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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
You can find more detailed descriptions of these rules online or in any good animation book. These rules might
seem pretty extensive at first glance but the more you animate the more they will become your own flesh and
blood. Every time your animation “looks a little weird“ it will most likely be because you didn’t follow one or
more of these rules. Now we want to put these rules to use.
2. General Information/Interface (Joints and Rigging)
If you are a R9.x user and have just upgraded to R11, here are a few infos regarding changes since Release 9.x.
Version 3 of MOCCA features a completely reworked system since R9.x where you now work with “joints”
instead of bones. Joints have been a part of the main CINEMA 4D application since R10 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.
Joints are laid out differently from bones because they represent the joints between bones, not the bones
themselves. Where you would have used three bones in R9.x, four joints are now required, as shown in the
next screenshot:
The character is no longer directly deformed by the bones/joints but by a Skin object that is a child of the
polygon mesh. Among other things, MOCCA now contains a Bind function. Select the joints and polygon mesh
you want to be deformed and the Bind function creates the Skin object automatically as a child of your mesh
and adds a Weight tag to the polygon mesh.
Your character is weighted automatically and in most cases the weighting should be adequate. The time-
consuming task of painting the weights manually using the Claude Bonet tool is no longer necessary!
You can quickly correct any areas of the deformation that need fine-tuning using the Weight tool. Also, unlike
bones in R9, joints do not have to be children of their polygon object. They are independent of hierarchies,
allowing you to deform multiple characters at the same time using a single skeleton of joints.
Since Version 3 MOCCA has a the Muscle object and Muscle deformer. These make it possible for you to place
virtual muscles under your character’s skin that bulge when the joint bends, causing the surrounding mesh to
deform.