CINEMA 4D RELEASE 11 3D FOR THE REAL WORLD Quickstart Manual
I CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart CINEMA 4D Release 11 Quickstart Manual Programming Plugin programming Product management Christian Losch, Philip Losch, Richard Kurz, Tilo Kühn, Thomas Kunert, David O’Reilly, Cathleen Bastian, Per-Anders Edwards, Paul Everett, Aleksander Stompel,Sven Behne, Wilfried Behne, Michael Breitzke, Kiril Dinev, Reinhard Hintzenstern, Eduardo Olivares, Nina Ivanova, Markus Jakubietz, Hendrik Steffen, Jens Uhlig, Michael Welter, Thomas Zeier Marco Tillmann, Bernd Lutz Quickstart writer
II CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart Contents Welcome to CINEMA 4D . .................................................................... 2 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2 2. What’s new in CINEMA 4D R11 ......................................................................................... 3 3. General Information / Interface ....................................................................................
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart III 4. Quick Tutorial – Outlines . .............................................................................................. 126 5. Quick Tutorial – Shaders and Tags ................................................................................. 130 6. Tips & Tricks . ................................................................................................................. 134 Welcome To NET Render (Optional module) . ................................................
IV CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart Welcome To MoGraph (Optional module) ........................................................................... 214 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 215 2. General Information / Interface ..................................................................................... 215 3. Sample Images ........................................................................................
© Chen Shih Wei - Sunglow Design Studio
2 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart 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. © Dave Brinda - www.brinda.com 1. Introduction No matter if you’re just checking CINEMA 4D out or if you already own your own copy of CINEMA 4D or one of its complete XL or Studio Bundle packages, you already know about the incredible things CINEMA 4D can do.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What’s new in R11 3 2. What’s new in CINEMA 4D R11 Before we get started with the Quickstart Manual we would like to give you a brief overview of what’s new in CINEMA 4D Release 11. Once again, CINEMA 4D is brimming with new and innovative functionality and innumerable improvements to make your 3D life easier and improve workflow. R11 now offers instant answers to almost any question regarding CINEMA 4D functionality with its integrated help system.
4 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What‘s new in R11 Your character’s walk cycle has been completed and it can walk from point A to point B. After viewing the animation you decide the character’s head should move more dynamically. So you create a new layer and record the keyframes for this more dynamic head movement. After you have finished you can play all layers simultaneoulsy or turn individual layers off (and on again). Not happy with the new head movement? No problem.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What’s new in R11 COLLADA Import / Export The COLLADA file format is a 3D file format from the Khronos Group. Originally created by Sony Computer Entertainment for use with the Playstation 3 and portable Playstation formats, this increasingly popular format (in addition to the existing FBX format) is being supported by a growing number of applications and has also found its way into CINEMA 4D R11.
6 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What‘s new in R11 Projection Man This powerful tool is especially interesting for matte painters but also for everyone who would like to save loads of time texturing a large scene. Example: Your animation consists of your camera briefly panning across a cityscape from left to right. Large cities generally have the irritating habit of consisting of hundreds to thousands of buildings.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What’s new in R11 BodyPaint 3D R4.0 BodyPaint 3D has been given various new functionalities to make working with textures even easier and more versatile. Among these additions are the arrangement of Photoshop-adapted tools and the addition of the Blur, Sharpen and Colorize tools. The Brush, Clone, Dodge, Burn and Erase tools now have their own separate brush settings.
8 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – What‘s new in R11
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 9 3. General Information / Interface CINEMA 4D Release 11 offers many new functions that will again speed up and improve your workflow. Let’s start with the most important step - starting CINEMA 4D.
10 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface The Editor Window shows all objects contained in the scene, for example polygon objects, cameras, lights and bones and other deformers. You can render any view at any time to check your work. A Group Icon contains several attributes for one group which can be accessed by clicking with the left mouse button on the main icon. The group icon differs from normal icons in that you will see a small arrow in the lower-right corner.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 11 The Object Manager contains all of the scene’s objects. You use the Object Manager to set up a hierarchy, assemble objects, set tags for objects (small icons to the right of the Object Manager let you assign an object certain attributes), or to name objects. Included are polygon objects, lights, cameras, bones, deformers, splines and null objects (objects without geometry). The Attribute Manager manages the attributes of each object or tool.
12 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface The Material Manager is used to display and manage all of a scene’s materials and 3D shaders. Textures and parameters can be modified in the Attribute Manager or the Material Editor. Double-click the material to open the Material Editor to make changes to its individual material channels. Illumination strength, type of specular, strength of bump and more can be adjusted here as well. We’ll cover this in detail in a later chapter.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 13 Now we will concentrate more on CINEMA 4D’s icon palettes to get you a little more familiar with them. The following explanation will refer to the colored icons on the next screenshot. The image shows the left icon palette. At the very top you can see the previously mentioned predefined layouts. Below that we have the (green) “Make Object Editable” button. This function lets a primitive be transformed using points, polygon or edges.
14 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface Now we will turn our attention to the most-used icons on the top palette. On the left you will find the “Undo / Redo“ arrows (yellow). This lets you reverse or repeat each step. You can determine how many steps CINEMA 4D lets you undo by changing the presets in the main menu (edit / preferences / document). Next to the Undo / Redo icons you will see the “Live Selection“ (pink) tool. This lets you select your points, edges or polygons for editing.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 15 This function can be very useful in modeling or animating your scene. Now to the next group of three, the (green) Render Icons. The first function (Render Active View), with a clapboard as a symbol, renders the image in the editor view. The rendering will be made using the settings you have specified, with exception of image size and several post effects.
16 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface The term “spline“ has its origin in ship building. The wooden slats which were elastic enough to conform to the shape of the ship’s hull were called splines. In the 3D world splines can be defined as “point-based curves“. A spline “follows” several previously defined points while still retaining a curved form. This group window offers several tools for drawing splines, as well as predefined shapes from which to choose.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 17 If the polygon object were made up of such fine subdivision modeling, it would be much more complicated. You would pull one point and only one point would be moved. All other surrounding points would retain their position. You would have to move each one individually in order to achieve the desired shape. Haven’t quite understood? No problem, in part 2 of our Quick Tutorial you will try modeling like this yourself so you can learn the functions first-hand.
18 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface The proper lighting of a scene is at least as important as the scene itself. You can make a better impression with simple models and great lighting than you can with a fantastic model lit by a default light. We’ll go more into detail about that later. Here you will find camera objects, the sun object and the environment object, among others (adds a general color and / or fog to the scene).
19 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Interface 4. Sample Images This is the “ooohs and ahhhs!” section. Take a look at these images and let them inspire you a little before we move on to the hands-on part of this tutorial. © Chris McLaughlin © Milan Soukup © G. Ferrero Moya gferrerom@gmail.com © Joe Yan dr_heyjoe@hotmail.
20 © Chris McLaughlin © Kevin Capizzi CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects © Anders Kjellberg, www.dogday-design.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects 21 5. Quick Tutorial – Arranging Objects In order to give you a feeling of how CINEMA 4D works we will begin with the simple creation of a couple of basic objects. Create 13 cubes and one sphere using the main menu (objects / primitive / cube / sphere) or the group icon “Add Cube Object“. “13 cubes“ may give you the impression that we are preparing to create a mammoth project but don’t worry, we are going to arrange the cubes into a little figure.
22 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects As you can see in the editor window, only one cube is visible. That’s because all cubes are located at the same coordinates and are the same size, with the sphere in the center. Of course we will want to change this state now, but first a quick introduction to navigating the editor window. How do I rotate and move my point of view? Simple. Take a glance at the top right corner of the editor window.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects 23 Each of the axis‘ arrows can be selected and dragged in its respective direction. This prevents the object from being dragged in the wrong direction in the editor view (as opposed to clicking on the object itself and dragging it). It is often impossible to see in which direction an object is being dragged in a 3D view. A similar method of moving an object in a single direction is the previously mentioned locking of a specific axis in the command palette.
24 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects If you prefer, you can switch to a four-editor mode (click the little rectangle at the top right of the editor window). If the objects are displayed as wire frame objects you can switch to “Quick Shading“ or “Gouraud Shading“ under “Display“ in the editor’s menu. Now let’s get to work. Here’s a screenshot of the figure from the front for reference. After you have arranged the cubes it still looks nothing like a “human character“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects 25 Using the orange handles, select the cubes that make up the arms and adjust their size and position as shown in the next screenshots. If you want to scale all cubes of the arms at once you can do this as follows: with the shift button pressed, select the objects “Lowerarm_L“, Upperarm_R“, Lowerarm_R“ and “Upperarm_R“ and press “C“ on your keyboard to convert the objects and scale them with the “Scale“ function along the Y and X axis.
26 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects This should be no problem with the knowledge you have gained up to this point. To squash the legs, for example, you can squash several objects at once instead of each one individually (as was the case with the arms). When you’re finished select the objects “Upperleg_R“, “Lowerleg_R“ and “Foot_R“. Once they are highlighted in white in the Object Manager press the “Alt+G“ key on your keyboard.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Arranging Objects 27 After you have selected the “Rotate“ function you can select the axis rings of the rotation sphere and rotate the object into position. Try changing the figure’s position by using these different “moving“ functions. If necessary, group objects into a Null object or select several objects at once in order to bring them into position.
28 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Modeling © Carlos Agell, homepage.mac.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Modeling 29 6. Quick Tutorial – Modeling This is the most important part of this tutorial: How is a model built? CINEMA 4D R11 has numerous tools that make modeling even easier and greatly simplify workflow. A helpful function for quick navigation is the “General Popup“ which you can activate by pressing “V“ on your keyboard. A circular menu lets you choose from several menus in which sub-menus appear when the cursor is placed over them.
30 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Modeling Repeat this procedure to create another square on the top of the cube. Create a HyperNURBS object using the top command palette and make the cube a sub-object of the HyperNURBS object. This will serve to subdivide our polygon object without us having to subdivide the original mesh. (Select the cube in the Object Manager and drag it onto the HyperNURBS object and let go when the little arrow points down.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Modeling 31 Grab the blue Z-axis in the editor window and drag it down until a relative large indentation has been made. Rotate your view until you have a good view of the underside of the cube and switch to the “Use Point Tool“ mode. Now, using the “Live Selection“ tool, select all four points on the underside, switch to the side view and drag these four points using the green Y-axis – drag them until the four inner points of the indentation can be seen.
32 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Modeling If you created the indentation deep enough you may have already been able to see these four inner points. (In the next screenshot you can see an X-ray view of the cube in which you can see the hidden points very well. More on “X-ray“ at the end of this chapter). We want to round off the shape a little more and to do that we will select the inner points. Even though they are visible you won’t be able to select them with the “Live Selection“ tool.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Modeling 33 Click on the HyperNURBS obje c t in the Obje c t Manager and drag it down a bit while pressing the “Ctrl“ button on your keyboard. We have now duplicated the hemisphere. The same object is now visible in the Object Manager twice. Now select one of the HyperNURBS objects and select the “Rotate“ tool. You can now adjust the object’s angle by using the “Rotation Rings“ on the “Rotation Ball“. Drag the blue Z-axis ring down 150 degrees.
34 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Modeling Position both hemispheres as pictured using the “Move“ function: Here you can use the aforementioned locking axis function and switch to using the world / object coordinate system. Now create a sphere and move it into a position almost completely covering both hemispheres.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Modeling 35 Using the “Scale“ function you can resize the sphere to fit inside the two hemispheres. Congratulations! You have just created your first modeled object. You can increase the HyperNURBS object’s subdivision to give our model a smoother look. Simply select the respective HyperNURBS object you want to smooth and set the “Subdivision Editor“ in the Attribute Manager’s “Object“ menu to a higher value.
36 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials Our eye still looks a little blind. We’ll change this in the next chapter by adding a pupil texture. Before we do that, though, we’d like to give you some more modeling tips. Adjust the influence of HyperNURBS: Select both cubes and several polygons in the Object Manager. Press the “V“ key on your keyboard, select the “Structure“ menu and click on “Weight HyperNURBS“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials 37 Bump: Uses an optical trick to translate light and dark elements of a texture or a shader to simulate the height and depth of an uneven surface. Scars, wrinkles or scratches can be simulated using this channel. Normal: This channel is meant for use with “normal textures”. Normals give a low-res polygon object a hi-res look when RGB textures containing the required properties are applied.
38 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials 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“ menu you can determine which channels should be activated for this material. Go ahead and activate the Bump channel. As soon as you have done that a new menu button, “Bump“ will appear. Now click on the menu button “Color“ and load a texture into the material by clicking on the small arrow next to “Texture“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials 39 Double-click on the dot again and it will turn green, which makes the objects visible again independent of the visibility settings of any parent object. The dot directly below has the same function except that it affects the rendering.
40 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials We have just aligned the texture on the eyeball mesh by changing the “Length X“ and “Length Y“ 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“. This function is useful if you have inadvertently rotated the perspective view instead of the editor view.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials 41 We will give the material a green tone and lower its brightness to 50%. Check the box next to the “Bump“ channel. Click on the little light gray arrow in the check box next to the word “Texture“ and select “Noise“. Click on “Noise“ and on the following dialog page set the global and relative scale factors each to 30%. This reduces the size of the bump-noise mapping which will result in a finer depiction of the bump map.
42 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials The displacement channel deforms the polygon mesh according to the bright and dark areas of an image. Bright areas of the texture raise the polygon mesh and dark areas lower the mesh. This lets you create a wide variety of shapes without having to model such a complex surface, thus saving you a lot of time. The ornamental facade of a house or the relief of a sword handle are good examples. The possibilities are endless.
43 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials Here are some more tips about channels for you to try: Got dirt? CINEMA 4D does! Most objects in the real world are not as clean and immaculate as they might appear in CINEMA 4D. Real stone figures show signs of weathering over the years and dirt has settled in the wrinkles and cracks. You can simulate such “dirt“ very easily with CINEMA 4D (if you own the Advanced Render module) by selecting the “Ambient Occlusion” in the main page’s “Effects” menu..
44 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Materials 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Lighting © christoph mensak, brown_eye_architechts@gmx.de © www.c4d-jack.
46 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Lighting 8. 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 R11 Quickstart – Lighting 47 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. Render the scene.
48 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Lighting 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Lighting 49 Now we’re happy with our key light. Next we will create a more even lighting by brightening our figure a little from the other side. Create another light source in the scene and name it “Brightener“. Place it at the following coordinates: X= -360, Y=225, Z=-230 and at an angle of H=-20, P=-10 degrees. Select “Area“ as the type of light. Since the brightness of the lights in the scene is additive, we must “dim“ the brightener a little.
50 © Edwin Arellano, nedwin.cgsociety.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Animation 51 The position of an infinite light is irrelevant since it always lights your scene in the direction of the Z axis. This is why we will leave it at the point at which it was created. It gives our Amphibian an interesting color edge and sets him off of the background a little. Your scene’s mood can be changed by simply changing the color of some of the lights used. That completes our classic 3-point lighting arrangement. Now the real work starts.
52 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Animation 9. Quick Tutorial – Animation With but a few exceptions CINEMA 4D lets you animate every attribute of an object. This means you can alter any attribute in the Attribute Manager over time, whether it’s an object’s Y-coordinates, the color of a light or the strength of an explosion object. By animating different attributes you can easily add complex animation effects and visually attractive scenes.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Animation 53 Slide the time slider to frame 90. Move the cube along its blue Z-axis (back) a little. Click on the record button. Three more keys will appear on the timeline, this time at frame / time 90. When you move the time slider you can see the cube move between the two recorded points. Congratulations, you’ve animated the cube! Using the red button to record an object’s changing attributes is the quickest and easiest way to generate keys. There is a disadvantage, though.
54 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Animation We just told CINEMA 4D that the “Top Radius“ attribute of the cone at point 0 of the animation should have a value of 0. Of course we haven’t created an animation yet, only a starting point for the animation. The filled red circle in front of the attribute name tells us that a key has been set at this point in time in the animation. This is an easy way to see if an attribute has been animated. A further CTRL-click on this circle would delete the key. Go to frame 50.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Animation 55 The cone now knows that at frame / time 50 the top radius has to have a value of 200. All changes to this attribute between frames 0 and 50 will be “interpolated”. Interpolated means that CINEMA 4D automatically calculates the necessary values in between. This means the value at frame / time 25 of the animation will be exactly 100 since half the time equals half the altered value of the attribute. The attribute’s value changes over time – it has been animated.
56 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Animation At the end of the animation the cone looks completely different. A nice animation such as ours deserves dramatic lighting so let’s not dwell on the cone anymore and move on to other objects. Make sure you’re at frame / time zero. Create a light source (objects / scene / light) and position it at X=200, Y=250. Set the color to a light yellow in the “General“ menu of the Attribute Manager.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Animation 57 The cone metamorphosis now takes place in animated light. The color sliders change as the animation plays and CINEMA 4D interpolates the colors between the keys that were set. Our animation is becoming more and more interesting. That’s why we don’t want to see it from only one perspective, but we want to let a camera fly around it. Create a target camera (objects / scene / target camera). Rename the camera in the Object Manager to “Animated Camera“.
58 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Animation In order to view the scene from the new camera’s perspective simply switch to the camera “Animated Camera“ in the editor menu under “Cameras“. The camera is looking at the scene from above but is not living up to its name since it’s not animated – yet. We would like to animate the camera along a circular path around the scene. For this we will need a circle. Create a circular spline (objects / spline primitive / circle). Set the radius to 1000 and the plane to “XZ“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Animation 59 Now the camera is positioned on the circular path. If we play the animation, though, we will be disappointed because the camera doesn’t move even one millimeter. That’s because we haven’t yet told it to move along the circular path. Make sure you set the animation back to 0 and the circle is the active object. In the Attribute Manager under “Align to Spline“ you will see an attribute called “Position“ which is set to 0% by default. Set a key for this attribute.
60 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Animation © Benedict Campbell, www.benedict1.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Rendering 61 © Greg Brotherton, www.brotron.com 10. 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.
62 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Rendering We will render frame 20 using CINEMA 4D’s standard settings to give you a quick impression of how our final scene will look. This method of rendering is probably the most widely used since it can be used to make sure the scene “is on the right path“. Slide the time slider to frame 0 and press “Ctrl+R“ on your keyboard. The view has been rendered again. There are three ways you can render the active view. 1. Using the main menu 2. The keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+R“ 3.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 63 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 sphere and the cone in the Object Manager. Select the command (Render / Render Active Objects).
64 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Multi-Pass Rendering Now you can save any image to your hard drive so you can edit them in an image editing program or just send them to your grandma via email if you want. Rendering to the Picture Viewer has the additional advantage that you can continue working on your scene if the image should take a while to render. You have probably noticed that the image which is rendered to the picture viewer is very small. 320 x 240 pixels to be exact.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 65 You use the Render Settings to determine what our final image will look like Everything from size, quality, single image or animation can be set here. Render the image again in the editor window and take a closer look at the result. You can see the cone’s edge behind the sphere. It looks a little pixelated. You can see a similar effect along the edge of the sphere. This is called “anti-aliasing“. This term refers to how smoothly an edge has been rendered.
66 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Rendering Re-activate the “Transparency” function and switch to “Output“ in the Render Settings. This is where we will find out why the image in the picture viewer is being rendered so small. “Resolution“ lets you choose from a wide variety of image resolutions. You can also simply enter the desired image size. Slide the time slider back and forth until you find a frame you would like to render. Set the size to “800 x 600“ and render the image in the picture viewer.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Rendering 67 CINEMA 4D will now render all of the scene’s pictures. The scene’s length is determined in the preferences (CINEMA 4D main menu: Edit / Preferences) menu. Our scene runs from frames 0 to 90. We just have to determine which file format our images will have and where they will be saved. Switch to “Save“ in the Render Settings, click on the button next to “Path“ and choose a name and a place to save your film. Now choose a format – you can use “Quicktime“ or “AVI“.
68 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Rendering If all you need is a quick preview of your animation you can save yourself the trouble of always opening and changing the Render Settings by selecting the preview function (Render / Make a Preview). The settings used here are kept to a minimum. Of course the “Output“ and “Save“ settings depend on the requirements of your scene. If you render a single image that will be printed with a resolution of 300dpi on a 8.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 69 Multi-Pass rendering means that not only the actual image will be saved but also the individual channels (passes) which comprise such an image. A channel can, for example, contain an image’s environment light, specular light, transparency or even single objects. This information is output as a separate image. These images can be edited individually using an image editing software and brought together to a single image after editing.
70 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Multi-Pass Rendering On the “Save” page you will find a set of parameters for saving Multi-Pass files. Set the format to “JPEG“ and click on the “Path“ button. Find a place to save the image on your hard drive and name the image “MultiPass_Scene“. Click on the “Multi-Pass...” button and add the channels “Diffuse“, “Reflection“, “Specular“ and “Refraction“ and render the scene using the command “Render / Render To Picture Viewer“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 71 But how can we use these images to manipulate our scene after it’s been rendered? By using an image editing software such as Photoshop. Photoshop is a very popular program which has established itself as the standard image editing software. If you don’t own a version of Photoshop you can download a demo version from their web site. Photoshop can split an image into several layers.
72 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Multi-Pass Rendering You may have noticed that there was a shadow in the original scene that is not visible in the Photoshop file. This is because the shadow has its own channel and we simply did not activate it in the Multi-Pass rendering menu. Add this channel in CINEMA 4D, render the image and open it in Photoshop. Now the shadow has its own Photoshop layer. The shadow is very dark and the right edge of the cone can barely be seen. We want to change that now.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 73 The compositing tag makes it possible to assign an image buffer to one or more objects in the scene. Assign a compositing tag to the cone as well. Activate the second buffer. The sphere and cone are now in two separate image buffers, 1 and 2. Now we have to activate these buffers in the Render Settings. Add 2 “Object Buffers“ by selecting them from the “Multi-Pass...” menu. For the first, leave the “ID“ set to “1“ and set the second to “2“.
74 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Multi-Pass Rendering Select the “Refraction“ layer in Photoshop. Choose select / load selection. Set “Channel“ to “Object Buffer 1“. We just loaded the buffer channel as the selection. Various image editing options will now be limited to the area within this selection – the sphere. Call up “image / adjustments / hue / saturation. Click on “Colorize“ and set the “Hue“ to 240 and the saturation to 100. Only the sphere will be colored.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering 75 Multi-Pass really comes to shine when it’s used with animated scenes. What Photoshop does for single images, compositing programs do for animations. After Effects and Combustion are two of these programs. Editing software such as Final Cut lets you edit image layers as well. CINEMA 4D works with all of these programs, partly over special export plugins which offer an extensive number of settings. You can change a color in a 15-minute animation in seconds.
76 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – XPresso Nodes are XPresso’s cornerstones. They represent objects or functions. Nodes have an input and an output which allow them to exchange information with other nodes. You can view a node’s complete input by clicking on the little blue box in the top left corner of the node. A node’s output can be viewed by clicking on the red box. Take a look at the exits of the cylinder’s nodes. Some of them will surely be familiar to you (Attribute Manager).
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – XPresso 77 Connect the “Cylinder_small“ “Position.Y“ output to the “Mix“ node’s input 1 and the “Cylinder_big“ exit to the “Mix“ node’s input 2. Both Y-positions will now be transmitted to the “Mix“ node which will now calculate their average of their respective values. The 50% setting makes sure the values will be mixed evenly. The result will be the Y-position of the medium cylinder.
78 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – XPresso We still have one problem: you can still drag the cylinder so far that our telescope comes apart. It would be nice if we could restrict the movement a little. Needless to say XPresso also has a solution for this! Go back to X-Pool and drag a “Clamp“ node into the XPresso editor. Set its “Max“ value to 300 in the Attribute Manager. The “Clamp“ node restricts various properties that are transferred to its “Value“ input to a range between 0 and 300.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – XPresso Now the cylinders can only be moved a limited distance in the Y-direction, just like a real telescope.
80 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – XPresso 13. Tips & Tricks © Luxigon, www.luxigon.com 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 R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks 81 Since the internet is always changing, doing a search for “CINEMA 4D“ in various search engines would be a good idea. The Internet is a good source for finding models. Through its special image search function you can find photos or drawings of practically any object. Even mail order catalogues can be a great source of information on how an object is supposed to look. Textures are all over the internet as well.
82 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks Welcome to BodyPaint 3D This is the BodyPaint 3D tutorial. In this tutorial we will explain the most important functions in order to give you a running start in the world of “body painting“. Even if BodyPaint 3D appears to be difficult at first, you will soon notice how intuitive BodyPaint 3D really is. In this tutorial we have also put an emphasis on a fast learning curve and a high degree of user friendliness for this module. Let’s start with its structure.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 83 2. General Information / Interface First take a look at the screenshot on the next page. 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. Editor Window (RayBrush Window) Here you can see the object you will be painting. You can rotate, move and zoom the window as needed.
84 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks 2. Texture Window (UV-mesh Editor Window) This is where you edit your UV-mesh. You can relax and restore your UV-mesh. If you use the UV-Manager’s UV-tools you can watch how the texture relaxes. You can also watch the color application process in this window, which will then be visible in the editor window right away. 3. UV-Manager The UV-Manager lets you restore the UV-mesh using an algorithm.
85 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 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 © Khalid Abdulla Al-Muharraqi www.muharraqi-sudios.com, Kingdom of Bahrain © James Ku © www.bediff.
86 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart 4. Quick Tutorial – The Paint Wizard The BodyPaint 3D Paint Wizard takes a lot of preparatory work off your hands and lets you begin texturing / painting in seconds. Before we actually start painting the object we would like to show you how quickly you can start painting, just in a few steps. Create a cone primitive (objects / primitive / cone). Switch to the predefined standard layout “BP 3D Paint“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 87 Aside from the fact that you will never have a need for a cone with a white mark on it, this simply demonstrates how BodyPaint 3D works. Now we’ll get to the heart of this tutorial. Open the file “QS_BP3D_Startl.c4d”. Say hello to Claude, our guinea pig for the day. In the course of this tutorial we will alter the color of his right eyelid a little and apply a bump layer in elephant-look to his skin.
88 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D Since Claude likes elephant gray we will leave the boxes the way they are. Leave the rest of the settings the way they are and click on “Finish“, then on “Close“ in the next window. The basic textures have been created and we can start painting. If you have experience with earlier texturing methods and the time it took to even get started BodyPaint 3D will seem like a blessing to you. BodyPaint 3D saves you a lot of time.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 89 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“.
90 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D Select the brush on the command palette on the left, Now select “Brush Tool for Painting Textures” for applying the color. Set the size to 25 and the hardness to 40 in the brush’s Attribute Manager (“Active Tool” window). and select a pink color in the Manager directly above the “Color” tab. If necessary, increase the HyperNURBS subdivision. Activate the “Render Active View for RayBrush Painting“ in the active view in the “Render” menu (BodyPaint 3D main menu).
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – BodyPaint 3D 91 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. We will take you one step further, though, in order to be able to explain an important function.
92 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –BodyPaint 3D Rotate the view so you can see the eyelid from the top. Activate the “Render Active View for RayBrush Painting“ and the “Enable / Disable Projection Painting“ mode and set the brush size to 10 and hardness to 40. 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks 93 Here you will find all the brushes your heart desires. If you don’t find the brush you’re looking for we’ve beat Murphy to the punch and have given you the possibility to create and save your own brushes. Just make the changes you want and click on the “Add Preset Save Brush“ button. With this tutorial you have gotten to know how BodyPaint 3D works and you can convince yourself of the advantages painting directly onto objects themselves offers.
94 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks Welcome to Advanced Render (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the Advanced Render Module. It will show you many of the module’s typical applications and covers some theoretical physics behind the effects. © Dave Davidson, www.max3d.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Advanced Render 95 1. Introduction The Advanced Render Module expands the realm of possibilities of CINEMA 4D’s renderer with several fascinating functions. Users who want to make photorealistic renderings will find these functions especially interesting. The module integrates itself seamlessly into existing rendering settings which makes learning to use it a simple matter.
96 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Advanced Render “Depth of field“, “highlight“ and “glow“ are post effects. You will find them in the Render Settings under “effects“. 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Advanced Render 97
98 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Advanced Render 3. Sample Images Here you can see what’s possible with the Advanced Render functions. © Marco Weiss, www.black-graphics.
99 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart © www.ericsmit.com © James Kaufeldt © Matthew O’Neill, www.3dfluff.
100 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart © Olcay Kayihan, olcay@aluplan.com.tr 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Global Illumination 101 Now we will light the scene with diffused light using Global Illumination rendering. We will use our sky object as the light source. Switch to the Material Manager. Create a new material (file / new material). Switch to “basic“ in the Attribute Manager. Deactivate “color“ and “specular“ and activate “luminance“. Drag the material from the Material Manager onto the sky object in the Object Manager. Create another material and give it your favorite color.
102 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Global Illumination Open the Render Settings (Render / Render Settings). Click on the “Effect...” button and Global Illumination. Switch to the Render Settings’ Options menu and make sure that “Auto Light“ is deactivated. Rotate the scene in the editor so the view is at such an angle as to show only the floor in the background. This speeds up rendering since the rendering will only be done to the “horizon“. Render the scene.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Global Illumination 103 We now want to use the blue sphere as a light. We don’t want the sphere to be visible, but only to emit its blue color. You achieve this by using the “compositing tag“. Apply a compositing tag to the sphere in the Object Manager (Tags / CINEMA 4D Tags / Compositing). Switch to the Attribute Manager and deactivate all options except “Seen by GI“ (Global Illumination). Render the scene.
104 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Caustics 5. Quick Tutorial – Caustics Have you ever observed the lighting effects at the bottom of a swimming pool? This phenomena is known as caustics – light is cast through a transparent material and is broken upon entry and exit. Open another new (empty) scene. Create a floor object (objects / scene / floor). Create a platonic (objects / scene / platonic) and give it a Y-position of 140 using the Attribute Manager. Create a new material in the Material Manager.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Caustics 105 Part of the light is falling on the platonic, part of it is falling on the floor. Still there is no caustic effect anywhere in sight - the effect must first be activated. Select the light and switch to the caustics page of the Attribute Manager. Activate “surface caustics“ for the light. Open the Render Settings menu (Render / Render Settings) and select “Caustics“ from the “Effects...” menu. Render the scene.
106 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Caustics 6. Quick Tutorial – Depth of Field You probably are familiar with the depth-of-field effect from the field of photography. Depending on which lens is used in which combination of camera settings it can only be focused on one more-or-less small area at once – everything outside this area is out of focus. This effect is often used as a dramatic element in movies to draw the viewer’s attention to a specific element in the scene.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – DOF 107 The target distance is the point of focus of the camera. An object located 1300 units from the camera object – as is the case with our figure located in the center – will appear the clearest. Objects located in front of or behind this object will be rendered out of focus. Simply activate this effect in the Render Settings to make this effect visible. Open the Render Settings and click on the “Effects...“ button.
108 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – DOF 7. Tips & Tricks Rendering often requires you to make a choice between speed and quality. Especially scenes using Global Illumination or Caustics can take a long time to render. This is why we recommend that you experiment with the Parameters and to initially use low values. For example, set the Global Illumination “Diffuse Depth” value to “1” to begin with and make a test render.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart © Fran Peréz, www.digitalfran.
110 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster Welcome to PyroCluster (Included in the optional Advanced Render module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for PyroCluster. It will lead you through the initial steps of this module and show you what’s possible with this amazing 3D shader. Here is how this tutorial is structured: 1. Introduction “PyroCluster“ is a powerful tool for creating volumetric smoke, explosions and fire effects.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 111 2. General Information / Interface The actual effect basically consists of the PyroCluster shader, the PyroCluster volume tracer, an emitter and an environment object. Together they comprise the necessary elements who’s properties you can set to create any and all pyrotechnic effects. The components in detail: The PyroCluster shader is the material which is assigned to the emitter.
112 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster “Make Preview“ is a helpful feature that gives you the chance to examine your effect before you render the entire scene. This saves a lot of time, of which we all have too little. We also gave PyroCluster various fractal types you can fine-tune according to your needs. A cumulus cloud, for example, would require a different type of fractal than would a gas cloud. You can use yet another fractal to depict coral or stone formations to name only two of many.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 113 4. Quick Tutorial – 10 Steps To Glory This tutorial describes the 10 basic settings needed for a PyroCluster effect. Once you have completed this exercise you can play with the settings of the example scene or set your own properties as you wish to see what settings do what to which effect, etc.. 1. Open a new (empty) scene in CINEMA 4D’s main menu (File / New). 2.
114 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 4. Create an emitter (Objects / Particle / Emitter). 5. Assign the PyroCluster material to the emitter. 6. Assign the Pyrocluster Volume Tracer to the Environment object. 7. Set the emitter’s “P“ angle to 90 in the Object Manager’s Coordinates Manager.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 115 8. Double click the material “PyroCluster“ in the Material Manager and select “Steam“ in the “Global“ menu. 9. Answer “yes“ to the question “Do you really want to convert parameters?“ and close the Material Editor window. 10. Drag the time slider to frame 40 and select “Render / Render View“. Now sit back and finish that cup of coffee.
116 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster Voila! If you go ahead and test the “Fire“ preset you could qualify as a junior pyromaniac and no court in the world can lay a finger on you! This scene was calculated relatively quickly but you will eventually notice that it can take longer depending on the complexity of your scene and the settings you use. There are a few tricks you can use to reduce render time without losing quality.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 117 Raise both of the emitter’s particle values (Birthrate Editor / Birthrate Renderer) to 20 (Click on emitter in the Object Manager and select the “Particle“ menu). Reduce the Lifetime from 500 to 100 and the Speed parameter to 300. Switch to the “Emitter“ and set Angle Horizontal and Angle Vertical to 30. The friction object gets a strength (friction-coefficient) of 4.
118 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster Now you can generate another preview (Main Menu / Render / Make Preview). The steam’s behavior is much more realistic now. The particles are being emitted faster but have a shorter lifetime and the wider angles disperse the particles by 30 degrees. The turbulence object adds (you guessed it!) turbulence and the friction object slows the particles and can even bring them to a complete stop if the value is raised sufficiently.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster 119 6. Tips & Tricks There are several methods to optimize your rendering but the most effective method is to increase the PyroCluster Volume’s “World Step Size“ parameter! Here you will also find several settings for the render mode. If you click on the drop-down menu you will see “User“ on the list. Selecting “User“ activates the “World Step Size“ editing parameters. Double click the Pyrocluster Volume Tracer. Set the render mode to “User“.
120 © Gary Ingle / Wes Ware CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – PyroCluster
121 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon Welcome to Sketch and Toon (Optional module) This is CINEMA 4D’s Quickstart Tutorial for its Sketch and Toon module. It will introduce you to some of this renderer’s fantastic creative possibilities. 1. Introduction Sketch and Toon belongs to the NPR family.
122 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon There’s more. You will also find Sketch and Toon elsewhere within CINEMA 4D. Take a look at the Material Manager. A sketch material is created as soon as the Sketch and Toon effect has been activated. This is a material especially for the depiction of contours in a Sketch and Toon rendering. You will also see that there are many more settings in association with this material in the Material Manager. These settings are global and affect the entire scene.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 123
124 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart © www.areyouplanning.
126 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart 4. Quick Tutorial – Outlines The moment of truth has come. Once you have worked your way through this tutorial you will have but a first impression of what you can to with Sketch and Toon. Sketch and Toon is a module that practically seduces you to experiment with it – give in to its seduction! Open the file “QS_Outlines_Start.c4d“. This scene is comprised of a head made up of just a few primitives.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 127 Navigate to your CINEMA 4D directory. You will find a number of presets under Library / Sketch / Styles. Select “QS_Outlines_Final.c4d“. This style is good for technical illustrations. Render the scene. Again the rendering looks different. Now the lines which are normally hidden are displayed as dashed lines. Along with the preset two additional materials were placed into the Material Manager – “Visible“ and “Hidden“.
128 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon The Sketch material’s preview display can be changed by double-clicking the material and selecting a line preview (right-click on the preview image). In the following menu you can select how you want your preview to appear (e.g. as a sphere). Let’s bring some color into play. Switch to “Shading“ in the Sketch settings (Render Settings / Sketch and Toon). Use the color sliders to set the “Background“ color to a discreet blue (or your favorite color).
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 129 We can use the Render Settings to influence the entire scene and the material settings to specifically affect the hidden contour. Select the “Visible“ material and switch to “Main“ in the Attribute Manager. Select the “Pen (Leaky)“ style in the “Presets“ menu. Render the scene. The visible lines already look like they were drawn with a leaking fountain pen and the hidden lines are still dashed.
130 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon The nose is now red with a black contour. 5. 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 131 Create a new material in the Material Manager (File / New Material). Deactivate the “Color“ and “Specular“ channels in the “Basic“ menu of the Attribute Manager. Activate “Luminance“ and switch to the “Luminance“ menu. Click on the small arrow to the right of the word “Texture“. Select Sketch / Cel. The cel shader is a type of gradient shader.
132 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon 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“ menu and select “Background“ in the menu next to the word “Object“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Sketch and Toon 133 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.
134 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Sketch and Toon 6. Tips & Tricks Sketch and Toon offers several levels of control. If you are taking your first steps with this module and are a little overwhelmed by the countless buttons and sliders simply set the level of control to “Easy” (either in the Render Settings or in the sketch material attributes). Several functions will then be “hidden”.
135 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks Welcome To NET Render (Optional module) Have you ever asked yourself “What should I do if my CINEMA 4D animation will render far longer than my life expectancy, regardless of any and all medical advances?“ The answer it “NET Render!“ This Quickstart Tutorial will help you reduce the time you have to wait for your renderings. First let’s look how this tutorial is structured: © Peter Hofman, www.pexel.
136 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render 1. Introduction Your computer probably won’t be able to handle most large and complex animations by itself in the time you need. NET Render lets you use every additional computer you have which is connected per TCP / IP in the render process. Better yet is the use of an entire render farm or of available company computers already connected to the network.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render 137 4. Quick Tutorial – Installation / Interface Let’s assume you have 4 computers at your disposal which are all connected to a TCP / IP network. Computer Number 1 (subsequently we will rename our computers “Computer 1“, “Computer 2“, etc.) is your main computer from which you will be distributing the work. The remaining computers will do the rendering.
138 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render Start all three clients, Computer 2 through 4. Enter the IP address we just got as the “Server Address“ in the “Network Settings“ for all three computers. After you have done this restart all clients. Open the NET Server and see what happens. If you did everything correctly all three clients should appear in the NET Server’s main window. Each client has now communicated with the server and, after a brief “hello“ has been registered as “New Client“.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render 139 5. Quick Tutorial – Jobs and Administration This is part 2 of the tutorial in which you will learn job and user administration. Click on “Enter“ in your browser window. If you are prompted for a user name and password use “administrator“ as the user name and *leave field empty* as the password. This is the default access code. If you still can’t get in, open “Server.ini“ in the “serverprefs” folder in CINEMA 4D’s main directory where the user data is located.
140 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render 6. Tips & Tricks NET Render’s major advantage is that it lets small companies and small budgets do network renderings! Even someone with only two computers can save time and nerves. You must select only static TCP / IP addresses! It is especially important that computers with a dial-up modem internet connection use the “dynamic“ setting. This setting must be set back when you want to reenter the internet.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – NET Render © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.
142 Welcome to Dynamics CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for Dynamics which will help you get to know the world of gravitation and physics. With the use of sample images and a two part tutorial we will give you an impression of what this powerful tool can do. Let’s begin with how this tutorial is put together: 1.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics 143 In order to make a simulation possible in the first make all objects, including gravitation, sub-objects of the solver object. Objects lying outside of the solver object will not be included in the simulation. This allows the creation of several optimized simulations within one scene which are completely independent of one another.
144 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics 4. Quick Tutorial – Rigid Bodies With just a few clicks of the mouse we will now create a scene in which several primitives will collide with each other. Let’s begin by setting up the necessary objects. In the main menu, click on Plugins / Dynamics / Solver Object. In the same menu, create a gravity object and drag it into the solver object. As we mentioned before, all objects to be affected by the solver object must be a subobject of the solver object.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics 145 Zoom out so you can see the entire scene. Tilt the plane object in the “B“ angle by 15 degrees and place the other objects in the approximate position they are in, in the following image. The cube and the sphere should be placed quite a bit above the plane, each over one half of the plane as seen from the top so they don’t cross paths.
146 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics Before we play the animation again we will change its length. To do this click on edit / project settings and change the “Maximum“ parameter to 300 frames. So that our solver object doesn’t stop the animation at frame 75 we will also change its “Stop“ parameter to 300 in the dialog field “Main“ to the right.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics 147 5. Quick Tutorial – Soft Bodies In this short chapter we would like to introduce Dynamic’s soft bodies. A soft body object can be made up of an arbitrary number of polygon bodies. For our purposes we will use a primitive. Open a new (empty) scene (File / New) and create a torus (Objects / Primitive / Torus). Rotate the “P“ angle of the object by 90 degrees so the ring sits vertically and change the number of “Ring Segments“ and “Pipe Segments“ each to 6.
148 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics If we play the animation now we will have a similar situation to the one we had in the previous chapter: The polygon object will fall out of the picture. We must set a zero value for the mass. But where? We will use the “Set Soft Mass“ from the “Dynamics“ menu. We will set the mass value of a point on the torus to “0“ which will keep this point in place (since it will possess no virtual weight) and the rest of the torus will follow the laws of gravity.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics 149 As an alternative you can increase the Eps (Epsilon) value of the solver object. A higher value increases the area around the polygon object in which the collision algorithm occurs. By doing this the objects will be detected earlier and can be prevented from passing through the plane object. We’re at the end of this part of our Quickstart Tutorial.
150 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Dynamics Welcome To Thinking Particles (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for Thinking Particles. It will give you a quick, and hopefully fun, introduction to this extensive particle system. 1. Introduction Thinking Particles is a particle system. A particle system is used in the 3D world when a large amount of objects will be colliding such as a flock of birds, a bacterial invasion or (especially in conjunction with PyroCluster) fire and smoke effects.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 151 Each of these nodes has certain properties that can be changed using the Attribute Manager or can be connected to the ports of other nodes. This lets you affect particles in many different ways. The various groups can be subdivided, their look or behavior altered after they have been created and much more. If you have worked with the “old“ particle system up to now, Thinking Particles may seem a little complicated to you in the beginning.
152 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles Select the emitter node in the XPresso editor and take a look at the Attribute Manager. Here you will see a bunch of values with which you can change the emitter’s behavior. How many particles should it generate? How long should the particles exist (live)? How big are they? Are they all the same size? You can change some of the values while the animation is playing and will see right away how the particles react to these changes.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 153 We still have a little problem, though. As you know the emitter is a node. A node cannot be moved, rotated or scaled. What do we do if we want to change the emitter’s size or orientation? By simply assigning an object’s coordinates to the emitter. Since we have already created a null object for the XPresso tag it stands to reason that we use is as a “donor“ for the coordinates.
154 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles 3. Quick Tutorial – Particle Snow In this tutorial we will create a storybook snowflake scene. Of course we will need an emitter for this as well. This time we won’t be attaching the emitter to a null object but to a polygon. We will use this polygon to control the size of the emitter. Open a new (empty) file. Create a square polygon primitive (Objects / Primitive / Polygon). Convert the parametric object to an editable polygon (Functions / Make Editable).
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 155 The particles should be created on the surface of the polygon. In order to do this the setup has to be extended a little. Give the “Pstorm“ node a “Particle Birth“ output. This output contains various particles generated by the emitter that will be “processed further“. Next we need a “PSurfacePosition“ node (XPool / System Operators / Thinking Particles / TP Helpers). This node creates random positions on a given polygon object.
156 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles Drag the “PSetData“ node into the XPresso editor and assign an input port for position. This will be the property we want to set for the particles. This port will be connected to the position output of the “PsurfacePosition“ node. Connect the particle input port of the “PSetData“ with the “Particle Birth“ output of the “PStorm“ node. Now “PSetData“ knows which particles it will position.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 157 4. Quick Tutorial – Objects as Particles Now we have a cute little setup that makes snow fall but we’re still missing the actual snow. What this snow will look like is completely up to you. Simple spheres or snow crystals with alpha channels? We’ve decided on a light object. With the right settings you can make it look like a pretty convincing snow flake. Add a light source to the scene (Objects / Scene / Light).
158 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles Switch to the “Visibility“ menu and set the “Inner Distance“ to 6.5, the “Outer Distance“ to 15 and raise the “Brightness“ to 125%. Switch again to the “Noise“ menu. Set the “Type“ to “Hard Turbulence“ and all three scale parameters to 7.5.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 159 Make the light invisible for the editor and the renderer in the “Basic“ menu. It will later be visible only as particles. The “light flake“ is ready. Next we have to let Thinking Particles know that it should use this light as a particle. You guessed it – there’s a special node for this as well. It’s called the “PShape“ node and is located in the X-Pool tab in the “TPStandard“ category. Add a “PShape“ node to the existing XPresso setup.
160 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles In order to understand the purpose of this object you have to know that Thinking Particles can divide particles into groups. To a certain extent, the “Particle Geometry“ object serves to let you assign various geometric objects to these groups. Our example contains only one group named “All“ which contains all particles that will be generated. Nevertheless, a “Particle Geometry“ object is always required.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 161 Add “TP Planar Wind“ to the scene. The wind does not yet know which particle group it should influence so open the Thinking Particle Settings (Objects / Thinking Particles / Thinking Particles Settings) and drag the group “All“ into the “Particle Group“ text field in the “User Data“ menu of the “TP Planar Wind’s“ Attribute Manager. Set the “Strength“ to 300 and the “Turbulence“ to 1000.
162 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles Our winter wonderland has been turned into a gyrating snowfall. We hope you had fun with Thinking Particles in spite of the snow storm at the end. Use this tutorial as a starting point and try new things with the snow. Let it fall on other objects or transform it to rain. The only limitation is your own creativity – which we know is limitless.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Thinking Particles 163 5. Tips & Tricks Don’t make your life more difficult than it has to be (which doesn’t just apply to working with Thinking Particles) and make use of the object library where you will find the most important Thinking Particles Nodes already assigned to objects and with simple interfaces which, in most cases, will save you a lot of time. Organize your setup. XPresso and / or Thinking Particles setups can become very complex.
164 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –Thinking Particles
165 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Welcome To MOCCA (Optional module) This is the Quickstart Tutorial for the MOCCA module, a collection of tools especially for character animation. 1. Introduction 3D character animation is a complex subject. It not only challenges the software but the animator as well. Almost anyone can quickly create a character that moves in one way or another, but a convincing character animation requires quite a bit more work.
166 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA You can find more detailed descriptions of these rules online or in any good animation book. These rules might seem pretty extensive at first glance but the more you animate the more they will become your own flesh and blood. Every time your animation “looks a little weird“ it will most likely be because you didn’t follow one or more of these rules. Now we want to put these rules to use. 2. General Information/Interface (Joints and Rigging) If you are a R9.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 167 MOCCA also includes three very powerful tools: Morph, Vamp and Visual Selector. Like the PoseMixer tool, the Morph tag lets you create various facial expressions for your characters and morph between them. The difference is that with Morph, you no longer need to work with copies of the original mesh, as was required in Posemixer for R9.
168 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Open the file “QS_Joints_Start.c4d”. Although turtles are generally considered to be slow creatures, this one will help us to get a fast result. In this tutorial, we’ll add joints to the left arm so that we can move it. You should already have a good view of the left arm in the editor, ready for joints to be added. First we need to hide the turtle’s shell so that it won’t be in the way later on when we weight the body.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 169 Switch to the top view in the editor‘s menu (Cameras/Top) and zoom the window as needed to get a good view of all four joints. As you can see in the top view, the joints are a little behind the geometry. It‘s important to get the joints in exactly the right place inside the geometry in order for the automatic weighting to work correctly later on. When we created the joints in the front view, the Joint tool had no way to tell at what depth the joints should be placed.
170 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Things are looking good so far. If you’ve painted weights in previous versions of CINEMA 4D using the Claude Bonet tool, you’ll appreciate just how much effort the automatic weighting has saved us here. However, if you now select the shoulder joint, there appears to be problem: almost all the geometry is weighted to this joint. Also, the elbow joint has more geometry weighted to it than it should have.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 171 Once you’ve adjusted the weighting, activate the HyperNURBS (“Turtle_Hypernurbs”). Make sure the Model tool is selected and click on the Rotate tool. If the “shoulder” joint is selected, you should now be able to move the arm around. If parts other than the arm also move then these parts have weighting that needs to be removed. Use the Weight tool as before to remove the weighting from these parts. Also try rotating the “elbow” and “hand” joints.
172 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA With these difficulties in mind, what if you could simply grab the hand and move it to where you want it with the rest of the arm moving itself to follow the hand? This is what IK allows you to do. Instead of rotating the individual joints one by one and working down the chain, you have an “effector” located near the hand that you can move to control the movement of the entire IK chain in one go.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 173 and in the Attribute Manager (bottom right), click on “Add Pole”. You’ll see a new object named “shoulder. Pole” appear in the Object Manager on the same hierarchy level as the “shoulder” joint. Select the pole and in the editor, drag the pole slightly down and behind the turtle. Select the two effectors again (“Joint.3.Goal” and “hand.Goal”). Move the arm forwards and backwards again.
174 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA No part of the polygon mesh should be moved after the “Skin Object” is turned off. This means that the actiation of the Skin Object itself constitutes a deformation. However, we want the deformation of the polygon mesh to be caused by the character’s movement. Try turning the Skin Object off. The mesh will jump away from the joints.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 175 In the following text, the abbreviation “VS” for “Visual Selector” is used. The purpose of VS is to place the individual controllers required to animate the character onto the corresponding parts of the picture. For example, a right hand controller should be placed on the right hand in the picture. Best of all, you can drag and drop the controllers directly from the Object Manager onto the picture in the VS interface.
176 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA The object icons appear as a layer on top of the character image. Drag the icons around on the character image to wherever you want them placed. Move the mouse pointer over one of the icons and click and hold down the right mouse button. You now have two possibilities. Either press the left or right cursor key to change the icon, or press the Up cursor key to open a window containing all the available icons, where you can choose which one to use.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 177 Here you can change the link to the hotspots and enter a name for the hotspot that appears in the main VS image window next to the hotspot. A further highlight is the Action function, which lets you assign a function to the hotspot (another feature designed to save you time). Suppose your hotspot is linked to the head joint, which must be allowed to rotate but not moved or scaled. Simply assign it the Rotate action.
178 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Open the file “QS_PM_Start.c4d“. It contains the character from the last chapter with new “Head Poses“ object. The new object contains copies of the figure’s head geometry including the head itself and the eyelids. “Head Standard Pose“ is an exact copy of the original head. “Head Happy“ is the same head with a smiling expression. In addition there is one head with raised ears and four heads, each with one closed eyelid.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 179 Deactivate the options “Rotation“ and “Scale“. We have to let PoseMixer know what it has to morph. In this facial animation only the points of the geometry will be used. If we were to activate the option “Position“ the entire head would move to where its copy is. Next, PoseMixer will need a neutral starting point, an undeformed state. Drag the object “Head Standard Pose“ from the Object Manager into the text field “Default Pose“ in the PoseMixer’s Attribute Manager.
180 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Click on “Add Pose“. Drag the “Head Ears Happy Up“ into the new field. Repeat this process until all six poses are in the Attribute Manager. What’s nice is that the poses can be mixed in any order – try it. A relatively small number of base poses lets you create a wide variety of facial expressions. As when animating any other parameter, make sure that your scene is set to frame 0.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 181 6. Quick Tutorial – Morph Tool Now we‘ll turn our attention to the Morph tool. As previously mentioned, it is similar to the PoseMixer except that it makes it easier to create poses. There’s no need to create copies of the original mesh when using the Morph tool. A single tag is all that’s needed to store the poses (the Morph tag). Among other things, this means file sizes are much smaller than when using PoseMixer.
182 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Next we need to select and rotate the joint that will be used to drive the morphing. In our case, this is joint number 2. Select the Model tool in the left toolbar and click on “Joint.2” in the Object Manager. Set the joint’s H rotation to -90 degrees in the Coordinates Manager and click the “Apply” button. Next, disable the “Auto Joint Driven option”. So what have we achieved by doing this? Earlier we enabled “Auto Joint Driven” in the Morph tag.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 183 7. Quick Tutorial – Muscles Welcome to Muscles, the personal fitness training program for your CINEMA 4D characters. If your character has been hanging around idly because it hasn’t been animated for so long, now it’s time to give it some muscles. With MOCCA V3, you can take character animation to the next level with virtual muscles that flex beneath the skin.
184 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA Switch to the Muscle object’s States tab in the Attribute Manager. Open “Min” and “Max” by clicking their small gray triangles. The two curves shown control the shape of the muscle when stretched and contracted. But first we need to set the minimum and maximum length for the muscle. Make sure that the animation is at frame 0 (the scene already contains an animation). Click on “Set Max” in the Attribute Manager.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA 185 Select the Muscle deformer object. You’ll find an empty field on its Object tab. Drag the “Muscle Object” from the Object Manager into this field. This tells the Muscle deformer which Muscle object it is responsible for. In the Object Manager, set the Muscle object to hidden (the top of the two small grey dots next to the word “Muscle Object” must be red) and play the animation once more. Congratulations! You’ve just set up the arm to have a bulging biceps.
186 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart Experiment with the Muscle object’s settings. As previously mentioned, you can change the shape of the muscle on the States tab using the curves. On the Settings tab, you can, among other things, move the muscle’s offset without affecting the start and end pin. As this tutorial demonstrates, adding muscles to your characters is a relatively simple task. Now there’s nothing to stop your characters from showing off their muscles. 8.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart 187 Drag the sphere object from the Object Manager into the Vamp tool’s “Source” field. Drag and drop the cube object into the “Target” field. We’ve now told Vamp which object the information should be transferred from and which object it should be transferred to. Enable the options for “Selections Polygons” and “Texture Tags”. Click on the “Transfer Maps” button.
188 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Clothilde If you now look to the right of our cube, you’ll notice it has a Selection tag, a material and a Morph tag. Make the cube visible by clicking on the small red dot next to the word “Cube” in the Object Manager. Click on the top dot for the sphere until the dot turns red. As you can see, the cube now has a red cap which has been transferred very accurately, even though the cube has a different number of polygons to the sphere.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Clothilde © Platinum, www.platinum.com.
190 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Clothilde © Jana Rot, www.rot.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Clothilde 191 9. Quick Tutorial – Dressing Clothilde is MOCCA’s cloth simulation tool. You can use this tool to let a flag flap in the breeze or to give your character a snappy t-shirt. This is exactly what we want to put on Claude. What’s nice about Clothilde is that it’s not necessary to go through the trouble of modeling a t-shirt. All you have to do is create the front and the back of the shirt. Clothilde will make it fit automatically. Open the file “QS_Cloth_Start.c4d“.
192 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Clothilde The shirt needs to be subdivided a little more so you can deform it better later. Switch to “Use Polygon Tool“ mode and select the polygons on the front and back side of the shirt. Select “Functions / Subdivide“ and set the value to 2. Make sure you don’t subdivide the polygons on the side (the ones created by the bridge tool). OK, it doesn’t really look like a t-shirt yet, it looks more like a box with sleeves.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 193 Now the t-shirt knows that is should not pass through the character. It’s about time that we gave the shirt its proper shape. Select the cloth tag and switch to the “Dresser“ menu. In the dresser menu you will find everything you need to make clothes fit. The other menus deal with the cloth’s behavior. Select “Set“ next to “Dress State“. This is like a security measure.
194 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR These polygons will serve as the t-shirt’s seam. Clothilde 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 195 Cloth nurbs acts similar to a HyperNURBS object: it smooths the geometry which was subordinated to it but with a slightly different algorithm which works better for cloth objects. Additionally, a thickness can be specified for cloth nurbs fabric objects. Set the “Thickness“ to 1 in the Attribute Manager and the subdivision to “0”. Create a HyperNURBS object and make the “CNURBS” object to a Child object of this HyperNURBS object.
196 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR If all the settings have been made the export can begin. Select “File / Export / FBX“. Save the file as a FBX file. Now a program like Motionbuilder can open the CINEMA 4D character. Motionbuilder assigns motion capture data to the character. These are then “plotted“, which means the animation is converted into movement and is assigned directly to bones. The final animation will be saved as an FBX file which CINEMA 4D can easily read. Select “File / Merge.
197 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart Of course you have to take into account a few more things when exchanging files with Motionbuilder. It makes life (and working with a character in Motionbuilder) easier if you use a naming convention when naming your bones. You can get more information about this from MAXON or the makers of Motionbuilder. © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.uk © www.bediff.
198 © S. Scatola, www.boxy.co.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 199 Welcome to HAIR (Optional module) This tutorial will show you how you can enter the world of HAIR and easily create hair, fur and feathers. 1. Introduction HAIR is a powerful tool for creating various types of hair and fur. Even feathers, animated grass, anemone and much more can be created using HAIR. Although achieving your first results in HAIR is relatively easy, HAIR is an immensely diverse and comprehensive module that will satisfy any beautician.
200 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR 2. General Information / Interface HAIR works with so-called guides that serve as placeholders for the rendered hair. The number of guides displayed in the editor view is far less than the actual number of hairs that will be rendered. The number of guides displayed can also be increased. The “missing” hairs are interpolated between the guides when rendered. Naturally, you will require some standard grooming tools to bring your hair into shape.
201 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR Before we get started with the HAIR tutorial, though, let’s take a look at what can be created with this module: 3. Sample Images © Patrick Eischen, www.patrickeischen.com © www.boblea.
202 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR Now let’s get started with the HAIR tutorial... 4. Quick Tutorial – Fur Our volunteer, “Hairbert”, is only a few mouse clicks away from becoming his warm winter fur. He may look a little pitiful without his fur but his simple construction will make our work that much easier. First, open the file “QS_Hair.c4d”. HAIR can be applied to either an entire object or a polygon selection only.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 203 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.
204 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 205 Set Length to 21 and Segments to 6. The Segments setting defines the number of individual segments each guide is made up of (this only influences how guides are displayed in the editor, not the rendered hair). If Segments were to be set to 1 each guide would consist of only a single segment and gravity could not bend the guide.
206 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –HAIR To prevent this from happening select Hair / Edit / Set As Dynamics in the main menu. Now we can cut and style Hairbert’s fur. Switch to the left view in the editor window and activate the Cut tool (Hair / Tools / Cut). Next, deactivate Only Visible 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – HAIR 207 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.
208 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart 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 0.5m and Tip to 0.03m. This will thin Hairbert’s hair to make it look more realistic.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MoGraph 209 Render the scene once again. The result should look like this: 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.
210 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –MoGraph 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MoGraph 211 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. First, click on the “Live Selection” tool in the top Icon Palette then click anywhere next to the figure in the editor window. All polygons will be deselected. Select the third triangle (from the left) with the red border next to Bear_mesh in the Object Manager.
212 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –MoGraph 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.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MoGraph 213 5. Tips & Tricks • You can save a lot of tome by optimizing your HAIR settings. Make sure your object really needs those 500,000 individual hairs – maybe half as many will suffice without sacrificing realism. • A greater number of individual hairs are required when creating short hair (as was the case with Hairbert’s fur) to prevent surfaces from showing through. Short hair, though, requires fewer segments because it is stiffer by nature.
214 Welcome To MoGraph CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –MoGraph (Optional module) This MoGraph Quickstart tutorial will give you a detailed insight into the limitless possibilities MoGraph has to offer. © Simone Bertolotti, www.imonfox.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MoGraph 215 1. Introduction The MoGraph module is designed to clone just about any geometric primitive or object and offers numerous Effectors with which these objects can be controlled.
216 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –MoGraph • Shader Effector: The Shader Effector analyses textures or shaders applied to clones and uses their height and depth information to deform the clones’ surfaces. For example, a noise shader, including its grayscale values, can be loaded into a Shader Effector and subsequently be animated. This animation will then affect the clone onto which it is applied.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MoGraph 217 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.
218 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart –MoGraph 3. Sample Images 4. Quickstart Tutorial In this tutorial we will show you how to achieve fantastic results with just a few clicks of the mouse. MoGraph has been designed to quickly master tasks that, until now, took hours to complete, if it could be completed at all. For example, the Target Effector: How would you animate 1000 clones that follow a target object without the use of MoGraph? Well, we won’t waste any time trying to answer that question.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Tips & Tricks 219 All we need for this tutorial is these four simple items – MoGraph will do the rest. All you have to do is be creative (as you surely always are...). Create a Cloner Object (main menu: MoGraph / Cloner Object) and a cube (main menu: Object / Primitives / Cube). The cube will serve as the object to be cloned and will be made a child of the MoGraph Cloner Object in the Object Manager. Before this happens, though, the cube has to be resized.
220 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – 3D Ghosting 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 Y-value can remain unchanged since we haven’t cloned the cube in the Y direction.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – 3D Ghosting 221 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 it we will add on here in order to better demonstrate (visually) how this effect works.
222 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – 3D Ghosting That basically completes our tutorial, except for the fact that we wanted to simulate the effect shown in the screenshots in chapter 2... To achieve this effect we will have to add an additional function: Falloff. Place the sphere at the center of and slightly below the clone field.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Projection Man 223 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%.
224 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Projection Man Simply plant hair onto a polygon object, make the HAIR object a child of the polygon object and this in turn a child of the MoGraph Cloner Object. Each animated clone will then be covered with the hair you just created – including HAIR dynamics! Our Quickstart scene could then look something like this. Now go wild with MoGraph and see what interesting animations you can create.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Projection Man 225 © Jens Kappelmann, www.jeso-art.de Welcome To 3D Ghosting 1. Introduction A very helpful tool for character animators has been added to CINEMA 4D. Especially artists coming from traditional 3D animation will benefit from this important tool, well-known in the field of 2D animation, for finetuning animaiton movement. A 2D animator draws a few frames of animation and lays semi-transparent paper onto a lighttable so all drawn frames can be viewed at once.
226 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Projection Man The technique we are talking about is “onion skinning” and the CINEMA 4D tool that provides this function is called “3D Ghosting”. This tool lets you get an impression of your character’s movement prior to and after the current frame (in order to make any necessary corrections) without having to move a slider back and forth. Any animated object’s motion path can be displayed by assigning that object a Display tag.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Projection Man 227 We will show you how this is done with just a few clicks! The next screenshot depicts a typical CINEMA 4D scene: • Right-click on the desired object and assign it a Display tag (CINEMA 4D Tags/ Display)
228 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation • Select the Display tag in the Object Manager and then switch to the “Ghosting“ tab in the Attribute Manager • Activate the Enable option and click on the “Calculate Cache” button at the bottom of the Attribute Manger. That’s it! All you have to do now is fine-tune the Ghosting to fit your needs.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 229 Let’s say you have a scene with a city containing hundreds of buildings. Instead of having to texture each one of these buildings all you have to do is create one or maybe two matte paintings and project it correctly onto the scene. You define the camera’s position and start Projection Man that in turn calculates the location of the geometry and starts Photoshop.
230 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation The first camera (“Camera projection”) is the camera that Projection Man will use to project a painted image onto the surfaces of the buildings. The second camera (“Camera animation”) is the camera through which we just viewed the animated approach to our buildings. We must now let Projection Man know which objects it should use for the projection. An this is how it’s done: Make sure you return your animation to frame 0.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 231 CINEMA 4D will now automatically start Photoshop and will open the rendered Projection Man 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 Projection Man 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.
232 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation Play the animation. As you can see, Projection Man projects the texture correctly onto all three buildings throughout the animation – and that without having to texture each individual object. Now we will take Projection Man a step further and add a few windows to the side of our buildings.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 233 Save the Photoshop file, and return to CINEMA 4D. Again a new material has been created, this time with the name, “PMat Camera right”. Double-click the material’s icon and reload the image in the Luminance channel. The texture will be updated in the Viewport immediately and the windows are projected correctly onto the objects. Play the animation.
234 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 1. Motion Layer We will now explore the motion layer method in more detail. Open the file, “QS_ML_Start.c4d” and switch the CINEMA 4D layout to Animation (top icon in the left Icon Palette, directly below the Undo button). As you can see, our scene contains a monkey head. We will use this head to create a simple character animation.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 235 Go to frame 15, move the monkey head back along the Z-axis. Set another Keyframe. Now go to frame 30 and return the head to its original position. This can be done easily by copying frame 0 to frame 30. All you have to do is simultaneously press the Ctrl key while dragging frame 0 onto frame 30. Your animation should look similar to the image below (here with 3D Ghosting): Again select Animation / Add Motion Clip from the C4D main menu.
236 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation Create another motion source with an automatically created Motion Clip (you already know how this is done). Our Timeline now contains three Motion Clips. For a better overview, rename the sources (double-click on each name) from top to bottom, “MQ U+D”, “MQ F+B” and “MQ L+R”, respectively. This will give you a better overview which source and which Motion Clip contain which animation.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 237 This creates a soft transition. Activate the Motion System (main menu: Edit / Use Motion System) to see how the transition looks. Play the animation and you will see that the animation, MQ U+D, now gradually transitions into the MQ F+B animation. Select the Undo option to undo the transition you just created. We will now turn our attention to the second method for mixing Motion Clips.
238 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation Never mix up the Motion Source and Motion Clips functions. The Motion Sources are located at the left of the Timeline and the Motion Clips are located in the Timeline itself. The latter are “merely” links to the original sources.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 239 Once you have finished setting all your keyframes click on the “Add” button in the Attribute Manager. If you do not see this button it is probably because the Motion tag or Null Object are not selected. Simply select either the “Monkey” Null Object or its blue Motion tag. If you have done everything correctly a Layer 1 should have been added after clicking on the Add button. Layer 1 will automatically be made the active layer.
240 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation Both layers will now be mixed. You can add any number of additional layers. Each time the keyframes will belong to the layer that was active when they were created. After setting keyframes on three separate layers we will have three separate animations that will be mixed.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 241 Once you’ve worked with the system a little you will realize that it is an indispensable tool for your animation needs. Your ingenuity and imagination are this tool’s only limitations. We hope you enjoy all the new features and functionalities CINEMA 4D R11 has to offer.
242 CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation © Matthieu Roussel www.mattroussel.
CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Non-Linear Animation 243
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