From the course: Cinema 4D: Dynamics

Follow Position and Follow Rotation - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D: Dynamics

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Follow Position and Follow Rotation

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Let's create a simple scene again. I'll make a small cube. Create a MoGraph cloner, make the cube a child of the cloner, change this to PIT array, increase the number of clones, make them render instances so they render faster. Raise it above the floor, add a floor, change my display settings, adjust my camera, select the clone and the floor and add rigid body tags. And, of course, as you have guessed already, I want the cubes to move independently of each other, so I will select my rigid body tag of the cloner, go to the collision. And change the inherit tag to apply tag to children, and the individual elements to all. Rewind, press Play, and you will see that all the cubes fall. Let me increase my frame range, and let's try an experiment. With the clone as selected, if I press Play and move the clone around, nothing happens. And I told you that when an object is dynamic, we can't actually animate. But that's not really true, so I have to admit I did lie. Well, I didn't really lie, I just kept the truth from you. And I think that constitutes, it's not lying. Anyway. Actually, there is a way we can influence a dynamic simulation using key frames. In order to do that, we have to go to the rigid body tag. The Force tab and increase these two numbers. One is follow position and one is follow rotation. Let me show you what they do, let me make this two. Press Enter, Rewind, press Play and with the cloner selected I'm going to move my cloner around. As you can see, the cubes, even though they're affected by the dynamic simulation, they are following as much as they can, the position. And when I stop moving it, they try to go to their original position. And this is because the Follow Position is on. Let me press Stop, Rewind. If I enable Follow Rotation as well. Rewind and press Play. You will see that after they strike the ground and I lift this up, then not only they try to assume the proper position, but they try to assume the, the proper rotation, as well. And the higher these numbers are, the more they will adhere to their original positions and rotations. Press Play, Rewind, because sometimes it needs to reset. And now, when I raise it, you will see that the cubes will try and organize themselves so that they are back in their position. You can push these numbers quite high, but then the influence from the keyframe animation will overwhelm the dynamics, and you can have effects like these. Let me show you what else you can do. I'll leave this set up as it was, I'll change these numbers to ten and ten. I will create a sphere. Let me bring this back to the middle of my scene. Move it slightly out of the way. Select my sphere. Raise it, so that it's in front of the cloner. Right-click, add rigid body tag. Make sure it becomes a static object. Rewind, select the clone, and Play. Look at this. This is a very interesting effect, because you can make your clones follow anything you want. And at the same time you can use visible or invisible obstacles. And create very interesting simulations. Sometimes you need to press Stop, Rewind, Play in order for the simulation to work properly again. As you can see, the invisible sphere is changing the position of the rotation of the cubes. And you can create some interesting effects.

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