Quickstart Manual
CINEMA 4D Release 15 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.
Contents Preface _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ IV Welcome to CINEMA 4D R15___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2 1. Introduction ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2.
MoGraph ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 109 1. Introduction __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. General Information/Interface __________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3.
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.
© Dimitris Katsafouros 1
Welcome to CINEMA 4D 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 support/documentation page (www.maxon.net). © Glen Johnson 1.
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. These ideas and concepts are then creatively implemented to satisfy the needs of our customers and those of the 3D markets.
Rendered Viewport Icon Palette (tools) Object Manager Icon Palette (modes) Attribute Manager Viewport (perspective view) Material Manager Coordinates Manager 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. Before we proceed we will increase the cube‘s subdivision. At the bottom right of the Attributes Manager you will find the Segments X, Y and Z settings. Increase each value to 3. Note: After an object has been initially created it is a parametric object. An object can only be modified as a whole and not its individual surfaces (an exception are special deformers from the Deformer menu).
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 Subdivision Surfaces mesh, with its finer subdivision, will follow the point being dragged (The image below shows the same Cube object - one with Subdivision Surfaces and one without). If the polygon object were made up of such fine subdivision modeling, it would be much more complicated.
© Clement Vaucelle © Joe Yan (Shanghai IHDT) – www.ih-dt.tv © Erdal Ugur – www.apachedesign.
© Soonyup Song – leoncafe1@gmail.com © Josh Grundmeier – www.fuseanimation.
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. Each of the four views has its own little rectangle which, when clicked, enlarges the respective window.
© Dimitris Katsafouros © Kay Tennemann – mostyle.
3. 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.
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. In the Basic tab you can determine which channels should be activated for this material.
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.
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. Tip: If you want to undo an accidental change to the view just press Ctrl + Shift + Z (Mac: Cmd + Shift + Z).
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.
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. © Marco Dattilo – www.marcodattilo.
© Enrique Rueda – www.amscenes.com 4. 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.
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.
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 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.
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: OPTIONS/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.
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 %. This area light illuminates the figure from a different angle and softens the contrast somewhat. It won’t cast a shadow since this would cause crossing of the shadows and make the object look bad. The scene is now pretty evenly lit, but we want to give it a little more pep.
That completes our classic 3-point lighting arrangement. Now the real work starts. If the scene has a background, which is often the case, it will have to be lit as well. With the proper use of omni lights details in the scene can be brought to light very nicely. But don’t overdo it. With good lighting, less is often more. Only add lights when necessary and if the scene can actually benefit from them.
Sample Images © www.kingcoma.
5. Tips and Tricks © Uli Staiger – www.dielichtgestalten.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.
• 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. Learning a software is only a matter of time. A good 3D artist has the ability to use software as a tool that helps him realize his ideas.
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. © Kaan Özsoy – www.idapictures.com 1.
Using the UV-tools you can relax and stretch your UV-mesh, no matter how complex it is. Put simply, a UVmesh is a second impression of a polygon mesh that projects the texture onto a polygon object. The days of 2D texturing are over and you can finally concentrate on what’s important in texturing: creativity. Everything that took up so much time with 2D texturing is now done by BodyPaint 3D and you can deliver your projects faster.
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. 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.
© Stefan Tsvetkov – render3.cghub.com © Valentino Szemere – www.apaxcreativi.ch © Victor M. Jiménez – alvi3d.blogspot.
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. Click on the BodyPaint 3D Wizard Icon so we can make the necessary preparations to the texture (brush symbol with white stars).
3. 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). Now Select the Use UV Polygon Edit Tool symbol.
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.
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 Subdivision Surfaces subdivision for the Viewport because the eye image has a very low resolution without Subdivision Surfaces. Activate the Raybrush Render View for RayBrush Painting in the active view in the Render menu (BodyPaint 3D main menu).
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.
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).
• 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. This also goes for 4-point polygons when they converge into a trapezoid.
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© Marco Dattilo – www.marcodattilo.com 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... button.
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. 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. Within a light’s caustics menu it is possible to determine whether the light source should generate surface or volume caustics.
© Alberto “ThirdEye” Blasi 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.c4d to work through the following tutorial.
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).
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. When the image has been rendered select File/Save As. A further window will open.
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. You can plainly see pixelation along the wire now as well.
If, for example, you render a single image that will be printed with a resolution of 300 dpi on an 8.5 x 11 inch 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 3 x 5 inches, a render resolution of 900 x 1500 will be more than enough. For animation, the frame rate, which is also editable in the Output menu of the Render Settings, plays an important role in animation. The frame rate is the speed at which the animation plays.
© Bastien Grivet – www.grivetart.
© CreativeDirection Dinko Lacic – MTV Production AixSponza GmbH © Soonyup Song – leoncafe1@gmail.
3. 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. The room is lit by diffused (indirect) light.
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/Edit Render Settings). Click on the Effect... button and Global Illumination.
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. Copy the sky material (Ctrl + drag into the Material Manager) and switch to the Luminance channel of the new material.
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. 4. Tips and 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.
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.
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 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. Of course you can use your favorite colors if you want. After you have finished modifying your image in Photoshop, save the image.
Play the animation. As you can see, ProjectionMan projects the texture correctly onto all three buildings throughout the animation – and that without having to texture each individual object. Now we will take ProjectionMan a step further and add a few windows to the side of our buildings. Normally, painting windows onto the surfaces at these angles would be quite difficult but all we have to do here is add a camera to project the desired image information onto the correct surfaces.
We will point this camera frontally at the light blue surfaces (side view). To create the camera, switch the Viewport to the Right view (Viewport menu: Cameras/Right) and center the view if needed. Create a new camera (main menu: Create/Camera/Camera). Rename the camera Camera right in the Object Manager (double-click on its name). Switch to this camera’s view by clicking on the + symbol next to its name.
© www.meusch.com © www.segnoprogetto.
© Victor M. Jiménez – alvi3d.blogspot.
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.
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. Take a look at the Material Manager.
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.
© Marco Weiss – www.black-graphics.de © P. Hofmann, M. Hilkert – pexel@3dup.
© www.areyouplanning.
© Michael Stehle Design 3. 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. We will test the cel shader on the second object and give it cartoon-like colors.
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. Tip: A material can also be edited by simply selecting (single click) it in the Material Manager. The material‘s settings will be displayed in the Attributes Manager at the right of the interface.
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.
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. We’ve done it! Three objects, each with completely different render styles coexisting peacefully in the same scene. 4.
© www.station-nullzwei.
© 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.
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. Anyone who is serious about character animation should stick these rules to the ceiling over their bed (and get rid of whatever else that is up there now).
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. To be able to correctly move your character a rig consisting of controllers must be set up that serve as handles for the animator.
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.
3. Working with the Auto Rigger and CMotion 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 R15, 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! Preparation Start CINEMA 4D and make sure you are using the Standard layout for the GUI.
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. This tab contains 4 menus: Build, Adjust, Binding, Animate and represent the 4 steps required to complete an animatable character. Directly below these tabs is the Template selection menu in which you can select the type of character rig you want. You can select from Advanced Biped, Biped, Quadruped and many more.
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. If you Cmd/Ctrl + click on the button, two legs will be generated.
First we will position the rig relative to the mesh. Select the Root 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 Root 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.
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. Binding the Rig to the Character’s Mesh Before you start binding the rig to the mesh it would certainly be a good idea to save your Project.
Creating a Simple Walk Animation We have now prepared our character so it can be animated. Select the Character object in the Object Manager and switch to the Object tab’s Animate menu in the Attribute Manager. Click on the Add Walk button at the right. This will assign a CMotion object to the Character object, which lets you generate cyclical animations or movements such as a walk cycle.
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. CINEMA 4D will automatically assigne a Lift (P.Y) action to the legs in accordance with the previously selected template. A set of parameters will be made available below. In this case you will see the Lift function as a Child object of the L_Leg (or R_Leg).
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. Copy and paste the Push (P.Z) action to the other arm. To tone down the movement we have to modify one setting for the arms. Currently, each arm moves with the leg on its own side, which is far from a natural walk behavior. To change this, select the L_Arm object in the CMotion menu and set its Phase value to + 25 %.
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.
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. For our tutorial, however, we can simply drag all points downwards simultaneoulsy.).
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.
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.
© Ki Yong Sim – sim4130@naver.
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. Open the file QS_Cloth_Start.c4d.
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. The Cloth engine is very easy to use.
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. After setting the Init. State, click on Relax.
Cloth Surface acts similar to a Subdivision Surfaces 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 Surface fabric objects. Set the Thickness to 1 or 2 in the Attribute Manager and the subdivision to 0. Create a Subdivision Surfaces object and make the Cloth Surface object to a Child object of this Subdivision Surfaces object.
© S. Scatola – www.boxy.co.
© 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.
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. 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. Among the tools HAIR offers are Brush, Comb, Scissors and more.
© Johan-Bernd Zweverink Sample Images 95
3. Quick Tutorial: Fur © Kaan Özsoy – www.idapictures.
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. 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.
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.
When hair is added, a corresponding material will be created automatically in the Materials Manager. The HAIR object is located at the top of the object list in the Object Manager. 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.
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. Alternately you can start the Dynamics calculation in the HAIR object by pressing the Relax button in the Dynamics tab’s Animation group (Click this button after the animation has been set to frame 100).
To prevent this from happening select Simulate/Hair Edit/Set As Dynamics in the main menu. Now we can cut and style Hairbert’s fur. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. It’s that simple! Now take what you have learned here and experiment with adding hair to other objects, transitioning from long hair to short hair, creating different styles, even creating grass and more. The only limitation HAIR has is your own imagination.
4. Tips and 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.
MoGraph CINEMA 4D’s MoGraph features make it easy to achieve complex-looking effects. MoGraph is available in CINEMA 4D Broadcast and Studio. © CreativeDirection Dinko Lacic – MTV Production AixSponza GmbH 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.
2. General Information/Interface MoGraph can be accessed in the CINEMA 4D main menu. In most cases, a Cloner object will be required in order to create a MoGraph scene. The Cloner object contains all functions required for the creation and depiction of clones. The Cloner object is then augmented by the various MoGraph Effectors.
Spline Effector You can use the Spline Effector to link spline-based shapes or objects to the Cloner object. Clones can be aligned to create text or morphed into text or other shapes. The image below shows how a Spline Effector, with Falloff set to Linear, (moved in the direction of its own Z-axis) was used to morph a row of donut clones into a helix shape.
Target Effector The Target Effector lets clones be aligned to a target object. 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.
© Vincent – www.vincentlondon.com © Kay Tennemann – mostyle.
3. 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 1 000 clones that follow a target object without the use of MoGraph? Well, we won’t waste any time trying to answer that question. Instead, we will show you how easily it can be done using MoGraph.
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 left and right fields). The Y-value can remain unchanged since we haven’t cloned the cube in the Y direction. Your scene should now look like this: All we need now is a Target Object and a Target Effector.
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. Create a sphere and set its radius from 100 cm to 5 cm in the Attribute Manager. The sphere now has to be made the Target Object.
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.
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 %.
4. 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. In this tutorial we will briefly explain how this very powerful tool works.
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. 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.
• 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.
© Kaan Özsoy – www.idapictures.com 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. Since the general setup of a Dynamics scene is similar to that of a MoDynamics scene we will not simply let objects collide, as we did in the MoDynamics chapter.
Open the file QS_Dynamics_start.c4d. The scene contains an oldtimer, 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.
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. 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.
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.
Sculpting Welcome to the Quickstart sculpting tutorial. With the introduction of CINEMA 4D R14, a powerful new sculpting tool was made available to users and offers comprehensive organic modeling features. In this tutorial we will show you how to get started with the CINEMA 4D sculpting tool. We will show you how to create the object in the image below. At the left is the base object. It contains practically no details and looks quite bland.
© Augenpulver – http://www.augenpulver-design.
Open the file ‘Sculpting_Turtle.c4d’. At the top right of your interface, select Sculpting from the Layout drop-down menu. To begin sculpting we must first select and subdivide the object. If you begin by creating a parametric primitive (cube, torus, etc.) you must make it editable before proceeding. This can be done by clicking on the Make Editable icon or by pressing the „c“ key. Click on the Objects tab at the right of the Object Manager. Select the object ‘head’ in the Object Manager.
This will disable the wire frame display. Any brush stroke we make can be undone by simply selecting Undo. Generally speaking, a graphics tablet is better suited for sculpting than a mouse because it lets you control your strokes more precisely. We will now add a Sculpt Layer to our base object. In the Sculpting Layers tab, select Add Layer from the Layers menu. Next, select the Pull brush and switch to the Stencil tab in the Attribute Manager. Drag the texture Turtleskin.
The Stencil you just selected will appear in the Viewport. You can adjust its transparency in the AttributeManager as you see fit but a value of 0.5 is a good value with which to start. Enable the Tile X and Tile Y options in the Attribute Manager (Stencil tab). This ensures that the Stencil will be applied across the object’s entire surface. Finally, we have to adjust the Stencil’s size. The structure applied by the brush is always in relation to the size of the Stencil/object.
Next, switch to the side view in the Viewport, make sure that you are on Layer 1 in the Sculpting Layers tab, and paint across the turtle’s head with the brush. Apply the Stencil using different perspective views and make sure that you only change the camera’s angle of view to the object and not its distance from the object. Otherwise the Stencil will be applied in different sizes. When you’re finished, press the Q key to hide the Stencil (and again to make it visible).
Reduce the brush size to 10 and paint over the lip and eye lid regions. The result should look like this: In the next step we will apply a Mask. Click on the Mask button at the bottom of the Sculpt Palette. Add a new Layer as you did before, leave the Size value set to 10 and set Pressure to 5 %. Make sure you are on Layer 2 and paint across the turtle’s neck to create a surface similar to the one in the image below.
Next, click on the Invert Mask button in the Sculpt Palette and then select the Pull brush. Set the brush’s Size to 50 and its Pressure to 5 %. Paint across the surface of the head as you did before. You will notice that only those regions not affected by the Mask are modified by the Pull brush. Smoothing tip: While smoothing the folds along the throat we don’t want the structure on Layer 1 to be affected. This can be prevented by simply hiding Layer 1 for the duration of the sculpting process.
The final result should look similar to the image below: We will apply one additional brush to complete our turtle’s head: The Knife brush. Delete the Mask by clicking on the Clear Mask button in the Sculpt Palette. Alternatively you can simply hide the Mask in the Sculpting Layers tab, which will make it available for future use. Add a new Layer and select the Knife brush. Set its Pressure to 10 % and its Pinch value to 0.25.
This completes our turtle’s sculpted head! Baking an object that contains objects with millions of polygons can reduce the number of polygons to a manageable amount and will produce exactly the same result for rendering! Baking generates Displacement and Normal textures that, simply put, subdivides the geometry during rendering and lets you work with low-res objects in the Viewport while maintaining filigree details for rendering. Baking will not affect the sculpted surfaces.
© Toni Ramon Sanchez © Josh Grundmeier – www.fuseanimation.
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