Combining Hair and MoGraph in Cineversity Brand ID: Moving a Hair System from one Object to Another

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Instructor Ranger&Fox

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  • Duration: 07:19
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  • Made with Release: 18
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Learn how to recreate similar style of geometry to be able to move the hair system to another object.

Now we have an animating play button that can be rendered with animation, we can now think about how to apply this as a system to another object. We’ll choose an object from the content browser. Add a poly reduction until we get something that feels right, not too many edges, less the better while still keeping the form. Add the newly created reduced polygon to the cloners and see what happens. The selections have numbers stored as to what is on or off. To art direct from the beginning, reset one of the selections, select some edges to turn off, copy the new selection to the alternate cloner, invert the selection and make sure it is applied to the Off effector.

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Transcript

Hi, this is Brett Morris, and in this final video, we'll choose a model from the Cinema 4D library. We'll reduce the poly count down and apply our hair system to create a whole new object. Okay, so if we come over to our content browser, let's go into presets and let's go broadcast, 3D objects. I believe we can find an ice cream cone and add that to the scene. Let's just turn off all of our objects, so we can see our ice cream cone, and something is visible, the cube, let's just turn that off. And those red dots are actually from the cloner, so let's just select the two cloners, com to display and turn to none. So our ice cream is pretty small, so let's just see our play button for sort of a scale reference. Let's scale our ice cream up and let's just bring this down. I'm looking to kind of make the ice cream bar around the same size, just so all of the dynamics and lighting is kind of similar. Actually, let's just scale it down so the lighting still stays the same. Okay, we actually don't want to touch the cone at all, so let's just work with our ice cream portion and let's go to the deformers and find a polygon reduction, add that to a child of the ice cream, and if we zoom in and hit N+B, we can see our edges. And as we increase the reduction strength, we will reduce the amount of polygons. So I know just from testing that I want to make this pretty high, so let's go 99.8, and that might be...let's try 99.75. Yeah, maybe. Let's just leave it at .8. It's not exactly the same form, but it gives the essence of the ice cream being there, and that's really all we're looking for for this particular system. The main thing is that the edges are sparse enough that we actually have some air in between the system, so at least, you know, the hair groups have a little bit more length along the edge to, you know, populate with their color. So to work with this, let's just do current state to object. We can actually just delete this, and this is our new geometry. So I know that we'll need to optimize this, so if I go to points mode, select all with Ctrl+A, right click and hit optimize, that just cleans up any additional points. Now let's actually just duplicate our display tag to our ice cream, and we can see that we're looking at some edges that are pretty dense, definitely looking at a more dense object than what we were before. So what we could do is just come in here and maybe select a couple of these, and I don't want to select the big ones. A system like this might require some level of clean up, just because you can never fully predict how the polygon reduction is going to reduce the actual polygons, but we can kind of do some quick clean up just to make sure that the inner area of this ice cream isn't too dense. It just means that we can work with a more sparse object and get the essence of the shape across a poster just having a ball of hair. So delete them out, just by hitting the delete button, and this is pretty good. I think I might just try and kill all, sort of, internal edges. So that feels pretty good. I mean, I could spend a little bit more time on it, but I think for the most part, that feels like a very low polygon ice cream. Okay, so let's just turn it off from the render view, and then from our previous system, if we select our two cloners, go to object mode, we actually want to replace the play button with the ice cream, and as we turn on our cloners, we can see that we have the low geometry. So the cool thing about our process that we've just done is if we turn our hide selection on, we actually keep the selection values of the cloner index, so we didn't even need to do anything. The selection retained the number of the edges that we were reducing from the visibility. Inversely, if I turn on the other cloner, we'll fill in those edges, and if we turn off A, we can see it, and likewise, if we turn off B. So that means our hair is still intact, and if we turn on our hair, obviously nothing happens because the connects is still off. We turn on the connects, there we go. We got a ball of ice cream hair, and as all the animation and styling, lights, is all in the same position, we can actually just hit play and start to see what happens with this. I'm actually sitting in a pretty funny perspective, so I'm just going to line up with my default camera view and let this play for a second, and you can see we're just getting the same animation to the ice cream if we render. We've got a nice little ball of ice cream hair. Now we can spend a little bit more time playing with the selections. We could change the color quite simply as we're just dealing with a single hair material for each group. We could reduce the polygons even further. We could do all sorts of things, but the idea of this series was just to show how you can create a single effect or a system and have that system apply to various shapes, and start to build up these sorts of tools and procedures, so you can always feel creative and continue to explore. Okay, so in this series, we've looked at systemizing our hair and MoGraph system, so that we can apply to any object, and we know we have so much flexibility and styling, animating and know we can render this super fast. We really hope that this tutorial series has inspired you to create something amazing. We really hope that you enjoy the iDen [SP], and please check out the NAD presentation, where I covered the creation of the glass shield from the iDen as well. Really appreciate it. This is Brett Morris. Thank you.
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