Cinema 4D primitive objects, tools, deformers
I would like to start talking about the actual deformers,
which is very fun and very procedural.
Let's delete this one and bring in one cylinder again here.
The good thing about using deformers
is that you don't have to turn them into editable objects.
This way, I can still have all these options available
and change them anytime that I want. This is why I call this procedural.
Here is where you can access all your beautiful deformers.
I'll start talking about the Bend,
and I will show you some of the different deformers.
When I click on that,
it creates one Bend deformer in my Object Manager.
If I select the Bend and in the Object tab
change these parameters, I can see it is changing,
but I don't see the effect on the actual cylinder.
Why is that?
To use deformers,
you always need to make the deformer a child of the object
or you have to put that in the same group of the object.
So, if I just grab that and put that under the object,
now it will start affecting the object.
I can change the angle here.
The strength of the tool.
If you ask me why we don't see that very smooth,
that would be a simple answer: because we don't have enough edges here.
We just need to add more subdivisions and this is the benefit of deformers,
because I still have all the options available here
and I can just add segments here.
I don't need to go through all the tools to add some subdivisions.
This way, I can get this very smooth bended cylinder.
Mixing deformers
If I add one Bulge here and then, again, make it a child
and change the strength here,
now you can see I get this beautiful shape.
I can change the curvature here.
And the only thing you always need to take care of
is the position of the deformer.
The deformer right now is here, which is not the center of the object.
I can select that and just hit this Fit to Parent,
and then this will be fit to the object.
You may ask yourself why this is not fit to this object.
Because the original object is this one. We just added this bend deformer
and turned this into a new shape, that's why.
This is what we can get with mixing these two.
So, if I turn off this, this will be the object just with the bend.
If I turn on the Bulge,
this will be just the Bulge and the mixture will be this.
Like I said before, the order of the objects
in the Object Manager in Cinema 4D is very important.
If I select this and put this on top,
I get a very different, strange result.
If I just put it here and reposition this,
now I get this very strange result.
I can even scale that,
to get a thousand different results.
Let's play with the Taper, for example.
I will delete the Bend and put this Taper here
and then Fit to Parent. Now you see it is exactly perfectly fit
and now if I change that, it adds this beautiful taper.
And I can get this very fast
and I can even add the Fillet to get a different result.
You can even reposition the Taper and get different results here.
Don't forget everything can be animated in Cinema 4D,
like the position.
Set a key frame here and put a key frame here
and then I can see this beautiful animation.
You can even turn off the deformers here in Filter
and then just focus on the animation you've created.
As one more example, I would like to bring in a Displacer.
It's my favorite deformer.
You just need to put that as a child
and then go to Shading and add one.
Noise in Cinema 4D is very procedural and powerful.
As you see, I immediately get this beautiful shape.
If you just select this tag, which is Phong Tag,
and you change this Phong Angle,
you can get a very smooth result when you apply this Displacer.
Now, if I select the Displacer again and go to Noise,
I can see all the available options here.
I can change the global scale, for example, set it to 500.
I can even animate this. So, if I put one and play,
now I can see this is an animated noise deforming my object.
I can change the low clip and high clip of this
and get very different results.
But on top of this, I can change the noise type.
Let's consider some of these different types of noises.
To get a better and detailed result, you always need to add more subdivision.
Let's just add subdivisions here, bump up to 50 and this to 50,
and you see now it shows me detail.
If I bump it to 100...
it shows me all the details here.
This is perfect.
You can also make this a loop, if you want.
Everything works in a second here, but I have 90 frames here
and if you remember, in Edit, Project Settings,
my FPS was set to 30.
It means that if I set this to 3,
it will be 330, which means 90 frames.
Then when I play, it should be a loop.
Besides the deformers, there is another one
which is my favorite called Formula.
If I put the Formula here and disable the displacer for now
and I play that, we'll see it's already animated.
The Formula deformer is the one that you can play with
and get different animations, because it has this formula here.
I know it could be a little confusing,
but you don't have to play with all the numbers here.
You just have to play with this number.
Let's say I press six here, now you can see it is stronger.
And you can have a lower value here to make this slower.
These two numbers are the most important numbers
that you need to know for Formula.
It can also change the effect type
to spherical, for example, or cylindrical.
And get these very weird, fun and strange results.
We just learned the fundamental assets that we need for our 3D project.
Now let's level up our knowledge by learning Cinema 4D tags and MoGraph.