Cinema 4D Roadshow 2016 - Flower Bloom Animation: Rigging Flower Petal with Deformers

Photo of Handel Eugene

Instructor Handel Eugene

Share this video
  • Duration: 17:59
  • Views: 3950
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

Rigging flower petal with multiple deformers. Applying displacer deformer to painted vertex map using the restriction tag.

Rigging the flower petal with multiple bend & twist deformers to maximize animation flexibility. We then paint a vertex map to be used in conjunction with a displacer deformer & restriction tag.

show less

Transcript

All right, welcome back to lesson three. In this video, we're going to go ahead and take our flower petal and rig it up to multiple deformers. So let's go ahead and jump right in. So first thing we're going to need to do is select our Extrude object and we're going to need to group it, so keyboard shortcut Alt+G or Option+G if you're on a PC, and that will group our flower petal. So let's just go ahead and rename it to "Flower Petal." And let's open this up. So the reason that we want to group our extrude objects is so that we can drop our deformers into this group so that way it will affect our extrude objects. So let's go ahead and do that now. Let's drop our first deformer in, and it's going to be a bend deformer. So click and hold and click on Bend, and take the bend deformer, make it a child of the group so that way it affects everything inside of the group. And we're just going to go ahead and rename this to "Bend Bottom." Okay, cool. Now let's take this and let's scale it down. First thing I want to do is I want to know which direction it's bending, so I'm just going to test this out. It's bending from left to right. That means I need to take this and rotate this 90 degrees like so. That's in the direction that we want, but we just need to rotate it downwards 180 degrees, so that way it's bending the bottom of our flower petal. Of course, this bend deformer's way too large. Let's go ahead and scale that down by hitting T. Bring this towards the bottom. Bring this up. Now we can adjust the size of our bend deformer like so. Just to get on the X. That should be close to what we want, so now of course, let's just test this out. Click on Bend deformer, increase our strength, forward and back, and that is giving us what we want. Now last thing we need to do is check Keep Y-axis Lengths so that way it's not stretching our flower petals disproportionately. Cool, all right, so this is looking good. I think that is what we want and need. Let's go ahead and drop in our next deformer. The next one we want is for it to bend the left side and the right side of our flower petals. So we're going to need to introduce another bend deformer. Take this bend deformer, drop it in again. And I'm going to rotate this to the left 90 degrees. Let's test this out. So it's on the lefthand side, but it's going up and down so that means I need to rotate this on the Y 90 degrees as well. Let's test that out. Okay, it's bending left to right the way we want. Of course, again, it's far too small, so let's take that... I apologize, far to big. So let's take that and scale it down. And I'm going to switch to my forward view. The keyboard shortcut for that is just the middle mouse button on your mouse. Going to hit S to frame up our flower petals, so that way you can see that. Now I'm going to want this to be thin. Want this to be pretty thin, and so want it to be tall, as tall as the flower petal, or roughly so. And then I want this to be thinner like so. And then this is going to be our bend edge left. Let's go ahead and rename that now. "Bend edge left." And let's test that out. Let me go ahead and full frame this so we can see this, and I'm going to go switch to Grude [SP] shading, that way we can get rid of our segments temporarily, for now. Yeah, okay, that's looking good. That's looking more so what we want. Around there should be good, and I'm going to take this same bend deformer, going to duplicate it. Bring strength down to zero temporarily and we're going to rename this to "Right, bend edge right," switch back to our four up view, and let's just rotate it 180 degrees and move it to the right, so that way it's bending the right side of our flower petal. Let's just increase the strength to see that in effect. All right, looking good. Okay, no here's one important thing that's definitely worth mentioning. The order of operation is important with your deformers, so your deformers work in a hierarchy format meaning that the top most deformer is going to deform our geometry first, then the next deformer underneath is going to deform our geometry, then the last deformer obviously is going to deform our geometry last. Now depending on the order, you could get results that you want or you could unfortunately get the result that you don't want. So like right now, and this is going to make a little difference, but I guess I'll reintroduce this concept once we introduce more deformers. But right now, this bend deformer bottom needs to actually be at the top like so. And that will make more sense once you start introducing more deformers and why that's key and important thing to make sure your order is correct. So the next deformer that we want to introduce is our twist deformer. So we have three deformers in our scene, and we introduce another deformer it can get pretty crowded really quickly. So let's go ahead and just turn off the visibility of our deformers, at least these three deformers for now. So we're going to want to hit the top stoplight that you see here. So click once, it makes it green. Click again, and drag up and you'll see this paintbrush that we'll apply red stoplights off to three of these deformers. Cool. So let's add our next deformer which is going to be our twist deformer. So click and hold and drop in a twist deformer. Again, the order of operations is important here, so I want to make sure this twist deformer goes last, that way it's effecting it in that order. Now again, I'm going to switch to my four up view, scale out, all right, twist deformer, it just needs to be as tall...holding on T to scale. Just needs to be as tall as our flower. Okay. We just need to make it thinner. Still containing our flower, still want it to contain our flower, but right around there should be good. Now this twist deformer, increase our angle, it is working the way we want it to. Now we're going to leave the value at zero because this twist deformer's going to come in handy once we're in the animation phase. So let's turn off the visibility of our twist deformer for now. Let's go ahead and introduce our last bend deformer, and that's going to be the bend back. So drop in a bend deformer, make it a child of the group and put it towards the bottom. Rename this "Bend back." Now let's switch to our four up view, of course scale this down. Our bend back, we want it to be just as big as our flower petal. We take our bend back and we want it to bring it in like so. Shrink it down like so. pick the wrong side. This pin is bending from left to right. It's okay, we can fix that by just rotating it 90 degrees like so, increasing the strength. We want it to bend back, which is what we want. Now of course, we want to keep Y-axis length against, that way it's not distorting it disproportionately. All right, and I'm just going to make that...just to clean it up visually, I'm just going to make that a little bit thinner, little bit wider. Maybe a little bit smaller. Somewhere around there should be good, and bend back. All right, that is looking good. This is actually right where we want our flower to be. This is probably going to be our hero pose for our flower petal. Now I'm giong to turn off the visibility...actually, I'm going to turn back on just so we can see all our deformers working together, and turn back all our deformers together, you can see this is our deformer. And again, the hierarchy is important. I take this bend back and I bring it all the way to the top. You'll see that it starts to really distort our flower petal in an undesired matter. So that's not what we want. Again, just making sure, if you're having issues at all with your flower petal looking a little funky, looking a little weird, just check your hierarchy and your order of your bend deformers. So I'm going to turn all these off for now. Again, clicking on a stoplight once, clicking it again, and clicking up, clicking and dragging up, will turn off all our deformers like so. And the next deformer we want to introduce is what's called a displacer deformer. So click on your deformers, go down to displacer, and just drop that into your scene. Now this displacer deformer, what it's going to do is just going to add a little bit of variation, a little bit of imperfections to our flower petals so that way it feels a little bit more organic. So with that displacer deformer selected, go ahead and go to your shading tab, and under shader, we're going to load in a noise. So as soon as you load in a noise, it distorts our flower. Obviously, the distortion is a large amount so we're just going to go onto our object tab and bring the height down to something reasonable, something around one. We just want this to be pretty minimal, just adding a subtle variation, some subtle details to our flower, which makes it feel a little bit more realistic. I think that's going to be right at what we want. Now let's introduce our last deformer, and that's going to be an additional displacer deformer, but this displacer deformer is going to be different. What we're looking for, what we want, is for the edges of the flower petal to start to have some wrinkles. We want to introduce some wrinkles, just along the edges. Not overall, not globally, but just in a centralized location along the edges. And to do that, we're going to need to make our flower petal editable. So let's go ahead and do that. So just hit C, keyboard shortcut C, to make our flower petal editable. And we're going to need to paint in a vertex map. So to do that, let's go ahead and just turn off all of our deformers for now and let's just focus on our flower petal by itself. And we're going to need to paint in a vertex map which is just going to be the selection, basically the selection. We're painting the area where we're going to restrict our next displacer deformer to which is going to be centralized to just the edges. So let's go ahead and do that now. Switch to polygon mode. And in polygon mode, you're going to go up to Select, Set Vertex Weight. Now the default value of 0%t is fine. We'll just go ahead and hit OK. Now what happens is it makes our flower completely red. And basically what that is is that's our selection. If it's completely red, then our selection is added 0% value, meaning the effect had 0%, had zero effect. If it's completely yellow, then the affect is at 100%. What we're going to do is we're going to paint in that yellow selection, that yellow 100% area where we want our displacer to affect our geometry. And of course, as we mentioned, we want it to be towards the edges. So to bring up our paint weight tool, we're going to need to double click on our weight tag, just double click on it, and it introduces our paint tool. And here, all we need to do is just paint, paint away. Let's just paint our selection like so. Now I'm just focusing on the edges of our flower petal like so. Now this is looking good, but we probably don't want the ripples to be towards the bottom, so if you want to subtract right now, we're just adding in our values. We want to subtract values, you just hold down command and it will subtract from our vertex map. Okay, that's looking good. There's one other thing that I want to do, and introduce, is right now we have some really hard edges. This is a really hard transition and I want to make this a bit smoother. So to do that, all I need to do is go to the mode and set it to smooth, and we're going to increase our strength to 100% and click apply all, and you can see it start to...as you can see, it starts to smooth out our transition. So let's click that a couple of times and make that a really nice and smooth gradient going from red to yellow, which will make for a nice transition with our displacer deformer. So now let's click off, let's switch back to modern mode and let's just reintroduce our displacer deformer. What we can do is just Command+drag to duplicate this displace deformer, let's just call this "Edge ripples." Now let's turn that on. Now of course, this displacer deformer is reflecting everything and we want to centralize it to just the edges. So let's just go ahead and let's just increase the height first to something like two. Let's go onto our shading, click on Noise. Let's bring our scale, our global scale, down to 75, let's say. That should be good. Now it's time to tell our displacer deformer to only be restricted to the area that we painted in. So we're going to click on our displacer deformer, right click, Cinema 4D tags, restriction tag. And once we have our restriction tag selected, all you need to do is click on your weight tag, make sure you click and hold, do not let go, and drag it into our restriction tag and there you go. Now this displacer deformer is only visible along the edges and is restricted towards that area. All right, that's looking good. Let's go ahead and introduce our other deformers as well so that we can see our final effect, our final results. That's looking good, and we just need to do one last thing. What I'm going to do is take this flower petal, and I'm going to drop it into a subdivision surface, which is going to add one extra layer of smoothing to our geometry, holding down Alt. Make sure you have your objects selected, holding down Alt or Option, it will automatically make it a parent of the object that you select, which is what we want. And now our flower petal is just a little bit smoother which is good. Let's just go ahead and rename this. And we're good to go. So in this video, we took our flower petal and rigged it up with multiple deformers, including bend deformer, twist deformer and displacer deformer. Okay, we're good to go, so we'll see you guys in the next lesson.
Resume Auto-Scroll?