Glank: Sound Effector in Practice: The Tassle Drum

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Instructor Joseph Herman

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  • Duration: 11:01
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  • Made with Release: 17
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In this video, we’ll learn how to set up the sound effector and dynamics for the the tassel drum. We’ll also see how the hair system was used to create the pink tassels.

The tassel drum uses a fracture object and sound effector to move the position of the iron pounder on one axis, causing it to strike the drum with the aid of rigid body dynamics simulation. We’ll also look at how to use CINEMA 4D’s hair system to create the pink tassels on the drum which convincingly react to the movement of the drum with secondary motion.

Music and found object instruments by Paul Rudolph.

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Transcript

♪ [music] ♪ - In this video, we'll take a look at the tassel drum that gets hit by this iron pounder, which moves back and forth on this metal rod. Let's take a look at what we have here. First of all, we've got the pounder itself here, this object. Next is this whole structure for the drum, which is an oil tank as well as this copper sort of cage that goes around it. Then we've got our hair. I've applied hair to these polygons on the side of the drum in here. Okay. Basically, these are the hair objects for them. They're applied with this material down here, which is hair material. It's got a little frizz, a little kink, and it's sort of this magenta color. Okay. Let's get started. First thing I'll do is I'll create a fracture object, and I'll draw the pounder inside of it. Then I'll go to the MoGraph menu and create a sound effector. For the sound of our sound effector, we'll use this track, tanks with delay. For this sound effector, I want to boost up the levels of the audio by 25%. Then, I want to go down over here. And under transform, I want the sound effector to affect the position of the pounder, not the rotation, by 40 inches. Okay. We'll just check to make sure that the sound effector is in the fracture objects list, and it isn't. I must not have had it selected when I created the sound effector. Let's just drag the sound effector inside of that. Now let's hit rewind and hit play, and let's go forward a little bit in the animation. Here we can see that the sound effector is affecting the motion of the pounder. Now, let's get this drum to react to the pounder when it's hitting it. We'll right-click on the oil tank and we'll add a rigid body tag to it. Then we'll right-click on the pounder and we'll add a collider body to it. If we were to hit play right now, as you would expect, the drum is just going to fall out of the frame because gravity is going to affect it. So as we did in previous parts of the animation, what we want to do is click on the drum's rigid body tag and go to the force tab, and let's set the follow position to five and the follow rotation to five. That will try to make the drum stay in a relative place, but still allow itself to be affected by dynamics. Before I hit play and the run the simulation, there's an effect introduced by the Sound Effector that I want to minimize. Let me show you what I'm talking about. I'm going to hide the drum for a minute as well as the hair, and if I were to go ahead now to a part of the animation where the pounder is moving, such as around here, let's say, you'll notice that the Sound Effector is very sensitive when it comes to moving this pounder, and as a result, the movement of this pounder becomes very abrupt as it reacts to the sound levels. We can help to smooth out the movement through the use of another effector, called the Delay Effector. What the delay effector does is that it smooths out the affects of an effector with regard to position, scale, and rotation, so that it doesn't begin and end abruptly, but rather with a temporal delay. That will help to make the pounder look less jittery and stuttery when it moves, and give it more of a smooth flowing motion. Let's click on the fracture object and it's not in there yet. Let's drag in that effector underneath the sound effector, so now we've got it in there. And in the delay effector, we'll leave the mode to blend and we'll leave the strength at 50, which is about right in between of having no effect and having a full effect. If you'd rather the delay effector to have less of an effect, you could drag it to the left, or to have more of an effect, you can drag it to the right. Now let's play and see what happens. You'll notice that this movement is actually a lot smoother, though it's hard to see without anything to compare it to. I'll try to turn the effect on and off while it's playing, and maybe you can see the difference. Here it is on, here it is off. On, off. On, off. I think you could probably see the difference there in how the delay effector helps to smooth out the motion of that pounder. There's another way to get better and smoother motion with the Sound Effector without using the delay effector, and I'll show you what it is. If I click the sound effector, under sample mode, if we change it from peak, which takes the peak levels of the audio, and switch it to average, which takes an average of the audio levels, we can also improve the motion of the pounder. To compare the results, I've made another file here with three pounders in it. Let's switch to the side view and change the display to box, just so that we would have the least amount of overhead for the motion. The top object is going to use the delay effector. The middle object will not use the delay effector, but just the peak values of the audio levels. The bottom will use the Sound Effector's average mode. Okay. Let's hide the bottom shape just for a second. Make sure that the sound effector in the middle shape just uses peak, and the fracture object does not have any delay effector in it. The top object is using peak as well for the sample mode, does have the delay effector applied. Now, let's hit play. ♪ [music] ♪ As we've seen before, the delay effector does smooth out the motion of the object. Now, let's show the third object, click on the sound effector, and this time let's choose in sample mode, let's make it average. Now let's see what this does. ♪ [music] ♪ First of all, we can see that this object just doesn't seem to be moving as much as these other ones. Let's go to the parameter tab and let's increase this number to make it sort of match the other shapes. Now, let's hit play. You can see that it's smoother and the motion is different. In some ways, I like it better. ♪ [music] ♪ Depending on your preferences, may be the best way to smooth out the motion of the pounder. You can experiment using the average mode in the other sections of the animation to see what that looks like. However in the final render, I use the delay effector, so let's stick with that for now. Let's show the drum and the tassels and hit rewind. Now let's press play and see how it looks. ♪ [music] ♪ It looks pretty good. There's just one thing. Some of the tassel hairs are penetrating the drum. Let's rewind, and on this oil tank, let's right-click, and under hair tags, let's add a hair collider tag to it. That will make sure that these hairs don't penetrate the drum, and instead are repelled by it. Let's rewind again and hit play. ♪ [music] ♪ There. Now the hairs don't go inside of the drum. That just about wraps up on how I use the Sound Effector along with Cinema 4D's dynamic system to create the animation for the Glank music video. Thanks for watching and good luck with your own projects. This is Joe Herman.
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