Cinema 4D is an incredebly powerful tool, unfortunately many people (including me) panic the first time they open the program. I inted to show you some different techinques to doing different things. I won't get you into Pixar Animation Studios, but still I'll teach you some other stuff. Without further ado, the tutorials:
Modeling and Rigging a Spring - Sweep-NURBS and a tad MOCCA
Result will be this when animated:
1. First of all we need a Helix-Spline. You can either go to the Spline drop-down menu, or go to Objects > Spline Primitive > Helix. It does look a bit short for a spring, so here are the settings I used: [*] Start Radius: 50 m [*] End Radius: 50 m [*] End Angle: 14000 [*] Height: 2000 m [*] Subdivision: 200 [*]Plane XY[/list] If I didn't mention something it's because I left it in the default settings. You can press H to view the whole spline now.
2. Still we do not have a circle to make some actually polygons, so go to the Spline drop-down menu, or go to Objects > Spline Primitive > Circle. Pretty big, and definitely too big for this example, so let's reduce the Radius to 5 m.
3. We need to put these two splines together into a Sweep-NURBS object to make the spring solid. So, go to the NURBS drop-down menu, or go to Objects > NURBS > Sweep NURBS. Make sure that the Circle spline is above the Helix Spline.
Our modeling is now complete, not that scary anymore, eh? Now, onto the rigging so our spring is nice and floppy.
If you don't have the MOCCA module, I'm sorry. The tutorial ends here for you. If not, there's a party in MOCCA's pants and you're invited!
Before going on, let's just change our display to lines, you can go to (in the view-port) Display > Lines, or press N, and then G. This is just to ease off some work from our PCs.
4. So, let's get some floppiness. Let's start with a bone. Go find it on your palette or go to Character > Soft IK / Bones > Bone tool. Click on the big shiny Add Bone button, you can guess what it does. It's in the wrong position, so get the move tool (big icon) or Tools > Move or E. Drag it all the way to the start of the of the Spring. Only drag on the Z axis (Blue arrow). It's not fixed yet so click on it in the Hierarchy (on the right with all of our objects), click on the Fixation tab, and click Fix Bone.
5. Now, our first bone is set up, we need more of them. Go back to the Bone-Tool. Click on Add Child Bone several times, you might want to go to the side view for this (F3 by default, press F1 to get back into perspective). Don't stop adding bones until you have them going through the whole spring. Drag and drop all of the Bones under the Helix Spline (Only do the top one and the rest will follow).
6. To begin with, go to the top bone's Fixation tab and click Fix with Children in case you mess up. On the Top bone's Object tab untick the Smart Bone Option. Also on the Function option list you can select 1/r^6, no reason to ask why, it just turns out sexy.
7. This needs an IK chain, so with the top Bone selected go to Character > Soft IK / Bones > Setup IK Chain. I'm not going to explain what we just did there now, or maybe at all. It's best to drag the Bone.Tip Goal null object out the hierarchy.
note: The Bone.Tip Goal is the part we drag around to deform/flop our spring
8. With the Anchor tag (Tag of the top Bone, it looks different that the other bones' tags) we need to untick Hard IK, and tick Dynamics. For this we will increase the gravity a little (more floppiness ). So still on the Anchor tag and under Dynamics, set the Gravity to -50. Now you're basically done, just drag the Bone.Tip Goal object around with the move tool and dance for me!
Bonus Step 9. As you might notice, when you drag the Bone.Tip Goal object around the spring stretches out. If you for some reason do not want that select the second bone's tag, right-click it and choose Select Identical Child Tags. In the Rest tab tick the Force Position option. Now it won't stretch out like that but still deform. You can change the Strenght of the Fore Position to anything you like.
If I was going to animate this I'd record key frames for the position of the Bone.Tip Goal.
Have fun with this tutorial, if wanted i can make more tutorials
Here is a screen shot with the view port rendered.
And if anyone wants it, the Scene File. Remeber that if you do not have the Mocca module you won't be able to do the second part of the tutorial.
Last edited by WilhelmSissener (2007-06-24 14:00:01)
Another tutorial for c4d, I just thought some of you would like it.
Modeling a Flag waving (version 1) - One De-former
Today we will be making this:
1. To start we need a flag, so let's create a plane. Go to the drop down menu or Objects > Primitive > Plane. Change it's orientation to Z+.
2. Doesn't look like much yet, but let's get a Wind De-former. So go to Objects > Deformation > Wind. Make it a child of the plane. Push play if you want to.
3. Most flags that I've seen are usually fixed at one end, so we can with the move tool (Tools > Move/Big Icon/E) change its X position to either -200, or 200 (I used -200 if you were wondering).
4. Another thing I've noticed about flags is that entire edge we have fixed really isn't fixed. So, make the plane editable (Press C), go to point mode. Get the magnet tool (Right click > Magnet) and push the point at the fixed edge a bit, make sure that you don't affect the top and bottom points though.
Congratulations, you're done.
extra
5. Since it is going a bit slow now, let's increase the wind frequency. Go to the Wind's Object tab and increase the frequency to something you like, I used 11.
there will be no more c4d tuts because of: After careful review you are no longer welcome here. Please don't create anymore accounts. Please don't ever come back. You got perma banned and thats that...
you know, all this noise is great...but man do i need an interior lighting tutorial for 3ds max 9...i know its a diff package. I just haven't been able to find much on it. Either way, great contribution to the forums. mmmm, knowledge
