So today, we're going to talk about life values, about how to improve on your
day-to-day life, how to enjoy life more than anything. Because all these years,
MAXON has been catering to the connoisseurs of 3D, the hedonists, the bon
viveurs, and all the people that have fun working, okay? But this time they thought
about, "Why don't we cater to the hard workers as well? Make a change, people
that actually work for their living." So they decided to create the ultimate
workflow tool, something that, regardless of what you do in the 3D industry, it will
save you time. And that time, you can allocate it wherever you want. You can
spend it with your family. You can make more money by doing more work. But it's
the only way you will actually save tons of time. Thank you very much. The funny
thing is I'm not going to drink it, but anyway. . .so this is very rare. I have a
keynote presentation here. I never do that. And actually it's not even the right
page. So let me go to the right page. There you go. So we're going to talk about
one of the main R17 features, which is the Take System. Now the Take System is not
one thing. It's a suite of workflows, managers and concepts that improve your
workflow like never before. There's one issue with it. It's so ridiculously easy
to use, that unless you actually start using it, it's hard to understand the
value. Because it's just simple. It's very deep and it's extremely powerful. So let's
move on. What is the Take System? It's a versioning tool. It's render layers, a
full solution for render layers, render naming solution.
I can't even read what I wrote, but that's another story. Scene management, smart
global material override, and more, everything in a single document. That's
it, one single document. No more multiple documents iterations, different folders,
change the name, do that. "Oh, which is the right document?" by date and so forth.
If you see my project files, project folders, you're going to be afraid. You're
going to be scared. I'm pretty sure this applies to everyone. So there's one main
principle: any attribute and parameter that can be keyframed can be taken, and
then some. I'm going to repeat this "and then some" quite a few times. So let me
show you. And as usual, everything starts with a cube, and this time, with a sphere
as well. Because we can have versions. Let's go. So I have my masterpiece here,
which is basically a bouncing cube, okay? Now inside this cube, there's a little
sphere. It's behind that. So there's the sphere. So I've been creating my new
fantastic project, which is basically something that's bouncing. And I'm
deliberating between do I want it to be a sphere or do I want it to be a cube? But
in real life, this is a situation that you're presented with quite often. Because
you don't know which of all models you're going to use, which character you're going
to use, and even which packaging you're going to use if you do package design. And
you understand what I'm talking about. So I'm going to create a real life situation
here. What I'm going to create, iterations. So I want to be able to have a
scene for my cube, a scene for my sphere, and then I'm going to do a few more
things. How does the Take System work? Well, there's a manager here. That's
called takes. I'm going to right-click on it and undock it.
And I'm going to click on this button so I get the full manager. Everything you have
to do with the takes, you actually do it in this window here. And it's all familiar
interface. Let me talk about the concept. The main take is exactly the same way you
have been working all these years. If you don't want to use the takes, you don't
even know they are there, all right? They're invisible. Only if you bring up
the manager you can start working with them. So I'm going to leave the scene as
it is. And I'm brainstorming by myself as usual. And I want to create my first
iteration, which is just a cube, a red cube bouncing, which means I need to get
rid of my sphere. See, behind here there's a little sphere inside my cube. I'm going
to use it later. So what do I want to do? I'm going to right-click here and do a new
take, which I'm going to name "red cube." The Take System does not help you spell,
okay? Red cube. And you can just select each and every one of them. Nothing
changes. On the red cube take, we want to see only the cube, nothing else, which
means I want to make the sphere invisible. What do I do and how do I do it? There are
different ways of making an object invisible. The simplest way is to turn off
its visibility in the renderer and the editor. So I'm going to do the following
thing. I'm going to go to my sphere, go to my basic, and already you're seeing a
difference in the interface. You can see that these are grayed out. When the
attributes are grayed out, that is because all the attributes that are grayed out are
inherited from the parent take. That's why these two scenes are identical, because
both this and this have exactly the same attributes. So we want to add an override.
So I go to the attribute I want and I drag it from here into my take.
And just like magic, we have the visible render parameter and only its attribute in
this little editing panel. And I'm going to make it off. I'm going to drag the
visible in renderer. I can drag it here. I can drag it there. I can drag it anywhere
I want. And I'm going to select it and turn it off. And look at this now. My main
take has the sphere but my red cube now doesn't. So you do it only once and that
state is recorded. Let's see how we can make this even more fun. I'm going to
create a new child take and call it red sphere. So I want to do exactly the
opposite. So what do I do? I go to my red sphere. I select my red cube this time
because that's the one I want to make invisible. I go to the appropriate
attribute. I'm going to use a different method now. I'm going to right-click on
this and say override. And it adds it. So you can drag it or you can add it by
right-clicking. And I'm going to do the same here, override. And I'm going to go
over here, open these things up. I can double-click here and change it, and I can
double-click here and change it off. So I did it once, and now I have one, two
states. This is the equivalent of having two documents, one with only the red
sphere and one with only the red cube. And you will ask me, "But this is easy to do
with two documents, " all right? Would you ask me? Can someone ask me? No. But then
we can add another extra element of difficulty. We have a red version. We want
a green version for both of them. So suddenly one version became two. Two
versions are going to became four. So how do I do that?
Well, if I right-click on the red sphere, and say new child take, I'm going to call
this green sphere. And because it's a child of the red sphere, it's going to
inherit everything that's in the red sphere, which means this, and everything
from the main that is not in here. So it inherits up the hierarchy anything that
hasn't been overridden. What do I want to change in my green sphere? I want to
change the sphere material assignment, but I'm going to do it in a different way. I'm
going to turn on the auto takes. And when I turn on the auto takes, everything
that's overridden turns to blue so you can edit it. But you know that it's all
inherited. And the only thing I need to do is grab. . .oh, I need to create a green
material. So go back to your main, turn off this, make a copy of this, call it
green, double-click. And this is our fantastic new color chooser, which I'm not
going to show. But you can do all sorts of things like this, and like this, and you
can add these. So I'm not going to show you the color chooser, okay? You can save
swatches. You have HSV, RGB, Kelvin, and all that. Anyway, so I made it green. I
wasn't supposed to show you the color chooser, but I did anyway. And all you
have to do is go to your green sphere, turn on your Auto Take, and make sure that
the sphere assignment is green now. And it records it automatically. That's what the
Auto Take does. So I'm going to turn it off. And just with one swift move of my
wrist, I've created another take that inherits everything from the red, that
inherits everything from the main. So now we have one, two, three, four states.
Fantastic. And I want to create the same change for the red cube. So in this case,
I will do exactly the same thing. Go to my auto take, select the cube material, and
assign the green. Undo, because I didn't create a new child
take, which I'll call green cube. Is it a cube here? Yes. So I'm going to go here,
Auto Take, and do this, turn off Auto Take. So red sphere, green sphere, red
cube, green cube. Fantastic. And if at any point I want to do a change on my main
scene, all those changes are going to propagate down the hierarchy. You don't
have to go and change every single instance of what you have made. And I'm
going to show you what I mean by the next example. Okay, I have my objects, but I
want to create a shadow pass. Now, for anyone that's used any multi-pass system
on any 3D software, you will know that shadows always get occluded by the object
in front. And although we work around that, it will be nice if all our shadow
passes were all the shadows and we can just drop the objects on top of them.
Well, we can do that. And it's so simple I'm embarrassed to show it to you. But I
will. Right-click, new child take. And I'm going to call this "floor alone." Good. So
the first thing I'm going to do is go to my main take and make my floor invisible.
I don't want it, okay? So because changes propagate down the hierarchy and all that,
you will see that all my takes don't have a floor. But the floor alone, I'm going to
activate for the floor the visibility, on and on. Fantastic. Turn this off. So we
have a floor alone, which if I render, you can see that we still have the objects. So
I need to tell the floor alone to remove the objects from my scene. But I don't
want to remove them from visibility and rendering because maybe I want a
reflection. I just want to remove them from visibility to camera. And in order to
do that, I'm going to use another great feature, which is called the right-click
override group. Now, what this override group does, it
adds a little group here, and you can assign to that group what to override. And
you can override textures, compositing tags, display tags, blah, blah, blah. And
it will apply all this to all the objects of the group. Or you can turn off the
visibility. And how that works is I grab my cube. I grab my sphere, drop them in
the group. And currently, nothing is happening, so they are still visible in
the take. All I have to do is for all of the objects in the group, tell it with a
compositing tag to be invisible in camera. And all the objects in the group are going
to be affected. And if I render this now, I get only my floor. Now, the good thing
about is that any moment, if I add more objects to my scene, all I have to do to
incorporate them in the same logic is to drag them in this group and they will be
excluded in that specific take. So okay, we have one, two, three, four, five takes,
which in previous times would either be clicking on and off buttons all the time
or grouping things in weird ways. And it becomes frustrating and the logistics
become crazy. But now everything is at the reach of one button. So we need to move to
the next step, which is, okay, we have all these things. We need to render them now.
So what's going to happen? How are we going to name them? How are we going to
name them? Something is coming up, so how do we name them? So what we're going to
do, we're going to open our render settings. And one of the features that I
haven't seen people using that much are the render settings, okay? So if you
don't, just use them, all right? Get it over with. Use them. Now, the good thing
about the render settings is that if you create a child, like with the Take System,
it inherits all the parameters that you haven't changed.
So if I call this, let's say, objects, okay? And I want to make sure that my
objects are rendered using a straight alpha. And you will see why I'm going to
use it later on. And then I'm going to create another child, which is going to be
called floor, okay? And although I won't make them any different other than this
one has a alpha channel and this one doesn't, what I'm going to show you is
that the floor, if you click on this little thing here, you can choose the
floor settings for this take, and you can choose the objects from these ones. So you
can define for each take a different render setting. What does that mean? Well,
that means that you can have in one scene different instances of your scene,
different iterations of your scene, that can render in different resolutions, with
different codecs, in different aspect ratios, with different cameras, with
different frame ranges, and you get the idea, with different object
passes. . .sorry, multi-passes. And how can we deal with this? Because here we can
have one, two, three, four, five renders for each frame. We need to find a way to
manage it. Enter the keynote presentation. The Take System introduces the concept of
tokens. A token is an attribute, a variable, that starts with a dollar sign,
and these are the ones that are hardcoded in Cinema 4D. $prj stands for document
name, camera for current camera name, take for the current take name, pass, blah,
blah, user pass. You're going to love the next one, frame rate, render settings,
name, and all that. And where do you use them?
Well, you use these in the file name. So, excellent. I'm going to define some kind
of place to put these. I'm going to create a folder with a very descriptive name,
11111, and "renders" is going to be the name of this. So I've got my path here.
And I'm going to extend my path to account for my takes. So if I put a slash here,
that means the name "renders" is going to be become a folder rather than a file. And
in here, first of all, I want a folder structure that has my project name. So I
type $prj, and then slash. This is going to create a folder with a project name.
Project name is Cube 01A at this point. Then I want a subfolder, which is going to
be my take name. So I'm going to type $take. If you're like me and you forget
everything, you don't even have to remember, because . . .whoop. You know
MAXON hides the best things in little triangles. I think it's a fetish or
something, but it's amazing. All the attributes are here. So all you have to do
is just select one of these and it tells you what it is, okay? As simple as that.
So a folder named "take," and I want the actual name of my file to be prj, again,
_take. So the filename is going to be Cube 01A, floor alone for this, red sphere for
that, green sphere for that, and that's going to be the name. And drumroll, I'm
going to render this from 0 to 10. And providing I haven't done something
terribly wrong. . .oh yeah, I need to put the same. . . I can put render settings as
well, but I don't care at this moment. I'm going to just paste this here and make
sure it's a PNG, although it won't make a difference.
I'm going to leave this as TIF so you can see the difference as well. And I'm going
to mark these because I can render all takes. But I just don't want the main
because the main is just the main. Render marked takes to picture viewer. . .let me
make sure I have animation. See? I knew it. Zero to 10, and floor. Actually I
could have changed the main one and they would inherit, but anyway, good, 0 to 10,
0 to 10. That's my mistake. And press render, mark takes to picture viewer. It's
going to tell me that the document contains dynamic simulations. It's smart,
just in case you need to bake them. And you go for a walk. You do your thing.
Okay. You can't justify that as real work to your clients, and that's up to you to
solve. So let's go to our desktop. Renders, so this is the folder structure
that was created. The name of cube one, the takes, and the names of each take.
Now, how cool is that? How cool is that? Come on. Let's hear the word. How cool is
that? How cool is that? Okay, we're not done yet. We're not done. We have quite a
few things to see still. So what else can we see? So this is the main concept of the
takes. And I'm not going to look at my notes. I'm going to look at my keynote.
It's not going to help me. All right. Scene management, yes. Oh, global material
override. Okay. I'm going to show this to you. And then I'm going to show you some
real life examples. Let me open a fantastic piece from
Aixsponza. And I don't know if you've seen Aixsponza's great movie "Seed." Yeah, go
to MAXON.net and see it. There's a link there. And if you go to the Aixsponza
website, you will see they have a making of it and all that. And according to
Emanuel from Aixsponza, one of the founders, if it wasn't for the Take
System, they wouldn't have been able to do this in the given amount of time they had.
Anyway, that's all Cinema 4D, but we already know that. So let's go into take
simplified advanced render. Okay. We are seeing the global material override. I'm
sorry. This is the wrong file for that. I'm going to go back to my hooked, okay,
and yes, takes. I have it open. Let's go. It's an animation that was done in 2012 by
a company called Cybertime, Günter Nikodim. And I would suggest you go on
YouTube and you watch it. It's a really, really nice piece, a great piece of
animation, "Hooked" from Cybertime. And it's all about an octopus. So he was kind
enough to give me this file. And what's happening with this file is that we have
our main hero object. He's in a situation where he's on a white floor because we
haven't decided on where we're going to put it, what kind of floor. But somewhere
in here, we have a shadow pass. So you will see that I have main without floor.
So we have only octopus. Then we have a sucker mask, and the sucker mask is a mask
of these blue suckers. So currently, at this point, if you want
to do this prior to R17, you actually need to create a new instance of the material,
and again either move it left or right in hierarchy to override it, create another
scene. You can't incorporate it in your document. But now with the takes, it's
very easy to do. And let me show you, first of all, how to do that. And then I'm
going to move to the material override, because this is not it. So no takes. So
this is the same version without any takes. It takes a little bit of time to
load because I think it's 500 megabytes of cached data for the octopus. Good. So I'm
going to go to a frame I find interesting somewhere here. And I have already a
material, which has a luminance channel, with just the suckers. So I'm going to use
this in a take. I'm going to just create a new child take and call this suckers. And
because it's a simple mask, I don't need a physical renderer. So I'm going to create
a new child called fast to keep it simple. And I'm going to go here, turn off
everything else, turn this to standard, and maybe turn down the anti-aliasing,
because I don't care. And what I'm going to do is the main take is going to be
rendered over here, but this take is going to be rendered with the fast version. And
I've taken care of that, so that's fantastic. Main fast, good. And the next
thing I'm going to do, I'm just going to get rid of these. And it's more of an OCD
thing rather than everything else. And I'm going to apply this material. And it's as
simple as the following: take manager, suckers. I want to make everything
disappear. And how to do that? Right-click, override
group. And I want to call this "invisible." And I'm going to start adding
these. And all I have to do is just make them invisible. And I'm going to add them.
So I want the octopus. The octopus is the only thing I actually want. So I'm going
to grab everything else, put it in here. Automatically, it's disappeared. But in
the main, it exists. Of course I could have created. . .if I wanted to create an
object mat for that, so it's over the mask and so forth, but I'm not going to do it
now. So we have the octopus alone. And the next thing to do is go to my octopus and
override this material. So I'm going to go here, select it, go to material, drag it
in here, go down to my texture, and change this to my mask. So I've created an
instance of my scene. Oh, we forgot the eyes. Excellent. Do a test render, grab
the eye in here. That's the good thing about groups. Since I've set up what I
want the group to do, all I have to do is add the other two objects in here, render,
and they're gone. And that's the basic premise using the groups and everything
else. So now I have two takes. I have my normal take here, which you will see the
octopus. You will see everything. You will see the shadows on the floor. And I've
created my sucker, which is, even with a different renderer. . .and I've created,
just like that, an iteration of my scene, which is optimized to render for a mask.
You don't need a physical renderer for a mask. On the contrary, it makes things
much, much slower. So this way, you can see you can create your custom masks. So
even material buffers now, material buffers, easy to do. Extremely easy to do
because you can use the Take System to do that.
That's why the Take System is so deep, that unless you start using it in your
everyday work, you will not understand what the benefits are. And honestly, I
think I have never seen anything simpler than this in its concept, just dragging
things in, grouping them, and turning on and off parameters, which is something we
do every day many, many times, multiple times. So since we are here -- I keep on
closing this take manager -- let's talk about another fantastic addition, the
material override. Now, the material override is not part of the Take System
per se, but it is. And it works in the following way. I turn it on and I press
render. And I wait for it. Yeah. Because I've got a take selected, I'm going to do
the following here. Here we go. Material override, exclude, do be do be do be do.
Yeah. This is a typical mistake I always do. Although I was trying to apply it to
the render, I had the render focused here. So the render render settings. But I had
the fast selected. So I turned it on here instead of here, okay? So the rule is the
yellow one, [inaudible 00:27:22], the yellow one. So let's turn on material
override. And now I will render. I'm getting a clay render. And the fantastic
thing about the implementation of. . .first of all, the reason this is a
bit grainy, I have very low physical renderer settings. Now, what's fantastic
about the material override is number one, all you have to do is turn it on. I think
it doesn't get easier than that. Number two, it's very flexible. So you can see
that in the material override settings, we can preserve any of the following
attributes of a material: transparency, bump, normal, alpha displacement, which
means that if I turn all these off, I'm not going to get any bump whatsoever.
So this would be the most common type of clay render you'll ever get. But no, we
are going to use actually all these parameters because this allows us to work
with our lighting without having the textures interfere with what we are trying
to see, the shadows, the highlights and all that. Now, the good thing is that
currently the custom material is just a white material. It's a default Cinema 4D
material. But what we can do, we can create our own material. So I'm going to
double-click here, call this custom, double click on this. And I'm going to put
a luminance with ambient occlusion. I love ambient occlusion. So yeah, turn this to,
like, 30. And what you need to do is drag this in the custom material and see what
happens here. There you go. So now, every object has been replaced by that custom
material. And then of course, you will ask me, "What if I don't want the microphone?"
You will ask me, "What if I don't want the microphone?" Excellent. You just exclude
the microphone. Duh. So microphone exclude . . .oh, that's materials. Sorry. You
exclude materials. My bad. So the microphone has this material, and I can
tell it to exclude this material, which means that any object that has that
material, that little thing here, will be excluded. So I'm going to drag my plastic
here, and this here, and anything else I need. And I think the chrome. . .and that
way, you can create a render that keeps certain elements and overrides everything
else. And I find this, again, so easy, I need to
slow down because I've got too much time to explain these things. So that's the
material override in action. I would like to show. . . Let me see if I have anything
else to show. I'm a bit short. Now, I'll show you how I Aixsponza used the take
manager. So this is a simplified version of their fantastic Seed movie, and it has
these going up. So what they did, they have first of all, they have an animatic
take. Because one of the most important things is to convey parts to show to your
client iterations of what you're doing, where you've got if you want to show
animation. Of course, up until now, you had to create a separate scene and change
the textures, make it faster, do some adjustments. But in this case, all you
have to do is make an animatic pass. So in this case, Aixsponza made this, which
renders really fast. But then the main render, which was actually created for
Octane. And Octane is the other thing. The Take System works with every third party
plug-in. Anything that can be animated or any parameter that can be changed in
Cinema 4D, regardless if it's native or made by a third party, it can be used with
the Take System. Third-party renderers can be used with the Take System. There's an
API that allows anyone -- did I tell you that -- to extend your tokens -- one more
time - extend your tokens using coding. And the way the Take System has been
written allows for the support of third-party renderers, even if you use, I
think, third-party distributor rendering solutions.
Now, one more thing which I was asked was, "Can you, in any way, render using Team
Render Server? Does it understand the takes?" Well, the answer is well, it
doesn't understand the takes, but what you do is you go here, and you say, "Save all
takes with assets." And what that will do is create a folder with the name of the
take that includes the project and all the assets. And if you do this, just as one
step, and save to your Team Render Server repository folder, automatically it starts
rendering. So it's a one-click solution. And then just get rid of it. Now, if it's
one file or five files, nobody really cares because that's what its job is. You
just get rid of it after the fact. So yes, it supports everything that works inside
Cinema 4D in its full extent.