Creating shapes using matrices

In this movie, we'll begin by creating the three particle morph points our particle groups will flow between. So you can see in this project file we have our objects set up that we're going to have our particle morphs flow between. We have a phone looking object that our particle group is going to form a screen on the phone and I have our camera already animated. And turn to the right, and it will form into this eye-shaped logo. So first, we actually want to have our particles come from offscreen, over to the left here somewhere.

So when I create particle animations, the workflow I like to follow is to first set it up by using guide shapes or matrices using matrix objects. So let's go ahead and create a matrix object. Go to Mow Graph > Matrix. Let me just get out of my camera view here and just focus on this matrix object. And I'm also going to just turn off the visibility of our scene. So what are matrices? We have this little cubes here. They don't actually render out or anything like that.

Matrices are basically points with no geometry. And therefore don't bear a huge load on the software, so you can have 1000 of matrices without slowing down your navigation in your view port. So for now we will create the particle movement using these matrices, and our geometry later once the animation set. So the way we're going to work is create a set of particles, create the objects these particles will flow to and inherit the position of. So we are first going to set up our particle group and set its start position so let's just zoom out here.

And we have our camera here. Let's have our particles initially flow from off camera, kind of behind it, into the left. So, let's go into our top view here. And here's our camera, so we have our particle group just behind our camera off screen. And let's go to our front view. We can have it come up a little bit from this top left here. Let's go back to our perspective view here and let's actually name our matrix object, start position just to keep everything organized.

So this actually increased the count of our matrices. Right now it's set to three by three by three, let's actually change this to 32 by 20 by just 1. So that makes our matrix account number 640, so 640 matrices because we multiplied 32 by 20 and this is just going to be our particle starting point. So we really don't need to worry about the grid size or anything like that. So we're going to control and manipulate this first set of matrices, to flock from this starting position to our two other forms.

So let's set up our second form. Our second form is going to be a large grid of matrices that are going to form the screen of this mobile phone object here. So let's create a second matrix object by Ctrl click and dragging the start position matrix. And I'm going to rename this the screen matrix. And then I'm going to move it into place, right by our phone. So let's go into our top view and kind of position this right up against our phone object here.

And go to our front view. So the second matrix object is going to have the same count. Remember that we need to keep our matrix count consistent because these 640 matrices need to flow to another set of 640 new positions to make up this screen. So let's adjust the size to fill out a screen like shape. So let's adjust our grid size. Change this to 1,125 and 700 in the y. And let's just reposition this so it's a little bit centered.

So this is forming our screen shape of our phone. So this l'll be our particle second position. Let's go back to our Perspective view. So now we need to set up another set of matrices that l'll form the shape of this eye logo over here. Let's again duplicate by holding Ctrl, click and drag our screen matrix, so it l'll still have the 640 matrices. Just move this over to where our eye logo is. Let's just adjust this grid.

Going to our front view here. And adjust the matrix grid so it encapsulates our eye logo here. So, that looks like our matrices are covering our eye shape here. Let's go back to perspective view. So we need to knock out this eye shape to knock out these matrices on this matrix object. So we only want to see the matrices that l'll form this eye logo shape. So to do this, we're going to use a volume effector.

So let's first rename our matrix object here to logo matrix. And we're going to go up, make sure our logo matrix is selected, go to mograph, effecter, volume effecter. So right away nothing happens, so we're going to use our volume effecter to knock out the shape of this eye logo into this matrix grid. So let's go to our volume object, go to effecter and we can define a volume object and that object is going to be our eye logo. So let's drag our eye logo object in there.

You can see that nothing happens, and you still need to do one more thing, and that is go into parameter. I'm going down to visibility and when I check visibility, you can see that we no longer have these matrices outside of this eye logo shape. And if I go ahead and hide our eye logo You can see that our matrices now form the shape of that eye logo, and that's by using this volume object. So let's rename the volume object logo volume. We can kind of adjust our logo matrix here just a bit to make sure our top and bottom will consistent these matrix numbers.

So this will be our third and final morph point that our matrices will flow to. So we now have our three shapes and our three positions that we're going to have our particle flow animation. So by using matrix objects you can easily navigate around thousands of matrices quickly inside of the Cinema 4D Viewport. Rule of thumb is setting up all your movement using these matrices. Then once it's set, add your geometry. because once you introduce geometry to the fold, it's going to take a toll on your viewport speed.