CINEMA 4D RELEASE 12 3D FOR THE REAL WORLD Quickstart Manual
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart CINEMA 4D Release 12 Quickstart Manual The software described in this document is subject to a license agreement and may only be used in accordance with the regulations thereof.
II CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart Contents Preface ................................................................................................................................. IV Welcome to CINEMA 4D R12 . ............................................................. 2 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2 2. General Information / Interface ...................................................................
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart III MoGraph ......................................................................................... 103 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 104 2. General Information / Interface ..................................................................................... 104 3. Sample Images .....................................................................................................
IV CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart Preface MAXON always strives to make the learning process for new CINEMA 4D and BodyPaint 3D users as easy as possible. This includes not only the interface and workflow but also the accompanying documentation. To best serve the needs of our users we have divided the MAXON documentation into four categories, which are designed for users ranging from absolute beginners through to professional user levels: 1.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 1
2 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart Welcome to CINEMA 4D R12 After you have worked through this tutorial you will have a good basic user knowledge which you can apply to future projects. In this Quickstart manual you will be asked to open certain files for demonstration purposes. These can be found on your Goodies DVD or on the MAXON homepage on the download / documentation page. 1.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Interface 3 No matter if you work in the field of print, advertising, design, visualization or film, CINEMA 4D gives you all the tools you need to make your ideas reality. The intuitive interface and the ease with which CINEMA 4D can be learned makes entering the versatile world for 3D a snap. CINEMA 4D places a link between your job or hobby, and your creativity in the palm of your hand. You can create what your fantasy demands. CINEMA 4D will be your dependable partner. 2.
4 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Interface Clicking on the light blue Cube icon opens the group window “Add Cube Object“. It contains all of CINEMA 4D’s available predefined parametric objects. Click on the very first icon to create one of these objects. Click and hold to see all available parametric objects. This is where you choose the initial shape you will need. Note: After an object has been initially created it is basically a parametric object.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Interface The advantages, especially in modeling, are obvious. Since the object contains few points (edges / polygons) that can be edited it remains very manageable. You can drag just one point of the original wire frame and the HyperNURBS mesh, with its finer subdivision, will follow the point being dragged (The image below shows the same Cube object - one with HyperNURBS and one without).
6 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sample Images 3. Sample Images © Milan Soukup © G. Ferrero Moya gferrerom@gmail.
7 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images © Chris McLaughlin © Sven Hauth www.pixeldoggy.com © Anders Kjellberg, www.dogday-design.
8 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Interface We will continue with navigation in CINEMA 4D. The first symbol (click – hold – move mouse) moves the view. The second symbol (foreshortened double arrow) lets you dolly in and out and the third (curved arrows with a dot in the center) lets you rotate the scene. Selecting the little rectangle to the right will again divide the entire view panel into four views, giving you a better overall view of the scene.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images © Carlos Agell, homepage.mac.
10 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials 4. Quick Tutorial – Materials A well-modeled object can make a mediocre impression if the right textures aren’t used. Textures give a model color, highlights, structure and other important surface properties. A texture placed into the bump channel, for example, gives the object’s surface an uneven, bumpy look without actually altering the geometric structure. This effect can be used to imitate skin wrinkles, scars or the surface of an orange.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials 11 A standard material has been created. If you click on this material its properties will be made visible in the Attribute Manager to the right. In the “Basic“ tab 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 tab will appear in the Attribute Manager for the Bump channel.
12 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials Click on the material in the Material Manager with the left mouse button and drag it onto the Eyeball object in the Object Manager (when you drag the material over the object you can let go once the arrow points down). Alternatively you can drag the material onto the desired object (the eyeball) directly in the Editor. Just make sure you drop the material onto the correct object if there are several in the scene or in close proximity to one another.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials 13 Once you have selected it you will see its parameters in the Attribute Manager. Adopt the settings you see in the next screenshot: We have just aligned the texture on the eyeball mesh by changing the “Length U“ and “Length V“ parameters. The offset setting put the texture in the correct position. If you rotate your view again you will see that the iris texture is positioned correctly.
14 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials If you own CINEMA 4D Visualize or CINEMA 4D Studio, you can render human skin realistically using Subsurface Scattering. The Sub Surface Scattering makes it possible. By placing this shader in the luminance channel (Effects / SubSurface Scattering) the effect is created when rays of light meet a slightly transparent object. Some rays infiltrate the object further and are dispersed, others are directly absorbed or bounce off.
15 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Materials Danel: Very good for simulating high-gloss finish. 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.
16 © christoph mensak, brown_eye_architechts@gmx.de © www.c4d-jack.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting 17 5. Quick Tutorial – Lighting 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.
18 CINEMA 4D R12 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 Attribute Manager: X=300, Y=580, Z=-300 at an angle of H=45, P=-45 degrees (enter the values and click on the Apply button). Render the scene (Cmd / Ctrl + r).
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting 19 In the “General“ menu of the Attribute Manager, set the light’s shadow to “Shadow Maps (Soft)“. We don’t want the shadow to be completely black so we’ll make it a little transparent. In the “Shadow“ menu, set the shadow density to 50%. Select “1000 x 1000“ as the shadow map. Render the scene.
20 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting You will see the result in the editor right away. You can also edit the light’s cone by dragging the orange handles (If your graphics card will support it you can set the editor’s display mode to “Enhanced OpenGL” with activated shadows. (Viewport: Display / Enhanced OpenGL) Generally speaking, OpenGL offers a much more precise depiction of your scene and gives you an impression of how the shadows will fall). Now we’re happy with our key light.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting 21 The scene is now pretty evenly lit, but we want to give it a little more pep. Create another light source, name it “Color“ and, in the Attribute Manager, set its type to “Infinite“. Set its color to turquoise and set its H angle to -160. 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.
22 © Dave Davidson - www.max3d.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images © Benedict Campbell, www.benedict1.
24 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting 6. Tips & Tricks © Dietmar Kumpf www.k-3d.de 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. One of the main sources of information, of course, is the MAXON web site www.MAXON.net.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Lighting 25 Since the Internet is always changing, doing a search for “CINEMA 4D“ in various search engines would be a good idea. The Internet is a good source for finding models. Through its special image search function you can find photos or drawings of practically any object. Even mail order catalogs can be a great source of information on how an object is supposed to look. Textures are all over the Internet as well.
26 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D 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 application. Let’s start with its structure.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 27 2. General Information / Interface First take a look at the screenshot below: Here you see one of the two standard layouts: “BP UV Edit“. The second layout (“BP 3D Paint“) is set up in a similar fashion, only without the UV-mesh editor window which gives you more room in the editor window to paint.
28 CINEMA 4D R12 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.
29 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 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. © Patrick Eischen, www.patrickeischen.com © Kaan Özsoy © www.mikelima.de (shader); www.patrix3d.de (model) © Glenn Frey www.bonewire.
30 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D Now we’ll get to the heart of this tutorial. Open the file “QS_BP3D_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. Select the predefined standard layout “BP UV Edit“ at the top and to the left of CINEMA 4D’s main editor window.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 31 Since Claude likes elephant gray we will leave the boxes the way they are. Leave the rest of the settings the way they are and click on “Finish“, then on “Close“ in the next window. The basic textures have been created and we can start painting. If you have experience with earlier texturing methods and the time it took to even get started BodyPaint 3D will seem like a blessing to you. BodyPaint 3D saves you a lot of time.
32 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D 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“.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 33 Now select “Brush Tool for Painting Textures” for applying the color. Set the size to 25 and the Pressure to 40 in the brush’s Attribute Manager (“Active Tool” window)… …and select a pink color in the Color Manager. If necessary, increase the HyperNURBS subdivision. Activate the “Render Active View for RayBrush Painting“ in the active view in the “Render” menu (BodyPaint 3D main menu).
34 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D 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“ (click and hold on the “Activate/Deactivate Projection Painting” button) 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 35 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“ mode and set the brush size to 10.
36 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D Avoid UV-mesh polygons that meet to a point when applying a “noise texture“ to a bump layer. The narrower a 3-sided polygon becomes, the coarser the bump noise channel will be rendered. Of course such a polygon has much less area for the noise structure at its tip than it does at its center which results in a magnification effect of the noise structure. Try to set up each side of a triangulated polygon as an isosceles.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 37
38 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer CINEMA 4D Renderer This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the CINEMA 4D renderer. It will show you many of the CINEMA 4D renderer’s typical applications and covers some theoretical physics behind the effects. © Dave Davidson, www.max3d.org 1. General Information / Interface As soon as you open the Render Settings (main menu: Render / Render Settings...) you will find parameters such as “Global Illumination“ by clicking on the “Effects...” button.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 39 Caustics (available in CINEMA 4D Visualize and Studio) acts in a similar fashion. The global settings can be found under “render settings“. Here you can activate or deactivate surface and volume caustics separately. Options relating to specific materials can be set in the luminance channel. In addition, caustics also offers a third setting. You will find this in the light object. The use of caustics requires at least one light object.
40 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer © Greg Brotherton, www.brotron.com 2. 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. Open the file “QS_Render_01.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 41 Use the method with which you feel most comfortable. Often we don’t necessarily want to render the complete editor view but only a small part of it. This is also no problem. Select “Render / Render Region“. The cursor will be transformed into a cross. Drag a frame around the region you wish to render.
42 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer The second possibility is to render only a single object. Select the object “Master” in the Object Manager. Select the command (Render / Render Active Objects). Only the selected objects will be rendered. 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 R12 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 43 Of course you can also save a series of images as an animation. To do so, change the Type from Still Image to Selected Frames, and set Format to QuickTime Movie, for example. 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 use the Render Settings (main menu: Render / Render Settings...) to determine what our final image will look like.
44 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer 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. “Geometry“ renders the image with sufficient smoothing and offers a good compromise between quality and speed. You can select the best quality when you render the final image. The “Filter” menu lets you select the type of anti-aliasing filter.
45 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 3. Sample Images Here you can see what the CINEMA 4D renderer can do! © Marco Weiss, www.black-graphics.de © Rafael Rau www.silverwing-vfx.de © Matthew O’Neill, www.3dfluff.
46 © www.transluszent.de © Olcay Kayihan, olcay@aluplan.com.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 47 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.
48 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer Create another material and give it your favorite color. Drag this color onto the torus. The luminance channel turns the sky 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). Click on the “Effect...
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 49 CINEMA 4D will automatically turn on Auto Light in a scene if there are no light objects present. When using Global Illumination, this automatic function is excluded since it would make the scene much too bright. Create a sphere (objects / primitive / sphere). Move the sphere along the X-axis a little to the right and a Y-position of 100 until it’s next to the Torus. Copy the sky material and switch to the luminance channel of the new material.
50 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –CINEMA 4D Renderer You will see that a blue light is being cast on the torus and the floor. The blue sphere is not rendered because we have made it invisible using the camera’s compositing tag.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man 51 5. ProjectionMan Once you have completed this tutorial you will be able to save a great amount of working time and maybe even create scenes you never would have been able to without this tool. This tutorial is primarily geared towards matte painters but can also be used by any 3D artist to keep from having to texture a great number of objects.
52 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man This is a very simplified version of a city scene in which a camera is animated to move in slightly to the buildings. Play the animation once (small green arrow below the Viewport). You can see how the angle of view changes. In traditional matte painting we would have a simple zoom in which the angle of the front building would not change in relation to the others. Our buildings, however, still need to be textured.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man 53 Enter the location to which you want to render the .psd file and click on “OK”. Confirm the prompt that follows with “Yes”. CINEMA 4D will now automatically start Photoshop and will open the rendered ProjectionMan image. You can either start painting in Photoshop right away or create a new layer and create your matte painting. In order to get to know how ProjectionMan works, edit your own image to look like the one below.
54 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man After you have finished modifying your image in Photoshop, save the image. Use the current name and location – otherwise CINEMA 4D will not be able to locate the image! Return to your ProjectionMan scene in CINEMA 4D. In the Material Manager, at the bottom left of your interface, you can see that ProjectionMan has automatically created a new material. Double-click the material and switch to the Luminance channel in the window that opens.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man 55 Again open the ProjectionMan window (main menu: Window / ProjectionMan) and drag “Cube 1” and Cube 2” onto “Camera right”. Select “Coverage Render” and confirm all prompts with “Yes”. The newly rendered image will also be opened in Photoshop. Edit the image to look (more or less) like the one below: Save the Photoshop file, and return to CINEMA 4D. Again a new material has been created, this time with the name, “PMat Camera right”.
56 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Projection Man 7. Tips & Tricks Rendering often requires you to make a choice between speed and quality. Especially scenes using Global Illumination or Caustics can take a long time to render. This is why we recommend that you experiment with the Parameters and to initially use low values. For example, set the Global Illumination “Diffuse Depth” value to “1” to begin with and make a test render.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon © Gary Ingle / Wes Ware 57
58 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon Sketch and Toon This is CINEMA 4D’s Quickstart Tutorial for Sketch and Toon. Sketch and Toon is included in CINEMA 4D Visualize and Studio. This tutorial will introduce you to some of this renderer’s fantastic creative possibilities. © Sebastian Storz s.storz@blattform.org 1. Introduction Sketch and Toon belongs to the NPR family.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 59 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.
60 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon Keep this general rule in mind: The sketch attributes in the Render Settings determine WHAT will be rendered (contours? Hidden lines?), and the material attributes determine how something will be rendered (Line width? Line color?). Of course not every object has to be rendered in the same style. You can create an arbitrary amount of sketch materials and assign them to different objects. This makes combining a pen drawing with a cartoon object no problem.
61 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 3. Sample Images Here is a sample of the beautiful imagery you can create with Sketch and Toon. © Marco Weiss, www.black-graphics.de © P. Hofmann, M. Hilkert (pexel@3dup.
62 © www.areyouplanning.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 63 4. Quick Tutorial – Shaders and Tags In this tutorial we will combine an object rendered in the sketch mode with an object rendered in the “normal“ mode in the same scene. We will also examine the “Cel“ shader, one of four special sketch shaders. Our goal will be to assign different render styles to each of three objects. The first object will only have a contour and it should look like it was hand-drawn.
64 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon The cel shader is a type of gradient shader. It can be loaded into any channel but for a cartoon-like look it should be put into the “Luminance“ channel where its colors will always be rendered as full-tone and will not be influenced by the scene’s lighting. Click on “Cel“. The cel settings will appear. 3 shades of blue are preset here by default but they don’t really match our figures. Double click on the color sliders and create three colors with a green hue.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 65 Select the Sketch effect that was just added and select “Pencil (Soft Sketch)“ in the Attribute 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.
66 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon We’ve done it! Three objects, each with completely different render styles coexisting peacefully in the same scene. 5. Tips & Tricks Sketch and Toon offers several levels of control. If you are taking your first steps with this tool 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”.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.
68 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools © Takagi Leon Character Tools This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the CINEMA 4D charracter tools, a collection of tools especially for character animation. CINEMA 4D includes a complete toolset for character animation. Many of these tools are available in all packages and some are available only in CINEMA 4D Studio 1. Introduction 3D character animation is a complex subject. It not only challenges the software but the animator as well.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 69 So before we explore the character tools themselves we would like to quickly go over the 12 principles of character animation. These 12 rules were developed back in the 1930s by Disney animators and can almost be applied 1:1 to modern 3D animation. They are useful not only for characters but for just about anything you animate.
70 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools Like the Pose Mixer tool, the Morph tag lets you create various facial expressions for your characters and morph between them. Your polygon object acts as the reference and a “base morph” (starting position for all following morphs) and “target morph” are created in the Pose Morph tag. You select the morph target in the Morph tag and change the mesh...finished! You create another morph target for each additional pose and model the poses one after the other.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 71 You should already have a good view of the left arm in the editor, ready for joints to be added. First we need to hide the turtle’s shell so that it won’t be in the way later on when we weight the body. To hide the shell, click twice on the top grey dot in the Object Manager to the right of the “Shell_Hypernurbs” object. The dot should turn red and the shell should now be hidden. We can add joints using the Joint tool.
72 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools Switch to the top view in the Viewport‘s menu (Cameras/Top) and zoom the window as needed to get a good view of all four joints. As you can see in the top view, the joints are a little behind the geometry. It‘s important to get the joints in exactly the right place inside the geometry in order for the automatic weighting to work correctly later on.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 73 Things are looking good so far. However, if you now select the shoulder joint, there appears to be problem: almost all the geometry is weighted to this joint. Also, the elbow joint has more geometry weighted to it than it should have. Both these joints are affecting parts of the geometry they shouldn’t. 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.
74 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools Once you’ve adjusted the weighting, activate the HyperNURBS (“Turtle_Hypernurbs”). Make sure the Model tool is selected and click on the Rotate tool. 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 75 3. Quick Tutorial – Forward Kinematics / Inverse Kinematics (FK/IK) Forward kinematics (FK) and inverse kinematics (IK) — terms used in 3D animation — give you two different ways to animate. FK means rotating every bone within the hierarchy from top to bottom until the arm is in the desired position. This method has its advantages for some parts of the animation but disadvantages in other parts.
76 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 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”. Make the object “Joint-Object.3.Goal” a Child object of the “Hand.Goal” object (in the Object Manager, drag it over the “Hand. Goal” object and let go when the arrow points downward).
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Character Tools 77 Select the effectors again (“hand.Goal”). Move the arm forwards and backwards again. Our arm behaves as before but now we have complete control of the elbow (and all arm rotations) thanks to the Pole Vector. Two more quick tips: You will surely have noticed that the entire arm rotates when the Pole Vector is pulled and the palm of the hand (depending on where you have placed it) no may longer point forward. We will change this now in just a few steps.
78 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Pose Morph 4. Pose Morph The Pose Morph tool is a powerful tool for mixing Joints, points, UVs, parameters, User Data and much more by morphing between states (e.g. size, position, rotation) using sliders. Using Pose Morph is as easily as it is logical. Open the file QS_Maxon_Head_start.c4d. We will use Pose Morph to change the facial expression of our friend in the image above from friendly and unassuming to consternated and silly.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Pose Morph 79 The pre-defined points will automatically be selected and CINEMA 4D will automatically be switched to Point mode. In our example, the points that affect the eyebrows will be selected. Move these points downward, slightly to the rear and rotate them slightly. If the eyeglasses get in the way, simply turn off their display in the Object Manager.
80 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Pose Morph Once all poses have been defined we can begin mixing the poses. In the Attribute Manager, set the Mode option from Edit to Animate (Tag tab). The Pose Morph tag’s options will change automatically and you can define the strength with which the poses will be mixed using the Strength value. All morph targets are animatable.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Pose Morph 81 5. Tips and Tricks • To create Joint poses with Pose Morph all you have to do is add a Pose Morph tag to the top-most Joint and enable the Rotation and Hierarchy options. You can then rotate the Pose Target’s Joints without modifying the Joints’ original position. • The joints of the fingers of a hand only need a single Pose Morph tag with an enabled Hierarchy option. Simply create a new Pose for each finger pose.
82 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Cloth © Jana Rot, www.rot.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Cloth 83 6. Quick Tutorial – Cloth CINEMA 4D contains a very powerful Cloth engine. 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 the Cloth engine 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. The integrated algorithms will make the garment fit automatically.
84 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Cloth The shirt needs to be subdivided a little more so you can deform it better later. Switch to “Use Polygon Tool“ mode and select the polygons on the front and back side of the shirt. Select “Functions / Subdivide“. Disable the HyperNURBS Subdivision option and set the Subdivision value to 2. 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Cloth 85 These polygons will serve as the T-shirt’s seam. The Cloth engine will do this for us as well. Select “Seam Polys“ in the “Dresser“ menu and set it to “Set“. The seam is still a little too wide. Click on “Dress-O-Matic“ and look what happens with the T-shirt. The seam will be “pulled together“ in accordance to the “Width“ value. It doesn’t necessarily match the shape of the character’s body, though. The “Steps“ value determines how exact this fit will be.
86 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Cloth Cloth NURBS acts similar to a HyperNURBS object: it smooths 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 Attribute Manager and the subdivision to “0”. Create a HyperNURBS object and make the “Cloth NURBS” object to a Child object of this HyperNURBS object.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.uk © Beto Prado - www.animalda.com.
88 © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – HAIR 89 HAIR CINEMA 4D Studio features a hair rendering and simulation system that you can use to easily create hair, fur and feathers. This tutorial will show you how. 1. Introduction HAIR is a powerful tool for creating various types of hair and fur. Even feathers, animated grass, 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 tool that will satisfy any beautician.
90 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR 2. General Information / Interface HAIR works with so-called guides that serve as placeholders for the rendered hair. 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.
91 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images Before we get started with the HAIR tutorial, though, let’s take a look at what can be created with CINEMA 4D’s HAIR system: 3. Sample Images © Patrick Eischen, www.patrickeischen.com © Beto Prado Now let’s get started with the HAIR tutorial... © Bill_Melvin_quadart.cgsociety.
92 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR 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 “QS_Hair.c4d”. HAIR can be applied to either an entire object or a polygon selection only.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 93 The guides all protrude perpendicularly from each surface and have a default length of 100. Go ahead and Render the scene to see what poor Hairbert looks like (Render / Render View or the far-left render icon). 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.
94 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR The HAIR object is located at the top of the object list in the Object Manager. Before we start editing the HAIR material and the HAIR object, we will shorten the guides a little (which will also shorten the rendered hair) and give the hair a little style by applying gravity. Select the HAIR object in the Object Manager. Go to the Attribute Manager and activate the Guides tab. This tab contains the Length and Segments settings. Set Length to 21 and Segments to 6.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – HAIR 95 If you play the animation now you will see how the hair is pulled down by the gravity (to make the animation of the Guides visible, make sure that the Hair object is selected in the Object Manager). Stop the animation before it reaches frame 100 to prevent the calculation from starting anew.
96 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR Switch to the front view in the editor window so we can trim and style the hair on Hairbert’s chin a little. Activate the Brush tool (Simulation / Tools / Brush). Activate the Collisions setting (one of the Brush tool’s most important settings (Options tab)) and set Coll. Radius to 1 cm. Doing so will prevent the hair from penetrating Hairbert’s skin when brushed. Leave the “Deactivate Visible Only” option disabled here as well.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – HAIR 97 It seems that Hairbert is suffering from a minor case of hair loss. This is not due to stress but the fact that we still need to make some changes to his hair settings. We’ll do that now. 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 Attribute Manager. Activate Fill Hairs in the Fill Hairs tab and set Count to 80,000. Render the scene again.
98 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR Follow these steps: • Specular: Set Primary Strength to 34% and Secondary Strength to 50%. • Thickness channel: Set Root to 0.5 cm and Tip to 0.03 cm. 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – HAIR 99 As you can see, Hairbert’s bad hair day is slowly but surely coming to an end. His fur is starting to look much more realistic. We’ll remove some of its smoothness and shine by adding a little frizz. Select the Frizz channel, located below Scale, and set Frizz to 15%. 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.
100 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR So what’s left to do? Right, Hairbert’s face still needs some hair. As mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, we will apply a different type of fur to Hairbert’s face. This time it will be even easier to apply! Again, we have pre-selected the polygons for you to which this fur will be applied. First, make sure the Use Polygon Tool is active and select the Bear_mesh object in the Object Manager.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – HAIR 101 Change the color to a very light gray and click on OK. Now select the right-most color marker and change its color to white. Do the same for the remaining HAIR material and render the scene. You may have to tweak the colors a little but your result should basically look like this: Congratulations! You have just completed your first HAIR project.
102 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –HAIR 5. Tips & Tricks • You can save a lot of time 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – MoGraph 103 MoGraph CINEMA 4D’s MoGraph features make it easy to achieve complex-looking effects. MoGraph is available in CINEMA 4D Broadcast and Studio. © Simone Bertolotti, www.imonfox.
104 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph 1. Introduction MoGraph is designed to clone just about any geometric primitive or object and offers numerous Effectors with which these objects can be controlled.
CINEMA 4D R12 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.
106 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph • Target Effector The Target Effector lets clones be aligned to a target object. The clones will follow the movement of the target object accordingly. In the image below, a ball was used as the target object, to which a Target Effector, with its Repel setting activated, was assigned. 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.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Sample Images 3.
108 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph 4. Target Effector 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, either took hours to complete or simply were not possible. 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 R12 Quickstart – MoGraph 109 Our surface is taking shape nicely. Only the number of clones needs to be increased. Set the Cloner object’s X and Z count to 25 each. In order to increase the density of the surface, the clones need to be closer together. To do this, change the Cloner object’s Size X and Z values from 200 to 150 (the first and right fields). The Y-value can remain unchanged since we haven’t cloned the cube in the Y direction.
110 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph By having selected the Cloner object subsequently assigning the Effector on the Cloner object’s Effectors page is no longer necessary. The Effector already knows it should affect the Cloner object. Your scene should now look like this: Next we will add a sphere to serve as a Target Object. It really is not necessary to add this sphere but we will add it on here in order to better demonstrate (visually) how this effect works.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – MoGraph 111 The clones will be repelled radially from the sphere. Move the sphere along any axis and see what effects result: That basically completes our tutorial, except for the fact that we wanted to simulate the effect shown in the screenshots. 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.
112 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph Open the Target Effector’s Falloff tab in the Attribute Manager. Set Shape from Infinite to Sphere and set Scale to 20%. This will define a smaller radius within which our Effector will affect the clones. Our clones are still being repelled much too far away from the sphere. To change this, go to the Target Effector’s Effector tab and reduce Distance to 20m and Distance Strength to 50%.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – MoGraph 113 5. Quickstart Tutorial: MoDynamics Simply linking any given object with a Cloner object in conjunction with a single Dynamics Body tag is enough to create an interesting, dynamic movement. It‘s easy to get caught up in experimenting with the various parameters to see how the movement is affected. The Dynamics functionality requires only very basic knowledge of CINEMA 4D and physics in general to be able to create impressive effects.
114 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –MoGraph Note: The workflow in CINEMA 4D Studio differs slightly from that of CINEMA 4D Broadcast. This is in part due to the fact that the MoGraph Dynamics Body tag in CINEMA 4D Broadcast has less functionality than in CINEMA 4D Studio. The CINEMA 4D Studio Dynamics settings are much more comprehensive and as a result have different default settings.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – MoGraph 115 Note that using MoGraph in conjunction with HAIR has its limitations. HAIR dynamics reference the original clone and will not be calculated anew for each cloned object. This means that hair on a clone that is oriented horizontally will not fall to the side when the original object is oriented vertically. • The settings that define the MoDynamics’ accuracy and the gravitation are located in the Document Settings... Dynamics tab.
116 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Dynamics © Jens Kappelmann, www.jeso-art.de Dynamics In this tutorial we will show you a few of the CINEMA 4D Dynamics functions. CINEMA 4D Dynamics are a powerful and multi-faceted tool for the creation of all types of dynamic calculations, object collisions and the general propulsion of objects, including “motorized” vehicles.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Dynamics 117 Open the file QS_Dynamics_start.c4d. The scene contains an old-timer, which we will equip with a motor using only a few objects and by modifying a couple of settings, which will cause the car to “drive”. As you can see, a polygon object was used to create the car body and the wheels. We could have created the scene using individual objects for each wheel but to keep things simple for this tutorial we simply used four Primitives.
118 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Dynamics This will create the links for all three objects. The object “Connector_front” must be selected to the “wheels_front” object can replace the “wheels_back” object in the Object A field. Compare your Viewport and Object Manager with the screenshots below - they should look the same. The car has now been set up correctly and all we need to do now is add dynamic movement. This will be done by adding a Dynamics tag.
CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart – Dynamics 119 Again, make a multiple selection and select all of the polygon objects: “wheels_front”, “wheels_back”, “car” and “ground”. Right-click on one of the selected objects and select Dynamcis Tags / Dynamics Body from the menu that appears. Next, select the “ground” object’s Dynamics Body tag and set the Dynamics parameter to Off (Attribute Manager: Dynamics tab). We want the ground to act as a collision object but don’t want it to move at all.
120 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart –Sample Images © Matthieu Roussel www.mattroussel.
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122 CINEMA 4D R12 Quickstart
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