You want to do use particles to morph one word into another? You don’t want to mess with all of the Xpresso scripting to do it with Thinking Particles? Here comes the MoGraph module to the rescue! Using an Inheritance effector and a Randomize effector you can get this effect done quickly and easily.

Step 01
Start by creating the two Text objects you want to morph between.

Step 02
Create two MoGraph Cloner Objects with a Sphere (or whatever you want your particle to be) as children. Set the Mode for both Cloner Objects to Object.

Step 03
Drag in your Text Objects into the Target Object Link attribute of the two Cloner Objects.  By default this creates a clone at each of the vertexes of the target object.

Step 04
We want to get a more even, random distribution of clones throughout all of our text. Change the Mode of clone distribution to Volume.

Step 05
Now first, hide the Cloner Object that will be the target of your morph.  And select the Cloner Object that will be the source of the morph and create an Inheritance Effector.

Step 06
In the Attribute Manager for the Inheritance Effector, find the Effector tab.  In the Target Object Link attribute, drag in the Cloner Object that is the target of your morph.  When you do this nothing will happen, until you check Morph Motion Object.  You will notice that all of your clones “jump” to the position of your target cloner object.

Step 07
Stay in the Attribute Manager for the Inheritance Effector, Effector tab. Animate the Strength slider from 0% to 100% over 20 to 60 frames.  You can play the animation and now see your morph working correctly.

Step 08
To get our particles to spread out a little more during the middle of the morph we’ll add a Randomize Effector.  Select your source Cloner Object and create a Random Effector.

Step 09
We only want the Random Effector to move everything around during the middle of our morph.  So set it’s Strength to 0% on the same two frames you set keys for the Inheritance Effector.  Then, halfway between those two keyframes, set a keyframe for Strength 100%.  You can tweak the timing of this however you like.

FINISHED
You should have something that looks similar to this…

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In the first part of this tutorial, we built a lighting grid using a couple of MoGraph Cloners and a Volume Effector.  At the end of part 01 we ended up with a lighting grid made up of plain spheres (see below). In part two, we’ll model a basic light bulb and go through the process of placing that object into our cloners without “breaking” our setup (see above).

Step 01

Grab a reference model for the bulb.  Grab it from anywhere, we’re only using the image as reference for modeling.  In the front view, go to Edit > Configure.  Under the Back tab, browse and select your picture.  This will give us an overlay image to help us draw our profile spline.  Using the Bezier Spline Tool, create a spline down one side of the profile of the light bulb.

Step 02

We need to make sure that our spline begins and ends at zero on the Y-axis.  The best way to accomplish this: select the bulb spline and go into point editing mode.  Select the Move Tool, and in the tool attribute manager, go to the Snap Settings tab, and activate the Grid checkbox.  Select each endpoint of the spline and drag them toward the Y-axis.  When you’re close, it should snap into place.

Step 03

Next, while you have the spline selected, hold down the Alt key while you click to create a Lathe NURBS.  The spline will become a child of the Lathe NURBS object. Now we have the basic shape for our bulb.

Step 04

Now we’ll make some basic materials for our bulb, one glass material and one metallic material.  You can tailor the materials to your own taste, but below are some screen shots of the most important parts.

The only other major thing to change is the Lumas Shader on the metallic material. Crank the roughness of the anisotropy in one direction. This will get us the brushed metal look of the back of a flood lamp.

Step 05

Start by applying the metallic material to the Lathe NURBS object.  Then press the “C” key to make the lathe nurbs editable.  Go into face editing mode and select all of the faces on the top part of the bulb.  While you have the faces selected, drag the glass material onto the selection.

Now that we have the bulb finished, we get to the important part.  Replacing the spheres in our mograph light rig from part one of this tutorial.

Step 06

Under the bulb cloner object, make our new Lathe NURBS bulb a child.  You’ll notice that we’re a little off on the positioning and scale of the Lathe NURBS bulbs.

Step 07

Deactivate the bulb Cloner object so we can get a clear look at our old bulb sphere and our new Lathe NURBS bulb.  Reposition and rescale our Lathe NURBS bulb to make it approximately the same position and dimensions as the old bulb sphere.  When you get it, make sure to reposition the Axis of the Lathe NURBS so that it is at X:0 Y:0 Z:0

Step 08

The last step is to throw an HRDI map on a sky object to get some nice reflections out of our metallic shader (Read how to do this)

FINISHED! You should now have a fully functional lighting grid that looks decent from any angle while still being dynamically updatable.

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Does your client want “that light grid look from all of the music videos a little while back”?  FINE…but you need to scroll a bunch of text through it…which means you need to be able to switch in new text on the fly.  PROBLEM…until now.  You would have to fake the lights using some sort of animated texture map.  That’s not a bad solution until you need to get CLOSE to the lights and then they’ll end up looking like crap.  Using the Volume Effector from C4D’s MoGraph module you can model dynamically, leaving your text in a procedural generator (Text Object), ready for changes.
In the first part of this tutorial we’ll go through the theory and setup the basic MoGraph model and get it running.  In part two, we’ll work on actually modeling the lights and the rig to get a good-looking final model.

STEP 01: The Bulb

Create a simple sphere object and make it very small.  We’ll also reduce the number of segments to something low so we won’t slow down our viewport.

STEP 02: The Rig Holding the Light

Create three cylinder objects and offset them behind our sphere.

STEP 03:  Grouping the Objects Properly

Then add the three cylinder objects into the group.  (This is important so that our axis center for the group remains at the sphere’s center.)

STEP 04: Matrix Object

Create a matrix object from the mograph menu.  (You could just use a cloner object, but we are going to be linking multiple cloner objects from this matrix object, so if we need to change any of the characteristics of the matrix object, it will update in both of our cloner objects.)

STEP 05: Cloner Object

With our bulb group selected, create a cloner object while holding down option (this will make the new cloner object a parent of the bulb group). Under the cloner object’s attribute settings change the mode to object and drag the matrix object into the object dialog box.

NOTE: After creating the cloner object, I realized that my cylinders we too fat and short.  I changed their settings a bit. (this is why procedural objects are great!)

STEP 06: Our Text

Create your normal text object with a text spline and an extrude nurbs.  In the extrude nurbs settings change the movement to 0m. We just want plain flat text.

STEP 07: “Lights On”

Duplicate our cloner object and then delete all of the cylinders.  Also make the radius of the sphere smaller than that of our bulbs.  (These spheres will be the bright spot inside the bulbs that are “on”)

STEP 08: Volume Effector

With our new cloner still selected, create a new volume effector from the Mograph menu.  In it’s settings, drag the text’s extrude nurbs object into the volume object dialog box. At the bottom of the attribute menu check the Visibility checkbox to on.  (This will make it so our “on” bulbs only show up where the text intersects with our matrix objects (kind of like a boolean object, all of the other “on” bulbs will be hidden.)

STEP 09: Some simple textures

First we’ll make a transparent texture for the outer bulbs (use a Fresnel shader for more realistic transparency. Then make a luminescent texture for our “on” lights.

Apply them to our objects and hit render.  We’re done.  We now have a lighting grid that we can still edit whatever text is being illuminated.

In part two, we’ll work on giving the bulbs, lights, and rack models a little more detail to add some style.  I hope you’ll check it out.

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SqueezeMe.tv

Freshly Squeezed Motion Graphic News, Tutorials, and other information from across the interweb.

A great page that puts all of the ‘big boy’ motion graphics pages all on one page.  Looks like a new homepage to me. Check it.

Amazing geek factor!  Typography and Science!  How can you beat that?

Great poster for sale or download.

You have your product or title object beautifully modeled and textured…but what about lighting?  Well, one short answer is to look into Global Illumination.  Another option fake GI with a complex lighting scheme.  There are many options out there, here is one.  We’re going to use MoGraph to make the setup a little easier and more flexible.

Step 01
Make a Sphere object to use as our guide for the lighting dome.  Under the Sphere Object Attributes we are going to make two changes.  First, make the sphere Radius BIG!  Second, make the sphere Type: Hemisphere.

Rename the Sphere “Dome” and make it not visible it in the Viewer.

Step 02
Make our light, a Spot Light.  This light is going to be multiplied lots and lots of times later with a Cloner Object, so we will set it’s Intensity very low.  We also need to change the Color to a 50% neutral gray (I’ll explain why later).  We also want some nice Soft Shadows.

Step 03
With the light selected, go to the MoGraph menu and while holding down the alt/option key create a Cloner Object.

SIDE-TIP: When creating a new object, holding down the alt/option key makes the new object a parent of whatever you have selected.

With the Cloner Object still selected, we need to change its Mode to Object.

Step 04
Next drag our Dome object from the Object List and drop it into the Cloner’s Attribute Manager in the Object dialog box.

Step 05
Since we had our light selected and we held down the alt/option key while creating the Cloner Object, it was created as the parent of the Light. This is exactly what we want, except the lights are pointed the opposite way we wanted.

Back to the Attribute Manager for the Cloner Object.  Under the Transform tab we want to change the Pitch Rotation 180 degrees to turn the lights around so that they all point at our main object.

If you do a quick test render, you’ll find that things are looking pretty good.  But let’s take it a step further.

Let’s take a second to think about light in real life.  Light color is Additive.  That is, if you add lots of lights of different colors, when they shine on the same object, all of the color will add together and create white light.  So we’re going to use a Random Effector to try to recreate this effect by setting all of the light colors to random colors.

Step 06
With your Cloner Object still selected, go to the Mograph menu and add a Random Effector.

In the Attribute Manager for the Cloner Object, let’s disable the default On values for Position, Scale and Rotation.

Next, we’ll go down to Color Mode and set it to On. And change the Blending Mode to Add.  (this is why we changed the Spotlight Color to a neutral gray…if you Add anything to white you get white, useless)

Now we have a bunch of lights, all different colors, pointing at our main object.

Step 07
With this setup we get a pretty good shot.

The only thing we’re missing is some pretty reflections. So we will go up and create a Sky Object and texture it with your favorite HDRI map. (for more info on this see my last tutorial “Creating a Chrome Metal with Great Reflections using a Sky Object and HDRI”

So here’s our final render, side-by-side with a GI render of the same scene.  A little different, true, but not bad considering that GI renders are really time consuming compared to our dome lighting setup.

Global Illumination

Dome Lighting

WHY MoGraph you ask?  Well, since we used a Cloner Object, we can continue to make changes to ALL of our lights by changing our ONE set of light controls.  You can also change the size of our lighting dome at any time by modifying our Dome Object.

So, you wanna get better at Cinema4D?  Try these resources I’ve collected over the last 5 years. (In alphabetical order…)

3DAttack! Magazine

Decent discussion boards. Their largest resource is 3 years of pdf magazines back with tutorials and articles. A lot of the information in the older editions of the magazine are outdated from a software point of view, but the techniques discussed are timeless.

Base80

You’ll find tutorials, textures and of course a lot of Xpresso. A treasure trove of german knowhow – written in english.

Cgtuts+

Part of the great ‘tuts+ network’ of sites. The site hosts tutorials for a
lot of different 3D programs, but has quite a few very high quality C4D
tutorials.

Cineversity

The online training and education resource run in conjunction with Maxon itself. A subscription is a bit pricey (but totally worth it if you have the money), but there are a decent amount of free tutorials as well.

C4Dcafe

Another great site for forum searches. Moderator 3Dkiwi is a C4D online community staple (you have probably already done one of his tutorials, whether you know it or not).

Cinema4D Noise Texture Reference

When was the last time you were making a texture and you were doing the tedious task of finding that perfect type of noise? NO MORE. This site has pictures of every type of C4D noise, each with a couple of settings to help you find the type of noise you want. I really can’t describe how useful this is…

C4D Textures

A great user-generated resource for C4D shaders and textures. Lots of procudural textures.

Cinema4D User

An Austrialian site that is no longer being updated, but really worth a look around. A few good tutorials and downloads.

Creative Cow

The tutorials behemoth has some very big forums for asking questions and is very well moderated. If you think you’re the first person to have “that problem I just can’t figure out”, think again. Do a search of the forums and find someone who has been in the same (or similar) pridicament. Remember, “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake”.

GreyScaleGorilla

Nick Vegas is based in Chicago and works for Digital Kitchen during the day, and at night he is the GreyScaleGorilla. Plenty of tutorials on C4D, AE, and digital photography.  He’s recently upped his Cinema4D efforts with a bunch of new tutorials on 11.5 MoGraph and Dynamics.

HYPA

The official blog of expert Tim Clapham. He has been a huge contributor to the C4D online community for years. He has quite a few useful example projects for download. He also totally has the hots for MoGraph.

Maxon

The mother-ship itself. The makers of Cinema4D have a decent web presence themselves including a yearly C4D demo reel exhibiting some of the best work around the world. Also has a great list of approved plugins for C4D.

MoGraph.net

Another huge motion graphics forum.  The members are very, very active.

Xpresso Anonymous

A bit old but still a great resource if you are making a foray into Xpresso and scripting. The writer is a computer programmer and engineer who dabbles in C4D, says “This is intended as a starter for all those who would like to use Xpresso and Thinking Particles.” I would argue that as people start to dive into MoGraph, more and more will start playing with Xpresso to augment the power of MoGraph.

Xpresso24

A great site focused solely on Xpresso. Tons of downloadable Xpresso scripts.

So that’s my shortlist of C4D resources.  Do you have any recommendations for sites that I may have missed?  Let me know in a comment.  And don’t forget to check out the C4D tutorials right here on sToChAsTiCiTy. I hope this is helpful for you!

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]]> http://stochasticity.cdawson.tv/15-of-the-best-c4d-resources-online/feed/ 6 http://stochasticity.cdawson.tv/tutorial-creating-a-chrome-metal-with-great-reflections-using-sky-object-and-hdri/ http://stochasticity.cdawson.tv/tutorial-creating-a-chrome-metal-with-great-reflections-using-sky-object-and-hdri/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:45:54 +0000 admin http://stochasticity.cdawson.tv/?p=102

Chrome text, chrome logos, chrome, chrome, chrome… everybody wants some bling bling.  What makes metallic textures look so good?  Reflections.  Reflections are easy if you have some text floating in a complete modelled environment.   What if you want some chrome text as an element to bring back into AE for a composite?  Here’s a beginner/intermediate tutorial to show you how you to make it quickly…

Step 01
Start with some basic text like this (I created my text using a MoGraph Text Object and a Random Effector).

Step 02
You can use your own custom material, but starting with a preset from the Content Gallery is not a bad place to start.  I’m going to start with metal006 from the basic folder.

Here’s what our text looks like now.  Not really what were looking for.  Why does it look like this?  It has nothing to reflect… (think about what a mirror looks like in a pitch black room).

Step 03
We add a Sky Object to our scene.  A sky object is an infinitely large sphere,
whose center is the origin of the world coordinate system. Perfect for making reflections.

And now here’s what it looks like.  Again, not what we’re looking for.  Why?  It has only has our white sky object to reflect.

Step 04
Back to the Content Browser.  This time we’re going to take a material preset from the HDRI folder.  (These were a new edition to C4D with version 11, and a great addition at that. If you would like to read about what exactly an HDRI map is, read on here.)

We’ll take that material preset and apply it to the Sky Object.  Now we have something that looks like this.  A lot closer to what we want, but all I want is our chrome letters, not that big wierld looking room behind it.

Step 05
To make the Sky Object not appear in the render, but still appear in the reflections of our text, we will use a Compositing Tag.  Right Click on the Sky Object in the Object Manager to find it.  The Compositing Tag is one of the most useful C4D tags out there (I suggest reading about it at some point).

In the settings we’ll uncheck Cast Shadows, Receive Shadows, and Seen by Camera (make sure that Seen by Transparency, Refraction and Reflection remain checked).

Now we’re almost there except for some finishing touches.

NOTE: These last steps are where you are going to be able to customize your chrome texture the most.  The right combinations of options to the shader is what separates professional looking chrome from ugly hobbist chrome.  (Remember LESS IS MORE, you should tone down and modify almost every procedural texture you apply to your shader.)  All this being said, here’s a couple of things to start with…

Step 06
Add a Fresnel (pronounced: FER-NELL) texture to the Reflection channel.  I normally tone down the gradient from it’s 100% black to 100% white starting setting. This will help to tone down our reflections a bit and offer some variation in the amount of reflection over the text.  Also, turn the blurriness up a few percentage points to blur the reflections coming off our text.

Step 07
Activate the Bump channel and add a Noise texture to it.  Pick the noise type that you like, and lower the Global Scale to something small.  We just want to have very small variations on the surface of the metal to help break up the reflections.

Now we have something like this.  A little TOO MUCH bumpyness on the text.

So we’ll go back to the bump channel and take the Strength down to 1% or so.

And we’ll get something like this.

Render out with an alpha channel and bada-bing… There some bling bling for your graphic.

You can download my ChromeWithHDRI.c4d file here.

Did I not explain something clearly enough?  Leave a comment. Did this tutorial raise an question you’d like to ask? Leave a comment. Like the tutorial? Leave a comment.
I hope this was helpful.

But I recently came across another good site for free fonts, FontSpace.  Check it.
Oh, and then there’s FontSquirrel…

Got any others?  Hollah!