- Hey everyone. Sean Frangella here for Cineversity.com with a new 3D tutorial about how to create this system of confetti where we got a lot of different style confetti particles blowing around and flying past the camera with some nice lighting and reflections bouncing around our confetti particles in our full 3D scene. So here is our final project file. If we jump out of our camera view, we can see a little better what we got going on here. We have this particle system dropping confetti with some wind and turbulence blowing it around, and because of where we position our camera, we get a nice view of it floating past. The great thing about this setup is that there's no key frames here. It's all done with a particle emitter and tweaking our simulation properties to get the look that we want. So let's get started with building this from scratch. I'll make a new file in Cinema 4D. The first thing I'll do is just set up my render settings at 1920 by 1080, and we might change some of these render properties later but we'll do that when we get to the rendering process so we can take a look at how it changes our look and render time. So if we're going to be dropping confetti out of an emitter. The first thing we're going to need is some confetti. So how we're going to do that is jump into our four views and I'll look in my front view, and I'm going to grab a bezier spline. We'll just draw a little slice of this and then extrude it to get a confetti shape. So I'll click and just draw a quick little curve and this can be my first piece of confetti and I'll just rename this "Confetti Particle." Then to get my shape, I'm just going to grab an extrude object for-- my menu right here, and I can hold alt or option when I let go of that and it's going to drop that into it. If I pan around, we can see that it's created depth for that and I can make that bigger by changing my movement. For this one, I'll just put it at about 300 and I'll just name this "Confetti." Now, we want this to seem a little more random. We don't want all the same particles and to look like it's just a bunch of the same shapes. So what we can do is draw a couple other shapes and repeat this process. So I'll go back up and get my bezier spline again. Now let's draw kind of a different one. I'll draw kind of an S-shape, maybe bent around a little as it was falling. Rename that "Confetti Particle 2." Now to get the same properties, I can just duplicate this whole confetti extruded object by holding command or control and dragging up, then I'll just swap out the spline in there and I'll do one more. We could do this a number of ways with the vector tools. I'll grab this B-spline as an example right now. Let's just do this one a little differently. We can click and just make points and then I'll bend it around in a different way. Then I can always go back in and just move those points if I want to get a different result. And this way, I'll have a little bit more natural variety of particles rather than the same little half circle shape. To get that one, I'll duplicate this whole system again, swap out that spline and I can just rename these "Confetti 2" and "Confetti 3". Now we have some quick nice confetti particles for our simulation. Now to get these into a particle emitter, I'm going to go to "Simulate, Particles, Emitter" and that's going to drop an emitter into my scene which we can see right here as shooting particles. What we want to do is put this above our scene, so I'll just drag it up and rotate it down by grabbing rotate, or pressing R and then I can hold shift to constrain it to 90 degrees. Then I'm going to grab all of these confetti particles, drop them into the emitter and on the emitter, I'm going to check "Show Objects" and now we can see it's dropping these in. These can all be at much smaller now that we've dropped them into our emitter. So I'll make sure I'm in "Model Mode" and I'll press T for transform and just scale, all these way down because they don't need to be as big but it was helpful to have them a bit bigger as I'm drawing them and I'll jump into my main perspective view. Just keep scaling those down. Now if we go back to the beginning and play, we can see that we got some confetti particles dropping into our scene. I'll just rename this "Confetti Emitter" so we can keep track of everything. And the way we can really control what's going on in this emitter is everything under this particle and emitter tab. So to get this a bit bigger, I'll go to our emitter and make this a lot bigger so it's covering our entire scene. I'll make it 2000 by 2000 and that's going to make a really big emitter, and that's good because we don't want it to seem like it's just falling in one section. We want it to be everywhere. Then I can go to particle and right now, I only have 10 particles showing up in the editor. If I did a quick render, we can see we have the same 10 showing up in the renderer. I want to turn that up for both right now to see a lot more, so I'll put it on 200 by 200 and that's going to give me a lot more particles visible in my editor and when I do my rendering. So they're all falling, but we can see that they're just all starting straight and not moving at all and they're all aligned exactly the same. How we can start to randomize that a bit is if we had changed this rotation on the particle. If we turn that up, it'll add spinning as they come down, and we'll add randomness up to the amount we specify as the particles are moving. So now if we back up and play, we can see that we're getting some nice animation just from changing that, and we can change it more or less, to add more or less spinning. That's looking like a good start. Now, what we want to do to make this seem really interesting visually is not just look at them from the side, but what we can do is orbit our camera around and we'll get right below the emitter and make a camera up here. I'll jump into my camera view and then if we look from our four views, we want to place the camera right below the emitter. Then to get this camera aligned straight, I'll go to "Camera, " and under "Coordinates, " make rotation 0, negative 90 and 0. So it's looking straight down below our emitter. What's nice about this is now if we back up and play, we can see that as the confetti starts to fall, it'll kind of whiz pass our camera and we get some nice views of some confetti particles just passing the camera as if we're right in the middle of the scene. We're going to be doing a lot more time on this, so on my timeline I'm going to turn this up to 300 and we'll get 10 seconds. Now, if we take a look back up and just play through this... We can get a nice idea of our confetti starting to fall. And since this particle emitter is so big, if we wanted to tweak that at all, we could always move the camera over and just pan it. If we like the end result in a little bit of a different area, and that's looking good. I like where this camera setup is going and kind of these little ones that fly past the camera, and everything that we're seeing with the particle system. It's looking good. We're getting an idea of what we're going to see on our final shot, but you might have noticed that we're running a little slowly as we try to play through this. So what we can do to work quickly but get a nice result is go to our emitter and under "Particle, " we'll turn the birth rate editor down, so I'll put that at 50. But if we want that many particles when we render even more, we could turn this up and that way, if I back up and play, and we could even look at this from multiple views. We're going to see not as many particles in our viewport, but we'll see enough to get the idea of what's going on and keep play back playing quickly. Then if we look at a nice frame here, once we render-- You could see in our render view, we'll get a lot more particles. So this is a good way to work quickly to get an idea of what's going on with our simulation but not bog down on our work flow. Our rotation on our emitter is doing some nice things, but we can add some more simulation properties to really make this seem like it's blowing around like it would be if it was real confetti falling outside. So to add some more randomness to these simulation properties, I can go to "Simulate Particles" and grab any of these to get different reactions from our particle system. So I'll drop in turbulence so we can have these moving around a bit more. And the way to get this to impact our emitter is we go to our emitter and go to this "Include" tab, change this to include and I'll drop this turbulence modifier into the box. Now, let's take a look at this from four views, and if we go to our turbulence emitter and back up and play, if we start to turn up the strength and the scale, you can see that these will really start to fly around quite a bit more and we'll get some additional movement on these which is nice if we're trying to make it really feel like they're being impacted. You can see if we kind of go way too far, they're really going to fly around all over the place. So we kind of want to keep it somewhere in the middle of that where they're moving enough, but they're not flying back up and down, and maybe even take it down a bit more. Now we're getting some nice movement in addition to our rotation property where they're really feeling like they're actual particles of confetti. If we just wanted to emit a little longer and you can see our emission is kind of stopping at a point. We can go to our emitter, turn the speed up a bit. So let's put that at 50 instead of 0. Our lifespan is fine, it's our whole timeline and then some, but we wanted to keep emitting confetti through our whole animation. So I'll put this on 300, and then if I back up, they're going to emit a bit quicker and they're going to keep emitting. You might want to go back and turn our turbulence down even a bit more, but it was good to get an idea of what it does. Let's go to turbulence and just put this at strength of 2 and scale of 10. For the sake of previewing, let's put our timeline at 600, and drag this out. Now if we look in our perspective view through our camera and play through our animation, we can see that our confetti starts to fall past the camera. We get some nice movement, we can see what's going on in our viewport. If we pause here on a frame and do a quick render with shift R, we can see an idea of our final shot with a lot of confetti particles really filling up our scene and that's looking good as far as the simulation part. If we wanted even more particles in our final render, we could always go back to our emitter and just turn up our birth rate renderer up a bit. So let's put that at 600, do another quick render and you can see we'll get even more particles of confetti falling. Now that we have our simulation set up, let's get started on adding some texture and reflections to these. So we could create a material from scratch, but let's grab a material to start with from the content browser and then we'll make some changes. So I'll go to "Presets," "Prime Materials," "Metal" and there's some good ones in here. Let's grab this "Silver" and we'll start from there and create some different colors of confetti. I'll double click this and we'll rename this "Red." This will be our red confetti. So to make some changes, let's first change this reflection color to a red and that's going to give you a pretty good start for this. Let's just turn down the reflection amount a bit and we could check back on color and change this from this blue that it starts out as to also a red. Now let's drag that onto one of our confetti particles and do a quick render. We can see that we get some red particles. Now let's duplicate this base material for some silver and white confetti. So I'll hold command or control and duplicate, open up this one, we'll call it "White." Again, I'll change this reflection color to a white, that will get me our silvery reflection back. For color, I'll change that to white. I'll turn up this color so we get more of a white material but still get our reflections. I'll drag that onto my “Confetti 2.” Then I'll do the same thing, duplicate that one, double click and call this "Silver." Then I'll make this gray, and then I'll turn down this brightness so we get more of a metallic silvery from our reflectance channel. We can even turn that up a bit and I'll drag that onto this first confetti particle. Now if we do a quick render, you can see that we're starting to get some nice variety of the textures. If we wanted to randomize this even more, so each red or silver particle aren't all the same shape and color, what we could do is duplicate all three of our confetti extrudes over here. Tweak those a bit and swap out the textures. So I'll duplicate this “Confetti 3,” call it "Confetti 4" in both parts. Then for that one, I'll change that texture to a white. Turn off our emitter temporarily so we can see exactly what we're doing to our particles and zoom in here. I'm going to scale that one down, I'll grab my “Confetti 2,” duplicate that one, call this “5” and “5.” I'll swap that texture out for silver so we get some variety with those textures. Then I'll just scale that down so it's a little more random. Same thing, I'll duplicate the first confetti and call this "Confetti 6" and “6.” Scale it down a bit and swap out this material to a red by holding command or control and dragging onto it. That way, when we render this out we're getting a little more variety in the types of confetti particles that we're getting along with which materials gone with, so it's not as repetitive. Now, to add even more reflections in here we can add a sky object in HDR image to project some additional reflections. So what I'm going to do is go to here and I'll drop in a sky object. For that, I'm going to make a new material by double clicking-- I'll double click this and I want to load an HDR image. A way I can find those is if I go to a content browser, grab "Search" up here and I'll just type in HDR and press enter. That's going to search my whole content browser for different HDR images and I could grab this one that comes with Cinema 4D and drop that into our color tab. Turn off reflectance and then back in my objects, I'll drag that onto my sky and I can rename that "Sky" to keep everything organized. Then if I do a quick render, now we're really getting some interest in these confetti particles. If we just go back and forth between that one and this one, look at how much that's adding, but we don't need this to appear in the background. So what we want to do is add a compositing tag to take care of that. So right click, go to Cinema 4D tags, compositing and I'll turn off seen by camera. Do a quick shift R render, and adding in that HDR image as a sky is really helping. If we just take a look at this even on a black background. We're going from here to here, and to get this metallic reflective look that we want with these particles, that's really helping. Now we are getting close to final render so I want to start to talk about our render settings. Right now if we go to render settings, we're still on our standard render. If we change that to our physical renderer and do a quick shift R render, it'll take a bit longer per frame but we'll get a slightly improved result. We look over here, one is at nine seconds and the last one was at three. This is a decision we can make, we can see it's a little clear, we're loosing a little bit of the noise. Let's zoom it in 100% just to really view this. This is a decision we could make at this point. If we were concerned about eating really quick render time, we could go at this one which is a standard renderer. If we want to jump into the physical renderer, we'll get a little nicer of a result. For this one, I think it does make a difference, I'm not loosing that much time. To get the result that we want and the look I'm going for, that's really all we need to do with rendering. I don't think we need to turn on anything else like ambient inclusion in this case for the look that we want. Now if we are setting this to render and want to prep it for either team render or just be able to take a look at the final simulation of our viewport. What we can do is grab our emitter and go to “Simulate Particle,” “Bake Particles” and that's going to bake in our animation from the duration that we set. So we'll do it from 0 to 600, click okay and it'll run that. We can then check, yes for sub objects. Now if we scroll back and forth, we can see that our simulation is baked in and we're able to scroll back and forth in the timeline and then if we do a quick shift R, there's our final result with our 600 particles. That's looking pretty good. We're getting some nice reflections with our textures and our sky image. So now we want to render this out and to add in some post production effects, we're going to render this out as a PNG sequence and send it to After Effects to do a couple last things. So under "Save," I'll go to PNG. I'll turn this on 16-bit. I want to turn on Alpha Channel because I want to be able to add my background colors in post production in After Effects. Then I'll click the locate a folder and I'll save this right here and I'll call this "Confetti Renders," click Save. Check outputs, make sure I'm on all frames so we'll get 0 to 600 and then we can just do a shift R and start rendering out our full video. Okay, so our render is just about done from Cinema 4D, and at this point we can open up After Effects and start working on our last post production techniques. So what I'm going to do is double click here in the project window and I'll locate that folder where we're rendering out our PNG sequence. I'll grab the first frame and make sure PNG sequence is checked and click open. That's going to import it and then I can take this, drag it to our new composition button and that's going to make a new composition. Even though this isn't completely done rendering, I can still work on it and as it finishes, it will add those frames in So what I can do real quick is go to “Composition,” “Composition Settings” and make sure this is at our full length of the animation which is 20 seconds, and I'll go to okay and just zoom this out with the minus key. Then we'll be able to see this add in our last few frames. So what we want to do in After Effects is add in our background, add a bit of a vignette and add post production motion blur on this. So what I'm going to do first is go to "Layer," "New solid" and we'll make that background solid. I'll make sure that this is white, I'll call this "BG" and go to okay. I'll drop this below our render. That's going to get our background. Now what I can do is put a vignette on that layer to get some nice soft edges. A way I can do that is if I grab curves over here from effects, I'll drag that onto our background and on that curves effect, I'll drag the white point down a bit and that's going to get it kind of gray. Then I'm going to grab any lips up here from our shape tools and I'll double click, and that's going to mask this. But what I can do starting in After Effects CC 2014 is go down to my effects, grab that curves and there's this new compositing option. If I click that, it's going to apply this mask to that effect only. Then if I change this mask, it's actually masking just that effect. So if I invert that mask and feather that out a bit, we get a nice soft vignette. If we turn this curves effect on and off, we can see it's adding some nice vignetting around the edges. Now, the other things I want to do is add post production motion blur directly to our Cinema 4D render. The way I can do that is I can either get pixel motion blur which comes in After Effects and I'll drag that on. If we zoom in, we can see that, that is doing a pretty good job of adding post production motion blur. If I go back a bit and put my end points to my play head and run preview a couple of frames, we can see that we're getting that blur. Another way we can do this is if you have really smart motion blur or RSMB which is by Revision Effects. We can drag that on. I'll turn off this pixel motion blur. This does a pretty similar thing but it renders quite a bit quicker which is nice. You can see that it's going quite a lot faster if I just scrub through or do a quick run preview of a few frames. That's doing a good job, if we look at some of these, we're going to see some nice realistic movement and reflections bouncing around this. Now that we're working in After Effects and letting this still render in the background in Cinema 4D, as it's updating what we can do is just grab that PNG sequence in our project window, reload and we can see that's going to add in the additional frames. We can just drag that out and as soon as that's done, we can get this set up to render. So since we're working in After Effects and we are doing some effects and vignetting. One thing we want to do is go to our project settings, make sure this is on 32-bit so we get 32-bit color settings and change our working space to SRGB. Now finally the confetti starts to fall in, bring my work area to there, and I can scrub through and we can see we're getting our nice confetti falling. I'll do a quick run preview to take a look. We can see, we get some nice animation with this, starting to whiz pass the camera. We get some cool movement. We get really nice reflections. If we look at some of those hits we're seeing right there that are created both by these objects reflecting themselves and that HDR image. So it's some really nice techniques to create this particle simulation and also texture them to where they feel like they're that metallic material that we'd expect with this sort of thing, and adding in some nice post production techniques so it feels realistic to being filmed with an actual camera. So some really fun techniques. I hope you learned a lot. This has been Sean Frangella teaching you how to do this 3D particle confetti simulation in Cinema 4D. Thanks for watching.