CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart CINEMA 4D Release 13 I 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 R13 Quickstart Contents Preface ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ IV Welcome to CINEMA 4D R13_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2 1 . Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2 2.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart III HAIR __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 94 1 . Introduction ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 94 2. General Information / Interface __________________________________________________________________________________________________ 95 3.
IV CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © Pavel Kaplun - www.kaplun.
2 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart Welcome to CINEMA 4D R13 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. © www.station-nullzwei.de 1.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Interface 3 No matter if you’re just checking CINEMA 4D out or if you already own your own copy of CINEMA 4D, you already know about the incredible things CINEMA 4D can do. We have been working very closely with our customers for several years now in order to satisfy their needs and wishes. This has lead to the creation and introduction of new functionality, according to their needs.
4 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Interface 2. General Information / Interface CINEMA 4D Release 13 offers many new functions that will again speed up and improve your workflow. Let’s start with the most important step - starting CINEMA 4D.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Interface 5 Clicking on the light blue Cube icon opens the parametric object group selection window, which contains all of CINEMA 4D’s available parameteric objects. It contains all of CINEMA 4D’s available predefined parametric objects. Click on the second icon to create a cube. Click and hold to see all available parametric objects. Note: After an object has been initially created it is a parametric object.
6 CINEMA 4D R13 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).
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 7 3. Sample Images © Raphael Rau - silverwing-vfx.de © www.bediff.com © www.kingcoma.
8 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © tectonic - www.tma-1.co.za © www.bediff.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Interface 9 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 divide the entire view panel into four views, giving you multiple viewports to use.
10 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © www.station-nullzwei.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials 11 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.
12 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials We will now create our own material. Open the QS_Material.c4d file. You can see in the Object Manager to the right that the object does not yet have a texture applied to it. Click on CREATE / NEW MATERIAL in the Material Manager at the lower left. 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials 13 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.
14 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials 15 If you own CINEMA 4D Visualize or CINEMA 4D Studio, you can render human skin realistically using Subsurface Scattering. By placing this shader in the Luminance channel (click on the small arrow next to Texture and select Subsurface Scattering from the Effects menu) 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.
16 Danel: Very good for simulating high-gloss finish. Banzi: Lets you depict various types of wood.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Materials 17 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. © christoph mensak, brown_eye_architects@gmx.
18 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Lighting © Christoph Mensak - brown_eye_architects@gmx.de 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Lighting 19 A 3-point lighting arrangement begins with setting a key light. As the name suggests, this light emits the main lighting for the scene and will cast the main shadows. Create a light object (Create / Light / Light). Name it Main Light (double-click on the name) in the Object Manager. CINEMA 4D has several different types of light sources. The Omni light will always be created by default. An Omni light emits from its center in all directions.
20 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – Lighting 21 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.
22 CINEMA 4D R13 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 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. Reduce the Intensity in the General menu to 40%.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Lighting 23 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.
24 © Dave Davidson - www.max3d.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © Benedict Campbell, www.benedict1.
26 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Lighting 6. Tips & Tricks © Raphael Rau - silverwing-vfx.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 R13 Quickstart – Lighting 27 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. Note that almost all image are copyright protected and cannot be used commercially. 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.
28 CINEMA 4D R13 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 3D 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. © www.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 29 2. General Information / Interface First take a look at the screenshot below: 1. Rendered Viewport 2. Texture Window (UV Mesh Editor Window) 6. Icon Palette (modes) 4. Attribute Manager Window 3. UV Manager 5. Object Manager and color settings Here you see one of the two standard layouts: BP UV Edit.
30 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 1. Viewport 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 R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 31 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 © Fredi Voß www.fredivoss.
32 CINEMA 4D R13 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 to give a more elephant-like look to his skin. Select the predefined standard layout BP UV Edit at the top right of CINEMA 4D’s main editor window.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 33 4. Quick Tutorial – First Painting Lesson At the bottom left of the Material Manager (in the Materials tab) you will find the textures we just created, right next to Mat. This is the default name for a new material. Of course you can rename the material if you like. The first texture 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).
34 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 35 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… …and select a pink color in the Color Manager. If necessary, increase the HyperNURBS subdivision. Activate the Raybrush Render View for RayBrush Painting in the active view in the Render menu (BodyPaint 3D main menu).
36 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 37 Rotate the view so you can see the eyelid from the top. Activate the Raybrush Render View for RayBrush Painting mode and set the brush size to 10. Switch to the color layer’s Color menu and set the color to a medium gray which will be the base color for our eyelid. Now go to the Bump layer’s color preview and set the color to black (both color layers are located in the Materials tab under the letters C and B + pencil symbol).
38 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 5. Tips & Tricks A very helpful function can be found in CINEMA 4D’s preferences (Ctrl+E). In the BodyPaint 3D menu you will find the function Project On Invisible Parts, which, when activated, allows you to paint on both sides of an object in projection paint mode. Let’s assume you want to color the arm of a figure or sprinkle color on the entire figure.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 39
40 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer © Christoph Mensak - brown_eye_architects@gmx.de 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. 1. General Information / Interface As soon as you open the Render Settings (main menu: Render / Edit Render Settings...) you will find parameters such as Global Illumination by clicking on the Effect...
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 41 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.
42 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer Depth of field, highlight and glow are additional post effects available in CINEMA 4D Visualize and Studio. You will find them in the Render Settings under Effect. Further settings for depth of field can be made in each camera’s attribute settings. A post effect will first be calculated after an image has been completely rendered. You can imagine it as a layer which is placed on top of the image after it has been rendered. © Robin Richter www.rr-graphix.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 43 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. 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).
44 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 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. To save your renders or render a full animation, select Render / Render to Picture Viewer or press Shift+R. The picture viewer will open in a separate window in which the scene will be rendered.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 45 You use the Render Settings (main menu: Render / Edit Render Settings...) to determine what our final image will look like. Size, quality, single image or animation can be set here. If your rendered objects appear pixelated at their edges, this is a result of the anti-aliasing settings. This term refers to how smoothly an edge is rendered. Open the file QS_Render_01.c4d. In the Render Settings menu, set anti-aliasing to None and render the scene.
46 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer If, for example, 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 900 x 1500 will be more than enough. Animation is a different story. The frame rate, which is also editable in the Output menu of the Render Settings, plays an important role in animation.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 3. Sample Images Here you can see what the CINEMA 4D renderer can do! © Molooh Studios © www.oliverhecke.
48 © www.transluszent.de © Jamie Martin - www.jamiemartindesign.co.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 49 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.
50 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 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 / Edit Render Settings). Click on the Effect... button and Global Illumination. Switch to the Render Settings’ Options menu.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – CINEMA 4D Renderer 51 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 (Create / Object / 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.
52 CINEMA 4D R13 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. 5. 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – ProjectionMan 53 Load a bitmap image in place of a color into the Luminance channel of a material that you use to illuminate a Global Illumination scene. The objects will then be lit with the colors of the image. This looks especially good if you use HDRIs. HDRI is an image format that contains special image luminance information and is thus an excellent choice for this effect. You can find information about HDRIs online.
54 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – ProjectionMan Open the file, QS_PMan_Start.c4d 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 R13 Quickstart – ProjectionMan 55 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.
56 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – ProjectionMan 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 R13 Quickstart – ProjectionMan 57 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.
58 © Uli Staiger - www.dielichtgestalten.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © DECC SC Project, Arditti + RDT Arquitectos, Developer: Grupo Rouz 59
60 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 61 2. General Information / Interface Sketch and Toon is a render effect. As you would expect you can find its settings in the Render Settings (Render / Edit Render Settings). As soon as you have selected Sketch and Toon from the Effect button’s menu a wide array of settings is put at your disposal. These parameters let you determine the basic look of your Sketch and Toon renderings. There’s more. You will also find Sketch and Toon elsewhere within CINEMA 4D.
62 CINEMA 4D R13 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 63 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.com) © Pavel Zoch © Glenn Frey www.bonewire.
64 © www.areyouplanning.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 65 © Michail Stehle Design 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.
66 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon Create a new material in the Material Manager (Create / New Material). Deactivate the Color and Specular channels in the Basic tab of the Attribute Manager. Activate Luminance and switch to the Luminance tab. Click on the small arrow to the right of the word Texture. Select Sketch / Cel. The cel shader is a type of gradient shader.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 67 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. Activate the Sketch and Toon effect in the Render Settings. Switch to the Shading tab and select Background in the drop-down menu next to the word Object.
68 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 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. Deactivate Allow Lines in the Attribute Manager.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 69 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.
70 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Character Tools 71 © Takagi Leon Character Tools This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the CINEMA 4D character 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.
72 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Character Tools 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Character Tools 73 2. General Information First, we will explain a few basics about character rigging in CINEMA 4D. CINEMA 4D works with a Joint system. Simply put, this system lets you assign joints and appropriate locations that will in turn be linked to the mesh and used to rotate and move your character. The mesh will follow the joints to which it is linked and the character can be animated.
74 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Character Tools You can weight joints by selecting them and painting directly onto the mesh using the Weight tool. While the Weight tool is active, the mesh is displayed black and the currently painted weighting is shown in white. The joint now knows it should affect the white painted parts of the mesh only. In the active Weight tool mode, weighting is shown for the selected joints. Each joint has its own weighting.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion 75 3. Working with the Auto Rigger and CMotion 1. Creating the Basic Rig Character rigging for 3D animation is one of the most complex and difficult disciplines in the field of 3D graphics. There is still no one-stop solution available but with CINEMA 4D R13, rigging and animating characters is no longer a book with seven seals. Several new functions and tools have been added that make working with characters much easier! 2.
76 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion What we will do first is put the new character system in place. Select Character from the Character menu. A symbol with the same name will appear in the Object Manager. The newly created object will appear as a gray arrow in the Viewport. In the Attribute Manager you will see the Character object’s initial settings. Numerous parameters are available here. When a Character object is created, its Object tab is active by default.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion 77 Before we continue, lets take a look at our model in the perspective view. The parts of the rig that we have created are not scaled in line with the character model. They are far too small. This is not a problem at this stage because the adjustment and re-positioning of the rig’s individual components will be done later, after all components have been generated. In the next step we will generate the legs.
78 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion First we will position the rig relative to the mesh. Select the Pelvis object in the Object Manager and use the Move tool to move it upwards until is centered on the character’s pelvis. Don’t forget to check the position in the side view to make sure the Pelvis object is centered there as well. Use the Scale tool to enlarge the rig to match the mesh. Don’t worry if individual components are too short or too long – we will fine-tune these as well.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion 79 Position the wrist next to the cufflinks. Six joints are located because this is where the fingers will be generated later. To locate the right joint, right-click on the wrist and select the right joint from the list that appears (…Hand_con+). Now we just have to adjust the fingers and the head and our rig will be ready to be bound to the character’s mesh. 4.
80 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion Important for the animators are the Controllers. These Controllers represent virtual strings of a marionette – which our character de-facto is. Hence, we only need these Controllers to be visible. Too many elements in the Project would clutter up the view and slow your workflow. You can modify the visible state of the rig’s components in the Attribute Manager’s Display tab.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion 81 Set the Stride value to 60cm. Now turn your attention to the list of objects in the Objects menu below and select one of the legs (L_Leg or R_Leg) in the list. A set of parameters will be made available below. Below the selected Leg in the list you will see the Lift (P.Y.) parameter. This is an Action that, as the name says, creates a lifting motion so the corresponding foot rises during the walk motion.
82 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Auto Rigger and CMotion 6. The Finishing Touches Play the animation again and observe how the arms swing back and forth. We have created a simple walk cycle animation, which of course can still be fine-tuned quite a bit. You can, for example, make the character actually walk past the camera instead of having it walk in place.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Pose Morph 83 4. Quick Tutorial – 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.
84 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Pose Morph 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 (To drag the eyebrows farther down for a “mean” look, the points at the end of each eyebrow must be deselected and each eyebrow rotated separately.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Pose Morph 85 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.
86 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Pose Morph 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © Jana Rot, www.rot.
88 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Cloth 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Cloth 89 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 Mesh / Commands / Subdivide from the main menu. 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.
90 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Cloth In the dresser tab you will find everything you need to make clothes fit. The other tabs 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 R13 Quickstart – Cloth 91 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. After setting the Init. State, click on Relax. Now other forces, such as gravity, will have an effect on the T-shirt which makes it sag on the character’s shoulders. Place a Cloth NURBS into the scene (Simulate / Cloth / CNURBS). Make the T-shirt a child of this object.
92 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Cloth Set the Thickness to 1 or 2 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. Now the Cloth NURBS object will concentrate on the thickness of the cloth and the HyperNURBS object will take care of the T-shirt’s edges. 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.uk © Beto Prado - www.animalda.com.
94 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR © Marcelo Biscola - www.artnetdigital.com.br 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 95 HAIR’s only limitation is your fantasy, whether it’s creating fur for a rodent, feathers for a ruffled chicken, the perfect English lawn or the newest hairstyles. And, HAIR is fast – what else have you come to expect from CINEMA 4D? HAIR renders immense amounts of hair with unmatched speed. The variations that HAIR offers are so great that any hairstyle can be created, from smooth and straight to curly or just about anything you can imagine. 2.
96 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR HAIR’s own IK makes sure hair moves realistically. Even some of the CINEMA 4D particle modifiers, e.g. wind, can be combined with HAIR and the HAIR dynamics ensure hair behaves naturally. And if you want to transplant hair, that’s no problem, either. HAIR lets you easily transplant hair roots.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 3.
98 CINEMA 4D R13 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. © Kaan Özsoy - www.idapictures.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 99 First, open the file QS_Hair.c4d. HAIR can be applied to either an entire object or a polygon selection only. Since we want to give Hairbert’s face a different fur than the rest of his body we will only select those polygons to which our first fur type (long fur) should be applied. Go to the Object Manager and select the Bear_mesh object. Make sure the Use Polygon Tool is active in the Mode Palette at the left of your interface.
100 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 101 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.
102 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 103 Switch to the left view (by pressing F3) in the editor window and activate the Cut tool (Simulate / Hair Tools / Cut). Next, deactivate Visible Only in the Attribute Manager to make sure hair that is not visible will be cut as well. Now set Form to Circle and let’s start cutting. To cut Hairbert’s hair simply click and drag over the blue tips of his hair.
104 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR After you’ve had your fun with Hairbert’s hair and it has the look you want switch to the perspective view in the editor window and position Hairbert so you can take a good look at him. Render the view and see what Hairbert looks like (main menu: Render / Render View). 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 105 The properties of Herbert’s hair still have to be edited extensively so let’s start by double-clicking the HAIR material in the Materials Manager. This will open the material’s dialog window with all its options and channels. 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.
106 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR Render the scene once again. The result should look like the next image: 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.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 107 Render the scene again. The result should look like this: 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.
108 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 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. Select the second of the five triangles with the red border next to Bear_mesh in the Object Manager. In the Attribute Manager you will see Hair Short in the Name text field. Click on Restore Selection or double-click on the triangle below this text field.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – HAIR 109 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.
110 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 111 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.it 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.
112 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – MoGraph The possibilities are endless! Even dynamic effects such as objects falling and colliding can easily be handled by MoGraph. 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 MoGraph can be accessed in the CINEMA 4D main menu.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 113 • 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.
114 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – Sample Images 3.
116 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 117 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.
118 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 119 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.
120 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 121 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.
122 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – MoGraph We‘ve made a few modifications to our scene but it‘s still not finished. But we are only two clicks away from doing so! Right-click on the Cloner object and the bowl object, respectively, and assign each a Rigid Body tag (Simulation Tags / Rigid Body). Note: The workflow in CINEMA 4D Studio differs slightly from that of CINEMA 4D Broadcast.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – MoGraph 123 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 Project Settings... Dynamics tab.
124 CINEMA 4D R13 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 R13 Quickstart – Dynamics 125 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.
126 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Dynamics Drag the wheels_back object into the Object A field and drag the car object into the Object B field. This will create the links for all three objects. The object Connector_front must be selected so the wheels_front object can replace the wheels_back object in the Object A field (drag & drop). Compare your Viewport and Object Manager with the screenshots below - they should look the same.
CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Dynamics 127 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 Simulation Tags / Rigid 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.
128 CINEMA 4D R13 Quickstart – Sample Images © Stefan Haberkorn - www.vi-3d.
