From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Intro to Cinema 4D R20 fields - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Intro to Cinema 4D R20 fields

- [Instructor] CINEMA 4D R20 introduced a brand new powerful feature called Fields that replaces the old fall off system. Fields are a much more unified way to control not only the influence of effectors, but many other things like MoGraph weights and vertex maps. In this video, we're going to cover some of the most basic aspects of Fields and how you can use different fall off shapes to achieve different types of animated looks. So let's go ahead, I have my clone in here, it's just cloning a bunch of cylinders. And let's go and grab our MoGraph plane effector. Now all of the objects are going to immediately move up, let's go to our parameter and maybe just bring all of these down to say negative 200 centimeters and now we can go ahead and control the influence of this effector via fall offs. So if we go to the Falloff tab, you can see that we have this whole new setup. So let's just go and start with a linear field. So I'll grab my linear field. And you're going to see this works very similarly, almost exactly similarly to how the old linear falloff systems work. But you can see that now Fields are their own separate object. So we have Falloffs as their own objects now. And what this allows us to do is you can see we have this whole field layer system, we can actually stack up different types of fields and combine them using different types of blending modes. So what we can do now is if we wanted to, say randomize the linear transition to kind of make this linear transition more organic looking and break it up so it's not so boring and linear looking, what we typically would have done before was go in and kind of mess around with the weight transform and all that stuff, but not anymore. We actually have an easier way to add randomness to our falloffs. So to do that now, what we're going to do is go ahead and load up a random field, and you'll see now we have this whole random field, it's affecting everything, but again, what we can do is use blending modes. And what you can think of fields as are basically like black and white mat layers, like Photoshop layers, and you can see that if I go and choose Overlay, what this is going to do is only add variation to the middle gray values. Now what I can do is go into my random field mode, go to Noise, and maybe just increase this a little bit so you can see that this noise is going to be overlayed on top of the linear field, and now we have a much more organic looking type of transition. And probably have this noise a little bit too large, so if I scale this down a little bit, basically what you can see if I go back to my linear field, you can see all that nice randomness breaking up the linear nature of our linear field here. So let's go ahead and just open up a brand new composition. And what I want to do is just kind of illustrate what's going on behind the scenes. So let's just go ahead and let's grab a matrix object and let's just go ahead and add our plane effector. So MoGraph, Effector, Plane. And let's add our falloffs. So we got our linear falloff, and you can see the color coded nature, that's being controlled by this little color wheel here. If I turn that on you can see that effect. Whatever is white is not being affected by our plane effector, whatever's purple is being effected. And if I go and just add my random field and change this to overlay, you can see exactly what's going on. It's just breaking up the linear transition from 0% influence to 100% influence of our linear field here. So it's as easy as that and this just kind of scratches the surface of what is possible with the new field system. We can also just add maybe a spherical field in here and you can see how this is now influencing and adding on to to influence of that plane effector in the linear field. We can also even subtract that influence of that spherical field and just kind of cut a hole in the influence there. So a lot of possibilities with the new CINEMA 4D field systems and if you want to learn more and go really in depth on the new features in CINEMA 4D R20, I highly recommend you head over to cineversity.com to check out their expansive training on all the new R20 features. And they're always updating the content over there so be sure to check that out and head over there often. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new, no problem. Here's some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn Library, visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily MoGraph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest MoGraph creations in Instagram. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you here again next week.

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