Siggraph 2015 Rewind - Tim Clapham: Unleashing Creative Possibilities with C4D

- My name's Tim Clapham, thanks for the introduction. Thank you Maxon for bringing me over here. And this is my Twitter if you want to follow me on Twitter. I'm originally from the UK, live in Australia now, so a bit of a flight over. I run a production company in Sydney called Luxx and if you want to see the work that we do, then check out Luxx.tv for all of the work that I've done over the years. I had a great time working with a lot of professionals, directors and different studios, broadcasters. Also had a blog, which turned into helloluxx.com and it started out as a small free tutorial site. It's evolved into much more of a portal for training and for just sharing the knowledge, really. So if you're interested in any of our free Cinema 4D, After Effects tutorials, head on over. We also sell professional training. We have training for Houdini, loads of Cinema 4D by myself and lots of other amazing artists from around the world that contribute. Just released a new product, Learn XParticles, it's five mini projects that take you through X-particles and hopefully teach you a lot of the cool things that you can do with it. So, today we're going to be focusing on MoGraph. And in this example scene here, we're going to off with a little petal. I want to talk about the cloner and the blend mode really, and all the things that you can do with blend mode. But first of all let's just have a look at this material here. And we have a multi-shader, and the multi-shader allows you to bring in a whole bunch of images, or shaders. You can bring them all in from one folder. Right here we've got a whole bunch of petals, but the great thing about this is that it allows you to just create one material and still have diversity. So if we come down here you can see that I've got this cloner set up. Now this flower obviously is meant to be seen fairly small, it's not meant to be seen at high detail. If we select these petals and just have a look you can see that they're, only you know four polygons each. So trying to keep this simple scene, keep it nice and efficient. Now, we have a random effector here, and under the parameter tab you can see that the color mode is set to on. And if we enable this, you can see that the petals are now changed because it's picking them from that multi-shader. And we can change the random seed if we're not happy with it and we can get a whole different variety. Nice and easy. We've got a bend deformer on here as well. We can use this to open and close this flower. But actually I've already got one up here. If we unhide that, which is closed, and you can see it's fairly low res. Drop these into a cloner object, and this cloner object is set to a grid array. And by default, it just iterates through these clones so we just see one after the other. But if we come to the object tab and we change it to blend mode here, then what happens is it blends the parameters instead. So it's blending the parameter of that bend deformer. And it's just starting here and it's interpolating through up to here, so it's a fairly simple example. If we add in--we've got a little bit of random rotation here, but we'll take our plane effect. If we enable that, this doesn't actually do anything yet, but coming to the parameter here, what we want to do is just choose to modify clone. And if we drag this up, you can see that it's changing that blend and how it occurs. So now we've pushed it to 100. Because we've only got two clones, 100 is the very last one. But if we come to the effector tab and look at our minimum and maximum values, if we take that maximum value and take that to minus 100 instead, instead of the second clone it's going to use the first clone. So now we can only see all of those closed flowers. We can then take another effector, like this plane effector, and then we can use the modify clone parameter. And we can use that and we can essentially control that blend. So if we set that up to 100, come to the falloff--we can just enable some simple simple spherical falloff--and you can see now that we only get that blending occurring anywhere inside that falloff. We can also change the falloff here, and we can change it to a source file. And we can drop--not a source file, a source link. We can drop any object in there and it will use the vertices, or we can even use this, which is an emitter, and it will use the particles. You can drop splines into there as well. And now if we rewind, press play, you can see that as the particles fly over the flowers, they're like little bees flying in, and the flowers are opening for them. You get the idea. So I though it'd be cool to show you a real world example of how I've used this. We did a project, worked with a couple of guys, Nathan Drabsh and Breckon Littlefoot, and this is for a cinema in Australia called Hoyts and they do a luxury... They sit down and they bring you the popcorn, that kind of thing. They called it Lux as well, which is... They stole my name. So let's just have a look at this. ♪ [music] ♪ So the thing with this, if we just scrub back through, especially a shot like this, we've got all of these hexagons tessellating together perfectly. And, you know up here we've got this perfectly mirror finish. And then we come down here and you can see that we've got this lovely bevel. So what's actually happening is we're using the blend mode of the cloner to go from having this bevel to no bevel. So let's just have a quick look at that scene and how that rig was set up. So here we have first hexagon. Here we have the other one without the bevel. If we come to the picture viewer quickly, we've got this. I put this in because I thought it kind of looked a bit complicated. It's not really. So in Cinema we can have a primitive spline that's a hexagon, but we only get the radius. But these...we need all these values so that we know how to offset our hexagon to make our rig so that it tessellates perfectly, and we only have our radius. But you can see that if we have our radius we know that that's the same size as this side, and we know that here we can find this length by the square root of three multiplied by t, and we already know what t is because we've got the radius. So we can use these really simple formulas to calculate how we should offset those. So here's a little bit of Xpresso that's...set that up. And it's really simple. These are user data, and they're just really linked to the cloner so that we can control the count. And then here the size controls the size of the spline. And then we take that and that goes into here. So that float function is...you can see down here it's the square root of three, and then we actually multiply that by the radius and then we divide it by two and that gives us the position offset. So you could've, like, you know just scrubbed the values until you get that all lining up perfectly, but by doing it this way you're sure that it's going to be an absolute perfect fit. So I've dropped this into a cloner and if we enable that, and you can see at the moment that even though this cloner down here is set to blend mode it's not actually blending here, because we've got render instances enabled. Now render instances allow you to create hundreds and thousands of objects, but you only really use the RAM from the very first object. If we disable that, you can see now that we are getting that blend. And we can just do a quick render of that, and you can see we blend from this. We've got a bevel, now we haven't, so. We drop that into another cloner to create the other offset, and there we go. And if we come up, just enable this Xpresso. We can select the Boolean and here's the user data I was talking about. And now we can just grab this and we can you know, just create as many as we like, nice and easy. And we can also scale it so everything fits together. The other thing in the Xpresso was just this; when I enable the Boolean, I've set it so that it switches render instances off, because with render instances off we get the proper blend. But also we've got a Boolean here, so we're kind of blending between all of those objects, and we're also going to bool it. It's going to be a little bit slow, so by just setting up that simple automation it means that the whole scene, you know, is really nice and snappy and we haven't got to worry about any problems with, you know the file being slow to work with. So I've got just a simple extruding here. Oops. And if we just come in a little bit closer, let's just enable these effectors. These are just set up just as before where we're modifying the clone. And when we use this one we modify clone again so that we can get that blend. And with some falloff we can just smooth that off. And then added in a shader effector here, using some noise to just offset these on y. Which means that we can, you know, we can just grab this and we can just pull it up and down, and we get a nice snappy result. You know we can have loads more of these if we want, and everything would still be nice and quick. So we've got a really nice quick playback. We can come in when we're ready, when we're happy with this. Just come in here, enable this bool, it's going to change the render instances, and then we can render and everything should work nicely, like so. And there you go. So, I wanted to show another example of how we can use blend, and this is for a job that I did for the Australian Graphic Design Association. They invite me to do a creative response for their awards. It was really fun, because it was an open brief. And the only rules were I had to have triangles in it. Other than that you could do whatever you wanted. And so there's no client leaning over your shoulder, which is always pleasant. So let's just have a look at that, and then I'll show you how I created some of the shots. ♪ [music] ♪ So one of the problems in this project was the sheer amount of clones on this object. So if you look at this shot here, you know we've got probably 200,000 clones. And on the shot before you can see here, I think there's about 50,000 clones all rendered with sub-surface scattering using Vray. And all of these clones are like morphing between shapes. So obviously the challenge here was to make it so that I could set this up and everything was nice and efficient. And to do that I used a very similar technique to what I just showed you. So with the blend mode, you can actually use it to morph geometry as well. So here we've got the objects and you can see they're both using the same point count and the same point order. So if we take this one for instance, and we add a post-morph tag, enable points so we can do a point morph. You can just drag this in and create an absolute morph. And now you can see I've just created a really simple morph. You can do this with a cloner as well. So if we unhide this and enable it you can see here we've got it set to blend mode. I've just got two children in here; these two. But by using blend mode, you can see it's blending between those morphs, those two shapes, and it's creating the intermediates. It's interpolating the geometry. So if we take this, we can create as many as we like. On top of that you can also use an effector to control that blend. So not only are we morphing the geometry, but we can grab this spline for instance, and we can use that to control how that blend occurs. So you really do have a lot of control. But I wanted to try that with a shader. So I've got a plane object here. Rather than showing you 50,000 clones, let's just look at it with a few hundred. So here we've got them just cloned across a plane object. And again you can see it's blending through nicely. If we enable this plane effector just as before with the modified clone parameter, so we take it so it's only showing the very first one, and in here we've got six objects. I've also got a shader effector here with some noise. And if we open this up you can see that we're using displace for annoy. And that's actually an animated noise, so it's just going to evolve and undulate. But what will happen is it'll take those grayscale values and if it's black it's going to show the first clone, if it's white it's going to show the last one, but on the gray values it's going to blend between. So if we enable that, you can see that we get this nice sort of undulating effect. But when we press play you can see it's a little bit slow. We really want it to be a bit quicker than that. And obviously there aren't that many clones here. If we've got hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, it's going to really start to slow down and workflow is going to become a bit prohibitive. So what can we do? We could use render instances. So if we select this and we enable render instances, you can see that now you get a much faster playback. But because we have render instances, it doesn't really create geometry, it's only showing that each clone--it's not actually doing the blends so you get this stop motion effect which isn't what I wanted. So I was thinking, well how can I do it with render instances and also make it so that I've got all of those blend shapes? Well I thought well okay we'll just create the blend shapes. So that's what I did. There we go. So if we unhide this one here you can see that what I've done is I've blended it but I've created 200. So now if we have a look at this you can see that we've got every frame that we need. We don't need to interpolate because we've just made them all. So we put those 200 clones in like so, and we get exactly the same result as before, but now we're using render instances, and when we press play we're getting a reasonably fast playback. We can see everything. Of course the other issue here is that we've got like fairly low res geometry, and if you'll have a look of these, you know obviously if I have any close-up shots we're going to see all the polygons, all the edges. We don't want to see that. So we need to subdivide it. But again, because render instances aren't real geometry, we can't just use a subdivision surface, because if we do that half of them disappear. And that's because half of them aren't real geometry. Even though they look like that. So using that isn't an option. But you can still do it, you can just do it with a material. So here we've got a material, we've got some displacement. We're using sub-poly displacement but we've set that to a very small height. So any set to 0.01, so you're not going to see that but when we render it you're going to get that nice smooth subdivided surface. So it means that we can create our subdivision with a material, we can use render instances, everything's nice and quick, nice and snappy. Here's one of the scenes from that job. And the rock itself was... I bought it on TurboSquid, it's like a couple of million polygons. This is just a small section of it, but you can see that because it's scanned, some of the polys up here are a bit messy. I didn't really want to spend all my time going around the mesh, finding everything, pulling those around. So we can just drop a smoothing deformer on there, and that just smooths it all out a little bit. So here's the cloner. Let's enable that. And you can see that we're using the blend mode once again. We've got 50,000 clones on there. Now it may look like we've got this super high-detail rock, but actually if we just come back you can see that what I've done is just deleted all of the polys that we don't need--we can't see. Just to keep it as efficient as possible. Add in our plane effector just as before. We've got a random effector for some scale, we've got the shader effector with the noise, just as I showed you in the previous scene, and then we've got a plane effector here that we're using to wipe that on. Because I'm using a display tag as well I've got the level of detail set down to 10, so even though we've got 50,000 clones we can view it as box mode with a lower level of detail, and it means that we can scrub the scene, and you know even on this old Mac Pro under here, it's still fairly snappy. So it's all these kind of things that mean you can get your work done nice and efficiently, you don't have to worry about the overhead or any technical limitations. Here's the actual scene that I used. I wanted to show you this because it's a good example of the new take system. So this was rendered in Vray just to show you the take system just works with all the other renderers as well. No problem at all. And you can see that in here we've got three cloners; one for the close-up shot, one for the wide, one for the front. I've got my three cameras, I've got various effectors, I've got different lights. I've even got animated materials on some shots on the other shots they're not animated. If we come into the render settings you can see that we've got three different render settings here. If I come down to my layers you can see I've also got some layers so I can solo the various shots nice and easily. Now previously we used to have to go through, change the render settings, set the layers, switch the cloner off, switch the other one on. We don't need to do that anymore, we can just set up some takes. And here's my takes, very simple. So if we select this first one, you can see that in here it's set to enable this cloner, make it visible, whereas the others it's set to disable them and hide them. With the textures, I've set that up so that it swaps the actual material that's in the tag so that I can just change the take, soon as I do that it changes all of these parameters, we jump to that camera. If we come into the render settings you can see it's changed to the correct render setting. And we just switch to the other, and it does it. Everything's automatic. We can even come here, we just tick these, we come up, which is save marked takes with assets, and that'll save each one of those takes as a separate project with all the assets you need. It'll set the camera, the render settings, you can just save them into your render farm directory and then just hit render and go. It's so efficient, I've used it for about the last eight months and I use it on every job and I just couldn't live without it. It's awesome. So, the next thing that I wanted to show you is a way of using the cloner object but this time to create, like stop frame animation. So rather than before we were blending between parameters of objects, or we were blending geometry, this time we can create a whole bunch of frames. So here if we have a look at this you can see I've created all of these splines, it's a simple little kind of cartoony explosion, all drawn in Illustrator. I've got these in a cloner, but this time the cloner, and the important thing here is that the cloner is set to sort mode. So sort mode means that we can use effectors to determine which of its children it's going to show. We've got a count of one, so if I enable this it's only going to show one of these splines. And just to keep it efficient, I'm just keeping the splines in here, and then I'm going to create the geometry afterwards by adding in a loft. And there it is, a little humble little explosion. I've got a plane effector here, and once again we can use the modify clone parameter, but this time rather than doing the blend, it's going to show the different children. So what've we got? We've got nine in here, so you can see as I come, as I increase that we see the next one and then the next one. So we can essentially drag that through, and we've created this little explosion. Of course it still works with falloff and everything else, so we can set that up to 100, and then enable falloff. I'm going to use a linear falloff here. There's my effector. I've got some keys on here just so it moves through. If we press play you can see that it just animates. So it's very simple, but it's a way of kind of automating stop motion and keeping it fairly parametric. So rather than it being a tedious task, we can take this we can duplicate it, and we can keep the whole thing parametric, and we can create quite complex animations using a stop frame technique. It could work perfectly well with a 3D object. And the great thing about this is if you want to control your timing, we can just set it so that that falloff just moves through over ten frames--well, nine frames. And then we're on ones. Or we can move it through in 18 frames then we're on twos. Or you can make the falloff a bit bigger. Here's another example of a very similar thing. This time we've got a planet here, it's actually just a sphere and some atmosphere. And then I've got a plane effect just sitting in here. And if we just enable this, you can see I've set the falloff so it just kind of fits into the atmosphere. This little white thing out here is just a standard emitter. Here's my cloner, just as before. It's the very same setup, this time I've just had a little spaceship that I've added to it. So if we enable this emitter and press play you can see that we get all these particles flying across. There we go there's one. And then we can set our cloner up to clone onto an object, but the object that we're going to use is the emitter. So we put the emitter into here, so if we enable this... Oh. And let's enable that one, you can see that we get these little spaceships. We can also make sure that they always point at the camera, because they're 2D. But you can see that as they hit the falloff it triggers the animation. So we're kind of creating this procedural animation using stop motion techniques. So it's pretty cool. We're in 3D space, we can move around. They're always going to face us. Nice and efficient, nice and quick. If you had to do this by hand it would be pretty laborious, so it's great to be able to, you know use the cloner object and it's slightly an unusual way of using it I think. Next thing I wanted to show you was another thing with cloner. This time, a way that you can actually trigger key framed animation. So previously we were creating animation with the cloner, with sort mode, or with blend mode. This time we're going to use some key framed animation. So if I just rewind and we have a look at this, you can see that's really simple just a box unfolding. Let's enable this cloner object. Okay so now if we rewind you can see that they're all--what's going to happen is they're all going to animate. Let's put render instances on. You can see they all animate simultaneously. Now I've got a shader effector here. In here we have this, just this very small bitmap, just created in Illustrator, just some really simple pixel text, but we can use that to control the visibility. So the shader effector has the parameter here, the visibility is set. And if we enable this it's just going to hide some of those so we can create some simple type. If we look next to the visibility check box we have this time offset. Now time offset is pretty cool, it allows you to offset any key framed animation. So if you use a random effector, your animation will randomly trigger at different times. If you're using a shader effector like this, then you can trigger your animation with a material, or with a shader. So you could use noise so that, again it was random. Or you could use a gradient so the animation starts one side and moves across to the other side. The time effector, however, is a slightly different beast. The way that this works is it increments a value over time. So if you were doing rotation you could say okay let's rotate one degree each frame, and your object's just going to continually rotate. If you use it with the time offset, however, essentially it's going to slow things down. If we come and, let's have a look at the timeline. See here that--you know, I would say it's a really simple animation, but it lasts 25 frames, so the last key is on frame 25. The time effector--time offset I've set to 25. So it's never actually going to animate, it's already offset the time. It's never going to reach those keys. So by doing that with the time effector we can press play and it's never actually going to animate, but it is animating internally we're just pushing it past those keys, so it's like it's always, it's done the animation. So... There we go. So you can see it's not working. But it is internally, so what we can do is we can negate that value and we can then use another effector and say minus 25. So I've got a plane effector here and that's set to minus 25 so whenever that passes over those clones, it's going to trigger the animation. This is a trick shown to me by Pear Anders, who is one of the geniuses that wrote MoGraph. It's a really simple little trick, but it just means that we can then trigger that animation. So you can see now, here's my plane effector. If I drag it through it's triggering that animation. It's fairly simple but even just that little thing is, there's a lot of power there, especially with a more complex scene. At the moment obviously it's very linear. We're just using a linear fall off, but with the cloner object we have this thing called weight. And if we come to the transform tab we can make that visible. And we can see that we get these red dots over all of our clones. And the red dot signifies that they're all the same weight. And weighting with MoGraph works in a very similar way to like a vertex map, where you're weighting for deformation and you can control the influence a deformer has on a mesh. And in that example, obviously you're going to be weighting the vertices, but here we're weighting clones, and it controls the influence that the effectors have. And this random effector is set to transform the weight. So if we enable that and come back to our cloner you can see now they're all different colors, so we've just randomized that weight. And it just means that it's not going to be quite so uniform. Now when we grab this effector and we pull it through, you can see that it happens in a much more random, a bit more organic kind of, or more pixelated way. So there's one more thing that I was going to show you guys. If we come back to this job here, now this was rendered in VRay for Cinema 4D. I was really fortunate to be able to use the beta of version 3; it's awesome. And my favorite thing in it is this new, well I think it was new with version 3. It's this ray-traced, refractive sub-surface scattering. And it's like, it looks amazing and it's beautiful. So I thought I'd show you how I set up this shot with this kind of globby thing that runs over. Now I'm not going to go into the material setup, but just to create the geometry. And it's really simple, again using the rock that I bought from TurboSquid. So here we go. So here's the rock itself. You can see--there were two versions of the rock; a lower res version that someone had redone the topology. So I worked with the low res one for this. And I wanted it to be hidden inside the high res rock, so to make it hidden inside I used a displace deformer. So displace deformer's a really cool thing because it work just like displacement on a material but it allows you to use a falloff, and it also allows you to use a whole bunch of shaders and see that real-time in the view port, whereas normally with a displacement material you don't see the feedback until you render. So the displacer object allows you to see that. You can see that when I enable that all it does is it pushes it in. I've set the displacement to be minus 15. Let's just hide those edges for a sec. Oh, did I just change that? Yes, we don't want to do that, do we? To make the mesh a bit smoother we can add on a smoothing deformer. And the smoothing deformer's really cool. It's a bit like a subdivision surface. Again it's a deformer, so we can use it with fall off. And we can control the number of iterations and the type of smoothness that we're doing. We can also drop in a vertex map etc. , here, to control the stiffness of it. Now I animated this object, then added--now which one did I animate? Well I animated one of them. But then I've got these constraints on here so that we don't have to animate all the objects we don't need to put them as children, we can just use a position constraint, link them all to the one animated object, and they're all going to move with it together. I think it was this one? Yeah, so it's the displacer out and this one is pushing the object back out. So we moved it in minus 15 so it hides inside the rock, and then twenty so it comes out. So if we just play that through, you can see that as this displacer comes down, you kind of get this first motion. We've got a few problems with the mesh, it's like a really high res mesh and the topology--some of the polygons are a bit messed up and inverted. So we can just add in another smoothing deformer to help fix any of those issues. It's all a bit static at the moment though, so one of the great that things we can do is use the jiggle deformer. The jiggle deformer is really nice because it allows you to jiggle things around. And it can give you a kind of a cloth feeling. I did a little bit of noise on there, add the jiggle deformer, press play. So we've got all of these deformers running through on this, a fairly high res mesh. And you can see just the jiggle deformer itself is creating all of these lovely creases and we get this nice wobble and so it feels like a bit of jelly or a piece of cloth or something. One of the awesome things about the jiggle deformer as well is that it's got this caching system. And you can see this one's already been cached. So we can really--we can switch off all these deformers, we don't need those, and now we should get a much quicker faster playback. So once you've set it up, use your jiggle deformer you can cache it on there. It's just caching it on that one object and your playback is going to be much quicker. You're not using--you're not having to calculate all those different deformers. And you can see that's how we kind of got this effect. ♪ [music] ♪ In this example here there's just one of them, though, but what I actually did was layered up several of them on top of each other. And I think that's why the sub-surface effect looks so nice, because we've got these various shaders using sub-surface, layered on top of each other. And because it's a ray-traced sub-surface, it's kind of calculating through each mesh. And if we just enable all of these, you can see the kind of effect. Really simple. And then what I did at that point, then I just converted it into a cloth object. Made the logo inside and just pulled it backwards. And that's how I created the end part. So I hope you enjoyed that presentation. But before we finish, what I'd like to do is show you my reel. So thanks for coming. And let's just check out the reel. ♪ [music] ♪ Thank you, thanks for watching.