Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello everyone. This class will be
an introduction to the x particles for plug-in
for Cinema 4D S 26. And we aren't going
to use some of the basic tools to create
an abstract image. We are going to start from a simple emitter and turn it into a custom shape, a meter. Then let's explore
the trail generators and some of the modifiers. To make an interesting look. You will learn how to
use the groups and subfolders to keep the
project well-organized. We're also going to check
the X Particles and hair material and some of them multi-pass options in
the Render Settings. At the end of the class, you will improve your x
particles scales and you would be able to apply our
setup to Juran model. Let's get started.
2. Emitter: Let's begin our class. The first thing is to create
is an X particle system. Click on the insidious
menu and select XP system. This will generate an hierarchy
with a default emitter. Under emitters. Once I press Play, x particles will start
to generate particles. I want to change a couple
of things to our emitter, the speed and the radius. First, let's extend our
timeline a bit more. Under the Emission tab, let's set the speed to 50. You can see the particles
are now moving slower. To visualize any
changes on the radius, you first need to
change the display mode rather than squares to circle. Back to the Emission tab, set the radius to. The viewport will
automatically change the visualization in real time.
3. Follow Surface: Now let's create our
customer emitter shape. If you see here, our
emitter shape by default is set to rectangle, but we can use a custom
object to be our emitter. So let's import our 3D model. Click on File and merge
objects to import your object. For this tutorial,
it's a human head. If you want to use
your own model, try to keep it more or less
the same size as this one. Otherwise, you may get
different results on stuff like the thickness
or the turbulence. Let's turn on the wireframe. Select the emitter and change the emitter shape to object mode and assigned to the
object field, the model. If you now press Play, you can see that
the particles are now emitting from the object. There is one thing
I want to show you under the Emission tab. If, for instance I increase the number of
particles to 100,000. You can see more
clearly that they are emitting from the
center of the polygons. If you look at the field, emit from it is set
to polygon center. Once we select polygon area, automatically the particles
are distributed in a much nicer and evenly
way all over the modal. Go back to the
Emission tab and turn back our emission to 1,000. Now I want to introduce
the first modifier. Select modifiers. Under motion modifiers
select Fall of surface. Once created, the modifier wants to know which
objects to follow. If we drag and drop
the head model. You can see that our particles are now moving along
the surface of it. I want to take accurate. This will make sure no particles can fly away from the surface. Okay, one last things to do. Under the Emission tab. The emission mode
is set to rate. This means the particles are
emitting every single frame. I changed emission
mode too short. And the particles will be
emitted just once at frame one. And this will be enough
for our project.
4. Custom Emitter: Instead of having the
particles emitting from every single polygon
of our surface, what we want to do next is
to create a selection of polygons and have the particles emitting only from
that selection. Let's go to the polygon
mode to create a selection. Our selection will be the eyes and the nostrils, and the lips. Let's select the first AI. Then the second. Now, let's select the nostrils and now the lips. Once we're happy
with our selection, what we need to do now is to go to Select store selection. You can see that Cinema
4D automatically created a tag which we can
rename to emission. Let's now go back to model mode and select again the emitter. And under the Object tab, let's drag our tag in
the selection field. The meaning is that our
emitter is the object, but the emission is
from the selection. If we press Play now, you can see that the emission is happening only
from the polygons. So we selected and this
is starting to create a nice dynamic movement from the front of the hand
towards the back. Let's turn off the work plane. If I switch to the side view, you can start getting an
idea of where we're heading.
5. Trails: The next thing that we
are going to create are the trails in the Hierarchy. Select generators, and then select XP trail
from the list down below. Once it is created, we need to tell the XP trail which one is going to be
the emitter to trace. So once we drop the
emitter into the field, now you can see that
every particle is generating splines
all over the surface. Few things XP trail. First, I would like to change the display color to the same
color as the ammeter one. This is because later on we will create another trail
and another emitter. So I prefer to have the
color of the trail to be similar to the one of
their own particles. So let's select a
light blue color. Now you can see that
the particles and the trails match
nicely together. And the second thing I
would like to show you is how to change the
length of the trails. By default, the length is set to time and the full scene trail. I change time to length and I assign any custom
length to our trail. For instance, if we set
it to 50 and press Play. Once they reached their value, the trails will stop
to draw the splines. For this tutorial, I
set the value to 350, but you can experiment
as much as you like. And that's it for
the trade-offs now.
6. Turbulence: It's time now to
introduce a new modifier. As you can see, our particles at the moment are moving
in a very regular way. And so are the tracers that
are following our particles. I would like to see a
more organic movement of our trails. And in order to do that, we will need to use a
modifier called turbulence. Under motion modifiers
select turbulence. Once created, you will see that the turbulence is
spreading the direction of the particles in a random way and the
picture gets a nice way. We look the main parameter to play with the scale, the frequency, and the strength. You can see that if we
change the strength, the turbulence will get stronger
and the look more wavy. Same as we change the
scale and frequency, we always get different
interesting results. One thing that you may notice, the toolbar lens changes
the speed of the particles. It doesn't matter how the
particle speed is set. This modifier will always
add its own speed. You can see that the
particles are moving very fast compared to how
they were moving before. It doesn't matter if we set the speed of the
particles to zero, there will be always an acceleration created
by the turbulence. A workaround to solve this is by using another modifier
that it's called speeds. So select Motion
modifiers and then speed. By default, the operation
of the speed modifier is set to increment
the speed over time. But if we set it to an
absolute value, for instance, 50, the particle's acceleration is now gone and
the particles are moving again at a
constant speed. So let's do a comparison. The particle speed is set to 50. If I deactivate the
speed modifier, we can see that there is a
very strong acceleration. If I reactivated the
speed in an absolute way. Now the particles are moving
again at a constant speed. For this tutorial, I
put the turbulence, the strength to five, and scale and frequency to 50. The result is a
very subtle way we movement of our
particles and trails.
7. Groups: Now that we're happy with our particles and the trace
running through the surface. I want to create another
emitter and trail to fill the volume of our model. First, let's quickly create a simple material to
better see our particles. Click on plus,
assign the material, and pick a dark gray color. Now, let's tidy up our project. I renamed the emitter to emitter surface and do
the same for the trail. Instead of creating an
emitter from scratch, I will just duplicate it. The parameters will
be exactly the same as the emitter surface, and I will rename it to volume. I will do the same with the trail surface duplicate
and then rename it as volume. Let's not forget that the trade volume needs
the ammeter volume. Another thing that we can do is to change the display mode. So let's select display mode. And we can change
the color to green. And maybe rather than
having the editor displays set as a circle, we could change it to a box. Also, we can assign a different color to
the trail volume. Let's pick a light green. Now we have just duplicated
emitter and trails. So they're going to behave
exactly in the same way. If you zoom in, you can see that the particles are displayed
in two different ways. And at the moment the traits
are just overlapping. You see if I deactivate
one or the other, they look exactly the same. Now it's time to
introduce the groups. The cool thing about the
groups is that we can assign different modifiers
to different groups. So let's start creating
our first group. Selected a surface emitter. Go to groups, and click, create and add a group. Here, our first group. Let's rename it
to group surface. Now select the emitter volume
and create another group. You can see that the group
will automatically pick the particle scholar and
displayed in the icon. So let's call this group volume. Now, if we go to modifiers, we can keep the project even tidyr by creating subfolders. Click on create a subfolder
and rename it as a shared. And then I drag and drop the turbulence and
the speed modifiers. They are applied to both
groups and both amateurs. While the surface
modifier will be applied only to
our Surface group. Click here to create another sub folder
and name it surface. And then I'm going to drop the
fall of surface inside it. The reason for creating
a folder is to keep the project tidy is not
strictly necessary, but it's useful as
a reminder of a which modifiers are
applied to which group. Now, how do we tell the
fall of surface modifier that it must be applied
only to the surface group. So if you see here, there is a tab called
groups affected. If I drag and drop
the group surface to the groups affected, it means that the
fall of surface, we'll work on that group only. So let's press Play now. And you can see that our
particles rounding on the surface are exactly
as they were before. They have the speed, turbulence and the
fall of surface. While the volume ones have
the speed and the turbulence, but not the fall of surface.
8. 07 Collider Tag: It's time to play with
the volume emitter. Let's turn off the
surface for now. And let's change the
display mode two lines. It will help us to see what's
going on inside the model. The first things
to do is to change the direction of the particles. If you remember, the
emitter at the moment is emitting from the head and
from our polygon selection. If you see here, there is a parameter called
particle direction. If we click Invert
and press Play, you will see that the
particles are now emitting inside of the model. Our next goal is to keep the
particles within the model. To do that, we need to
add the collider tag. Right-click in CDM tags. Xp collider. So once created, don't forget that we need to drop
the group volume to the group affected tab because we want the collider to
ignore the surface group. Then we need to change
the collision from the outside of our
model to the inside. So now if we press Play, you can see that
the particles are trapped inside our model.
9. Avoid Modifier: You may have noticed that
thanks to the collider tag, once the particles
reach our surface, they start to bounce. But this creates a lot of sharp corners when the direction
of the trails changes. To avoid it and to
get a smoother look, we can use another modifier. If we select again modifiers, motion modifiers, and
then we click on a void. Don't forget that the group of our avoid modifier is going
to be the volume group. So we're going to
create a subfolder. We rename it volume, and we drop the modifier inside. If we scroll down a bit, we need to drag the model to avoid and double-check
that under on detection, they change direction is ticked. If we press Play now, the particles are now
trying to avoid our model. You can see that
obviously there is a big gap between the
surface and the trails. This is the detection
distance parameter. So if we reduce it to 20 cm. Now you can see that
the particles are almost reaching our surface, but then they will avoid it. This is a much cleaner
result because we don't have any more bouncing and the
sharp corners are gone.
10. Quick Recap: Let's do a quick recap
of our particle system. We have two emitters generating
particles and two trails. Then we created the two groups, the surface and the volume. The sheriff modifiers
are the speed and the turbulence
because they don't have any specific
groups affected. Then the fall of surface is applied only to
the group surface. The void is applied only
to the group volume. And the collision tag is applied only to
the group volume. And this is great because
we kept everything under one system with a nice
and tidy hierarchy with all our objects.
11. XpMaterials: Okay, let's add some materials
and work on the look. If you hit the render, you can see that nothing
has been rendered. What we need to create
is an XP material. Click on create extensions,
x particles material. Let's assign the material
to our emitters. And if we exclude the
head from the render, you can see that the particles
are now generated and the colors are the ones we have assigned as the display mode. Let's have a look at the
material. You can see here. The color mode is set
to particle color. If you want to override
the display mode, select single color and
pick a light yellow. Now, this color will overwrite
all the display colors. Another tab to
check is the size. By default, it is set
to particle radius. And personally I don't like this way because I always need to check the particle radius
from the emitter tab. If instead I select the world. Now we have a proper
dimension field that we can set here directly. If I keep 1 cm, we now have all our particles
with one Custom Size. Third parameter is
the illumination. By default, delighting
mode is set to flat depending on the look, there are a bunch of
options you can play with. The one I've chosen is neon. This will give a glow
to our particles. Obviously this looks too much, but we can drop the width
of our glow to 25%, which will give our particle
the look, I'm happy wind. In the next lesson, we'll create our trail material.
12. Trail Materials: Now let's jump on the
materials of our trails. For the trails we
are going to use the hair material because
the render is super-fast. First, I renamed the particles
material as x p dots. And let's create
a new shader here material and rename
it as trade one, and assigned it to
the trail surface. By default, the hair material
comes with a brown look. And if we hit render, you can see is quite ugly. Let's activate the
interactive render region, extend its area, and set
it as the highest quality. Let's have a look to
the hair material. Here you can see the
default color is a gradient with the
dark and light brown. So let's change it. For the surface,
I've used a preset. If we click to load a preset, we will have a bunch of
pre-made color palettes. The one I picked is
the scheme seven. And by selecting the colors, we can change the
interpolation to smooth. Now you can see the
look is much better. Now, let's jump
on the thickness. By default, we have a
big root which is set to 1 cm and a tiny tip at the end. I preferred to change the
route to a smaller one. This way, we will
get more density and more details in
our emission area. The end of the tip could be 0.5. So it's slowly get sicker
while it's growing. Now, duplicate the material
and rename it as a trail to let's assign it
to the trail volume. So at the moment, both of them have the same look. Now let's choose
another gradient. I want to show you how I load the color palette from
an external file. You can find it in the project
assets or build your own. This little icon is called
the color from picture. Click on Browse to
select the image. And you can see that the
image is now loaded. There are four colors, so we can remove these two. Now let's pick the colors
with the eye dropper. And then we can select the blue, green, yellow, and red. We need to adjust the
position of the color. This one will be 33.3 and
the second will be 66.6. So it's evenly distributed. Now we have a nice combination
of the two gradients. But at the moment is
still looking flat because we haven't had that
any light to our source, which will be done in
the next tutorial.
13. Light: Now let's work on the
lighting of our scene. Right now, the overall
look is very flat. This is because at the moment, there is only the Cinema
4D default light. So let's create our light. I'm going to do a
very simple setup, just one area light
for this project. You can see straight away that it's already getting better. Let's work a bit on the light. First, I want to
add a target tag. And let's use the
head as a target. Now, we can move the light around and it's always
pointing at the subject. Also, I want to activate the shadows because by
default they are off. Now the Luke is getting much
nicer. For small tweaks. I'm going to turn off the particles and work a
little bit directly on our subject because
it's easier to understand where the
lights and shadows are. Let's move the light a bit up and round up the numbers. Another thing that I want to
add to our light is the fall of go to the details and
add the inverse square, which is a physically
accurate fall off. Let's turn back on the
particle system and turn off our model. I think we are close. Maybe it's a little
bit too bright. We can drop the fall of 2300. Now is not overexposed. I press play and let the
particles grow a bit more. You can also forward
frame by frame. This is enough because it's close to the
back of the head, but not reaching it yet. We can start to create our
camera in the next tutorial.
14. Camera and Render: In this lesson, we
are going to create a camera and set the Render. Click on the camera button to create it and make it active. In the Object tab, change the focal length to
portrait 80 millimeter. Let's move the camera to frame the subject to a side view. And tweak the coordinates
of the camera. Let's set all the values to zero except the rotation
at 90 degrees. This value will be
2000 to make sure we have enough space at the
top and at the bottom. I can forward frame
by frame and stop once I'm happy with
the frame to render. Turn on the interactive render
region to double-check. And now it's time to open
our Render Settings. So let's change the
file extension to PNG and activate the alpha
channel and straight Alpha. Click here to choose
the destination folder. I'm going to name
the file as XB had. In the Output tab, look the ratio and set the
render to 1920 by 1080. I also want to render an extra pass with
only our particles. To do so, we need to
activate the multi-pass. The particle will be in
the atmosphere paths. Click back on the Save tab. And you can see that under the regular image now there
will be the multi-pass image. Select the same folder and
name the file as particles. And as a file format, let's choose again PNG
eight bits per channel, exactly the same as
per the regular image. Now we can finally hit Render, and this is going to
open the picture viewer. Cinema will start
rendering very fast. And if we click on
the single bus, you can see there
is the atmosphere and the alpha
channel information. While in the image there
will be the full RGB file. So let's sit for
Cinema 4D and we will jump in after effects
for the compositing.
15. 14 Compositing: In this final class, we are going to do a bit of
compositing in after effects. Double-click in the
project window and import that two images
generated by Cinema 4D. Select XP head and drop it
into a new composition. This is going to create
a new composition with the same size and
same name of the image. And if we click here, you can check the alpha channel. First. Let's create
a background color. So right-click and select New Solid and rename
it background. Select a very dark blue with
those value 15, 25, 40. Once created, drag it below. Second, I created a fake source light to add a bit of
variety to our background. Once again, new solid. And name it Light. And I picked a slightly
lighter blue with those value, 25, 35, 50. And drag it between
the two layers. Select the Mask tool and double-click and scale it
until it looks like a circle, but it doesn't have
to be precise. Unfold the mask
option and feather 500 pixels and change the
blending mode to add. This will match more or less
the light from Cinema 4D. Now, a bit of color correction. If you zoom in, you can
notice here the shadows are too dark and I want to blend the image and
the background. I'm going to use an effect
called the selective color. Double-click, and it's applied automatically to the image. Here, you can select
all the different tones plus the whites,
neutral and blacks. By selecting the blacks, we can tweak the shadows. Let's add a bit of cyan. Also, removing the yellow
means you are adding blue. You can see now that
the image is more blended with the
background color. Now I want to use our
particle atmosphere image to make the particles
more visible. Drop the image on top and
change the blending mode to add press T and change
the opacity to 25%. You can see it's adding a
bit of touch to the scene. Now let's create another
solid to add some vignettes. It will be black, and let's name it. Vignette. Double-click
on the ellipse masks. And this time the operation
will be subtract. You can see the solid is now on the coordinates of
the composition. Change the feather to 300 pixels and set the
blending mode to multiply. And the opacity to 25 per cent. This will add an extra
vignette to the compositing. Create an adjustment layer and name it blur effects. Let's type fast box blur
and blur three pixels. Tick, Repeat Edge Pixels to remove the black
lines around. One more time, the Ellipse
Tool and set it as subtract feather 200 pixel. Now, if we press
and hold control, the scale of the mask
will be on both sides. What is doing is adding a bit of blur at the top
and at the bottom. Now let's create another
adjustment layer to add some contrast. Name it levels, type in levels, and change the Gamma 2.85. Finally, one last adjustment
layer to add some grain. Grain is very useful to remove the bending caused
by any gradient. We viewing mode from
preview to final output. Otherwise, the grain
will be only visible to the small square in
the center of the screen. As a preset, I use
the second one, which is a small grain pattern, and change the transparency
to 50 per cent. To render the final
frame, go to Composition. Save frame as file. It will automatically
open the Render Queue. In output mode, select
PNG sequence and press OK. Name the file XB head. Final look. And let's hit Render. Okay, that's it for this class. And I really hope you enjoy it. Thank you very
much for watching.
Davide Frusteri, Motion Graphics Designer
