55 | Let's hide the Deflectors as well.
| | 04:57 | When I disable them, I can
still see them on the scene,
| | 04:59 | it's a little bit confusing.
| | 05:00 | So let's hold down the Option or Alt
key and then click twice and drag down to
| | 05:05 | paint those guys invisible.
| | 05:07 | Now let's take the Wind Object.
| | 05:09 | Hit R on the keyboard to bring up the
Rotation Tool and rotate the Wind Object
| | 05:14 | so it's pointing up in the air.
| | 05:15 | And let's drag it down like this
and put it out here in this area.
| | 05:19 | And then we'll rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 05:22 | You can see that the Wind
Object is blowing those particles up.
| | 05:25 | On the Wind is a really
important option called Falloff.
| | 05:31 | Under the Object Properties, you can
adjust the Speed and Turbulence and
| | 05:34 | that sort of thing.
| | 05:36 | But the Falloff controls where
the particles will be emitting.
| | 05:39 | Let's hit Stop and then go into the
Shape pull-down and change it from
| | 05:42 | Infinite to be a Box.
| | 05:44 | When I do that, I get this
box around my Wind Object.
| | 05:48 | Let's make the box quite a bit larger.
| | 05:53 |
| | 05:53 | And then let's move the box
up into the particle stream.
| | 05:56 | So the particle stream is going to pass
right through there, and watch what happens.
| | 06:05 | Actually, let's take the Wind Object and
move it out just a little bit more.
| | 06:09 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play again.
| | 06:11 | You'll see that as they hit that
red field, they'll start to upward.
| | 06:15 | And just like the Deflector Object, you
can have multiple Wind Objects in the scenes.
| | 06:19 | Let's take this first Wind Object.
| | 06:21 | Hold on the Control key and drag a copy.
| | 06:23 | And then let's take that one and
rotate it a different direction.
| | 06:27 | I missed the axis band that time, let's grab
the axis band and rotate it around its X-axis.
| | 06:33 | And let's move it up on Y. And then,
it's important that the particles pass
| | 06:39 | through this red box, otherwise
they won't be deflected by the wind.
| | 06:42 | And let's rotate that down a little bit.
| | 06:44 | So now what we're going to get is a stream
that's going to pass up this way, pass in
| | 06:48 | this way, and then head back down again.
| | 06:50 | Let's rewind and hit Play.
| | 06:51 | So you can do a really nice
job of directing that wind.
| | 06:57 | Underneath the Wind Objects, I'll go
to the first Wind Object, and there is
| | 07:01 | under the Object Properties, a Speed
that controls how fast the wind is blowing.
| | 07:06 | And then Turbulence, that
controls how smooth the wind is.
| | 07:08 | Let's introduce a lot of Turbulence
and let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 07:14 | So in first one, you'll see that the Wind
is going to spread them out, so it's not
| | 07:18 | blowing evenly in one direction.
| | 07:22 | You can see that the particles are
being so displaced by the Turbulence that
| | 07:26 | they never even make it
to the other Wind Object.
| | 07:28 | Let's hide these two Wind Objects
again and talk about one more object, and
| | 07:34 | that is the Rotation.
| | 07:36 | Rotation allows you to
introduce rotation into the particles.
| | 07:40 | And this is different than the
Rotation Option on the Emitter.
| | 07:44 | This is going to rotate the
entire field of particles.
| | 07:46 | Let's add a Rotation Object to the scene.
| | 07:50 | And when we rewind back to 0 and
hit Play, you're going to see that our
| | 07:54 | particles are now creating a vortex,
and if we look down the tunnel of this
| | 07:59 | vortex, we can see that it is really hypnotic.
| | 08:04 | Let's back out a little
bit and take a look at that.
| | 08:07 | So the rotation is causing them
to spread outward on their axis.
| | 08:12 | Because what happens is the particles
are coming out in a straight line, but
| | 08:16 | then they're being spun, and they continue off
in the direction that they're being spun in.
| | 08:20 | And if I change the Angle Speed, that
will increase the speed of the Rotation,
| | 08:24 | let's make that like 60.
| | 08:26 | Rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 08:27 | And you'll see that they'll spin
off even harder. Let's hit Stop.
| | 08:35 | Now if we take the Emitter Object and
go under the Emitter Options and change
| | 08:41 | the size of the Emitter, and let's
make this, say, 10 x 10, very small Emitter.
| | 08:46 | And then, let's rotate it upwards.
| | 08:49 | Let's twirl that up on its axis.
| | 08:51 | Remember the Emitter emits along its Z-
axis. And then let's hit Play one more time.
| | 08:55 | You'll see that these guys are going to
spray out in a spiral, and that's because
| | 08:59 | of the way that the Rotation Object behaves.
| | 09:02 | The Rotation Object rotates around its Z-axis.
| | 09:05 | So the particles are being created in
spiral around that axis, and you can have a
| | 09:11 | lot of fun with that.
| | 09:12 | Let's take the Rotation
Object and rotate it up as well.
| | 09:16 | Let's rotate that up so the Z-axis
is lined up with the Emitter.
| | 09:20 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play
one more time, you'll see we'll create a
| | 09:23 | cool looking tornado.
| | 09:26 | So those are what I think are
the most important of the Forces.
| | 09:29 | They all work essentially the same way.
| | 09:31 | They have some options that you can
change that affect how they affect the
| | 09:35 | particles, and most of them have a
Falloff option that allows you to limit how
| | 09:39 | much of the particles or how much of
the scene they're actually affecting.
| | 09:43 | In the next movie we'll see a
practical example of how to use the Particle
| | 09:46 | Emitter to create an effect.
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| Particle exercise: Creating an impact splash| 00:00 | For this example, we're going
to create a splash of particles.
| | 00:04 | I have a sphere hitting the floor and
melting into a flat object, and this was
| | 00:08 | created in an earlier module, under
Deformers, and it's basically just a sphere
| | 00:12 | that is being influenced by Melt Deformer.
| | 00:14 | And the Melt Deformer is causing it to
actually splat out when it hits the ground.
| | 00:19 | So what we want to do is to create
some little globs that will come of this
| | 00:23 | location when the object hits the ground.
| | 00:25 | So the first thing we need to
do is create an Emitter Object.
| | 00:28 | So let's go to the Simulate Menu, and
then go to Particles, and go to Emitter.
| | 00:32 | The Emitter is going to splash out
particles, and we want it to spray it up.
| | 00:36 | Remember, the Emitter spits out along its Z-axis.
| | 00:38 | So let's rotate it.
| | 00:39 | I'll hit R on the keyboard.
| | 00:41 | I'll hold down the Shift key
to do it in even increments.
| | 00:45 | And let's rotate it up 90 degrees.
| | 00:47 | Now let's rewind and hit Play.
| | 00:48 | So the particles are coming out a bit little soon.
| | 00:51 | We actually don't want the particles to
actually come out until the sphere hits the floor.
| | 00:56 | So right about there, which is frame 11.
| | 00:59 | So let's go to our Emitter Object and
change, under the Particle Options, the
| | 01:02 | Start Emission to be frame 11.
| | 01:04 | Now let's change the Stop
Emission from 150 down to, say, 20.
| | 01:09 | Then we'll change the Birthrate in Editor.
| | 01:13 | Let's make this up pretty high,
let's call it, say, 50 x 50.
| | 01:17 | And then when we rewind to 0,
let's hit Play. Boom. Not bad.
| | 01:23 | I think that's still not quite enough particles.
| | 01:25 | Let's change that from 50 to, say, 200 x 200.
| | 01:27 | Let's rewind back to 0 and
hit Play. Boom. That's better.
| | 01:34 | The particles, when they come out,
you'll see that they're actually emitting.
| | 01:38 | Let's rewind back to 0
and I'll scrub through this.
| | 01:40 | You can see that they're coming
out and they're not spraying outward.
| | 01:43 | We want them to spray outward in
all directions except for down.
| | 01:46 | Let's zoom in on this a little bit more.
| | 01:49 | Under the Emitter Properties
let's change the Angle Horizontal.
| | 01:53 | The Angle Horizontal is the
angle around the Emitter's Y-axis.
| | 01:57 | So let's change that to 180, actually a
little bit less than 180, let's call it 170.
| | 02:03 | And let's change the Angle Vertical,
that's the vertical is around the Z-axis, to 180.
| | 02:10 | And you can see the Angle Vertical tops out.
| | 02:13 | When we rewind back to 0 and hit Play,
| | 02:15 | you'll see that our objects are spraying out.
| | 02:19 | You'll notice that they're not spraying
below the ground, they're going upward.
| | 02:26 | The other thing you'll notice is
that the Emitter is a little bit big
| | 02:28 | compared to the splats.
| | 02:29 | So let's go over to the Emitter Size
and bring that down to, say, 70 x 70.
| | 02:33 | That's going to tighten up our spray.
| | 02:37 | Let's rewind back to 0
and hit Play. There we go.
| | 02:40 | The next thing we want to do is to have
the particles fall downward after they
| | 02:44 | come out of the Emitter.
| | 02:45 | Right now they come out to the Emitter and
go off in whatever direction they started in.
| | 02:49 | So let's go to the Simulate
Menu and go to Particles again.
| | 02:52 | Let's add in Gravity.
| | 02:53 | Now when we rewind and hit Play, our
objects fall down. They splat outward, and
| | 03:00 | then they fall down.
| | 03:02 | Let's rewind back to 0.
| | 03:03 | Now our particles aren't making it very far
up into the air, before they are splashed down.
| | 03:09 | So let's go back to the
Emitter and adjust the Speed.
| | 03:12 | If I go the Particle Option and change
the Speed from 150 to say, let's try 300.
| | 03:19 | Rewind back to 0 and hit Play. Not bad.
| | 03:21 | So you can see they're still not
making it very far up into the air.
| | 03:28 | So let's crank the Speed up just a little
bit more, let's try 500. Rewind back to 0.
| | 03:35 | And that makes the
splashes a little bit too big.
| | 03:38 | Let's rewind back again and
bring that back down to 300.
| | 03:41 | I think what the problem is also is that the
splashes are lasting a little bit too long.
| | 03:46 | Right now, they live all the way to 600 frames.
| | 03:48 | Let's have them live only
about -- let's call it 30 frames.
| | 03:51 | Let's change that to 30,
and then rewind back to 0.
| | 03:54 | You notice, I'm rewinding and hitting
Play each time I make a change. Much better.
| | 03:59 | In order to get a feel for what our
splash is actually is going to do,
| | 04:06 | we need to be able to see the actual particles.
| | 04:08 | Right now, we're seeing a
representation of the particles.
| | 04:11 | We're going to spit out spheres,
and let's add a Sphere to the scene.
| | 04:15 | The Sphere is really large, let's scale it
way down, let's change the Radius to, say, 5.
| | 04:20 | That's a little bit too small.
| | 04:22 | Let's make it about 8.
| | 04:23 | I think it's better.
| | 04:24 | Then we want to change the Segments to 6.
| | 04:27 | There's an interesting feature on
the sphere, this Render Perfect.
| | 04:31 | We can render this down to 6, and even
though we such a low polygon count, when
| | 04:36 | we render, Cmd+R, it still
renders to a perfect sphere.
| | 04:39 | Let's hit A on the keyboard.
| | 04:43 | So now let's make this Sphere a child
of the Emitter Object, and select the
| | 04:47 | Emitter, and then we're
going to tell it to Show Objects.
| | 04:50 | Now rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 04:54 | You can see there are our particles jumping out.
| | 04:56 | The particles are all
living the same amount of time.
| | 04:59 | Let's introduce some
Variation in the Particle Lifetime.
| | 05:01 | Let's bring that up to
100, and rewind back to 0.
| | 05:06 | You can see that now, they'll die
off at a slightly different rate.
| | 05:10 | Some die off sooner and some die off longer.
| | 05:13 | Now what we want to do is change the End Scale.
| | 05:16 | We want our particle droplets to hit the
ground, splash, and then radiate outward
| | 05:21 | and diminish as they live.
| | 05:24 | So let's change the End Scale down to 0.
| | 05:26 | So now, over the course of the Lifetime,
they're going to scale down. And then,
| | 05:29 | let's introduce just a
little bit of Variation in that.
| | 05:33 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 05:35 | And that's starting to feel a
little bit more like a splash.
| | 05:41 | The next thing we need to do, you'll
notice if I hit Play, I'm going to orbit
| | 05:46 | around, so I'm kind of even.
| | 05:47 | I'm very close to the
ground now looking at it sideways.
| | 05:50 | We don't want any of our
particles to go down below the ground.
| | 05:53 | We want them to splash outward
and then bounce across the ground.
| | 05:56 | So let's go to the Simulate Menu, and
under Particles, let's add in a Deflector.
| | 06:03 | The Deflector Object comes
in pointing along the Z-axis.
| | 06:06 | So let's rotate it around.
| | 06:07 | Hit R on the keyboard to bring up the
Rotation Tool if it's not already active.
| | 06:11 | And then rotate this around.
| | 06:13 | Let's hold down the Shift key
so we do it in even increments.
| | 06:16 | So now we're at 90 degrees.
| | 06:17 | Now let's make the
Deflector Object really, really big.
| | 06:20 | So go to the Deflector, under the Object
Properties, and make the Size, let's make it huge.
| | 06:24 | 10000 x 10000.
| | 06:27 | Now there's no chance that our
particles can fall below that.
| | 06:31 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 06:34 | You can see that they now are
being deflected off the floor.
| | 06:38 | They'll skid away into the distance.
| | 06:44 | The Bounce on it, let's reduce the
Bounce from, say, 100 to about 60 or so, so
| | 06:50 | that our particles don't tend to bounce up
into the air quite as much. There we go.
| | 06:54 | I think we're about ready for the last step.
| | 06:59 | These particles, when they
spit out, are just spheres.
| | 07:01 | We want to create a little blobby mass
that spits out of our object, and we're
| | 07:05 | going to use something called
a Metaball Object to do that.
| | 07:08 | Underneath the Modeling objects is this
little guy right here, and it's got a kind
| | 07:12 | of a blobby icon for it.
| | 07:14 | This is a Generator Object that takes
any kind of spheres you place under it,
| | 07:17 | or Splines, and creates a smooth skin based
on the positions and sizes of those shapes.
| | 07:23 | Let's move the interface down a bit so we
can see all the hierarchy. And twirl that close.
| | 07:27 | Let's drag the Metaball down and make
the Emitter a child of the Metaball Object.
| | 07:32 | Now what happens is, we get
this weird looking blob here.
| | 07:35 | Let's rewind back to 0
and scrub forward in time.
| | 07:39 | This doesn't look like a splash at all.
| | 07:41 | What's happening is that the
Metaball Object has some settings on it.
| | 07:44 | Number one is the Hull Value.
| | 07:45 | The Hull Value determines how
accurately the Metaball will conform to the
| | 07:49 | shapes that it encounters.
| | 07:51 | So let's take the Hull Value and drag it up.
| | 07:53 | It's a little bit
counterintuitive to what you might think.
| | 07:56 | Let's back up to time 0 and scrub forward to
the splat where the particles are coming out.
| | 08:03 | Now what we want to do is to
decrease the Editor Subdivision.
| | 08:07 | The Editor Subdivisions are showing
some very coarse representation here.
| | 08:11 | So 40 centimeters is a really low
resolution, so let's increase the resolution.
| | 08:15 | That's very important, never drag
the Editor Subdivision below the Render
| | 08:19 | Subdivision, you might get a crash.
| | 08:21 | Let's bring this down to, say, 10.
| | 08:25 | And so you can see, now it starts to
look a little bit more like a blob.
| | 08:28 | Let's bring this down to 5,
just like it is in the Render.
| | 08:32 | And you can see that's looking much better.
| | 08:34 | Let's go to the Hull Value and
increase it, so that we have a really
| | 08:38 | tight representation.
| | 08:40 | Now when we scrub through, boom.
| | 08:42 | You see we get the splashes radiating outward.
| | 08:45 | And the cool thing is that they die
off right when they're supposed to.
| | 08:48 | So let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 08:50 | And I think we're getting a
really good splash going out of this.
| | 08:55 | Let's make the splash the same color
as the splat itself, and let's drag the
| | 08:59 | material up on the Metaball Object.
| | 09:02 | I'll deselect the Metaball,
let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 09:04 | In order to get a feel for how this is
going to look when it renders, let's hit
| | 09:11 | Shift+R on the keyboard.
| | 09:12 | You see our objects are
still a little bit chunky.
| | 09:15 | We might need to lower the values in
both the Editor and Renderer Subdivisions.
| | 09:20 | So let's close that up.
| | 09:22 | And then under the Metaball
Object, let's take these both down.
| | 09:25 | I'll start off by changing the Render
Subdivision down from 5 to, say, let's call it 2.
| | 09:31 | And then I'll back up and make
the Editor Subdivision 2 as well.
| | 09:35 | And you can see now that makes
them a lot more accurate.
| | 09:38 | Rewind back to 0, hit Play, and
now let's render that, Shift+R.
| | 09:44 | And you'll see that those
are much, much, more smooth.
| | 09:49 | To make sure that we're actually seeing
everything correctly, let's do a Preview movie.
| | 09:54 | I'll deselect the Metaball and then
hit Option+B or Alt+B on the keyboard.
| | 09:58 | Let's change this from Full Render to
Software Preview, and then leave the Size
| | 10:02 | at 640, and hit Enter.
| | 10:05 | And it's going to calculate that Preview.
| | 10:07 | And now in the Preview movie, we can
see what our splash is actually doing.
| | 10:11 | It's a little bit off center,
but that's okay, you get the idea.
| | 10:14 | It's caching the frames right now.
| | 10:16 | When it's done caching, the line will
be solid green, and now we're seeing the
| | 10:20 | actual speed of Playback.
| | 10:21 | That's a really simple example of how to
use the Particle Emitter to create an effect.
| | 10:25 | Go back and play with this setting.
| | 10:27 | Add in Particle Forces, mess around
with it, and see what kind of other results
| | 10:32 | you can come up with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Thinking ParticlesExplaining the Thinking Particles (TP) workflow| 00:00 | In the previous chapter we took a look
at the Basic Particle System in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:05 | In this chapter we're going to
take a look at Thinking Particles.
| | 00:08 | Thinking Particles is a part of
the Studio Bundle of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:11 | If you don't have the Studio Bundle,
and you only have Prime, or Broadcast, or
| | 00:15 | Visualize, then you'll need to get
Studio Bundle in order to take advantage
| | 00:18 | of Thinking Particles.
| | 00:19 | What Thinking Particles is, is an
Advanced Particle System that's based on XPresso.
| | 00:24 | XPresso is the visual node-based
language for writing scripts and establishing
| | 00:29 | links between Objects in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:31 | Because Thinking Particles is based
on this scripting language, it's both
| | 00:34 | incredibly complex and incredibly powerful.
| | 00:37 | So the Thinking Particles
workflow starts off with a Null Object.
| | 00:42 | Let's add a Null to the scene, and
this Null I'm going to name Emitter.
| | 00:47 | It doesn't have to be called Emitter,
it can be called anything you want, but
| | 00:51 | I'm going to call it what it's going to be.
| | 00:53 | Then we'll add an XPresso
Tag to the Emitter Object.
| | 00:56 | Let's right-click on the Emitter Object and
go to CINEMA 4D Tags and then go to XPresso.
| | 01:01 | And in the XPresso Editor that pops up,
we're going to need to do a couple of things.
| | 01:07 | First off, we're going to add in the Emitter
Object, let's make that a little bit larger.
| | 01:13 | Now we need to add a new node, a
Thinking Particles Node, and that node is going
| | 01:17 | to be called PStorm.
| | 01:19 | Let's go to new Node and Thinking Particles,
and under TP Generator, let's add in PStorm.
| | 01:25 | The PStorm Node is a
Thinking Particle's Emission Node.
| | 01:31 | If you look, it's got a bunch of
parameters that all look like the kind of
| | 01:35 | parameters that you'd
see on a Particle Emitter.
| | 01:38 | Let's bring the XPresso Editor
down a little bit and hit Play.
| | 01:41 | You can see that our scene is in
fact spitting up particles now.
| | 01:46 | The problem is, is if we move the
Emitter Object, the particles don't follow the
| | 01:49 | Emitter, so we have no way of
controlling the position of these particles, where
| | 01:53 | they are emitting from.
| | 01:54 | Let's undo that Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z.
The way we fix that is by linking the
| | 01:58 | Emitter to the PStorm by the Emitter Position.
| | 02:01 | Let's go to the Emitter Outflow, click
and go to Coordinates, Global Position,
| | 02:06 | and adding Global Position.
| | 02:08 | Then let's link the Global Position of
the Emitter Null Object to the Emitter
| | 02:12 | position on the PStorm.
| | 02:13 | Now when we move the Emitter Object,
the particles will follow with it.
| | 02:18 | So let's move that over
there, and then let's hit Play.
| | 02:21 | You can see that these particles are
just leftover, when it recycles, you'll see
| | 02:25 | the correct particles.
| | 02:27 | Now we've got control over where the
particles are going to emit from.
| | 02:31 | Next, we want to create particles to emit.
| | 02:34 | Just like the regular Particle
Emitter, these particles don't render.
| | 02:37 | If I hit the Cmd+R or Ctrl+R on
the keyboard, you can see that I've got
| | 02:42 | nothing in the scene.
| | 02:43 | Let's hit A to redraw.
| | 02:44 | Let's start off by adding a Cube to the
scene for our particles to emit, and I'll
| | 02:48 | add a Cube to the scene.
| | 02:50 | Let's make it little bit smaller, so
it's smaller than our Emitter. And I'll just
| | 02:54 | hit the letter T on the keyboard
and scale the Cube down, here we go.
| | 02:57 | A crucial object in the Thinking
Particles workflow is something called a
| | 03:00 | Particle Geometry Object.
| | 03:02 | Under the Simulate Menu, under
Thinking Particles, is Particle Geometry. And
| | 03:06 | the Particle Geometry Object is a Generator
Object that allows you to spit out particles.
| | 03:12 | Now if we drop the Cube under here, and
then let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 03:17 | You see that nothing is happening.
That's because the Particle Geometry Object
| | 03:22 | needs a couple of things
to actually make it work.
| | 03:24 | The first thing it needs, if you click on
the Particle Geometry, under the Object
| | 03:28 | Properties, is something called a Particle Group.
| | 03:32 | Underneath the Simulate Menu, under Thinking
Particles, are the Thinking Particle Settings.
| | 03:36 | And the Thinking Particle Settings are
where you control different Particle Groups.
| | 03:40 | One of the powerful attributes of
Thinking Particles is that you can divide your
| | 03:43 | particles into multiple groups.
| | 03:45 | So the same Emitter can spit out
particles in different groups and those groups
| | 03:49 | can be made to do different things.
| | 03:50 | For now though, we're just going to use
one group, and that group is called All,
| | 03:54 | that's the Default Group.
| | 03:55 | You can always make a new group in here
and call it whatever you like, but for
| | 04:00 | now we're just going to use All, and
we'll take that word All and drag it across
| | 04:04 | into the Particle Group Field.
| | 04:05 | Let's close up the Thinking
Particle Settings Window.
| | 04:08 | Let's rewind and hit Play again.
| | 04:10 | And you can see that nothing's
happened, and that's because we still
| | 04:15 | have another step to do.
| | 04:16 | I'm going to zoom in here just a
bit, so we can see what's going on.
| | 04:20 | Let's orbit around. There we go.
| | 04:22 | The step that we have to do is we
have to tell Thinking Particles that this
| | 04:26 | Particle Group, All, should generate particles.
| | 04:29 | The way we do that is by passing
the Particle Group into a PShape Node.
| | 04:34 | Now that may sound like gibberish,
but it's a very important step.
| | 04:37 | Let's right-click in the XPresso Editor
and go to New Node > Thinking Particles,
| | 04:43 | and under the TP Standard,
we're going to add PShape.
| | 04:45 | And the PShape Node is asking for an
Object. And we're going to pass all the
| | 04:52 | Objects from the All
Group, into the PShape Node.
| | 04:56 | And the way we do that
is by using a P Pass Node.
| | 04:59 | So let's right-click again, and go to
new Node, let's go to Thinking Particles,
| | 05:03 | and then TP Initiator, and grab P Pass.
| | 05:07 | And then, you'll notice that the P Pass
already has the All Group listed there.
| | 05:11 | And so what we can do is take the
group from the P Pass and drag it out and
| | 05:17 | attach it to the PShape. And when
we do that, let's rewind back to 0.
| | 05:25 | Let's hit Play again, and you'll see
that still nothing has happened, that's
| | 05:28 | because we've still got one more step to do.
| | 05:30 | Let's go in the XPresso Editor and drag
that up, and you see on the PShape Node
| | 05:35 | that there's no Object there.
| | 05:36 | What we need to do is take the Object
that we want to have the particles emit
| | 05:42 | and drag it into that Field.
| | 05:43 | When we do that, now
suddenly we can see those objects.
| | 05:47 | Drag the XPresso Editor Window down
out of the way for a moment, and hit Play.
| | 05:51 | You can see, now we're spitting out Cubes.
They're very tiny right now, but there they are.
| | 05:57 | To make those Cubes larger we can go
back to the PStorm Node, and if we select
| | 06:00 | that PStorm Node, under the Parameters
here is a Size, and let's go to the Size
| | 06:07 | Option and change it from 10 to, say, 30.
And that make our Cubes much larger.
| | 06:13 | All of these options here can be changed.
| | 06:15 | We're not going to go through them
now though, because this workflow that I
| | 06:19 | showed you, where we build a Particle
Emitter from scratch, is really, quite
| | 06:22 | frankly, not necessary.
| | 06:23 | I wanted to do it though to show
you just how intense the Thinking
| | 06:27 | Particles Workflow is.
| | 06:28 | There are a lot of steps to it
and it can be very intimidating.
| | 06:31 | But thankfully, there are a lot of
Thinking Particles presets that will allow
| | 06:35 | you to jumpstart this process.
| | 06:37 | In the next movie, we'll take a
look at a basic preset for the
| | 06:40 | Thinking Particles Emitter.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Breaking down the TP standard emitter| 00:00 | Because Thinking Particles is based on the XPresso
scripting language, it's fairly complex to set up.
| | 00:06 | As you saw from the first movie, the creation
of a basic Emitter was a fairly long ordeal.
| | 00:11 | Fortunately, there are some great presets
that ship with the Studio version of CINEMA
| | 00:15 | 4D that will help you jumpstart the process.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to go into the Content Browser and
under the Presets--this inkwell is a preset--
| | 00:24 | before I click on anything, I'll go to the
View and change it to As list. And I'll click
| | 00:29 | on Presets, and then I'll scroll down to Studio.
And in the Studio I'll click onto Simulation
| | 00:38 | and then Thinking Particles, and under Presets,
under Emitters. Now that's a lot of folders
| | 00:43 | deep, but there's a bunch of great emitters
in here, and the one that we're going to take
| | 00:48 | a look at is the TP Standard Emitter.
| | 00:51 | So I'll double click on that; that
adds to the currently open scene.
| | 00:55 | Let's go back to the Object Manager, and you
could see that I now have this TP Standard
| | 00:59 | Emitter Null Object in the scene. When I
hit play, I'm getting this little plus signs.
| | 01:03 | So those little plus signs
are the Thinking Particles.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to click on the TP Standard Emitter
Null Object and under the Thinking Particles
| | 01:11 | attributes, these are simply a whole bunch
of user data fields that have been added by
| | 01:16 | the programmers at Maxon.
| | 01:18 | And these all correspond to a
various settings on the PStorm node.
| | 01:23 | And if you double-click on the XPresso tag--and
let's use the 2 key and back out just a bit--
| | 01:29 | you can see that there's a fairly
complex arrangement of XPresso nodes in here.
| | 01:35 | Over here on the left, this long node represents
all of the user data that's on the TP Standard
| | 01:40 | Emitter, and these different fields on the user
data are all being piped into different locations.
| | 01:45 | Some of it is going to the PStorm node, and
others are going to other supporting nodes
| | 01:49 | that all help to support the different
features that are listed underneath these settings
| | 01:54 | in Thinking Particles.
| | 01:56 | The good news is that you don't have
to understand all of these connections,
| | 02:00 | as long as you understand what's
going on in these fields over here.
| | 02:04 | I'll close the XPresso Editor up; it's kind of
making me dizzy anyway, looking at all those lines.
| | 02:09 | Over here on the right, in the Thinking
Particles Attributes of the TP Standard Emitter, we've
| | 02:13 | got a lot of the same control that you'd
see on a regular particle system emitter.
| | 02:17 | Now let's rewind back to 0 and hit play again.
| | 02:19 | And you can see we're
spitting out those plus signs.
| | 02:22 | If I render, Command+R or Ctrl+R, you can see
that there is no particle in the scene when
| | 02:27 | it renders, and that's
because we need two things:
| | 02:29 | we need to have a particle to spit out and we need
to have the Thinking Particles Geometry Objects.
| | 02:34 | Let's rewind back to 0. And then let's start
off by adding a cube to the scene, and this
| | 02:39 | will be the particle that we spit out.
| | 02:40 | I'm going to make that cube a very obvious
color. Let's double click in the Material
| | 02:45 | Manager. Let's make that
material a very bright green.
| | 02:49 | So let's drag that material from the
Material Manager onto the cube and let's make the
| | 02:53 | Cube smaller. I'll hit T on the keyboard to bring
up the Scale tool and let's click and drag
| | 02:57 | any place in there and make
it smaller than the emitter.
| | 03:00 | That's pretty good right there.
| | 03:01 | The next part is to add the Thinking Particles
Geometry Object, so let's go to the Simulate
| | 03:06 | Menu, under Thinking Particles, and add
the Particle Geometry Object to the scene.
| | 03:11 | In the Standard Emitter is a field for
Particle Shape. Let's drag the Cube into the Particle
| | 03:15 | Shape field and then I'll rewind back to 0 and hit
play. And you can see, there's our cubes being spit out.
| | 03:24 | Let's rewind back to 0 and take a
look at some of these fields here.
| | 03:28 | Particle Group relates to the grouping of
particles, and these particles in the scene
| | 03:32 | can be made to interact with each other or do
different things than other particle groups.
| | 03:37 | And so it's a way of controlling
and organizing your particles.
| | 03:41 | Next step is the Particle
Number I want to take a look at.
| | 03:43 | I'm going to adjust from 100 down to about
50 to reduce the number of particles in our
| | 03:47 | scene. And let's hit play again.
| | 03:49 | You'll see that we've got much fewer particles.
| | 03:52 | I'll orbit around here.
| | 03:55 | The Spread Angle is very important.
| | 03:56 | That controls the angle of orientation for the
Particle Emitter, and it's set to 45 degrees right now.
| | 04:02 | If we drag that open, you'll see that the Spread
Angle particles will come out at a wider angle.
| | 04:07 | If we bring that tighter, you'll see that they will
come more in a straight line out of the emitter.
| | 04:12 | Let's leave it on 4 degrees for now.
| | 04:15 | The Type is Circle, but we can
set it to a Rectangle as well.
| | 04:19 | We'll leave it set on Rectangle. And the
Size controls the size of the Emitter.
| | 04:25 | I'll bring that back down to 100 units.
| | 04:29 | Let's hit Stop and take a look at the Speed.
| | 04:32 | Under the Speed we've got
Inherit Emitter Velocity.
| | 04:35 | If you're actually animating the position
of your emitter, you might want to turn that
| | 04:38 | on, to have the particles inherit some of the speed
from that emitter as it's travelling through the scene.
| | 04:45 | The Speed is set to 1,000 units and if I hit
play we can adjust that speed down. I will
| | 04:50 | cut it into half, to something like 500.
| | 04:53 | You can see the particles will come out slower.
And the Speed Variation adjusts the variation
| | 04:58 | of the speed of the particles.
| | 05:01 | Let's leave the Variation at 75% and
change the particle speed back to 1000.
| | 05:06 | Now, the Lifetime - there is a very
important checkbox here: Use Document Length.
| | 05:11 | That's on by default. That means the
particles will live as long as the document is.
| | 05:15 | Right now our document is looping back at
frame 90, so the particles don't exist beyond
| | 05:20 | that, but if we change that, then the particles
will match whatever document setting we have.
| | 05:26 | Let's uncheck that for now, and we can the
control the length of our particle lifetime now.
| | 05:30 | Let's change it from 30 frames to something
like 60 frames, and let's suggest the Lifetime
| | 05:35 | Variation and I hit play.
| | 05:40 | And you can see that some of the particles
are dying out after 60 frames. Let's hit Stop.
| | 05:47 | If you scroll down, you've got spin and the
Spin field controls how much the particles are
| | 05:50 | spinning. I'll hit Play and drag this out a
little bit, and you can see that the particles
| | 05:55 | are spinning very fast. This is
a little bit counterintuitive.
| | 05:58 | The longer this slider is the
slower the objects will spin.
| | 06:02 | So let's drag this out here. And you see that
now the particles are spinning out at a slower
| | 06:06 | rate, and the Spin Variation of course controls
how much variation, the randomness in the spin.
| | 06:12 | So some will be spinning faster,
some will be spinning slower.
| | 06:16 | Let's hit Stop. And then under the Advanced
field, you've got a Random Seed. If you have multiple
| | 06:23 | Emitters in the scene, the Random Seed
will control whether or not the particles come
| | 06:27 | out the exact same way
between the two emitters.
| | 06:29 | Next step is Size, and we can
increase the size of the particles.
| | 06:35 | We can also have some variation in the size.
| | 06:39 | I'll do that, and hit Stop.
| | 06:43 | So all these controls closely resemble the
settings that you'd see in a basic particle emitter.
| | 06:49 | That begs a question: What can you do with
Thinking Particles that you can't do with
| | 06:52 | a regular particle emitter?
| | 06:53 | Well, one very important thing is that you can
have particles collide with other particles.
| | 06:58 | You can also detect those collisions from
other particles and create additional particles
| | 07:03 | based on the collisions of other particles.
| | 07:05 | A great of example of that would
be sparks coming off a welder.
| | 07:09 | As those sparks fly off the welder and strike
the ground, they spark other sparks, and they
| | 07:13 | break into smaller pieces.
| | 07:15 | That's the kind of thing you can do with
Thinking Particles that you can't do with the regular
| | 07:17 | particle emitter.
| | 07:18 | Let' take a look at how to make the
particles collide with one another.
| | 07:21 | I'm going to Ctrl+Drag a copy of this TP
Standard Emitter, and I'll end up with two standard
| | 07:28 | emitters in the scene.
| | 07:30 | And I want to make a second piece of
particle geometry and I'm going Ctrl+Drag a copy of
| | 07:35 | the cube down and the Cube 0.1 object.
| | 07:37 | Let's make it a different
color than the original cube.
| | 07:39 | Let's drag all the green out of
there and then apply it to Cube 0.1.
| | 07:45 | I can drag that right onto
that material Tag and replace it.
| | 07:49 | Now to get the Standard Emitter 0.1 object
to emit that cube, then we have to drag that
| | 07:56 | into here. And then let's take that emitter,
hit E on the keyboard for the Move tool, and
| | 08:01 | drag it over here to the right.
| | 08:04 | And then when I rewind back to 0 and hit
play, you see we have two emitters coming up.
| | 08:08 | Now these two emitters are spitting
up particles in the exact same way.
| | 08:12 | Let's stop playback and then go to the Standard
Emitter and scroll down to the Advanced options
| | 08:18 | and change the Random Seed.
| | 08:20 | Now Random Seed value doesn't have to be a big
difference between what the original value was.
| | 08:23 | It just has to be different. Let's just
change this to, say, 125, and what's going to happen
| | 08:28 | when we rewind back to 0 and hit play,
| | 08:31 | and now you see that the two particle steams
are a little bit different than each other.
| | 08:35 | So now, how do we get them to collide?
| | 08:37 | I'm going to grab the TP Standard Emitter 1
and hit R on the keyboard and rotate it around.
| | 08:44 | Let's do it 90 degrees. I'll hold down the
Shift key to get an even increment, and then
| | 08:48 | I'll hit the Move tool
and drag it on its X axis.
| | 08:51 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit play.
| | 08:55 | You can see that now these two
particle streams are intersecting each other.
| | 09:02 | Let's orbit around just a bit, so we can see
things a little bit better and stop the playback.
| | 09:07 | Now you notice that the
particles are not colliding yet.
| | 09:09 | We have to do a little bit of work here to get
the Thinking Particles to notice one another.
| | 09:13 | Fortunately, once again, there's a
great kick starter in the Content Browser.
| | 09:17 | So let's go back to the Content Browser.
| | 09:18 | We're inside of the TP
Emitter subfolder right now.
| | 09:21 | Let's go up one level and go to Interaction.
| | 09:25 | Inside the Interaction
is TP Particle Collision.
| | 09:28 | Let's double-click on that to add it to the
scene and go back to the Object Manager, and
| | 09:32 | now we have this Particle Collision Object.
| | 09:35 | If you select that, this also has a whole
bunch of user data on it that's been added
| | 09:40 | ahead of time, and the most important things
are Particle Group A and Particle Group B.
| | 09:44 | So remember I mentioned
those Particle Groups earlier.
| | 09:47 | We need to divide these two Particle Systems
into two different groups, so that this particle
| | 09:52 | collision object can parse them and
make them collide with one another.
| | 09:56 | So step 1 is to create two different groups.
| | 09:58 | Let's go to the Simulate menu and go to
Thinking Particles > Thinking Particle Settings.
| | 10:04 | And in this, if we go to Particle Groups window
and twirl that open, you can see we have Original.
| | 10:09 | Let's make a second group, so let's select
the Original and right-click and go to Add,
| | 10:15 | and now we have another group.
| | 10:16 | Now, I actually should have right-clicked on
the All, and that would have added it as a
| | 10:20 | peer of this. And the Groups
can have parents and children.
| | 10:23 | We don't want that in this case, so let's
take this Group 1 and drag it up out of that.
| | 10:27 | And so let's call these Groups A
and call this second Group B.
| | 10:33 | And these two groups now need to be fed
into Particle Group A and B over here,
| | 10:37 | so let's drag the A into the A
field and Drag the B into the B field.
| | 10:43 | Now what we need to do is to tell these
emitters to be parts of these groups.
| | 10:49 | So if you look at the TP Standard
Emitter, that's these green particles.
| | 10:54 | Let's drag the A from the Thinking Particle
Settings window into the Particle Group here.
| | 11:00 | And then on the TP Standard Emitter 0.1,
let's drag the B into the Particle field.
| | 11:06 | Now if you go back to the Particle
Collision, that's pretty much all we need to do.
| | 11:12 | So let's rewind back to 0 and hit play, and now
you can see that the particles are not colliding.
| | 11:17 | So let's hit stop. And the reason that the
particles are not colliding is because of
| | 11:22 | something called the Distance. And on the
Thinking Particles Collision Object is this field right
| | 11:28 | here, the slider called Distance, and Distance
relates to the size of the actual particles.
| | 11:34 | Thinking Particles looks at these object as
these little tiny crosses, and you have to
| | 11:38 | tell it to look a little bit larger, a little bit
farther around the actual particle for the collision.
| | 11:44 | So as we expand the Distance outward--
let's rewind back to 0 and hit play--and you'll
| | 11:49 | see that as I scrub these forward--let's go
up to about say 40 or so--you'll see our
| | 11:55 | particle start to collide with one another.
| | 11:59 | Let's orbit around a bit so we can see that
particle collision just a little bit better.
| | 12:03 | I'm going to look at it from the top view and
then I'll rewind back to 0 and hit play again.
| | 12:07 | You can see that those particles
are now colliding with one another.
| | 12:11 | Hopefully that gives you a good overview of
the TP Standard Emitter and how you can combine
| | 12:15 | it with other objects to
get some great results.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using TP with the MoGraph Tracer| 00:00 | Thinking Particles is an incredibly
powerful Particle System, but it's even more
| | 00:04 | powerful when used in combination with MoGraph.
| | 00:07 | I'm going to create a very basic scene.
Let's start off by going to the Content
| | 00:12 | Browser and into the Presets, and
under Studio, and then we'll go in to
| | 00:17 | Simulation, and then Thinking
Particles, and go into Presets.
| | 00:22 | And here in the Emitters, we're
going to grab the TP Standard Emitter.
| | 00:27 | So let's go to TP Standard. And if
these words are getting cut off and it's
| | 00:30 | bugging you, you can do two things. I
can resize these guys larger, or I can
| | 00:34 | change the view to a list.
| | 00:36 | So let's scroll down, and there's the TP
Standard Emitter, and if I double-click
| | 00:40 | on that and rewind it back to zero,
hit Play, you can where there we've got our
| | 00:45 | Thinking Particles.
| | 00:46 | Let's go back to the Object
Manager, and what I want to create is a
| | 00:50 | situation where I've got particles
spitting out and falling down on to a
| | 00:53 | Plane on the floor.
| | 00:54 | So let's orbit around here just a
little bit so we can see it better.
| | 00:58 | And I'll raise it up, let's click
on the Axis Band here and Drag it up.
| | 01:02 | Now don't worry that the
circle didn't go with it.
| | 01:04 | If you rewind back to zero you'll see
that the circle snaps back to it's location.
| | 01:08 | That's one of the things with
Thinking Particles, you always have to rewind
| | 01:12 | back to zero and Play forward again because
Thinking Particles does not go backwards in time.
| | 01:16 | The next step, we want to have some
Gravity in the scene. And if we go back to
| | 01:20 | the Content Browser, and
we're going to go up one level.
| | 01:23 | It's inside the Effectors Folder.
| | 01:24 | If we double-click on that, we're going to
scroll down and get the TP Planer Gravity.
| | 01:29 | Let's double-click on that to add it to
the scene, and now when we rewind and hit
| | 01:33 | Play, you'll see that our
particles are falling down.
| | 01:35 | They're spraying out really fast, the
speed is overcoming the Gravity right now.
| | 01:40 | So let's stop Playback, and go to the
Object Manager, and under the Standard
| | 01:45 | Emitter, let's bring the Speed down.
| | 01:49 | Let's change it from 1,000 to, say, 250.
| | 01:53 | Rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 01:55 | Now you can see our particles are falling down.
| | 02:01 | Let's go also to the Gravity Object and
increase the strength of the Gravity, so
| | 02:05 | our particles will fall
down to the ground faster.
| | 02:08 | Let's stop Playback.
| | 02:11 | Now what we need to have is a Plane for them
to interact with, so let's grab a Plane
| | 02:16 | Object in the scene, let's make it a
little bit larger so there's no chance of
| | 02:19 | our particles missing the Plane.
| | 02:22 | And now what we need to do is to tell
the particles to interact with the Plane,
| | 02:26 | and there's another great
Preset Object for that too.
| | 02:28 | Let's go back to the Content
Browser, make it a little bit bigger.
| | 02:33 | And this time we'll go up one level, and
this time in the interaction, let's go
| | 02:38 | to -- scroll down and find TP Object
Collision. And we add that to the scene by
| | 02:44 | double-clicking on it and go
back to the Object Manager.
| | 02:46 | On the TP Object Collision Object,
under the Thinking Particle Settings, we're
| | 02:49 | going to tell the particles
what object to collide with.
| | 02:53 | So let's go to the Plane and put it into
the Collision Object field. And when we
| | 02:58 | rewind back and hit Play you'll see
that -- oh, man they're not colliding.
| | 03:03 | The reason that they're not colliding
is that in order for particles to collide
| | 03:07 | with an object, that object has to
be made a polygons and not parametric.
| | 03:11 | So let's make the Plane
editable. So I'll hit C on the keyboard.
| | 03:15 | And now the Plane is made of polygons.
And rewind it back to zero and hit Play.
| | 03:19 | You can see that now the
particles are bouncing off.
| | 03:22 | The next thing we need
are some actual particles.
| | 03:24 | These little plus signs that
represent the particles don't actually render.
| | 03:28 | So let's add a Cube to the scene. And
let's take that Cube and make it small,
| | 03:32 | let's make it, say, 50x50x50.
| | 03:34 | Maybe just a little bit smaller than that.
| | 03:37 | Let's make it 25 x25x25, that's even better.
| | 03:42 | And let's make it a really obvious color,
I'm going to make it green, so let's
| | 03:45 | double-click in the Material Editor and
make new material, and then Drag out all
| | 03:49 | of the red and blue, and
then put that onto the Cube.
| | 03:54 | Now we need a Particle Geometry Object.
| | 03:57 | Let's go to the Simulate Menu, and go to
Thinking Particles, and add Particle Geometry.
| | 04:01 | And then on the TP Standard Emitter,
we have to tell it to use that Particle
| | 04:06 | Shape, which is this Cube.
| | 04:07 | Let's put that into that Particle Shape Field.
| | 04:10 | And now when we rewind and hit Play,
there's our Cubes falling out and
| | 04:14 | bouncing off the floor.
| | 04:16 | Now, you can see that our objects
are kind of colliding with the floor.
| | 04:20 | They are going through it just a little
bit. Go to the TP Object Collision. I'm
| | 04:24 | going to adjust the offset just a bit.
R ewind it back to zero and hit Play.
| | 04:31 | There we go, that's going
to feel a little bit better.
| | 04:35 | I don't want to be able to see this Cube
that's here in the center of the floor,
| | 04:40 | that's our actual Particle
Object that we're spitting out.
| | 04:42 | Let's add that under a Null Object.
| | 04:44 | I'll add a new Null Object to the scene.
| | 04:46 | Let's call this one TP geometry hider,
and put the Cube under that object, and
| | 04:53 | then make both dots on the Null
Object red by holding down the Opt or Alt key,
| | 04:57 | and then click twice.
| | 04:59 | Now that's safely hidden. We can put
that at the bottom of the scene where we
| | 05:02 | don't need to touch it
anymore, and then deselect it.
| | 05:05 | So now we got our basic scene set up.
What I want to be able to do is to trace
| | 05:10 | the position of these Cubes with MoGraph Tracer.
| | 05:13 | So let's add a new MoGraph Tracer to the scene,
go to the MoGraph Menu and add Tracer Object.
| | 05:18 | And in the Tracer Object
is the Trace Link Field.
| | 05:22 | Normally, with regular objects you would
Drag the object itself into the tracing
| | 05:26 | field, but with Thinking Particles, what
you need to Drag in here instead is the
| | 05:30 | actual Particle Group.
| | 05:31 | So the way we get the Particle Group is
by going to the Simulate Menu, and going
| | 05:36 | to Thinking Particles, and going to
Thinking Particles settings. And let's twirl
| | 05:40 | this open, and Drag the word
Original into the Trace Link Field.
| | 05:44 | Let's close the Thinking
Particles Settings Window up.
| | 05:46 | Let's rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 05:51 |
| | 05:52 | And you'll see that the particles
are not being traced, and the reason is,
| | 05:55 | because I Dragged the word Original
into this field, the Particle Emitters do
| | 06:01 | not know to use that Original.
| | 06:03 | If I go back to the Thinking Particle
Settings, and in that setting there's an All.
| | 06:08 | On the standard Emitter Object, under
the Thinking Particle Settings, if the
| | 06:12 | particle group field is left blank, then
Thinking Particles by default will use the All.
| | 06:17 | By Dragging the word Original into
the Particle Tracer Object, let's select
| | 06:22 | it so we can see that.
| | 06:22 | Oops, I accidentally clicked
on the Particle Geometry Object.
| | 06:26 | Let's click on the Tracer.
| | 06:28 | And in that Trace Link Field, when I
Drag the word Original into that Field,
| | 06:32 | that overrode that default All setting.
| | 06:34 | So now what I need to do is go back
to the Standard Emitter, and under the
| | 06:39 | Thinking Particle Settings, let's Drag the
word Original into the Particle Group Field.
| | 06:43 | And then let's do the same thing for
the TP Object Collision, drag in Original
| | 06:49 | into that field as well,
| | 06:50 | and now when we rewind and hit Play,
we'll be seeing those Traces. And you can
| | 06:57 | see there's our Traces.
| | 06:58 | Those splines coming out are
being generated by the Tracer Object.
| | 07:04 | So that begs the question, what
can you do with those Splines?
| | 07:07 | If I render Cmd+R or Ctrl+R, you see
that the Splines don't actually show up.
| | 07:11 | So what I want to do is to use
that Tracer inside of a Sweep NURBS.
| | 07:15 | Let's go to the NURBS Objects and add a
Sweep NURBS to the scene, and under the
| | 07:20 | Sweep NURBS, replace the Tracer.
| | 07:22 | And the Sweep NURBS needs a second
Spline object to trace along these pads.
| | 07:27 | So let's go into the Spline
Primitives and add a Circle, and let's make that
| | 07:31 | Circle really small, let's call it, say, 10 units.
| | 07:35 | And then put that circle into the
Sweep NURB write above the tracer, and we're
| | 07:39 | going to end up with Geometry for that.
| | 07:42 | Let's hide the Cubes that are
actually generating that. And we'll go into
| | 07:45 | the Particle Geometry.
| | 07:47 | Let's hold the Option or Alt key and then
click twice on that, and that hides those
| | 07:53 | Cubes. Now let's rewind back
to zero and hit Play again.
| | 07:56 | You can see now we've got
this Geometry coming out.
| | 07:59 | Now the scene's going to go kind of
slow and chunky, that's because it's
| | 08:03 | generating a lot of polygons.
| | 08:04 | The way we can reduce the number of
polygons being generated is to reduce the
| | 08:08 | number of particles being generated.
| | 08:09 | If we go to the Standard Emitter, and
under the Particle Number, let's reduce
| | 08:14 | that, let's cut it in half to, say, 50.
| | 08:17 | Then we'll get a decent Playback here.
| | 08:18 | You don't have to do that, we could
just make a preview movie and see that.
| | 08:22 | So if you need to have more particles,
it's okay. I'm just doing that so I'll be
| | 08:25 | able to get a better
playback here in the Editor Window.
| | 08:28 | Let's rewind it back to zero and hit Play.
| | 08:31 | You can see now we have a much better
Playback, until it reaches a certain point.
| | 08:35 | The longer those Splines get, the more
Geometry is being generated and you'll see
| | 08:39 | the computer go slower and slower,
until it hits the loop point again.
| | 08:44 | Using Thinking Particles and MoGraph
together is a really powerful combination,
| | 08:47 | and you can have a lot of fun with it.
| | 08:50 | Do some experimentation and see what
kind of crazy stuff you can come up with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. DynamicsUnderstanding the dynamics engine| 00:00 | The dynamics module in CINEMA 4D is
part of the Studio bundle, and it allows
| | 00:05 | CINEMA 4D to simulate the behavior of
objects as if they were in the real world
| | 00:10 | affected by gravity.
| | 00:11 | Anytime you hear that word Simulate or
Simulation, it means that the computer is
| | 00:16 | trying to recreate behavior from the real world.
| | 00:19 | Because of that recreation, the
calculations that go on behind the scenes
| | 00:22 | are incredibly complex.
| | 00:24 | It also means that you lose a certain
amount of control that you have over your scene.
| | 00:28 | There's a lot of things that you can do
with simulations that you can't do with
| | 00:32 | keyframes, but you often lack the
control that you have with keyframes.
| | 00:35 | It's a lot like trying to
bowl a ball down the lane.
| | 00:38 | You know you can throw the ball down
the lane but you don't always know that
| | 00:42 | you can hit those pins.
| | 00:43 | And that's what the Dynamics
Engine is like, it's just like bowling.
| | 00:46 | So how does the Dynamics Engine work?
| | 00:48 | Let's add a very simple cube to the
scene. And at the heart of the Dynamics
| | 00:52 | Engine is the Dynamics tag.
| | 00:53 | Let's right-click on the Cube and go to
Simulation Tags, and then go to Rigid Body.
| | 00:59 | All of these options--Rigid Body,
Soft Body, Collider, and Ghost--are all
| | 01:03 | contained under the same tag.
| | 01:05 | Even though their icons are different,
they're all based on the same tag.
| | 01:08 | The tags icon changes, depending on
what type of settings you put under it.
| | 01:12 | So let's start off with a Rigid Body.
| | 01:14 | And when we add that to the scene it looks like
nothing happened, except that when I hit
| | 01:18 | Play, my cube falls away. It's now being
affected by gravity. And that gravity is
| | 01:23 | controlled by the Project Settings.
| | 01:24 | Let's hit Cmd+D or Ctrl+D on the
keyboard, and underneath the Project
| | 01:30 | Settings, under the Dynamics option,
is the gravity in the scene. And I can
| | 01:34 | control that gravity. I'll
leave it at 1,000 for now.
| | 01:37 | Let's rewind back to zero, and you
can see that my cube falls away.
| | 01:40 | And that cube would keep on falling
off to infinity, unless it collides with
| | 01:44 | something, and that's a very important
aspect of the Dynamics Engine is that it
| | 01:47 | allows for object collision.
| | 01:49 | Let's go to the Primitives icons and
add a Plane to the scene, and let's make
| | 01:53 | that Plane a Collider.
| | 01:54 | So we go to the Plane and right-click, and go
to Simulation Tags, and then add Collider Body.
| | 02:02 | Let's rewind and hit Play, and you can see
that my cube falls but, it falls even faster.
| | 02:08 | The reason that it falls even faster is that
when two dynamic objects start off the
| | 02:12 | scene in the exact same location,
the Dynamics Engine doesn't know how to
| | 02:15 | resolve it and so it freaks out
and just throws the objects off.
| | 02:19 | You never know what direction they're
going to fly off in but they do take
| | 02:22 | off in strange ways.
| | 02:24 | So what we need to do is rewind back to
zero, let's grab the cube and raise it
| | 02:28 | up on the Y axis, let's drag it up out
of frame and let's expand out a little
| | 02:32 | bit, and then hit Play. And you'll see
that now the cube falls down and it strikes
| | 02:37 | the Plane as if it were a solid floor.
| | 02:39 | Let's rewind back to zero.
| | 02:41 | Because our Cube and the Plane are
directly lined up, when it hits the Plane it
| | 02:46 | just bounces and stays flat.
| | 02:48 | If I rotate my cube, let's rotate it a
little bit so that the point is down
| | 02:53 | first, rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 02:55 | You'll see that the cube point now
hits the Plane, and it bounces and
| | 02:59 | rolls around and tumbles.
| | 03:01 | Let's hit Stop. That illustrates
another important point about the Dynamics
| | 03:04 | Engine, is that it allows you to adjust
the starting positions of your objects.
| | 03:09 | Now all of this dynamic simulation
and calculation is being contained within
| | 03:13 | the Dynamics tag, let's take a look at that.
| | 03:16 | And under the Dynamics tag,
we've got the Dynamics Properties.
| | 03:20 | So the Enable option determines whether or
not the tag is active. And I'll turn that off.
| | 03:25 | And because this is the Plane, when I
hit Play, you'll see that the cube will
| | 03:30 | fall but it will no longer
make contact with that collider.
| | 03:33 | The Plane's ability to interact with
Dynamic objects has been disabled.
| | 03:38 | Let's turn that back on and rewind back to zero.
| | 03:41 | Now let's select the Cube's Dynamics
tag, and when I click on that one, you
| | 03:45 | notice that the Dynamic
option has reverted to on.
| | 03:49 | So on the Plane, if I click on that
tag, you can see that this is Off.
| | 03:53 | If I go to the Cube, it's on again. Off and on.
| | 03:56 | And you notice that the icons are different.
| | 03:58 | If you watch that location right
there on the screen, the icon will change.
| | 04:01 | So the only difference between the two
tags, the one on the Plane and the one on
| | 04:06 | the Cube, is this Pull Down: Off, On, and Ghost.
| | 04:09 | Ghost Objects allow you to create
invisible objects in the scene that will
| | 04:12 | behave with dynamic ways.
| | 04:13 | And that's a great way to create a
collision with something that doesn't
| | 04:17 | necessarily need to be seen.
| | 04:18 | Underneath the Collision options, you
have the ability to adjust how the object
| | 04:22 | interacts with other
Dynamic objects in the scene.
| | 04:24 | I'm going to go the Bounce Settings
and change that from 50 to, say, 100.
| | 04:30 | And I'm on the cube, and so when I rewind and
hit Play, the cube's going to bounce higher.
| | 04:37 | You can scrub that value even higher, it
can go beyond 100%, I just clicked and dragged.
| | 04:41 | And because I did that while the cube
was playing, you saw it froze for a minute
| | 04:45 | while I was scrubbing the value.
| | 04:47 | And then when I let go, the cube
bounces down and then springs off, it's got
| | 04:51 | way too much energy.
| | 04:52 | It's returning way more
energy than it had when it started.
| | 04:54 | Let's bring that back down to 100%,
it's a little more realistic value.
| | 04:59 | Friction determines how sticky the
surface that the object is bouncing off of.
| | 05:03 | If I make this Plane really large,
let's select the Plane and hit T on the
| | 05:08 | keyboard to bring up the Scale Tool, and
make the Plane really large and rotate it.
| | 05:12 | When I rewind back to zero and hit
Play, you'll see that the object kind of
| | 05:17 | bounces and slides off. Let's stop that.
| | 05:20 | Now we'll go to the Plane object, and on
its Collision options, we'll change the
| | 05:25 | Friction from 30 to something like 100.
| | 05:29 | Let's rewind back, and let's look at
this from the side so we can see it a little
| | 05:33 | bit better, and let's hit Play.
| | 05:35 | You see that it's not
sliding off quite as quickly.
| | 05:40 | Let's go to the Cube object and
do the same thing for its Friction.
| | 05:44 | You can see that now, it feels like the
Plane is maybe made out of sand paper or
| | 05:48 | something like that.
| | 05:49 | It's grabbing on to that cube and
they're interacting a little bit more
| | 05:52 | dynamically with each other because
they have more stickiness to them.
| | 05:56 | The Forces section allows you to add
forces to the scene, and those refer to the
| | 06:02 | Particle Forces under the Simulate Menu.
| | 06:05 | So let's rewind back to zero and
rotate the Plane under the Coordinate
| | 06:10 | Properties back to zero.
| | 06:12 | And then hit Play to confirm we still
have the correct reaction, and we do.
| | 06:17 | Let's rewind back to zero.
| | 06:19 | And go to the Simulate Menu and under the
Particles Submenu, let's add in a Wind Object.
| | 06:24 | Now the Wind Object blows along its Z Axis.
| | 06:27 | If I Drag this up out of the floor --
let's grab the Axis Band and drag it up
| | 06:33 | out of the floor, you can see
that it is oriented along the Z Axis.
| | 06:37 | Now because the Falloff is set to
Infinite on the Wind object, it's going to
| | 06:41 | blow in the entire scene.
| | 06:42 | So it really doesn't matter where
it is in relationship to the cube.
| | 06:45 | The only thing that matters
is the direction of the Z Axis.
| | 06:48 | Now let's go back to the Cube, and under
the Force tab, you see because this mode
| | 06:52 | is set to exclude, any forces that I
add to the scene, when I hit Play will
| | 06:57 | automatically start to affect the cube.
| | 07:00 | Let's go to the Wind object and crank up,
under its Object Properties, the Wind Speed.
| | 07:06 | You see that it blows the cube so hard
that it never even makes it to the ground.
| | 07:10 | Let's rewind back to zero and change
the Wind Speed from 100 back down to
| | 07:15 | something like 50 or so. Hit Play.
| | 07:20 | The Dynamics Engine in CINEMA 4D is
both incredibly powerful and easy to use.
| | 07:25 | The key is that all of that power and
ease of use is contained within those tags.
| | 07:29 | The properties there will
help you do amazing things.
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| Explaining the difference between Rigid and Soft Bodies| 00:00 | In the previous movie we took a look
at the basics of the Dynamics Engine and
| | 00:03 | created something called a Rigid Body.
| | 00:06 | The Dynamics Engine also allows for
something called Soft Bodies. And Soft Bodies
| | 00:10 | are, well, they're soft.
| | 00:11 | It's like the difference between a
block of sugar and a Jell-o cube.
| | 00:14 | They're both sweet and delicious but
they behave in very different ways.
| | 00:18 | Let's create a very basic dynamic
relationship, I'll add a cube to the scene, and
| | 00:22 | let's also add a Plane. And take the
cube and raise it up on the Y, let's back up
| | 00:29 | just a bit, and now I'm going to right-click
on the Plane and make that under the
| | 00:35 | Simulation Tags, a Collider Body, and
then right-click on the cube and go to
| | 00:38 | Simulation Tags and make that a Rigid
Body. And now when we rewind back to zero
| | 00:43 | and hit Play, we have our dynamic relationship.
| | 00:47 | Now let's Delete the tag on the cube
and right-click on the cube, and go to
| | 00:53 | Simulation Tags and add in a Soft Body Tag.
| | 00:57 | Now let's Rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 01:00 | Well, it looks like nothing happened.
| | 01:02 | The reason that it looks like
nothing happened is because of the way that
| | 01:06 | the Soft Bodies work.
| | 01:08 | What the Soft Bodies do is they look
at the points that make up the object and
| | 01:12 | they try to create little
virtual springs between those points.
| | 01:16 | If you remember from our previous
module on deformers, I made a very
| | 01:19 | important statement, and that is a single
polygon or a single polygon edge cannot be bent.
| | 01:23 | The polygons can be twisted but the
edges cannot be bent themselves, their edges
| | 01:27 | are always straight lines.
| | 01:28 | Well, that's what's
happening in the case of this cube.
| | 01:31 | It's not deforming into a Soft Body
because it only has one edge per side.
| | 01:36 | So let's go in to the Cube Settings, and
go to the Object Properties, and change
| | 01:41 | the Object Properties
Segments from one to, say, five.
| | 01:46 | Now let's rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 01:50 | You can see that our cube is flexible.
| | 01:52 | Let's rewind back to zero and rotate
the cube, I'll hit R on the keyboard and
| | 01:58 | rotate the cube around.
| | 02:00 | Let's rotate it so that the
point is down. There we go.
| | 02:04 | Now rewind back to zero and hit Play,
you can see that the cube is very
| | 02:08 | flexible, let's Rewind to back zero.
| | 02:10 | Under the Cube Properties, if we
change this number of segments from 5 x 5 x 5,
| | 02:14 | let's crank it up to, say, 10 x 10 x 10
and rewind back to zero and hit Play again.
| | 02:20 | And you can see that now not only is the
cube very flexible, but when it hits the
| | 02:25 | ground, it doesn't spring back.
| | 02:28 | That's because there are so many
springs in there that the springs all
| | 02:31 | collapse on one another.
| | 02:32 | The other thing you may have noticed
is that the Playback was very sluggish.
| | 02:36 | That's because there are so many more
springs in the cube that there's a lot
| | 02:39 | more information for it to process.
| | 02:41 | Let's take that back down five and
take a look at the Properties in the tag.
| | 02:48 | The only difference between the Rigid
Body Tag and the Soft Body Tag is this
| | 02:54 | pull-down under the Soft Body options.
| | 02:55 | If I turn this to Off, and I'll
rewind back to zero and hit Play, you can see
| | 03:00 | our cube is now back to being a Rigid Body.
| | 03:03 | If I Rewind back to zero and turn that
back on to Made of Polygons/Lines, then
| | 03:07 | you see that our cube is squishy again.
| | 03:12 | Now the Made of Clones Option is for
using with MoGraph Cloner Objects, and for
| | 03:17 | now though, we'll leave it
on Made of Polygons/Lines.
| | 03:20 | Underneath the Soft Body Pull Down are
all the options related to the springs,
| | 03:24 | and these basically affect the
stiffness of the object and how the object
| | 03:27 | behaves when it bounces and collides.
| | 03:30 | The spring settings control the
actual stiffness of the springs.
| | 03:33 | If I crank up the structural value,
let's make it up to something like
| | 03:36 | 5,000, really high.
| | 03:38 | Rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 03:40 | You see the object hits the ground
and then it doesn't bounce back anymore
| | 03:44 | that's because the springs are so
stiff that they can't return any energy,
| | 03:48 | Let's hit Stop.
| | 03:49 | Now I'm going to rewind back to zero,
and let's change the structural value from
| | 03:53 | 5,000 back to 100 and take a
look at the Stiffness Option.
| | 03:57 | And out of the Stiffness Option, that
relates to, again, how the springs behave.
| | 04:02 | By default, it's set to zero, but let's
change the value from zero to something
| | 04:06 | like 10, and then we'll hit Play again.
| | 04:10 | You'll see that our object is now very
springy, it's much more stiff than it was before.
| | 04:15 | If we scroll down and look at the
Pressure option, that allows you to actually
| | 04:19 | introduce air pressure inside of the
object, so we can actually inflate it.
| | 04:23 | If we rewind back to zero, now I'll
increase the pressure, let's make it
| | 04:27 | something like, say, 50.
| | 04:30 | Now it looks like nothing happened, but
when I hit Play, you're going to see the
| | 04:33 | object instantly inflate and then fall down.
| | 04:39 | That really feels like that
object has a bunch of air inside of it.
| | 04:42 | The Soft Body Option can be a really
great Tool for making jiggly things, or
| | 04:46 | objects that need to collapse when they bounce.
| | 04:49 | The key is to tweak your Spring
Values to get the behavior that you want.
| | 04:52 | Once you've got those Spring Values set
correctly, that will determine whether your
| | 04:56 | object behaves like Jell-o that's been
sitting out in the counter for a while or
| | 04:59 | Jell-o that just came out of the fridge.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with MoGraph and dynamics| 00:00 | The Dynamics Engine in C4D is powerful
and easy to use, but what I think makes
| | 00:04 | it most amazing is that it
can be combined with MoGraph.
| | 00:08 | What I mean by that is you can
actually apply the Dynamics tag to Cloners and
| | 00:12 | have those Cloners behave in a dynamic way.
| | 00:15 | Let's create a very simple dynamic arrangement.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to add a Plane to the scene, and
that Plane is going to be a Collider object.
| | 00:23 | So let's right-click on the Plane, and
go to Simulation Tags, and add it as a
| | 00:28 | Collider Body. And the
Collider object doesn't move.
| | 00:31 | It just sits there waiting
for a collision to happen.
| | 00:33 | So now let's make a very
simple MoGraph arrangement.
| | 00:36 | Let's go to our Cube and
add a Cube to the scene.
| | 00:41 | Let's make it very small,
call it, say, 10x10x10.
| | 00:46 | Now let's add that Cube to a MoGraph Cloner.
| | 00:48 | So I'll go to the MoGraph Menu and go
to Cloner, and put that Cube as a child of
| | 00:53 | the Cloner Object, and
let's make it a grid of clones.
| | 00:56 | So I'll change it Grid Array, and let's
crank up the count just a bit and make it
| | 01:00 | from 3x3x3 to say 5x5x5. Now let's
raise the Cloner up off of the floor a bit so
| | 01:09 | it's floating up from the sky.
| | 01:12 | Now we can right-click on the Cloner and go
to Simulation Tags, and then make a Rigid Body.
| | 01:17 | Now when we rewind back to 0 and hit
Play, the whole Cloner falls down as if
| | 01:23 | it were a giant Cube.
| | 01:25 | It's looking at this entire
Cloner object as a Rigid Body.
| | 01:29 | What we really want to have happen is
we want all of those little Cubes to be
| | 01:33 | treated as individual Rigid Bodies. And
the way you do that is by going to the
| | 01:37 | Dynamics Tag and go into the Collision
Options and telling it to look at the
| | 01:42 | Individual Elements.
| | 01:43 | Right now, the Individual Element is
off, and let's turn that to be All.
| | 01:49 | Now when we rewind back to 0 and hit
Play, you'll see that all those cubes are
| | 01:55 | treated as if they were individual elements.
| | 01:57 | Not only that, they slide off the
Plane and ball off into infinity.
| | 02:00 | That is a pretty awesome effect and you
can do all kinds of great stuff with it.
| | 02:04 | What I want to do is talk about the idea of
gravity combined with this for just a moment.
| | 02:10 | In the Project Settings is where you
control the gravity for the Dynamics Engine.
| | 02:15 | Let's hit Cmd+D or Ctrl+D on the
keyboard to bring up the Project Setting.
| | 02:19 | And underneath the Dynamics Option is
the Gravity Setting, and we're going to
| | 02:23 | change that Gravity Setting from 1,000 to 0.
| | 02:27 | Now there's no gravity at all in our scene.
| | 02:30 | And when I rewind back to 0 and hit Play,
you'll see that our objects just sit there.
| | 02:34 | So let's rewind back to 0.
| | 02:38 | Now what I want to do is have an object fly
through the scene and collide with these guys.
| | 02:43 | So let's add a sphere to the scene, and
I'm going to bring that sphere up so that
| | 02:47 | it's inside of the grid.
| | 02:50 | Then let's animate that sphere along its X axis.
| | 02:53 | So at time 0 we want it back
over here, and then under the Spheres
| | 02:58 | Coordinate properties I'm going to
Ctrl+Click to add a keyframe for position, and
| | 03:03 | then let's advance forward
about, maybe 30 frames or so.
| | 03:07 | Then drag it through the Cloner object and
then we'll Ctrl+Click again to set a keyframe.
| | 03:14 | Now when I rewind back to 0, I'll hit
Play, nothing happens. That's because the
| | 03:18 | sphere needs to be a collider.
| | 03:21 | The next thing I want to do is to
make this sphere a Dynamic object.
| | 03:25 | Let's right-click on the sphere and go to
Simulation Tags and make this into a Rigid Body.
| | 03:30 | Now when I rewind back to 0 and hit
Play, you'll see that this object is
| | 03:35 | moving kind of slow.
| | 03:36 | It's not moving nearly as fast as it ought to.
| | 03:40 | It ought to be traveling really quickly
across the screen to hit this mark over here.
| | 03:43 | Underneath the Dynamics Tag that's on
the sphere, if you go to the Force option,
| | 03:48 | there is a Follow Position, and that
Follow Position determines whether or not
| | 03:52 | the sphere, the Dynamic object in
this case, will honor the keyframes
| | 03:57 | associated with it.
| | 03:58 | So by turning up this value I'll make it
more likely to stick with the keyframes.
| | 04:02 | If we bring that up to, say, 10, and rewind
back to 0 and hit Play, you'll see that
| | 04:07 | the object will travel through the
scene and collide with those guys.
| | 04:13 | Let's rewind back to 0 and make
our sphere a regular old collider.
| | 04:16 | So we'll go back and under that Dynamics
Properties we'll change it from Dynamic On to Off.
| | 04:22 | Now it's a regular collider and under
the Forces tab, this doesn't have any
| | 04:26 | effect anymore because colliders
will honor the keyframe by default.
| | 04:31 | So now we can hit Play and you can see
it goes through there and hits everything.
| | 04:35 | Let's Rewind back to 0.
| | 04:36 | Let's make the Cubes a little easier to see.
| | 04:38 | I'll double-click in the Material
Editor, and let's make a green material and
| | 04:43 | apply it to the Cube.
| | 04:45 | Now we've got a grid green Cubes. And
now let's make the Cloner object smaller.
| | 04:49 | So we go to the Object
properties, we can scrub the grid down.
| | 04:53 | Now I don't want to make the
grid so tight that they're touching.
| | 04:56 | I just want to make it a
little bit more dense. Oops!
| | 04:59 | That's a little bit too dense.
| | 05:01 | I accidentally scrubbed the Count value.
| | 05:02 | Let's make that back to 5, and let's
scrub the Y value to tighten that up, and
| | 05:08 | then do the same thing on Z
to get a much more dense Cube.
| | 05:13 | Now we can rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 05:15 | You can see that that sphere will hit
those Cubes and knock them off into space.
| | 05:23 | If I make both dots on the sphere red
by holding down the Option or Alt key and
| | 05:28 | clicking twice on those status dots,
now the sphere won't show up in the render
| | 05:32 | engine and it won't show up in the
Editor window, but it will still have an
| | 05:36 | effect on the Dynamics.
| | 05:37 | Let's put that right at the camera.
| | 05:43 | Combining Dynamics and MoGraph together
is a really fun thing to do, and you can
| | 05:47 | create all kinds of great
motion graphics effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Combining TP and dynamics| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to combine MoGraph,
Dynamics, and Thinking Particles together.
| | 00:05 | I've got a very simple scene with a Cloner object
that has been made Dynamic and I'll hit play.
| | 00:10 | And this is pretty much the same setup
that I created in the previous movie.
| | 00:15 | What I want to do is create a situation that
when these spheres collide with the plane,
| | 00:18 | they generate a particle, and I can use that
particle as position information to make a
| | 00:22 | little disc show up where they land.
| | 00:24 | It's going to be used for making
footsteps or little bullet holes and things.
| | 00:29 | There's all kinds of really
cool things you can do with it.
| | 00:31 | So let's rewind back to zero.
| | 00:33 | We need to have a Thinking Particles Emitter in the scene,
but we need to have a very special kind of Emitter.
| | 00:37 | Let's go to the Content Browser, and I'm
going to change the View to a List and let's go
| | 00:41 | into the Presets and then under Studio and
then Simulation and then Thinking Particles.
| | 00:48 | Then under Presets,
we're going to go to Dynamics.
| | 00:52 | And we want to have a TP
Dynamic Collision Emitter.
| | 00:55 | So let's grab that, double-click on it to
bring it into the scene, and let's go into
| | 00:59 | the Object Properties.
| | 01:01 | The way this works is that we're going to
have a particle shape, and that's going to
| | 01:03 | be the little disc that's going to get created
every time one of these spheres collides with the plane.
| | 01:08 | Then you have Collider A and Collider B.
And A is going to be the actual clones themselves
| | 01:13 | and the B is going to be plane object.
| | 01:15 | So wherever A and B touch, it's going to
generate one of these little particle discs.
| | 01:19 | So let's make the disc.
| | 01:21 | Let's go to the Primitive Objects and add
a Disc Object into the scene, and the disc
| | 01:25 | can sit right there in
the middle of the scene.
| | 01:26 | I'm going to in fact add a Hider object.
| | 01:29 | Let's make it Null and call this one Hider,
and let's drag that down to the bottom of
| | 01:34 | the scene and then put
the disc into that hider.
| | 01:38 | And then I'll make both
dots on the Hider Object red.
| | 01:41 | I'll hold the Alt or Opt key
and click twice on those dots.
| | 01:46 | Now, let's apply this material to the disc so the
disc is really obvious color when it gets created.
| | 01:51 | Now, we can go back to the Collision Emitter and we
can put the disc into the Particle Shape field.
| | 01:56 | Let's put that in there.
| | 01:58 | Now remember, with Thinking Particles, you'll
never actually be able to see a particle in
| | 02:00 | the scene rendered unless you
add a Particle Geometry Object.
| | 02:04 | So let's go to the Simulate menu > Thinking
Particles, and add a Particle Geometry Object.
| | 02:08 | In the TP Dynamic Collision Emitter,
we need to have Collider A and Collider B.
| | 02:13 | Let's go and add the Cloner as
Collider A and then add the plane as Collider B.
| | 02:21 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit play,
| | 02:23 | and you'll see that as soon as we do
that, those little planes get generated.
| | 02:30 | In order to see what's
happening here, let's hide the plane.
| | 02:34 | I'll hold on the Alt or Opt key and click twice
on these red dots to make the plane invisible.
| | 02:39 | Let's zoom in on that just a bit, and you can
see that the discs in fact are being created,
| | 02:43 | but they're facing the wrong direction.
| | 02:45 | So let's go to the disc and under the Object
Properties, change the Orientation to -Z.
| | 02:51 | Now, when we rewind and hit play, we'll see--
and we'll wait for one of those balls that
| | 02:55 | come into frame--and you can see that the
discs are actually being created flat now in the
| | 02:59 | same direction as the plane.
| | 03:01 | Let's back out just a bit,
and then we'll rewind and hit play.
| | 03:09 | Now, you'll notice that
the discs are popping off.
| | 03:11 | They literally only exist for one frame,
and that's controlled by the Dynamic Collision Emitter.
| | 03:16 | Let's click on that, and you can see that
underneath the Emitter Properties there's a lifespan
| | 03:20 | of only one frame.
| | 03:22 | Let's make that higher;
let's make it 90 frames.
| | 03:25 | Now when we rewind back and hit play, you'll see that
the particles will now live for a much longer time.
| | 03:32 | We'll actually be able to see those guys when they
hit the ground, and this is a really fun look.
| | 03:37 | Let's zoom in on that and
look at it from up above.
| | 03:39 | I'll deselect the emitter to get rid of
those rotation bands, and let's hit play and stop
| | 03:47 | it right about there.
| | 03:48 | Let's do one more thing. And on the Dynamic
Collision Emitter, if we scroll down, there
| | 03:53 | is under the Advance Option, a Size Variation,
and we can make these a little bit bigger.
| | 03:59 | And don't worry; nothing
is going to happen here.
| | 04:01 | And let's change the variation a
little bit so we get different sizes.
| | 04:05 | Now, let's rewind back to 0 and hit play.
| | 04:10 | I'll stop it right around frame 84 or so.
| | 04:12 | And you can see that's a lot more fun-looking.
| | 04:14 | If I render, Command+R or Ctrl+R, you can see
that it looks like these balls are sitting
| | 04:19 | on little droplets of paint.
| | 04:22 | So that's a really fun look that you can
create with Thinking Particles and Dynamics.
| | 04:26 | The combination of these tools is really only
limited by your technical ability and your imagination.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating dangling objects with spline dynamics| 00:00 | A little known part of the
Dynamics Engine in CINEMA 4D is something
| | 00:04 | called Spline Dynamics.
| | 00:06 | One of the reasons that it's so little
known is that it's not really part of the
| | 00:08 | Dynamics Engine, it's actually part of
the Hair Engine in CINEMA 4D. But you can
| | 00:12 | use it for creating some
really cool dynamic effects.
| | 00:15 | I'm going to draw a Spline in the scene.
| | 00:17 | So let's middle mouse-click to get
to one of the orthographic views.
| | 00:20 | I'll do this in the front view.
| | 00:22 | Let's draw a Spline.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to go to the B-Spline, and I
want my first point to hit exactly on the
| | 00:29 | center of the world.
| | 00:30 | So I'll turn my snapping on, and I'll
enable Snapping first by making the view
| | 00:35 | active, and then click and hold on the Icon.
| | 00:38 | What I want to do is snap it to the work plane.
| | 00:41 | So now when I go in here and I click, I
know that I'm just clicking exactly on 0,
| | 00:46 | and that made my first point.
| | 00:47 | Now I can go out here and I'll click
another one here, and I'll click another
| | 00:51 | point here, and I think
that's enough points for now.
| | 00:54 | You notice because my points are
all lined up on the grid, I get a
| | 00:57 | perfectly straight line.
| | 00:58 | Let's turn the Snapping off now, and now
we can go back to the Perspective View.
| | 01:05 | So let's back out a little bit so we
can see our Spline, and I'm going to
| | 01:09 | right-click on the Spline and go to
Hair Tags, and then Spline Dynamics.
| | 01:15 | And when I let go, it looks like nothing
happened, except that when I rewind to 0 and
| | 01:19 | hit play, my Spline falls away.
| | 01:22 | The Spline is now on Dynamic Object.
| | 01:24 | Now that may not seem very
impressive, until we do a very important step.
| | 01:28 | Let's use the Selection Tool and click
on the very first point that we had at
| | 01:33 | the center of the world, and then go
back to the Dynamics tag that's on the
| | 01:37 | Spline and go under the Properties
Option, and tell it to set the Fixed Point.
| | 01:43 | When we do that, this first point
is now turned a different color.
| | 01:47 | Let's deselect the Spline.
| | 01:48 | You'll see that it's now turn
sort of purply magenta color.
| | 01:52 | Let's rewind back to 0 and hit play.
| | 01:54 | When we do that the Spline now
dangles as if it were a Dynamic object.
| | 02:00 | And not only that, it's flexible as well.
| | 02:03 | I want to be able to move that Spline around.
| | 02:05 | The unfortunate thing, though, is
that you have to kind of trick the tag.
| | 02:08 | Once you put that tag on the Object, the
spline point is fixed to wherever it was
| | 02:12 | in relationship to its
parent or the center of the world.
| | 02:15 | Because I did not have the Spline
parented, then I won't be able to move it.
| | 02:19 | So what I need to do is go back and
parent the Spline to a Null object and now
| | 02:24 | we'll be able to move that Spline around.
| | 02:26 | Let's get out of Point Mode and select
the Null Object, and then drag it up a
| | 02:30 | little bit. And you can see
you can still move that point.
| | 02:33 | Now what I want to do is to hit play again.
| | 02:36 | You can see that the Spline
now will jump back a little bit.
| | 02:39 | That's because it's
recalculating the new position.
| | 02:42 | Now it's very flexible.
| | 02:44 | Let's do something else now.
| | 02:45 | I'm going to rewind back to 0.
| | 02:47 | I want to stick a sphere
on the end of that spline.
| | 02:50 | We're going to use a little
bit of XPresso to do that.
| | 02:53 | First, let's add a Sphere to the scene.
And then let's add another Null object,
| | 02:58 | and this Null object is
going to be called Sphere parent.
| | 03:03 | I want that Sphere parent to be right at the
tip of the Sphere, at the very top of the pole.
| | 03:08 | So I'll take that Sphere parent
and raise it up 100 units on Y.
| | 03:14 | Now let's parent the sphere to that.
| | 03:16 | Then on the Sphere parent I'm going to
add some XPresso, because I want to use
| | 03:20 | XPresso to stick that to the Spline.
| | 03:22 | So let's right-click on the Sphere parent,
go to CINEMA 4D Tags, and then do XPresso.
| | 03:27 | Under the XPresso Editor, I'm going to
drag in the Sphere parent, and then I'm
| | 03:31 | going to drag in the Spline.
| | 03:32 | What I want to do is I want to get the
point information from that Spline out to
| | 03:37 | the Sphere parent to use
that as position information.
| | 03:40 | So I'm going to right-click and add a
New Node and under XPresso > General, I'm
| | 03:46 | going to add a Point node.
| | 03:47 | Now every Object in CINEMA 4D has
something called a Point Index Value, and you
| | 03:52 | can find out the Point Index Value
by going to the Structure Manager.
| | 03:55 | So let's select our Spline and then
lower the interface down just a bit.
| | 03:59 | Then over in the tabs on the
right is the Structure Manager.
| | 04:02 | When I select that, I now see a
little spreadsheet, and this spreadsheet
| | 04:05 | represents the locations
of the points on my Spline.
| | 04:09 | You can see I have the first point selected.
| | 04:11 | So it's highlighted point 0. And these
are the index values of the points.
| | 04:16 | The first point on a Spline is always
0, and then it counts upward from there.
| | 04:20 | The last point on the Spline where
I want to connect my sphere is point 2.
| | 04:24 | So let's click on that, and now
we've got that point selected.
| | 04:27 | So I know that point 2 is
the last one on the Spline.
| | 04:30 | And in my node for the Point node, it's
highlighted yellow, because it's not
| | 04:34 | calculating anything right now,
| | 04:35 | it's alerting me that it's not calculating.
| | 04:36 | I'm going to change that Point Index
Value to be 2, and that matches that number
| | 04:41 | 2 that I have up here.
| | 04:42 | Let's go back to the Object Manager now.
| | 04:44 | We're done with the structure.
| | 04:45 | So now what I want to do is I have to
tell the Point node what object should you
| | 04:50 | look at to calculate this value.
| | 04:52 | So I'll go to the Spline and take the
Object Property out of the Spline and then
| | 04:56 | connect it to the Object Property on the
input of Point node and you'll see that
| | 05:00 | it will turn gray again.
| | 05:01 | Now it's actually calculating something.
| | 05:02 | Then I want to take the Point Position and put
it on the Global Position of the Sphere Parent.
| | 05:08 | So I'll drag a connection out onto the
blue here, and when I let go it's going to
| | 05:13 | ask me, where do I want it to connect it to.
| | 05:16 | And I'll connect it to Coordinates,
Global Position, and then Global Position.
| | 05:19 | When I do that, the sphere jumps
immediately to the Global Position.
| | 05:23 | Now let's close up the XPresso Editor
and rewind back to 0 and hit Play, and
| | 05:28 | you'll see that the sphere will now dangle.
| | 05:33 | I want to give this a little bit of
motion as well, just a little bit of
| | 05:36 | jumping around motion.
| | 05:37 | I can use something called
a Vibrate tag to do that.
| | 05:40 | Let's right-click on the Null that's
the parent of the Spline and go to CINEMA
| | 05:44 | 4D Tags, and then Vibrate.
| | 05:47 | The way to Vibrate tag works is that it
doesn't do anything until you activate
| | 05:51 | one of these parameters.
| | 05:52 | We'll activate Position.
| | 05:53 | Rotation won't do anything in this case.
| | 05:55 | We just want to concentrate on Position.
| | 05:56 | Let's turn on Position, and then
rewind back to 0, and hit play.
| | 06:00 | So now you'll see that
our object will be dangling.
| | 06:04 | Let's give it a little bit more room
to run, and I'll rewind back to 0. And
| | 06:09 | let's change the Preview Range from 90 to, say,
300, and then enlarge the Preview Slider here.
| | 06:17 | And that will give our dangling sphere a little
bit more time to be affected by the Amplitude.
| | 06:21 | I'm also going to crank up the
Amplitude from 100 to, say, 500, and so our sphere
| | 06:26 | will be jumping all over the place.
| | 06:28 | And you really get a sense for
the flexibility of that Spline.
| | 06:31 | So let's rewind back to 0 and hit play.
| | 06:35 | Now you'll be able to see.
| | 06:37 | Let's raise the view up just a bit,
and you can see that the Spline is very
| | 06:41 | flexible and the sphere is going crazy.
| | 06:46 | To add a little bit more flexibility
to the Spline, we can go to the Spline
| | 06:49 | Dynamics tag and we can reduce the Stiffness.
| | 06:52 | Let's reduce the Stiffness down from
20% to, say, 5% and let's rewind back to
| | 06:57 | 0 and hit play again.
| | 06:59 | And now you see that the Spline is a
little less stiff than it was before.
| | 07:03 | This is a really fun technique and
I've used it in the past to create dangling
| | 07:05 | type effects in motion graphics spots,
but I'm sure you can come up with some
| | 07:09 | more amazing uses.
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ConclusionFinal thoughts| 00:00 | I hope you enjoyed CINEMA 4D
Essentials: Particles and Dynamics.
| | 00:04 | If you came to this module without
having watched any of the other components
| | 00:07 | of the CINEMA 4D Essential series, I
encourage you to go back through and look
| | 00:10 | at some of that stuff.
| | 00:11 | There's probably some nuggets of
information in there that's going to get you
| | 00:14 | excited about using CINEMA 4D.
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