Siggraph 2015 Rewind - Tim Clapham: Character and Simulation Tools in Motion Graphics

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Character rigging, cloth and posemorph in a Motion Graphics context.

Tim Clapham of HelloLuxx demonstrates how Cinema 4D's "character" tools work in a motion graphics context. You'll see how joints and spline IK can be used to create a flexible page-turn rig. You'll also see how Cloth and other dynamic effects can be merged with PoseMorph. You'll also see how the Mesh Deformer can improve Dynamic simulations, and how to use proxy geometry when calculating MoGraph dynamics.

01:24Page Turn Rig
08:30Morphing Rig Hierarchies between Poses
11:36HSBC
12:38Combining Cloth and PoseMorph
16:43Peter Pan Sails
17:38Explosive Effects - Particle Forces with Cloth
21:08Combine Soft Body Dynamics with Rigged Animation via PoseMorph
23:39Simpsons Promo - Mesh Deformer
26:54Simpsons Promo - Layers
28:06Melbourne Town Hall - Dynamics and Proxy Geo
35:21Procedural MoGraph Selections based on Effector

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Transcript

- Hi, everyone. Hi, internet. It's good to be here. This is my Twitter, if you want to follow me. My name is Tim Clapper. I'm originally from the UK, but now reside in Sydney. I flew over. Maxon flew me over for this. Thank you Maxon. I run a production company in Sydney called Luxx. If you want to see the work that we do, Luxx dot TV. Very fortunate to have worked with a whole bunch of creative people around the world, various studios from all around London, Asia, Singapore, Canada, and of course, in Australia. When I first started out there was very little out there for training, so I started blogging. It evolved into helloluxx dot com, which is our training website. We have loads of free tutorials there. We also sell professional training. We've got a Seagraph sale going on at the moment, so you should grab a bargain while you can. We just released a new product, Learn X-Particles, which is five mini projects so that you can learn many of the features including this branching example, and also fluids, and loads of other stuff. It's a really amazing, powerful plug-in. If you want to learn it, go and grab this and you're going to get a discount right now. I am going to show you some tips and tricks today. First of all, I want to show you how easy it is to do some rigging. We're going to build a really quick page turn. Everyone always needs a page turn. You're always going to do that. You're always going to do a pop-up book. I wanted to show you how easy it is to do that kind of thing. I've got a simple page, here. It's basic geometry. You can see that we only have a subdivision along this way, and that's for a reason. I'm going to click here, shift and control, click over here, and that selects that loop. We can do the same down here. We've selected those loops. We're going to come up and choose edge display, and that gives us a spline. We'll hide this geometry. Now we've got two splines. I'm going to select this one, press U-W to select all of that, then right-click and choose split. Then we can delete those points. Now we have these two separate splines. What I want to do is open center and center the axes for these two. Now we've got two splines. We can select these, we can come up to the character menu, and we can choose splined joints. Easy as that. Now we've got two joint chains. If we unfold these... Bang. The great thing about this is because we've done it that way, if we unhide this geometry you can see that they are lining up perfectly with the edges. There's a mistake made already. These ones are going the wrong way. What we need to do is do that again. I'm gonna delete that. The reason for that is that these splines I've created, if we select the spline, go to points mode, you can see that the spline hasn't gone directly blue to white. If we select the other one you're going to see that it is going the opposite way. We need to select this spline and reverse that sequence. Now we can come up and convert that to joint again. The thing with these joints is that they're all called "joint," which is pretty useless. We can easily rename those. If you've used the naming tool before, it's got some new improvements in release 17. Down here we can apply this to objects, tags, materials, layers, and takes. It's really handy for renaming your files. I've already got this name in here. If you use this token, dollar N, it will create a numbered list. We can then select these, come back to the naming tool, which is here, and we can call this one bar two. That saves tabbing through and renaming them all by hand. What I want to do now is show you how we can set up a really simple spline I-K. Let's hide those for the moment and grab these two splines. Let's get my selection tool. I'm going to delete some of these points, because we're gonna use these splines to control those joints. We don't really want all those points on there. If we delete some of these, we just have four points. Let's set these to be B splines with a little bit of interpolation. We're going to use uniform. Now, if we come back to these joints and right-click on these, we can choose character, I-K spline. Do that for both of those. What this allows you to do is grab this tag, and we can grab this spline, if I can get this mouse to work. We grab this tag, drop this spline into there. Then we have to tell it which is the final joint in that chain, which is this one. We do the same for this tag. We name these splines so I know which is which. In here we've got spline one, in here we're going to put spline two. Then we fold these joints down, and grab this, and put that in there. Now we can grab these splines. If we unhide these joints we can see. If we grab these points, we can pull this up. Now you can see the splines are going to move to that. It's even easier. We can actually select these tags, and we come to the handles here and choose to add handles. We've got four points so we add four handles. Then we click create, and now we've got four node objects. We can grab these nodes, and we can use that to control our rig. You can see it's really simple, really easy to set up. You can name these, which would probably make a bit more sense. Now we've got these, which are gonna control these joints. I'll move them down not quite there. Just put them here. Once we've done this we can select all of these joints, just deselect these nodes. We grab the geometry as well, and then we choose character, bind. This automatically creates the skin deformer for us. It adds in a tag, the weight tag, and it adds all of those joints for us. If we unhide this geometry, we select these joints, come up to the character menu. Let's grab our weight tool. You can see that it's weighted all of those for us. If we grab any of these nodes it's going to deform our page. If you were going to pass this on to an animator, they've got complete control over that page turn. If you want to manually animate that then that's nice and easy. Of course, at the moment we don't have enough geometry, so we need to select this, switch the edges. Let's select all these edges and bring up our edge cut tool. In here we're going to add six cuts, and that's going to divide it. People are always a bit nervous about rigging, but you can see how easy that was. It weighted it and everything. We haven't had to manually paint anything, and even sub-dividing that mesh. If we select all these joints again, and then grab our weight tool again, you can see that the weight is still perfect. Even though we've sub-divided the mesh it's interpolated all of those weights for us. It's nice and easy. We start with some simple geometry, add our joints, bind it, and then we can sub-divide that and we still know that weight distribution is going to be working really well. We could animated that by hand, but I'm going to show you another way of doing this. In here we've got a bunch of nodes, if I unhide these. You can see what I've got here is exactly the same setup that I just showed you. We've got some spline I-K. If we grab these controllers here we can reshape this. Rather than actually hand animating every single page, we can use this setup and we can morph between these hierarchies. Let's fold these up so we can see what we're doing. I do need to see the actual joints, but I only need to see the top one. If we unfold this, you can see in here we've got a simple setup with the same number of joints. If we right-click on here and choose character and add in a pose morph tag... Pose morph allows you to morph things. Not only points, but you can morph position, scale, rotation, UV maps. You can also morph hierarchies. If we enable the hierarchy option... What we want to do is morph the position and we want to morph the rotation. We come here, it's already added a pose. I'm going to delete that. Now what we need to do is grab this joint, drop it in. It's going to set that as an absolute morph target. We can grab the second one, drop this in, and grab the third one, drop that in. Okay. Now, you can see that it's actually morphing between those joint chains that I've set up. Of course, we can still change the shape of that if we don't like it, but now we've set that up it's very easy to create some animation. Let's grab this, I'm going to add a key, here. Let's come to frame 10, frame nine. Pull this up. Add another key for these. Come forward maybe 25 frames. Come up here. Come somewhere around here, and there we go. Let's bring up that timeline. I'm going to set this to be linear for now. Now, if we scrub through, you can see that we've created that simple morph. If we use that with the rig that we had before, we've now created a really nice, simple page turn. We can even take this object, control drag, create another one. Offset. Maybe another one. Offset that. Of course, this is cheating a bit, but now we've got this simple rig that'll create a nice, simple page turn. We can add as many pages as we like. I used this on a job recently, a similar thing. It was a very wide render, like 12,000 pixels. This is the render area. It's for a conference of HSBC. They're 100 years old. This is just one of the scenes that we created. You can see here, very easy to create a nice, simple page turn. This is due to exactly the same thing. If we unfold this you can see we've got the same setup. It's just lots and lots of the same thing. This mouse keeps catching on the mat, sorry about that. Nice and easy. It just shows you how simple it is to create a nice, simple rig. Generally, the book is just made up of a big piece of geometry here that has a texture of some pages on it, and then the separate pages in the middle just to fake that it is a thick book. Obviously you wouldn't want to have all of those pages. The next thing I wanted to show you was using pose morph once again. This time I want to show you how you can use pose morph to rig, but use cloth as well. Cloth is a simulation, and controlling simulations isn't always easy. It's great if you can rig them so you can have control over that and use it in combination with all the other tools. Cinema allows you to do that. It's very easy. I'm going to show you this really simple scene. I've got this object, just a simple plane. Let's delete that for a sec. You can see that we've got a simple geometry. Above this I've got another object which is exactly the same. It's got exactly the same point counts in order, but on here we've got a cloth tag. You can see that we have these pink dots. All I've done is selected those points, and then in the cloth tag you can come to the dresser tab and you can say, "Fix those points." We can hide them if we want. That just means that they won't move. If we press play you can see that that's the cloth, and we've got some wind in there. That's just to show you an example of how we'd use this. We can hide this, now. Here we have our object. I'm gonna right-click and add a pose morph tag once again. This time we're gonna be morphing points, just a stand morph. We're going to call this "Up." Okay. We've got some point selections here. That's the points that we pinned, and they're the points that I want to move. For this I want to pull them across, then grab all of my points, move my axes to the top. Let's bring T to bring up our scale tool. Now we can scale this up. Did I have that selected? Yes, I did. I've created the morph. Now we can pull this up and down. That's our first basic morph. We also can grab this cloth object, and we can drop that in there. Now, if we press play, you can see that the cloth is actually part of our morph. We can control how much influence that has. Reducing the strength, so we're still using cloth, but we have a little bit more control over it. If we wanted to animated this, nice and easy, we could just add a key, pull this down so it drops down, add another key. If we rewind and press play, nice and simple. I want to change the curve on that, so I'm gonna bring up my F curve. Let's grab this second pint and pull this up a bit, just so it snaps down rather than being at ease at the bottom. Now when we press play you can see it snaps in. Quite boring. Let's add in a jiggle deformer. Jiggle deformer's great. It allows you to create wobbly stuff. It gives you all that secondary motion for free. Now if we rewind and press play, we're going to get this wobble. Of course, the whole thing is wobbling. Don't necessarily want that. I've got a vertex map, here. What I've done is I've painted the points. These are weighted, and these are the points that are pinned in cloth. If we take that jiggle deformer, go to the friction tag, we can drag this in here. Now you can see that those points aren't moving. If we drop this sub-divider we're going to get some nice curves. Again, we come back to the timeline, and we can just do this on the tag. Let's add a key for our cloth. We can then morph, bring that cloth into the scene. We're using a combination of the jiggle deformer for that secondary motion, we're morphing our points, and then we're bringing in a cloth simulation as well. It's really nice that you can combine all of these different elements and create some really flexible rigs. That's a very simple example. I'll show you a scene I've created. This was quite a while ago, but I worked with Mash from 3D Fluff. He was doing a job for Peter Pan in London, and it was a theater projection. I think it was really unusual because it was a round stage, and the projection was 360, all the way around. I was in charge of doing the rigging, so this is Captain Hook's pirate ship. I've got some layers in here. Let's switch that ship off. You can see, very similar setup. As this comes down we've got some spring constraints to create the rope, but exactly the same setup I just showed you. We're using a combination of morphs and cloth to create these sails. As soon as you put some nice textures on there and light that, job done. It's really great that it's so flexible and that we can do these kind of things. I wanted to show you something else that you can do with cloth. Here we've got our Hello Luxx logo. It's pretty dense, actually. We've got quite a lot of geometry here. You can use cloth as well, not only for cloth simulations, but you can use it for creating things like explosions. If we press play, nothing's going to happen. We need to right click on here, come down to simulation tags, and add a cloth tag. Now when we press play it's going to start to fall because of gravity. I just want to come to the other tag, switch to the forces tab, and set that gravity to zero. Although cloth has got forces such as wind and gravity built in, it's also very flexible. It allows you to use some of the particle tools. If we come here, standard particle emitter, we can add gravity here. Now if we press play it's actually not going to do anything, but that's an advantage because what we can do is select the tag, come to the expert tab, and we can drop that gravity in there. This means that by disabling the forces in cloth we can choose which forces we want to use. Let's just make sure that's working. There we go. Falling slightly slowly, but we can have falloff on here. If we want, we can pull this over to one side, and this is the only part that's going to be affected by gravity. You're going to start to get some interesting cloth deformation. But I didn't want to show you how to use gravity. I wanted to show you how we can create some kind of explosive effects. We can do that with particle forces. If we add an attractor, an attractor is normally going to pull all the particles towards it. I'm going to set this as a force, and instead of attraction I'm going to set it to minus 200, so it's repulsive. I've never liked them. Now if we press play, it's right in the middle of that cloth object. It's not going to do anything, of course, because we need to come here and add this into our include list. Now we should see an effect, and there we go. It's not quite explosive, but it's starting to look pretty cool. I quite like that effect. If we really want to make it explosive we need to actually tear the cloth, and to tear the cloth we need to add in a cloth surface. We come to here. Cloth, add in a cloth surface. If you hold down alt that makes it apparent. On the cloth tag we have this option, "Use tear." What it does is it places a whole bunch of points across the spring, and the springs between all the vertices. As we pull one point, it ripples through all those springs. You get that really nice behavior. If we pull those springs until they're greater than this value, which now you can't see, if they get greater than that amount they'll snap and tear the cloth. Let's just add some falloff on here. We're going to use spherical falloff. Maybe reduce the scale of that down slightly. Let's pull this to one side. Now it's not going to have any effect. It's only affecting this area. But if we press play and we grab this, we should be able to pull it through. We should see that cloth tear. We're going to get some quite cool, funky explosion going on. It's a rather unusual use of cloth, but clients love that kind of stuff. I love that kind of stuff. Cloth is a very versatile tool. That trick I showed you before using pose morph with cloth, you can do that with soft bodies as well. The reason I wanted to show it to you, this is a slightly different way of doing it. What I've got here is a really simple character. I put some joints in here, just as we used joints before. Just three joints. If we select these, bring up our weight tool. We need to switch the sub-division off. There we go. You can see that the weighting is very simple. That joint is just going to affect that red part, and the second one is just going to affect the rest of the head. Nothing too groundbreaking. That means that we can grab this, we can rotate our head around. Normally you'd have a whole body, but this just shows it to you nice and quickly. I've already got the Pose Morph tag on here. The eyes bulge a little bit. Up here I've got this other head object which is exactly the same, but we've got a soft body tag on here. This is soft body dynamics. We're going to come along here and add some pressure. If we add a key, let's come forward 10 frames, let's set this up to 35. That's going to be as if we're inflating it. It's almost like he's got a peanut allergy. You can see, whoop, and there we go. Bulgy eyes. That's a soft body simulation. We can't do a lot with that apart from dynamics, but we can use it with pose morph, and we can still use our rig. We'll still be able to animated our character, and then we can blend into the dynamics and everything should work. The important thing here is the hierarchy. We need to make sure that the morph comes before the skin deformation. We can grab this head, drop it in here. Yes, we want to have that as a relative morph. Now if I press play, you can see that that now morphed. We've got it rigged. It's linked to that soft body, but at the same time we can still use our rig. That's really flexible to be able to combine dynamics, simulations, and rigging like so. The next thing I wanted to show you. Everyone loves a doughnut. We did this promo for The Simpsons. It was a lot of fun to do. These are rigged with dynamics. This is all dynamics. These are soft body. These have hinges on them, so they drop down, and then some deflectors that are hidden to push all the sprinkles out of the way. The thing is, soft body dynamics can be a bit cumbersome if you've got a lot of geometry. It can be quite slow. That's just the nature of the beast. In here I've got one of these doughnuts. I've got a tag on here. If we enable this, press play, you can see that we're not really getting the effect that we want. I don't really like what's happening with the cloth, with the soft body. It's sort of pushing the icing out. I want it to mush and have a nice deformation. Of course, the performance isn't fantastic. So that isn't the route I'd like to go. Instead of doing that, what we can do is take some simple geometry. Here I've got a torus. We've also got a motor on here. Motors are a great way of creating animations with many keys. This is using an angular motor, so it's going to make it roll. If we bring up our edges, you can see that torus is pretty low res. In comparison with our doughnut, which is sub-divided much more. It's got a lot more geometry. We should be able to press play and get a much more...actually, hold on one sec. We've still got this one running in the background, so let's hide that, switch that off. There we go.that's the kind of thing that we want. You can see that we get this lovely squash. Doughnuts probably don't squash quite so much, but, you know, it is The Simpsons. Let's switch that off. Once we've set that up we can use that geometry such as I've got here. We hide this one. We can use this geometry, which is hidden, with the mesh deformer. Rather than putting the soft body on the doughnut itself, we do the soft body on some really simple geometry, it'll calculate much quicker, and then we use that to form or to transfer that over to our high-res mesh. You've all been on TurboSquid, or you've got clients that are sending you an OBJ. It's got two million polygons. I saw a really cool thing the other day. This guy had a character. It was done in Z-Brush. There were millions of polygons. He just drew a simple cage around it, he ripped the cage, did all the animation on the cage, and then he used the mesh deformer to transfer that onto the high poly object. He didn't have to go paint millions of points, he just had a few points to do and everything worked great. There we go. You can see now, we've done that. We're getting nicer playback. We're getting much better deformation. There we have our rolling doughnut. Here's the actual scene, just so you can see that. We've got a lot of dynamic objects, here. If we press play you can see that the playback is a little bit slow, but it's nice. You can see the doughnut is interacting with all the sprinkles. We're getting that soft body deformation. If we want to work more efficiently, probably be a good thing to do is to use layers. I use layers a hell of a lot. Now, if I want, I can think, "Okay. I really want to concentrate on working with the text objects. I don't need all those dynamic objects to slow my scene down." You can see as I work on that it's nice and quick, nice and efficient. We don't need to get bogged down with calculating all these millions of things when we're not necessarily working on them. We can switch to just the sprinkles or we can work on our doughnuts. You can see there's a few more hiding up here that are all going to drop down just as they're triggered. These kind of things make your workflow much faster, more efficient. It means you can get your job done sooner, you can go home, have a beer, spend some time with your family. The next thing I wanted to show you was a way of using dynamics on splines. We all do spline animation, whether it's with spline wrap or using a spline effector. It's a great way of animating objects, even if you're dropping your camera on there with a line to spline. In here I've got a cloner object. Before I show you this, let me show you the job that this relates to. I did a job for Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne in Australia. At Christmas they take Melbourne Town Hall, which is a beautiful building with lovely columns, and they do projections on it. Last year at Luxx we did the work for that. This is a slightly smaller version than the actual render. I think we rendered out 6 cameras, and they're all 4K renders. When you've got minutes of renders it can take a long time. Here you can see, animated, first of all we did a whole bunch of lights. They were lights inside cloners. Next part is interesting. We create these plastic columns that were projected onto the real columns. If you look closely, you can see up each column travels all of these toys. The toys travel up, they come around, and they drop down the columns. As they drop through, they change. As they come down here, they get wrapped up behind there, and they come down as presents. The presents go along the conveyor belts, up here, and then Santa's sleigh comes out. There he is. You can see that there's a lot going on, there're a lot of toys. I'll turn it down. If we press play, you see up here we're getting some really nice interaction. All of the toys are playing and rolling around each other. It looks really nice. Really simple to do. Here we have my scene. If I press play, you see they're all animating. The cloner is set to clone on an object, which is the spline. Then we're using this rate parameter, which will automatically animate these objects. I've got some variation in there. You can see they're all traveling at different speeds. They're all passing through each other, and we've only got one teddy at the moment. These models, a lot of them were bought on TurboSquid. Once again, ridiculous high res. You never get a low res object. They always collapse everything down, but if I focus down, you can see that they're all instances. This is a trick that I love. I've shown this before. I'm not going to go into it, but if you go to Hello Luxx dot com there's a tutorial on this. It's a quick way to create a proxy. We're going to use one switch so we can switch over to a lower res object. At the moment the cloner is only showing the first object. The reason for that is it's set to sort mode. The sort mode will allow you to use effectors to sort between which of these children are going to be shown. I've got a random effector here, and you can see the random effector. The first one is for scale rotation. The second one is to randomize which one is shown. We do this with a modify clone parameter. If I enable this, then we should see all of the toys. See there's a little bit of a delay. I've got another one here, so let's enable this. We've also got a randomizer for this. The only reason I've got two of these is I want to have a different seed value, just so that the order of toys isn't the same on both of them. If we enable that, you can see the geometry is pretty high. Everything's gone to box mode. This is why I've set up the proxies. We can select here. We have this switch, and you can switch this, and now I've got all of these low res objects. Now when I press play you get nice, fast playback. Everything works. We can work on our job without all those super high res. You can see they're really, really simple. This is the teddy, for instance. It's just couple of spheres and a couple of cylinders. But as long as that approximates the correct geometry, if we come up here and select these two dynamic tags, they're currently disabled. If we go and enable these and zoom out far too far... Now if we press play gravity takes over and the toys are gone. We come to these tags, we can come to the force tab, and then we can set this to 10, and 10. What that means, it's going to try to follow the position, if it's animated or if you've put key frames on it. In this example it's on the spline. It's gonna try to stay there all the time, but with the added bonus that the dynamics are still going to work. The collision is all going to work. Now if we press play we should get a really nice behavior just like on the actual Melbourne Town Hall job. You can see you get this really lovely tumbling. You get all of that for free. If you wanted to hand animated all of that, oh my goodness. What a nightmare. Yet, it works perfectly. You can see that it's playing back really well. You can come up here. We've got some cash tags. We can bake this out. Now it's going to bake that dynamics in. If we wanted to network render it over multi machines it's going to get exactly the same result. Now we can scrub it. Everything's really fast. Time to render. We just come up, switch that proxy out. Switch it to the high res, and we can render it. That's a really nice way of keeping your files really efficient. You get all that free animation. Saves you a lot of work, especially when you have so many of those toys and so many things to do and such a short deadline. Here's the actual file for Melbourne Town Hall. Whole bunch of layers once again. So much going on here, but the great thing with the layers is we can just switch that off. Okay, I really only want to see the toys. There we go. It's using exactly the same setup as I showed you before. If we come down here I can select this and switch them over to be these low res objects. Now you can see everything works. There's a lot more toys in this, but it all works nice and fast, nice and efficient. By using layers it means we can focus just on that one element without being bogged down with either technical limitations or hardware limitations. Everything's nice and fast and snappy. Okay. Cool stuff. Next thing I want to show you is a way of creating dynamic mograph selections. When I mean dynamic, I don't mean as in dynamic simulation. I mean we can use effectors to create the selections. If you use mographics, as I'm sure a lot of you do, you know that we can create a mograph selection, we can then create an effector, and we can limit it to that selection. Here you can see that mograph selection is going to interact into that field. If I enable plane effector, you can see that's the selection. If I change tool, you can see that plane effector is only affecting those clones. If we grab our cloner object and that selection, come up to our mograph selection tool, we can then paint wherever we want. It means that you could isolate effectors and only affect specific clones. It gives you a lot of control. We can also use our effectors to create these selections. We just need a little bit of espresso. Let's deselect and bring back my move tool. If we select the cloner, come to the transform tab, and here we've got this display option. Here we can display the weight. The weight of the clones determines how much an effect influences them. At the moment they're all exactly the same weight. We can use this as a little bit of a hack to create our mobile selections. Does require a little bit of Espresso. If I open that... What we've got here is the cloner object. This is the mograph data node. We say, "I want the data for this cloner, and I just want to know how many clones." We take one off of that, because the cloner will have a certain count, but any iterator starts on zero. We then say, "Okay. That's the number of times I want to iterate through them all." It just means that this expression is going to iterate through all those clones and extract data from each clone. It might extract the position, the color. It might extract the rotation. Or it might extract the weight. That's what it's doing here. It's saying, "Okay. Iterate through these. What's the weight of that clone?" We've then got a compare node on here that says, "If that weight is less than half, less than 0.5, then add that clone to the selection. If it's not, then don't add it to the selection." If we select this tag and enable it, you can see immediately it changed because the selection changed. All those clones were all red. They were all the same weight. I'm going to switch this plane effector off. Here we have a shader effector. Under the parameter tab it's set to weight transform at 100%. It's going to transform the weight of all those clones. What we can do is we can use a texture, and in this example I'm just using a gradient so it's really simple. But it could be a movie, it could be any shader, it could just be an image. You could take an image and use that to create a mobile selection. I'm using this gradient. If we enable this, if we select our cloner, you can see now the weight of the clones is being controlled by that gradient. To be part of the selection, it's either in it or it's not in it. If we grab this dynamics tag, and dynamics is really good because it allows you to use mobile selections. This selection is saying, "If you're a part of that selection you're dynamic. If you're not, then you're not dynamic." If we enable this... What I've done in this shader effector is I've animated this gradient. I've just offset it. The gradient just moves across. What's going to happen? As that gradient moves across, it's going to make some dynamic, and then it's going to switch them off being dynamic. In the dynamics tag, I've set this up so it's got a dynamic transition. That means that as it switches off being dynamic it's going to travel back up, and it's still going to collide with everything. It's a really simple example, but it shows the kind of power. Now when we press play you're going to see that as that gradient moves across, different cubes become dynamic. We get this really interesting effect, which would be quite hard to achieve any other way. Like I say, this is just a gradient. But you could use this, you could perhaps use a black and white film, you could have them dropping down as the movie changes and then coming back up. You could create this weird, crazy, dynamic half-tone effect. It's pretty rad. Talking about dynamics, I wanted to show you one more thing. This is just how to create some very simple type. I've got a sphere, here. I'll hold down alt key, come up, go back to a cloner object. The cloner we're going to set to be object mode. I've got this geometry, let's enable. There it is. T for Tim. I'm going to hide this. Okay, let's grab our clone. We drop that one to there. At the moment it's cloning onto the vertices. I want to clone on the actual surface. I think I'm going to say 500 clones. We get this interesting, kind of organic-looking, could be the inside of a chocolate bar, it could be some cellular structure, it could be whatever you want it to be. At the moment, all of those clones are intersecting. We can use the same trick that we used before. We can make them dynamic, and we can make them follow position so they then push apart, but they stay in the same place. If we grab this cloner object and add in... If I could just work out ease of mouse... Adding a simulation. We're gonna add a rigid body tag. We're gonna go to the forces here, and let's force this position at 10. Now we press play. Ah. It all tries to fall down. That's because it's treating it as one solid thing. We to say, "Oh, we need to look at the individual elements." I'm gonna change that. Now all of them burst out. If we come up here, we just leave it running, grab a random effector, boom. I don't want to randomize position, I just want to randomize scale. Let's set this to one. All different sizes. If we use a different random mode, noise, for instance, ... This mouse is not my friend. There we go. You can get this really interesting, weird undulating effect. Let's scale that look down so that it's 5. Now we've got this really weird, interesting, organic-- and none of them are intersecting.maybe you want that to be like that, but you want the shape of the letters to be much more defined. That's very well defined. With your purse out, it's all a bit loose. Maybe you've got great type, but you want to use this trick. What we can do is we can create another object, and I've got one here. Here's one I did earlier. If we unhide that, you can see that it fits and that it encompasses all of that geometry. Well, almost. Let's just make it a bit bigger. The thing with this is if we do press play, nothing's going to happen. We need to add a collision tag to this object. Now we can press play. Boom. They all jump outside, because inside it, they all think they're colliding with it straight away. They're inside that object. But we can actually jump through a few hoops and get around that. We've got all of those polys selected, but if we come up and we choose mesh, commands, and we disconnect-- What disconnect is going to do, if we uncheck preserve groups, Is going to me meant that now, if we grab this, it's not part of that mesh anymore. If we then select all of those points, choose mesh, conversion, polygon groups to objects, it takes all of those polys and splits them out as separate objects. We don't need these glider tags on all of those. We've got this one tag, under the collision we can choose make this a compound collision shape. So that's going to use all of its children, but because they're all separate objects now, it's not actually inside any object. The collision will still work. Now when we press play we should see that creates a much more defined shape. We've still got all that really nice animation going on. We've created this funny-looking thing. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed it. That's the end of my presentation. Don't forget, if you want any more of my tutorials then go to Hello Luxx dot com. Thanks very much for coming along. I hope you learned some tips. Before we go, we should look at my reel, because that's what everyone does. - Thank you.
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