CINEMA 4D RELEASE 10 CINEMA 4D RELEASE 10 • Quickstart Manual 3D FOR THE REAL WORLD Quickstart Manual
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart I CINEMA 4D Release 10 Quickstart Manual Programming Christian Losch, Philip Losch, Richard Kurz, Tilo Kühn, Thomas Kunert, David O’Reilly, Cathleen Poppe, Per-Anders Edwards, Paul Everett Plugin programming Sven Behne, Wilfried Behne, Michael Breitzke, Kiril Dinev, Reinhard Hintzenstern, Eduardo Olivares, Nina Ivanova, Markus Jakubietz, Hendrik Steffen, Jens Uhlig, Michael Welter, Thomas Zeier Product Manager Marco Tillmann Writers Glenn Frey, Sven Hauth, Dirk Beichert, Fa
II CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart MAXON Computer End User License Agreement NOTICE TO USER WITH THE INSTALLATION OF CINEMA 4D AND ALL ITS COMPONENTS AND PLUGINS (THE “SOFTWARE”) A CONTRACT IS CONCLUDED BETWEEN YOU (“YOU” OR THE “USER”) AND MAXON COMPUTER GMBH ( THE “LICENSOR”), A COMPANY UNDER GERMAN LAW WITH RESIDENCE IN FRIEDRICHSDORF, GERMANY. WHEREAS BY USING AND/OR INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE YOU ACCEPT ALL THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart III 4. Transfer (1) You may not rent, lease, sublicense or lend the Software or documentation.
IV CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart (2) The Licensor and its suppliers do not and cannot warrant the performance and the results you may obtain by using the Software or documentation. The foregoing states the sole and exclusive remedies for the Licensor’s or its suppliers’ breach of warranty, except for the foregoing limited warranty. The Licensor and its suppliers make no warranties, express or implied, as to noninfringement of third party rights, merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart (2) This agreement is governed by German law. Place of jurisdiction is the competent court in Frankfurt am Main. This agreement will not be governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, the application of which is expressly excluded. (3) If any part of this agreement is found void and unenforceable, it will not affect the validity of the balance of the agreement which shall remain valid and enforceable according to its terms. 13.
VI CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart Contents MAXON Computer End User License Agreement .................................................................... II Welcome to CINEMA 4D ..................................................................... 2 2. General Information / Interface ........................................................................................ 3 3. Sample Images ............................................................................................................... 12 4.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart VII 3. Sample Images ............................................................................................................. 110 5. Quick Tutorial – Shaders and Tags ................................................................................. 114 6. Tips & Tricks .................................................................................................................. 118 Welcome to NET Render .................................................................
VIII CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart 5. Tips & Tricks .................................................................................................................. 187 Welcome to MoGraph .................................................................... 188 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 188 2. General / Interface ..............................................................................................
© Chen Shih Wei - Sunglow Design Studio
2 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface Welcome to CINEMA 4D This is the CINEMA 4D Quickstart Tutorial. We want to help you enter the 3D world with this short and easy to understand tutorial. After you have worked through this tutorial you will have a good basic user knowledge which you can apply to future projects. © Dave Brinda - www.brinda.com 1. Introduction Unfortunately books haven’t yet reached the point where they can play an opening melody as soon as you flip them open.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 3 2. General Information / Interface CINEMA 4D Release 10 offers many new functions that will again speed up and improve your workflow. One of the most notable changes is the newly-designed interface. So many functions have been added to CINEMA 4D in the past six years that made a redesign necessary. The new design is more defined, more concise and offers a more uniform look. Warm colors were used for functions and modes and cool colors for objects.
4 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface The Editor Window shows all objects contained in the scene, for example polygon objects, cameras, lights and bones and other deformers. You can render any view at any time to check your work. A Group Icon contains several attributes for one group which can be accessed by clicking with the left mouse button on the main icon. The group icon differs from normal icons in that you will see a small arrow in the lower-right corner.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 5 The Object Manager contains all of the scene’s objects. You use the Object Manager to set up a hierarchy, assemble objects, set tags for objects (small icons to the right of the Object Manager let you assign an object certain attributes), or to name objects. Included are polygon objects, lights, cameras, bones, deformers, splines and null objects (objects without geometry). The Attributes Manager manages the attributes of each object or tool.
6 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface You can open up to 4 Editor Views simultaneously, giving you an overview of your scene from different perspectives. You can view your scene in different modes ranging from gouraud shading (includes any lights you have placed into the scene) to quick shading (displays your scene using only a default light, not lights you have placed into the scene), wire frame and more. This lets you adapt your editor window layout to your needs or your computer’s processor speed.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 7 The image shows the left icon palette. At the very top you can see the previously mentioned predefined layouts. Below that we have the (green) “Make Object Editable” button. This function lets a primitive be transformed using points, polygon or edges. The editability of primitives is limited until they transformed! You can determine size and number of segments but you cannot make any polygonal transformations.
8 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface Next to the Undo / Redo icons you will see the “Live Selection“ (pink) tool. This lets you select your points, edges or polygons for editing. The next three (turquoise) icons are pretty much self-explanatory. Use these to move, scale or rotate your object or your object’s selected points, edges or polygons. When rotating, please note that the center of the rotation will always be that of the active object (or camera).
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 9 One click and the world’s most used object is created – the cube. Click and hold to see all available parametric objects. This is where you choose the initial shape you will need. And don’t forget! “Only parametric objects that have been converted to polygon objects can be edited at a polygon, point or edges level!“ The yellow icon represents spline objects. The term “spline“ has its origin in ship building.
10 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface If a polygon object is a sub-object of a HyperNURBS object its polygon wire frame (mesh) will be subdivided to a higher degree. Visually it will be comprised of many more smaller polygons than before the subdivision (the object automatically looks softer / rounder) without losing the original mesh. As you can see in the next screen shot: The outer mesh (light blue) shows the polygon cube’s actual subdivision.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 11 Let’s take a look at the objects behind the (green) “Function Objects“. Here you will find, for example, the null object (object without geometry), the boolean object for boolean operations (parametric and polygon objects can cut / slice each other), as well as the symmetry object, which can be unbelievably helpful in character modeling.
12 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 3. Sample Images This is the “ooohs and ahhhs!” section. Take a look at these images and let them inspire you a little before we move on to the hands-on part of this tutorial.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 13
14 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 4. Quick Tutorial – Arranging Objects In order to give you a feeling of how CINEMA 4D works we will begin with the simple creation of a couple of basic objects. Create 13 cubes and one sphere using the main menu (objects / primitive / cube / sphere) or the group icon “Add Cube Object“. “13 cubes“ may give you the impression that we are preparing to create a mammoth project but don’t worry, we are going to arrange the cubes into a little figure.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 15 As you can see in the editor window, only one cube is visible. That’s because all cubes are located at the same coordinates and are the same size, with the sphere in the center. Of course we will want to change this state now, but first a quick introduction to navigating the editor window. How do I rotate and move my point of view? Simple. Take a glance at the top right corner of the editor window.
16 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface They make it possible to stretch and squash the parametric object on the respective axis Now we’ll get to the nitty gritty part of this project. You now have enough basic knowledge to be able to arrange the objects according to the following screenshots. If you prefer, you can switch to a four-viewport mode (click the little rectangle at the top right of the editor window).
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 17 After you have arranged the cubes it still looks nothing like a “human character“. We have to rotate and stretch the figure a little. Click on “Figure“ in the Object Manager and select the orange handle on the (green) Y axis. Drag this handle until the top edge of the cube lies even with the arms. Using the orange handles, select the cubes that make up the arms and adjust their size and position as shown in the next screenshots.
18 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface If you want to scale all cubes of the arms at once you can do this as follows: with the shift button pressed, select the objects “Lowerarm_L“, Upperarm_R“, Lowerarm_R“ and “Upperarm_R“ and press “C“ on you keyboard to convert the objects and scale them with the “Scale“ function along the Y and X axis. As you can see, the orange handles are not visible. Squash and move the figures arms and legs until it looks like the following image.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Interface 19 When you’re finished select the objects “Upperleg_R“, “Lowerleg_R“ and “Foot_R“. Once they are highlighted in red in the Object Manager press the “G“ key on your keyboard. This groups all and makes all selected objects children of a Null object. If you look at the Object Manager you will see the newly created Null object. Clicking on the “+“ symbol will open the hierarchy and the objects we just selected will be shown.
© M at t h i e u R o us s e l - w w w.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling 21 5. Quick Tutorial – Modeling This is the most important part of this tutorial: How is a model built? CINEMA 4D R10 has numerous tools that make modeling even easier and greatly simplify workflow. A helpful function for quick navigation is the “General Popup“ which you can activate by pressing “V“ on your keyboard. A circular menu lets you choose from several menus in which sub-menus appear when the cursor is placed over them.
22 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling Repeat this procedure to create another square on the top of the cube. Create a HyperNURBS object using the top command palette and make the cube a sub-object of the HyperNURBS object. This will serve to subdivide our polygon object without us having to subdivide the original mesh. (Select the cube in the Object Manager and drag it onto the HyperNURBS object and let go when the little arrow points down.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling 23 Rotate your view until you have a good view of the underside of the cube and switch to the “Use Point Tool“ mode. Now, using the “Live Selection“ tool, select all four points on the underside, switch to the side view and drag these four points using the green Y-axis – drag them until the four inner points of the indentation can be seen.
24 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling If you created the indentation deep enough you may have already been able to see these four inner points. (In the next screenshot you can see an X-ray view of the cube in which you can see the hidden points very well. More on “X-ray“ at the end of this chapter). We want to round off the shape a little more and to do that we will select the inner points. Even though they are visible you won’t be able to select them with the “Live Selection“ tool.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling 25 Click on the HyperNURBS obje c t in the Obje c t Manager and drag it down a bit while pressing the “Ctrl“ button on your keyboard. We have now duplicated the hemisphere. The same object is now visible in the Object Manager twice. Now select one of the HyperNURBS objects and select the “Rotate“ tool. You can now adjust the object’s angle by using the “Rotation Rings“ on the “Rotation Ball“. Drag the blue Zaxis ring down 150 degrees.
26 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling Position both hemispheres as pictured using the “Move“ function: Here you can use the aforementioned locking axis function and switch to using the world / object coordinate system. Now create a sphere and move it into a position almost completely covering both hemispheres.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Modeling Using the “Scale“ function you can resize the sphere to fit inside the two hemispheres. Congratulations! You have just created your first modeled object.
28 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials You can increase the HyperNURBS object’s subdivision to give our model a smoother look. Simply select the respective HyperNURBS object you want to smooth and set the “Subdivision Editor“ in the Attributes Manager’s “Object“ menu to a higher value. The parameter “Subdivision Renderer“ is only responsible for renderings in the picture viewer. Our eye still looks a little blind. We’ll change this in the next chapter by adding a pupil texture.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials 29 Fog: This channel lets you apply a fog or cloud property to a material. Bump: Uses an optical trick to translate light and dark elements of a texture or a shader to simulate the height and depth of an uneven surface. Scars, wrinkles or scratches can be simulated using this channel. Normal: This channel is meant for use with “normal textures”. Normals give a low-res polygon object a hi-res look when RGB textures containing the required properties are applied.
30 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials A standard material has been created. If you click on this material its properties will be made visible in the Attributes Manager to the right. In the “Basic“ menu you can determine which channels should be activated for this material. Go ahead and activate the Bump channel. As soon as you have done that a new menu button, “Bump“ will appear. Now click on the menu button “Color“ and load a texture into the material by clicking on the small arrow next to “Texture“.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials 31 Once you have made the eyelids invisible and have rotated the view a little the eyeball should look as follows: Switch the visibility of the HyperNURBS objects back by clicking again on the dots next to the object in the Object Manager, making them gray. Click on the “Texture Tag“ at the right of the Object Manager next to the object. It’s the material that we applied to the eyeball. You can recognize it in the mini preview of the texture in the Object Manager.
32 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials (Tip: If you want to undo an accidental change to the view just press “Ctrl+Shift+Z“). This function is useful if you have inadvertently rotated the perspective view instead of the editor view. You can also select edit / undo view in the main menu of the editor view. Our eye may be able to look at us now but the eyelids still make it look a little too gray. We will change a couple of settings that will give the eye a reptilian look.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials 33 Click on “Noise“ and on the following dialog page set the global and relative scale factors each to 30%. This reduces the size of the bump-noise mapping which will result in a finer depiction of the bump map. Check the box next to “Displacement“ and repeat the previously mentioned steps for the bump channel but set the global and relative scales each to 150%. This will increase the size of this channel.
34 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials Close the Material Editor window and set the HyperNURBS subdivision of the eyelids to at least 4 in the editor (Click on the respective HyperNURBS object and change the settings in the Attributes Manager) and apply the new material to the eyelid objects. Render the view (Ctrl+R). The result should be at least somewhat similar a reptile’s eye. You have seen how you can get quick results without having to create a complex tex ture.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Materials Danel: Very good for simulating high-gloss finish 35 Banzi: Lets you depict various types of wood. Banji: Calculates complex lighting situations with glass and even makes rear-projection (shadow casting) on partially transparent materials such as rice- or canvas paper possible.
© www.bediff.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Lighting 37 7. Quick Tutorial – Light If you are already familiar with lighting a scene in the “real world“ then you will feel right at home with the CINEMA 4D light objects. They can do everything “real“ lights can do – and quite a bit more. In this tutorial we will set up a 3-point lighting arrangement.
38 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Lighting Now our light source has been transformed to a spot. A spot acts like a flashlight. CINEMA 4D offers spots with square and round cones of light. This cone is visible in the editor and can be manipulated. Now we will aim the spot at our figure. Position the light at the following coordinates in the Attributes Manager: X=300, Y=580, Z=-300 at an angle of H=45, P=-45 degrees. Render the scene. The light now falls at an angle onto our object.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Lighting 39 CINEMA 4D offers three types of shadows: “RayTraced (Hard)“ – a shadow with sharp edges, “Shadow Maps (Soft)“ – a shadow with soft edges and “Area“ – a shadow that becomes softer the further it’s away from the object, resulting in the most realistic shadow effect. Try the other two shadow types. Careful, the area shadow can take a long time to render! The larger shadow map allows the shadow to be rendered more accurately. The light’s cone is a little too small.
40 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Lighting Now we’re happy with our key light. Next we will create a more even lighting by brightening our figure a little from the other side. Create another light source in the scene and name it “Brightener“. Place it at the following coordinates: X= -360, Y=225, Z=-230 and at an angle of H=-20, P=-10 degrees. Select “Area“ as the type of light. Since the brightness of the lights in the scene is additive, we must “dim“ the brightener a little.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Lighting 41 The position of an infinite light is irrelevant since it always lights your scene in the direction of the Z axis. This is why we will leave it at the point at which it was created. It gives our Amphibian an interesting color edge and sets him off of the background a little. Your scene’s mood can be changed by simply changing the color of some of the lights used. That completes our classic 3-point lighting arrangement. Now the real work starts.
© Benedict Campbell - www.benedikt1.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation 43 8. Quick Tutorial – Animation With but a few exceptions CINEMA 4D lets you animate every attribute of an object. This means you can alter any attribute in the Attributes Manager over time, whether it’s an object’s Y-coordinates, the color of a light or the strength of an explosion object. By animating different attributes you can easily add complex animation effects and visually attractive scenes.
44 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation Slide the time slider to frame 90. Move the cube along its blue Z-axis (back) a little. Click on the record button. Three more keys will appear on the timeline, this time at frame / time 90. When you move the time slider you can see the cube move between the two recorded points. Congratulations, you’ve animated the cube! Using the orange button to record an object’s changing attributes is the quickest and easiest way to generate keys.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation 45 We just told CINEMA 4D that the “Top Radius“ attribute of the cone at point 0 of the animation should have a value of 0. Of course we haven’t created an animation yet, only a starting point for the animation. The filled red circle in front of the attribute name tells us that a key has been set at this point in time in the animation. This is an easy way to see if an attribute has been animated. A further ctrl-click on this circle would delete the key. Go to frame 50.
46 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation Now two of the cone’s attributes have been animated. One changes between frames 0 and 50 and the other between frames 0 and 90. For an overview of the keys that have been set we us the timeline. If the timeline is not yet visible, simply open it (window / timeline) or switch to the predefined animation layout (window / layout / animation). In the timeline you can see the cone, its animated attributes and the keys that were set.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation 47 Now go to frame / time 90, set the color to a friendly blue and set a third key. Play the animation. The cone metamorphosis now takes place in animated light. The color sliders change as the animation plays and CINEMA 4D interpolates the colors between the keys that were set. Our animation is becoming more and more interesting. That’s why we don’t want to see it from only one perspective, but we want to let a camera fly around it.
48 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation A target camera differs from a normal camera in that it focuses on a specific object. This has the advantage that the camera can be moved freely within a scene, without “losing sight“ of your targeted object. When a target camera is created, it places with it into the scene an additional object, a Null Object named “Camera Target“. This is the object upon which this camera is targeted by default.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Animation 49 Now the camera is positioned on the circular path. If we play the animation, though, we will be disappointed because the camera doesn’t move even one millimeter. That’s because we haven’t yet told it to move along the circular path. Make sure you set the animation back to 0 and the circle is the active object. In the Attributes Manager under “Align to Spline“ you will see an attribute called “Position“ which is set to 0% by default. Set a key for this attribute.
50 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering 9. Quick Tutorial – Rendering You’ve been a busy bee. You have created a scene, set up the lighting, animated objects and assigned materials to them. Now we want to see the result of all this work. What you have to do is to transform this 3-dimensional scene into a 2-dimensional image (in the case of an animation it would be an entire series of images. We will “render“ the images. CINEMA 4D offers a wide variety of options for rendering your 3D scene.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering 51 Open the scene “rendering.c4d“ (file / open). Slide the time slider to frame 20 and click on “Render / Render View“. We will render frame 20 using CINEMA 4D’s standard settings to give you a quick impression of how our final scene will look. This method of rendering is probably the most widely used since it can be used to make sure the scene “is on the right path“. Slide the time slider to frame 0 and press “Ctrl+R“ on your keyboard. The view has been rendered again.
52 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering The second possibility is to render only a single object. Select the sphere and the cone in the Object Manager. Select the command (Render / Render Active Objects). Only the selected objects will be rendered. You can also access both commands by clicking on their respective icons. Rendering the editor view gives us a quick overview of the scene but it does not offer the possibility to process this image further, to save it to the hard drive, for example.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering 53 Now you can save any image to your hard drive so you can edit them in an image editing program or just send them to your grandma via email if you want. Rendering to the Picture Viewer has the additional advantage that you can continue working on your scene if the image should take a while to render. You have probably noticed that the image which is rendered to the picture viewer is very small. 320 x 240 pixels to be exact.
54 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering The effect is much worse without anti-aliasing. You can plainly see pixelation along the left edge of the cone now as well. Set anti-aliasing to “Best“ and render the scene again. All edges have been rendered sharp as a knife. To quickly check the scene you can leave the anti-aliasing set to “None“ or “Geometry“. “None“ renders the edges without anti-aliasing and very quickly.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering 55 Now you can see a lot more of the scene. We’ve done enough with single images and want to move on to an animated scene. We want to set everything in motion. Set the render size back to “320 x 240“ and “Frame“ to “All Frames“. CINEMA 4D will now render all of the scene’s pictures. The scene’s length is determined in the preferences (Edit / Preferences) menu. Our scene runs from frames 0 to 90.
56 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Rendering You can also choose single image formats such as TIFF, for example. CINEMA 4D will then save 90 images for this particular animation. You can then create a film from these single images using editing software. Some formats even allow you to save an alpha channel with the image. Alpha channels help you to cut out objects in the image in an image editing program, letting you change the background, for instance.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering 57 Of course the “Output “ and “Save“ set tings depend on the requirements of your scene. If you render a single image that will be printed with a resolution of 300dpi on a 8.5x11 size page you should render the image with a resolution of at least 2550 x 3300. If you want to print the image in a picture size of 3x5, a render resolution of 1000 x 1500 will be more than enough. By the way, there are many services that will print your digital images.
58 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering Set the format to “JPG“ and click on the “Path“ button. Find a place to save the image on your hard drive and name the image “Multi-Pass_Scene“. (In case you are working with a demo version you will find the result of this function in the following files: “scene_diffuse0015.jpg“, “scene_specular0015.jpg“, “scene_trans0015.jpg“ and “scene_refl0015.jpg“.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering 59 You will not notice anything special when the image is rendered. When you look into the “channel“ menu of the image viewer you will see that you can call up each of the channels you just rendered individually. If you now look on your hard drive where you saved the image you will see four files.
60 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering The great thing is that we can change the layers in Photoshop and at the same time the channels of our rendering. Remember the specular light we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter? We think it can be a little brighter. Select the “Specular“ layer in Photoshop and call up the “Levels“ function (Image / Adjustments / Levels). Now you’ve already made the specular light brighter without having to render the image again.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering 61 The image already looks brighter. And what should we do with the client who wants his pink panther dove blue? Aside from the fact that our scene contains neither the color pink nor a panther, what should we do when we want to change the color of the cone only? How do we change the color of a single object in the scene? For this we have to prepare a little in CINEMA 4D first.
62 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Multi-Pass-Rendering The sphere and cone are now in two separate image buffers, 1 and 2. Now we have to activate these buffers in the render settings. Add 2 “Object Buffers“ in the Multi-Pass settings window. For the first, set the “ID“ to “1“ and for the second to “2“. Render the scene and open the new file in Photoshop. At first glance nothing has changed in the Photoshop file. There are still only five layers.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso 63 Only the sphere will be colored. Since it consists mainly of refractions, we chose the respective layer in advance. Multi-Pass really comes to shine when it’s used with animated scenes. What Photoshop does for single images, compositing programs do for animations. After Effects and Combustion are two of these programs. Editing software such as Final Cut lets you edit image layers as well.
64 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso We now have three cylinders with different radii in the scene. Our goal will be a telescopic effect by pulling the smallest cylinder up while keeping the medium cylinder dead center as it moves with the smallest cylinder. This is a case for XPresso! Apply a new XPresso tag. The quickest way to do this is to click on one of the cylinders in the Object Manager with your right mouse button. Select CINEMA 4D Tags / XPresso.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso 65 Both cylinders can now pass on their respective Y-position. We will use a special node to calculate the average between these two points. Switch to the X-Pool tab and drag a “Mix Operator“ node from System Operators / XPresso / Calculate / Mix onto the surface where the other nodes are. Set the “Mix“ node’s “Mixing Factor” to 50% in the Attributes Manager. Connect the “Cylinder_small“ “Position.
66 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso We still have one problem: you can still drag the cylinder so far that our telescope comes apart. It would be nice if we could restrict the movement a little. Needless to say XPresso also has a solution for this! Go back to X-Pool and drag a “Clamp“ node into the XPresso editor. Set its “Max“ value to 300 in the Attributes Manager. The “Clamp“ node restricts various properties that are transferred to its “Value“ input to a range between 0 and 300.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso 67 Now the cylinders can only be moved a limited distance in the Y-direction, just like a real telescope. 12. Tips and Tricks CINEMA 4D has been able to build a large community of users around it who are more than happy to help newcomers in any way possible, be it through the use of home-made tutorials, directly in one of the many forums or by offering free models, plugins, expressions or textures.
68 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso Here you will find news, interesting projects that were done with CINEMA 4D, an extensive CINEMA 4D link library and even a form for questions for our support department. You can even get information about third party seminars and training. The Plugin Cafe is a sister site to the MAXON web site www.plugincafe.com. If you’ve pushed your skills to the limit or if you are looking for a specific tool you can probably find what you need at this site.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – XPresso 69 Even mail order catalogues can be a great source of information on how an object is supposed to look. Textures are all over the internet as well. Taking your camera and photographing textures yourself is even better. Inspiration is everywhere. You can build your own texture archives in no time. Try to get away from the technical point of view. Learning a software is only a matter of time.
70 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D Welcome to BodyPaint 3D This is the BodyPaint 3D tutorial. In this tutorial we will explain the most important functions in order to give you a running start in the world of “body painting“. Even if BodyPaint 3D appears to be difficult at first, you will soon notice how intuitive BodyPaint 3D really is. In this tutorial we have also put an emphasis on a fast learning curve and a high degree of user friendliness for this module. Let’s start with its structure.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 71 Using the UV-tools you can relax and stretch your UV-mesh, no matter how complex it is. Put simply, a UVmesh is a second impression of a polygon mesh that projects the texture onto a polygon object. The days of 2D texturing are over and you can finally concentrate on what’s important in texturing: creativity. Everything that took up so much time with 2D texturing is now done by BodyPaint 3D and you can deliver your projects faster.
72 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 1. Editor Window (RayBrush Window) Here you can see the object you will be painting. You can rotate, move and zoom the window as needed. The RayBrush mode lets you paint directly onto the object in the rendered version of the view. This gives you control over the amount of color applied and can see right away how a new color looks on the object. 2. Texture Window (UV-mesh Editor Window) This is where you edit your UV-mesh. You can relax and restore your UV-mesh.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 73 3. Sample Images We’ve reached a part of the tutorial for which words are not necessarily needed. Simply take a look at the following images.
74 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 4. Quick Tutorial – the Wizard The wizard takes a lot of preparatory work off your hands and lets you begin texturing / painting in seconds. Before we actually start painting the object we would like to show you how quickly you can start painting, just in a few steps. Create a cone primitive (objects / primitive / cone). Switch to the predefined standard layout “BP 3D Paint“.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 75 Aside from the fact that you will never have a need for a cone with a white mark on it, this simply demonstrates how BodyPaint 3D works. Now we’ll get to the heart of this tutorial. Open the file Claude_BP_start.c4d. Say hello to Claude, our guinea pig for the day. In the course of this tutorial we will alter the color of his right eyelid a little and apply a bump layer in elephant-look to his skin.
76 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 5. Quick Tutorial – First Painting Lesson At the bottom left of the Material Manager you will find the texture we just created, right next to “Mat“ This is the default name for a new texture. Of course you can rename the texture if you like. The first material is the color layer and the second is the bump layer (at the top of the window you will see the abbreviations which refer to these layers – “C“ for color and “B“ for bump).
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 77 The individual UV-mesh polygons of these eyelid edges take up less texture area than the rest of the polygons. That’s why a texture placed into the bump channel appears larger in these places (photograph of elephant skin, for example). We can do without this, though, since we are painting our own skin structures onto the surfaces and not using an existing texture. We can counter any distortion we encounter when painting manually by using “Projection Painting“.
78 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D Select the brush on the command palette on the left, Now select “Brush Tool for Painting Textures” for applying the color. Set the size to 25 and the hardness to 40 in the brush’s Attributes Manager. and select a pink color using the “Preview Active Channel” directly below. Use the sliders that appear on the right. If necessary, increase the HyperNURBS subdivision. Activate the “Render Active View for RayBrush Painting“ on the command palette.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 79 Paint along the edge of the eyelid. The eyelid will probably end up looking like this: If you move / rotate the figure now or click on the “Apply the Content of Projection Paint Plane“ you will see how the color was applied to the texture (you can see the recently applied strokes of color in the window to the right). You can take the same steps for the bump layer. We will take you one step further, though, in order to be able to explain an important function.
80 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D You have now told BodyPaint 3D that you want to paint in both layers at the same time. If you like you can switch from the standard “BP UV Edit“ layout to the “BP 3D Paint“ layout. This gives you more room to work in the editor window. Rotate the view so you can see the eyelid from the top. Activate the “Render Active View for RayBrush Painting“ and the “Enable / Disable Projection Painting“ mode and set the brush size to 10 and hardness to 40.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 81 It goes without saying that you need different brushes for different texture looks. CINEMA 4D has a wide variety of brush types for you to use. Just select the tab “Attributes“ and click on the small arrow on the brush preview Here you will find all the brushes your heart desires. If you don’t find the brush you’re looking for we’ve beat Murphy to the punch and have given you the possibility to create and save your own brushes.
82 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render Welcome to Advanced Render (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the Advanced Render Module. It will show you many of the module’s typical applications and covers some theoretical physics behind the effects. © Jürgen Schulz, schulz@formmad.com 1. Introduction The Advanced Render Module expands the realm of possibilities of CINEMA 4D’s renderer with several fascinating functions.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 83 2. General Information / Interface As soon as you have installed Advanced Render you will notice several new options in your render settings (Render / Render Settings). Under “Global Illumination“ you can activate “Global Illumination Rendering“. As soon as you have activated “Global Illumination Rendering”, other options will be made active which allow you to create custom settings for radiosity.
84 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render The Sub-Polygon Displacement can be activated in a material’s “displacement“ channel.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 3. Sample Images Here you can see what’s possible with the Advanced Render functions.
86 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 87 4. Quick Tutorial – Global Illumination Light as we know it in the “real“ world spreads on its own. It is reflected by the objects it hits. This differs depending on an object’s surface characteristics. Imagine a room with a window on one wall. Light is being cast through the window onto the floor of the room. The light doesn’t stop there, but is reflected from the floor onto other objects which, in turn, reflect the light themselves.
88 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render The luminance channel turns the material into a light source. Since the sky object spherically encloses the entire scene. It acts as a huge lamp which lights the torus from all sides. This effect will only be visible when we use Global Illumination as the render mode. Open the render settings (render / render settings). Switch to Global Illumination and activate Global Illumination. Switch to the options menu and make sure that “Auto Light“ is deactivated.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 89 We now want to use the blue sphere as a light. We don’t want the sphere to be visible, but only to emit its blue color. You achieve this by using the “compositing tag“. Apply a compositing tag to the sphere in the Object Manager (Tags / CINEMA 4D Tags / Compositing). Switch to the Attributes Manager and deactivate all options except “Seen by GI“ (Global Illumination). Render the scene. You will see that a blue light is being cast on the torus and the floor.
90 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 5. Quick Tutorial – Caustics Have you ever observed the lighting effects at the bottom of a swimming pool? This phenomena is known as caustics – light is cast through a transparent material and is broken upon entry and exit. Open another new (empty) scene. Create a floor object (objects / scene / floor). Create a platonic (objects / scene / platonic) and give it a Y-position of 140 using the Attributes Manager. Create a new material in the Material Manager.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 91 Part of the light is falling on the platonic, part of it is falling on the floor. Still there is no caustic effect anywhere in sight - the effect must first be activated. Select the light and switch to the caustics page of the Attributes Manager. Activate “surface caustics“ for the light. Open the render settings menu (render / render settings). Activate “surface caustics“ in the caustics menu here as well. Render the scene.
92 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 6. Quick Tutorial – Depth of Field You probably are familiar with the depth-of-field effect from the field of photography. Depending on which lens is used in which combination of camera settings it can only be focused on one more-or-less small area at once – everything outside this area is out of focus. This effect is often used as a dramatic element in movies to draw the viewer’s attention to a specific element in the scene.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 93 Open the render settings and switch to “effects“. Select “Depth of Field“ in the pull-down menu at the top right and increase the “Blur Strength“ to 10%, activate “Background Blur” and set it to 20%. This makes the effect more obvious. Render the scene. Only the figure in the center will be in focus. You can customize the strength of the effect using the parameters in the render settings.
94 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Advanced Render 7. Tips and Tricks Rendering often requires you to make a choice between speed and quality. Renderings with radiosity or caustic effects can take especially long to render. This is why we suggest that you experiment with the settings a little. For example, you can set the Global Illumination’s “accuracy“ value very low to start with and try a “quick“ test rendering.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 95 Welcome to PyroCluster (Included in the optional Advanced Render module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for PyroCluster. It will lead you through the initial steps of this module and show you what’s possible with this amazing 3D shader. Here is how this tutorial is structured: 1. Introduction “PyroCluster“ is a powerful tool for creating volumetric smoke, explosions and fire effects.
96 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster The PyroCluster shader is the material which is assigned to the emitter. We’ve taken a little work out of your hands by entering a couple of presets under “Settings“ in the “Globals“ menu of the PyroCluster’s Material Manager. PyroCluster’s Material Manager menu is the quickest way of creating cool effects. Fire, Volcano and Cloud as well as Steam, FireBall and Smoke are at your disposal.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 97 You can display the execution and “development“ of an effect in the form spheres, cubes or other objects. This gives you an excellent overview of the effect and keeps you from having to render the entire effect just to see how far a trail of smoke has traveled. Of course all PyroCluster effects can cast shadows on other objects, if desired, using the normal scene lighting.
98 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 4. Quick Tutorial – 10 Steps to Glory This tutorial describes the 10 basic settings needed for a PyroCluster effect. Once you have completed this exercise you can play with the settings of the example scene or set your own properties as you wish to see what settings do what to which effect, etc.. 1. Open a new (empty) scene in CINEMA 4D’s main menu (File / New). 2.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 5. Assign the PyroCluster material to the emitter. 6. Assign the Pyrocluster Volume Tracer to the Environment object. 7. Set the emitter’s “P“ angle to 90 in the Object Manager’s Coordinates Manager.
100 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 8. Double click the material “PyroCluster“ in the Material Manager and select “Steam“ in the “Global“ menu. 9. Answer “yes“ to the question “Do you really want to convert parameters?“ and close the Material Editor window. 10. Drag the time slider to frame 40 and select “Render / Render View“. Now sit back and finish that cup of coffee.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 101 Voila! If you go ahead and test the “Fire“ preset you could qualify as a junior pyromaniac and no court in the world can lay a finger on you! This scene was calculated relatively quickly but you will eventually notice that it can take longer depending on the complexity of your scene and the settings you use. There are a few tricks you can use to reduce render time without losing quality.
102 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster Raise both of the emitter’s particle values (Birthrate Editor / Birthrate Renderer) to 20 (Click on emitter in the Object Manager and select the “Particle“ menu). Reduce the Lifetime from 500 to 100 and the Speed parameter to 300. Switch to the “Emitter“ and set Angle Horizontal and Angle Vertical to 30. The friction object gets a strength (friction-coefficient) of 4.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 103 Now you can generate another preview (Main Menu / Render / Make Preview). The steam’s behavior is much more realistic now. The particles are being emitted faster but have a shorter lifetime and the wider angles disperse the particles by 30 degrees. The turbulence object adds (you guessed it!) turbulence and the friction object slows the particles and can even bring them to a complete stop if the value is raised sufficiently.
104 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – PyroCluster 6. Tips & Tricks There are several methods to optimize your rendering but the most effective method is to increase the PyroCluster-Volume’s “World Step Size“ parameter! Here you will also find several settings for the render mode. If you click on the drop-down menu you will see “User“ on the list. Selecting “User“ activates the “World Step Size“ editing parameters. Double click the Pyrocluster-Volume Tracer. Set the render mode to “User“.
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© Jacques Pena - www.digi9.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 107 Welcome to Sketch and Toon (Optional module) This is CINEMA 4D’s Quickstart Tutorial for its Sketch and Toon module. It will introduce you to some of this renderer’s fantastic creative possibilities. 1. Introduction Sketch and Toon belongs to the NPR family.
108 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon There’s more. You will also find Sketch and Toon elsewhere within CINEMA 4D. Take a look at the Material Manager. A sketch material is created as soon as the Sketch and Toon effect has been activated. This is a material especially for the depiction of contours in a Sketch and Toon rendering. You will also see that there are many more settings in association with this material in the Material Manager. These settings are global and affect the entire scene.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 109 After all, Sketch and Toon offers four “Sketch Shaders“. These can be placed into the channel of a “normal“ material just like any other shader. We suggest you place them into the luminance channel. These shaders work independently, which means Sketch and Toon does not have to be active. The shaders are; “Art“ for effects such as oil or acrylic painting, “Cel“ for a cartoon-like style, “Spots“ for a halftone print effect and “Hatch“ for cross hatching.
110 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 3. Sample Images Here is a sample of the beautiful imagery you can create with Sketch and Toon. 4. Quick Tutorial – Outlines The moment of truth has come. Once you have worked your way through this tutorial you will have but a first impression of what you can to with Sketch and Toon. Sketch and Toon is a module that practically seduces you to experiment with it – give in to its seduction! Open the file “schraubkopf_e.c4d“.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 111 The result looks much different from the first rendering. All objects have a black contour and the color gradations are somewhat “stepped“. Notice that a new “Sketch Material“ has been generated in the Material Manager. The look of the contour is defined in this material. Switch to the “Effects“ menu within the “Render Settings“ menu and click on “Load Style“. Navigate to your CINEMA 4D directory.
112 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon Again the rendering looks different. Now the lines which are normally hidden are displayed as dashed lines. Along with the preset two additional materials were placed into the Material Manager – “Visible“ and “Hidden“. “Visible“ defines the look of the visible lines and “Hidden“ that of the hidden lines. The “Sketch Material“ is no longer being used.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 113 We can use the render settings to influence the entire scene and the material settings to specifically affect the hidden contour. Select the “Visible“ material and switch to “Main“ in the Attributes Manager. Select the “Pen (Leaky)“ style in the “Presets“ menu. Render the scene. The visible lines already look like they were drawn with a leaking fountain pen and the hidden lines are still dashed.
114 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon You will see several settings in the Attributes Manager that you may already know from the render settings. The difference here is that the tag’s parameters only effect on the “Nose“ object. Switch to “Shading“ in the Attributes Manager. Activate “Enable“ and select “Custom Color“ in the “Object“ menu below. Set the color to red and render the scene. The nose is now red with a black contour. 5.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 115 Create a new material in the Material Manager (File / New Material). Deactivate the “Color“ and “Specular“ channels in the “Basic“ menu of the Attributes Manager. Activate “Luminance“ and switch to the “Luminance“ menu. Click on the small arrow to the right of the word “Texture“. Select Sketch / Cel. The cel shader is a type of gradient shader.
116 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon The number of colors represents the number of color steps an object will be colored with. 1-2 colors is always good for a cartoon look. Drag the new material in the Object Manager onto “Whimp_ center“ and render the scene. Our Sketch and Toon figure is standing between two “normal“ rendered figures. It is not necessary, though, to activate the Sketch and Toon render effects in order to use a sketch shader. Now we will beautify the rear figure with a contour.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 117 Select the newly created sketch material and select “Pencil (Soft Sketch)“ in the Attributes Manager’s Preset menu. Render the scene. Even though all figures have the correct “filling“ each of the two front figures has assumed the contour style of the figure behind it. We will deactivate the contour rendering for these two objects completely. Select “Whimp_front” and “Whimp_middle” in the Object Manager and select Tags / Sketch Tags / Sketch Render.
118 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon We’ve done it! Three objects, each with completely different render styles coexisting peacefully in the same scene. 6. Tips & Tricks Sketch and Toon offers several levels of control. If you are taking your first steps with this module and are a little overwhelmed by the countless buttons and sliders simply set the level of control to “Easy” (either in the render settings or in the sketch material attributes). Several functions will then be “hidden”.
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© Peter Hofmann www.pexel.de pexel@3dup.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – NET Render 121 Welcome to NET Render (Optional module) Have you ever asked yourself “What should I do if my CINEMA 4D animation will render far longer than my life expectancy, regardless of any and all medical advances?“ The answer it “NET Render!“ This Quickstart Tutorial will help you reduce the time you have to wait for your renderings. First let’s look how this tutorial is structured: 1. Introduction NET Render helps you deliver your animations on time.
122 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – NET Render 3. Sample Images As we know images say more than words. On that note, here are a few first impressions.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – NET Render 123 4. Quick Tutorial – Installation / Interface Let’s assume you have 4 computers at your disposal which are all connected to a TCP / IP network. Computer Number 1 (subsequently we will rename our computers “Computer 1“, “Computer 2“, etc.) is your main computer from which you will be distributing the work. The remaining computers will do the rendering.
124 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – NET Render This is the default IP address you must use when the NET Server has been installed on your computer, from which you can also distribute jobs using the browser. If the working computer has been installed onto a “render slave“, though, you would simply enter the IP address of that respective computer. It’s not imperative that you install the NET Server on your working computer.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – NET Render 125 6. Tips & Tricks NET Render’s major advantage is that it lets small companies and small budgets do network renderings! Even someone with only two computers can save time and nerves. You must select only static TCP / IP addresses! It is especially important that computers with a dial-up modem internet connection use the “dynamic“ setting. This setting must be set back when you want to reenter the internet.
126 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics Welcome to Dynamics (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for Dynamics which will help you get to know the world of gravitation and physics. With the use of sample images and a two part tutorial we will give you an impression of what this powerful tool can do.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics 127 1. Introduction You can become “Lord of the Masses“! We are referring less to your next diet than to the fact that you will be in command of so many virtual masses. Dynamics is the perfect extension module for imitating the behavior of physical bodies. Dynamics has made child’s play out of a task that has been very time-intensive in the past. Simulations such as collision, drag and gravity are all done by Dynamics.
128 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics The base object refers to the object required for the Dynamics simulation. You can use parametric objects which have been converted to polygon objects or imported polygon objects. The Dynamics tags give the object its character. They let a polygon object behave like a hard metal or wood body on the one hand or a rubber ring or pudding on the other.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics 129 4. Quick Tutorial – Rigid Bodies With just a few clicks of the mouse we will now create a scene in which several primitives will collide with each other. Let’s begin by setting up the necessary objects. In the main menu, click on Plugins / Dynamics / Solver Object. In the same menu, create a gravity object and drag it into the solver object. As we mentioned before, all objects to be affected by the solver object must be a sub-object of the solver object.
130 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics Zoom out so you can see the entire scene. Tilt the plane object in the “B“ angle by 15 degrees and place the other objects in the approximate position they are in, in the following image. The cube and the sphere should be placed quite a bit above the plane, each over one half of the plane as seen from the top so they don’t cross paths.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics 131 Before we play the animation again we will change its length. To do this click on edit / project settings and change the “Maximum“ parameter to 300 frames. So that our solver object doesn’t stop the animation at frame 75 we will also change its “Stop“ parameter to 300 in the dialog field “Main“ to the right.
132 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics Open a new (empty) scene (File / New) and create a torus (Objects / Primitive / Torus). Rotate the “P“ angle of the object by 90 degrees so the ring sits vertically and change the number of “Ring Segments“ and “Pipe Segments“ each to 6. Create a HyperNURBS object (Objects / Nurbs / HyperNURBS) and make the torus its sub-object. Don’t forget to convert the torus to a polygon object.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Dynamics 133 We’re done! The torus has a virtual hook and swings to and fro when you push it. There’s not much we can say about the state of the physics of the polygon body but we can say a little about its physical state. The torus has assumed the properties of a rubber-like mass and will behave according to gravity and the properties we gave it. In the second part of this tutorial we only showed one of the many possibilities soft body makes possible.
134 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles Welcome to Thinking Particles (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for Thinking Particles. It will give you a quick, and hopefully fun, introduction to this extensive particle system. 1. Introduction Thinking Particles is a particle system.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 135 Each of these nodes has certain properties that can be changed using the Attributes Manager or can be connected to the ports of other nodes. This lets you affect particles in many different ways. The various groups can be subdivided, their look or behavior altered after they have been created and much more. If you have worked with the “old“ particle system up to now, Thinking Particles may seem a little complicated to you in the beginning.
136 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles Select the emitter node in the XPresso editor and take a look at the Attributes Manager. Here you will see a bunch of values with which you can change the emitter’s behavior. How many particles should it generate? How long should the particles exist (live)? How big are they? Are they all the same size? You can change some of the values while the animation is playing and will see right away how the particles react to these changes.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 137 Even if it doesn’t take a lot of time to create such an emitter it can be quite tedious repeating these steps for other emitters. This emitter has a critical disadvantage in that every parameter change requires the selection of the node in the XPresso editor.
138 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles Assign an XPresso expression to the plane and the XPresso editor will open automatically. Drag the “Emitter_ surface“ onto the XPresso editor window. Create a “Pstorm“ node. Again the nodes must be connected to each other so that the polygon’s coordinates can be transferred to the emitter. Now our emitter is busily emitting little crosses. By the way, the particle preview doesn’t always have to be depicted as crosses.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 139 Next we need a “PSurfacePosition“ node (XPool / System Operators / Thinking Particles / TP Helpers). This node creates random positions on a given polygon object. It has an “object“ text field in its Attributes Manager. Drag the emitter surface into this field. You will also find a menu in the Attributes Manager that determines if the particles will be emitted from the face, edges or points of the polygon.
140 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles This node assumes the actual setting of the particles in their random positions You can see the result immediately in the editor view. The particles are now being generated evenly from the entire polygon. The particles are still moving in the wrong direction – along the default Z-axis of the emitter. Since snow doesn’t usually fall horizontally (except in a major storm), we have to rotate the emitter by 90 degrees.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 141 Switch to the “Visibility“ menu and set the “Inner Distance“ to 6.5, the “Outer Distance“ to 15 and raise the “Brightness“ to 125%. Switch to the “Noise“ menu. Set the “Type“ to “Hard Turbulence“ and all three scale parameters to 7.5.
142 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles Make the light invisible for the editor and the renderer in the “Basic“ menu. It will later be visible only as particles. The “light flake“ is ready. Next we have to let Thinking Particles know that it should use this light as a particle. You guessed it – there’s a special node for this as well. It’s called the “PShape“ node and is located in the X-Pool tab in the “TPStandard“ category. Add a “PShape“ node to the existing XPresso setup.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 143 Just one more step. In order to be able to display a renderable object at all, Thinking Particles needs a special “Particle Geometry“ object. Create a “Particle Geometry“ object (Objects / Thinking Particles / Particle Geometry) and drag the light from the Object Manager onto it so the light becomes its sub-object. In order to understand the purpose of this object you have to know that Thinking Particles can divide particles into groups.
144 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles Add “TP Planar Wind“ to the scene. The wind does not yet know which particle group it should influence so open the Thinking Particle Settings (Objects / Thinking Particles / Thinking Particles Settings) and drag the group “All“ into the “Particle Group“ text field in the “User Data“ menu of the “TP Planar Wind’s“ Attributes Manager. Set the “Strength“ to 300 and the “Turbulence“ to 1000.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 145 Our winter wonderland has been turned into a gyrating snowfall. We hope you had fun with Thinking Particles in spite of the snow storm at the end. Use this tutorial as a starting point and try new things with the snow. Let it fall on other objects or transform it to rain. The only limitation is your own creativity – which we know is limitless. 5.
146 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA Welcome to MOCCA (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the MOCCA module, a collection of tools especially for character animation. © Matthieu Roussel - www.mattroussel.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 147 1. Introduction 3D character animation is a complex subject. It not only challenges the software but the animator as well. Almost anyone can quickly create a character that moves in one way or another, but a convincing character animation requires quite a bit more work. The animator needs to know the theory behind character animation before he or she can judge whether or not the animation is good or bad.
148 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 2. General Information/Interface (Joints and Rigging) Version 3 of MOCCA features a completely reworked system where you now work with “joints” instead of bones. Joints are part of the main CINEMA 4D application and bones now exist only for compatibility with old scenes. MOCCA 3 itself offers enhanced tools designed to help you create perfect character animation fast.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 149 Vamp gives you the possibility to transfer data from object to another, including selection information, Texture tags, vertex maps and UVs. You can even transfer facial poses from one character to another! Visual Selector is a great help with day-to-day animation. You load a render of your character into Visual Selector‘s background (or use Visual Selector‘s default character picture) and place your character‘s controllers onto the picture in the appropriate places.
150 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA We can add joints using the Joint tool. Select it by choosing Character/Joint Tool from the main menu. In the viewport, Ctrl-click on the turtle’s shoulder to add the first joint. Add the other joints required for the arm by Ctrl-clicking on the elbow, wrist and base of the middle finger, as shown in the next screenshot. The joints are shown as yellow circles in the viewport and as objects in the Object Manager.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 151 In the Object Manager, click on the “+” symbol for “Turtle_Hypernurbs” to open the hierarchy for the turtle’s mesh. Hold down the Ctrl key and click to select the “body” object and the three joints “shoulder”, “elbow” and “hand”. Make sure that only these four objects are selected and choose Character/Bind in the main menu. A Skin object is added automatically to our mesh as a child and a Weight tag is added.
152 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA But don’t worry. The auto weighting is in fact working correctly. The reason is that we didn’t create a joint for every part of the body. When we called the Bind function, it tried to auto weight the entire geometry using just the four joints. When animating characters you usually create a joint for each part of the body. After all, even if you just wanted to wave an arm in the air you’d still expect some movement to come from the rest of the body.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 153 If the “shoulder” joint is selected, you should now be able to move the arm around. If parts other than the arm also move then these parts have weighting that needs to be removed. Use the Weight tool as before to remove the weighting from these parts. Also try rotating the “elbow” and “hand” joints. Congratulations! You have just weighted the arm. The arm is now ready to be animated using forward kinematics, which we’ll move right on to in the next chapter. 3.
154 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA Before we carry on working with the arm, we should switch to the perspective view so that we can see the arm in three dimensions (Cameras/Perspective). You’ll find two new objects at the top in the Object Manager: “Joint.3.Goal” and “hand.Goal”. Select both objects (Ctrl) and make sure that the Model tool is selected in the left toolbar. Select the Move tool in the top toolbar.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 155 and in the Attributes Manager (bottom right), click on “Add Pole”. You’ll see a new object named “shoulder. Pole” appear in the Object Manager on the same hierarchy level as the “shoulder” joint. Select the pole and in the viewport, drag the pole slightly down and behind the turtle. Select the two effectors again (“Joint.3.Goal” and “hand.Goal”). Move the arm forwards and backwards again. The arm now moves correctly.
156 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA This is where Visual Selector can help. With Visual Selector, you only need to search for the controllers once: when you create your Visual Selector interface. Start a new scene (File/New) and add a cube (Objects/Primitive/Cube). In principle, it doesn’t matter which object you choose because the Visual Selector tag can go on any object. In the Object Manager, right-click on the cube and choose Character Tags/Visual Selector to add a Visual Selector tag to the cube.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 157 At the top in the main VS interface you’ll find a Tag tab. Click this tab to access the VS settings. Here you can give a name to the VS, swap the background image for your own rendering and change the aspect ratio and size of the VS. On the Tag tab you’ll also find a “hotspots” page. Clicking on this takes us into the settings for the hotspots you’ve created.
158 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 5. Quick Tutorial – PoseMixer As we have seen, joints are good for constructing a “control frame” for a figure. You can also use joints to animate the face. The joints are positioned so they can imitate the natural facial movements. A second possibility is to “morph” the facial geometry using different states. For this MOCCA offers two tools: the PoseMixer, which we will examine closer in this chapter, and the Morph tool, which we’ll return to later.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 159 Deactivate the options “Rotation“ and “Scale“. We have to let PoseMixer know what it has to morph. In this facial animation only the points of the geometry will be used. If we were to activate the option “Position“ the entire head would move to where its copy is. Next, PoseMixer will need a neutral starting point, an undeformed state. Drag the object “Head Standard Pose“ from the Object Manager into the text field “Default Pose“ in the PoseMixer’s Attributes Manager.
160 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA What’s nice is that the poses can be mixed in any order – try it. A relatively small number of base poses lets you create a wide variety of facial expressions. As when animating any other parameter,make sure that your scene is set to frame 0.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 161 The base morph is our starting position and cannot be deleted. The morph target is the target pose you need to model. Unlike the base morph, you can freely create and delete morph targets. Choose Cameras/Top in the viewport to view the arm from above. Select the Morph tag if it isn’t already selected and enable the “Auto Joint Driven” option in the Attributes Manager (more about this option later on).
162 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA Among other things, the Driver tag stores how many degrees the joint has been rotated and which axis the rotation is around. It passes this information on to the Morph tag, which in turn performs the morphing. Each time we rotate the second joint by -90 degrees around the H angle, the Morph tool will morph to the pose we created. If it wasn’t for the “Auto Joint Driver” option, we’d have to manually add a Driver tag to the second joint and adjust the tag’s settings.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 163 The muscle now lies exactly between the two points, but why the offset of 10? This parameter is extremely important for the muscles to work correctly. To see why it’s necessary, open the file “Arm_comparison.c4d”. In the bottom example, you can see that pin number 2 (the end of the muscle) is exactly on “Joint.2”. This prevents the muscle from being able to contract when the arm bends. In the top example, pin number 2 is away from “Joint.
164 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA But what’s the point of the muscle getting thicker when it’s the skin that needs to bulge? After all, the muscle itself shouldn’t be directly visible later on. This is where the Muscle deformer comes in. Stop the animation and choose Character/Muscle Deformer in the main menu. We need to make the deformer a child of the polygon object that is being deformed, which in this case is the object “Otto_mesh”.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 165 Experiment with the Muscle object’s settings. As previously mentioned, you can change the shape of the muscle on the States tab using the curves. On the Settings tab, you can, among other things, move the muscle’s offset without affecting the start and end pin. As this tutorial demonstrates, adding muscles to your characters is a relatively simple task. Now there’s nothing to stop your characters from showing off their muscles. 8.
166 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA Drag the sphere object from the Object Manager into the Vamp tool’s “Source” field. Drag and drop the cube object into the “Target” field. We’ve now told Vamp which object the information should be transferred from and which object it should be transferred to. Enable the options for “Selections Polygons” and “Texture Tags”. Click on the “Transfer Maps” button. If you now look to the right of our cube, you’ll notice it has a Selection tag, a material and a Morph tag.
© Jana Rot - www.rot.
168 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 9. Quick Tutorial – Dressing Clothilde is MOCCA’s cloth simulation tool. You can use this tool to let a flag flap in the breeze or to give your character a snappy t-shirt. This is exactly what we want to put on Claude. What’s nice about Clothilde is that it’s not necessary to go through the trouble of modeling a t-shirt. All you have to do is create the front and the back of the shirt. Clothilde will make it fit automatically. Open the file “shirt_start.c4d“.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 169 Make sure you don’t subdivide the polygons on the side (the ones created by the bridge tool). OK, it doesn’t really look like a t-shirt yet, it looks more like a box with sleeves. But don’t worry, we’re going to change that right now. Clothilde is very easy to use. Most functions are contained in one tag, the “Cloth Tag“. It will be assigned to the object, which will then be turned to cloth! Right-click on the shirt and select “Clothilde Tags / Cloth Tag“.
170 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA In the dresser menu you will find everything you need to make clothes fit. The other menus deal with the cloth’s behavior. Select “Set“ next to “Dress State“. This is like a security measure. We can recall the shirt’s initial state in case we don’t like the position of the shirt or if we want to add a breast pocket, for example. Switch to “Use Polygon Tool“ mode and select the polygons on the sides (the ones created by the bridge tool).
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA 171 Cloth nurbs acts similar to a HyperNURBS object: it smoothes the geometry which was subordinated to it but with a slightly different algorithm which works better for cloth objects. Additionally, a thickness can be specified for cloth nurbs fabric objects. Set the “Thickness“ to 1 in the Attributes Manager. The character should be clothed now. Of course there is still some fine-tuning necessary to make the t-shirt behave properly in an animation.
172 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MOCCA Motionbuilder assigns motion capture data to the character. These are then “plotted“, which means the animation is converted into movement and is assigned directly to bones. The final animation will be saved as an FBX file which CINEMA 4D can easily read. Select “File / Merge. Load the FBX file. It’s not necessary to open the complete file. The FBX import is smart enough to know that it only has to load the animation.
© Alberto “ThirdEye” Blasi.
174 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR Welcome to HAIR (optional module) This tutorial will show you how you can enter the world of HAIR and easily create hair, fur and feathers. 1. Introduction HAIR is a powerful tool for creating various types of hair and fur. Even feathers, animated grass, anemone and much more can be created using HAIR. Although achieving your first results in HAIR is relatively easy, HAIR is an immensely diverse and comprehensive module that will satisfy any beautician.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 175 The number of guides displayed in the editor view is far less than the actual number of hairs that will be rendered. The number of guides displayed can also be increased. The “missing” hairs are interpolated between the guides when rendered. Naturally, you will require some standard grooming tools to bring your hair into shape. Among the tools HAIR offers are Brush, Comb, Scissors and more. HAIR’s own IK makes sure hair moves realistically.
176 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 3. Sample Images © John Shakespeare de © Janine Pauke - www.3dfluff.com © 2005 John Balestrieri www.tinrocket.com ©Fredi Voß www.fredivoss. ©Fredi Voß www.fredivoss.de O.K, now pick your jaw up off the floor and let’s get started with the HAIR tutorial...
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 177 4. Quick Tutorial – Fur Our volunteer, “Hairbert”, is only a few mouse clicks away from becoming his warm winter fur. He may look a little pitiful without his fur but his simple construction will make our work that much easier. First, open the file Hairbert,c4d. HAIR can be applied to either an entire object or a polygon selection only.
178 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR If Hairbert were a porcupine or had just come out of the spin cycle at 90° we could finish this tutorial at this point. Since Hairbert deserves better we will continue and use the settings described below to give this guy his cuddly winter fur. When hair is added, a corresponding material will be created automatically in the Materials Manager. The HAIR object is located at the top of the object list in the Object Manager.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 179 Set Length to 21 and Segments to 6. The Segments setting defines the number of individual segments each guide is made up of (this only influences how guides are displayed in the editor, not the rendered hair). If Segments were to be set to 1 each guide would consist of only a single segment and gravity could not bend the guide.
180 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR Stop the animation before it reaches frame 100 to prevent the calculation from starting anew. Alternately you can start the Dynamics calculation in the HAIR object by pressing the Relax button in the Dynamics tab’s Animation menu. Click this button after the animation has been set to frame 100). In order not to lose this state we have to tell HAIR that this should be our new initial state.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 181 Switching views as needed in the editor view can be very helpful when brushing or styling hair. To brush hair, simply click and drag over the blue hair tips. The guides possess their own HAIR IK which ensures hair-like behavior when the hair is styled. To create our fur we will need to pull the guides out a little and curl them up slightly at the tip. Take a look at the following screenshots to get an idea of what we mean.
182 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR First, we will turn our attention to the number of hairs Hairbert has. Select the HAIR object in the Object Manager and set Count to 100,000 in the Hair tab menu in the Attributes Manager. Activate Fill Hairs in the Fill Hairs tab and set Count to 80,000. Render the scene again. It should look similar to the image below. Poor Hairbert has been transformed from a porcupine to a bad Prince Valiant look-alike. We’ll have to make more changes.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 183 Follow these steps: • Specular: Set Primary Strength to 34% and Secondary Strength to 50%. • Thickness channel: Set Root to 0.5m and Tip to 0.03m. This will thin Hairbert’s hair to make it look more realistic. • Scale: Activating this channel will vary the size of the hairs, which adds additional realism. Set Scale to 100%, Variation to 80% and Amount to 40%. Render the scene once again.
184 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR Hairbert’s looking better and better. Soon he can let himself be seen in public again. What we want to do now is get rid of that “just blow-dried” look and clump the hair a little. We will do this using the Clump channel. Select the Clump channel and change the settings to match those in the screenshot below: Render the scene again. The result should look like this: So what’s left to do? Right, Hairbert’s face still needs some hair.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 185 First, make sure the Use Polygon Tool is active and select the Bear_mesh object in the Object Manager. The polygons to which we just applied Hairbert’s long fur will be highlighted in red. Click anywhere next to the figure in the editor window. All polygons will be deselected. Select the second triangle with the red border next to Bear_mesh in the Object Manager. In the Attributes Manager you will see “Hair Short” in the Name text field.
186 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR Congratulations! You have just completed your first HAIR project. It’s that simple! Now take what you have learned here and experiment with adding hair to other objects, transitioning from long hair to short hair, creating different styles, even creating grass and more. The only limitation HAIR has is your own imagination.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – HAIR 187 5. Tips & Tricks • You can save a lot of tome by optimizing your HAIR settings. Make sure your object really needs those 500,000 individual hairs – maybe half as many will suffice without sacrificing realism. • A greater number of individual hairs are required when creating short hair (as was the case with Hairbert’s fur) to prevent surfaces from showing through. Short hair, though, requires fewer segments because it is stiffer by nature.
188 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph Welcome to MoGraph (optional module) This MoGraph Quickstart tutorial will give you a detailed insight into the limitless possibilities MoGraph has to offer. © www.c4d-jack.de 1. Introduction The MoGraph module is designed to clone just about any geometric primitive or object and offers numerous Effectors with which these objects can be controlled.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 189 MoGraph offers creative minds a virtual universe of endless possibilities. Once you complete this tutorial we urge you to let your creative juices flow – experiment to your heart’s desire and see what MoGraph can do! 2. General Information / Interface Once MoGraph has been installed it can be accessed in the CINEMA 4D main menu. In most cases, a Cloner Object will be required in order to create a MoGraph scene.
190 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph • Spline Effector You can use the Spline Effector to link spline-based shapes or objects to the Cloner Object. Clones can be aligned to create text or morphed into text or other shapes. The image below shows how a Spline Effector, with Falloff set to Linear, (moved in the direction of its own Z-axis) was used to morph a row of “donut” clones into a helix shape. • Target Effector The Target Effector lets clones be aligned to a target object.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 191 This is also the scene we will use for this tutorial. Before we get started, sit back and take a look at what MoGraph can do. Maybe these images can say more about what MoGraph can do than any amount of words... 3.
192 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 4. Quickstart Tutorial In this tutorial we will show you how to achieve fantastic results with just a few clicks of the mouse. MoGraph has been designed to quickly master tasks that, until now, took hours to complete, if it could be completed at all. For example, the Target Effector: How would you animate 1000 clones that follow a target object without the use of MoGraph? Well, we won’t waste any time trying to answer that question.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 193 If you didn’t zoom in too far you will see that two additional cubes have been created (you may have to adjust your editor window to see the cubes). These cubes are located above the original cube, with relatively large intervals between them. This interval represents the default interval the Clone Object applies. Since we will be creating a surface comprised of many cubes we will now adjust the Cloner Object’s settings accordingly.
194 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph All we need now is a Target Object and a Target Effector. Create a Target Effector by selecting the Cloner Object in the Object Manager and subsequently selecting Target Effector from the MoGraph menu (main menu: MoGraph / Target Effector). Note: Always make sure that the Cloner Object is selected when adding an Effector. The Effector will then automatically be added to the Cloner Object’s Effector tab.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 195 The clones will be repelled radially from the sphere.
196 CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph That basically completes our tutorial, except for the fact that we wanted to simulate the effect shown in the screenshots in chapter 2... To achieve this effect we will have to add an additional function: Falloff. Place the sphere at the center of and slightly below the clone field. Open the Target Effector’s Falloff tab in the Attributes Manager. Set Shape from Infinite to Sphere and set Scale to 20%.
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 197 5. Tips & Tricks • The MoGraph Cloner Object contains the Object mode. The quantity of clones will orient itself according to the points (default setting) of the object to which they are linked. HyperNURBS can be used to create a smooth animation with a high number of clones. The HyperNURBS object will be used by the Cloner Object in place of an actual polygon object.
© Steve Leworthy - Holder Mathias Architects - Westmark
CINEMA 4D R10 Quickstart – MoGraph 199
