Cinema 4D Tutorial - Write With Clouds Using Thinking Particles and Pyrocluster Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

hey everyone it's EJ from I design comm
and today I'm going to show you how you
can do a little bit of cloud writing so
we're going to be writing with clouds so
the first thing I'm going to show you is
how to actually set up your clouds in
second I'm going to show you how you can
actually clone your clouds onto a spline
object and then lastly I'm going to show
you how you can actually animate on the
clouds onto and scale up on that spline
so the technique that I'll show you to
actually animate on these clouds will
help you out in a lot of other mograph
situations so just how you can scale up
along a spline and it's a lot harder
than it seems to how to try to figure
out it's a little bit tricky but I'll
show you how you can do that so first
things first let's set up these clouds
before I actually begin I want to go and
give a shout-out to hello Lux
Tim Clapham and he had this really great
pyro cluster cloud tutorial where he
shows you how to do and how to create
all these clouds and really optimize it
for speed and kind of demystified all of
these settings here so I'm gonna kind of
blow through the cloud settings but know
that if you watched
Tim's tutorial here he he really helps
out in trying to get to understand what
all of these weird settings are right
here alright so let's get to creating
our clouds and I have a spline here that
spells out the word I and that's just a
sweep nerve with a spline in a circle
swept along it and the one thing to keep
in mind when you're creating your blind
to clone your clouds on too so you can
write them up write a word on is to just
give it a little bit give the spline a
little bit of depth so adjust the spline
points on your spline and make sure that
none of the parts of the word are kind
of overlapping so if I you see what I
did in here is that I have the front of
the e forward and z space and then the
to the e back a little bit in z space of
e this actual tube is an overlapping and
this also helps give the little bit
subtle depth in z space when we actually
put our clouds on to the spline so like
I said I'm gonna kind of blow through
the settings of the clouds because you
can actually know any everything you
need to know from Tim's tutorial here so
but the first thing we need to do is
create a few shaders to get our clouds
into our scene and that's a pyro cluster
which is our actual what our clouds look
like and then we need to create a volume
tracer which will actually render the
clouds in our scene and the next thing
we need to do is create an environment
that we can apply our pyro cluster
volume tracer shade or two and then the
next thing we need to do after that is
actually have something where we can
actually render the particle geometry in
our scene so we just go to simulate
thinking particles and just create a
particle geometry and then we're just
going to apply our pyro cluster cloud
onto that pyro cluster geometry there
okay so now we need something to
actually define where our clouds are
going to clone on to and that what we're
gonna use for that is a matrix object so
if you use the matrix object enough you
know that you have two settings where
you can actually generate matrices or
thinking particles and what we want to
create in this instance is thinking
particles so right away we have these
thinking particle little plus signs that
are in a grid array so we want to change
the mode from grid array to a object and
our objects gonna be this cloud text
suite object or sweetener so let's just
go ahead and drag our sweep nerve into
our object field here and you'll see
that we have all those pluses now cloned
on to our sweep nerve here onto our
sweep nerve
mama tree and right now it's set to
vertex distribution we need to just go
to surface and when working with
thinking particles you might have to
usually have to update and go to frame
zeros for the the thinking particles to
refresh in your viewport so keep that in
mind of something you're changing
something and didn't quite update always
just go back to frame 0 and that should
fix that and refresh the thing particles
so let's go to our count you can see
that we just have 20 of these little
thinking particle plusses there that's
not quite enough to form a word here so
let's just Jack this up to say 700 so
now we have pretty good coverage of
these thinking particles along this
sweep the sweep word right here or over
our sweep geometry here so now if we hit
render you can see that we have a little
bit of cloud action going on it doesn't
look too good right now it kind of looks
like Santa Claus has a beard or
something like that and we actually
first need to just hide from visibility
are a sweep nerve so it doesn't render
hit that again
so you can see that everywhere one of
those particle those thinking particle
pluses are a little cloud puff is gonna
clone or is gonna render where that
thinking particle plus is so what we
need to do is number one go into our
settings and just play around with the
size of the of the clouds and what it
looks like as well so first thing we can
do is go into our volume tracer here and
the render mode we can actually just
change this to user settings and Tim Tim
from hello Lux recommends using these
settings for just to really optimize how
fast your clouds render in your scene
and I've seen that it actually gives
pretty good results regardless that
you're actually dumbing down the
settings a little bit but so let me just
change our world step size to 15 matt'll
speed things up along with bringing up
our Ray Ray limit to 5% our shadow step
size to five this is the five is well
see step size there 10 in raytrace limit
to five so these are all settings that
Tim suggests in his tutorial and I'm
just basically copying it word-for-word
so like I said go back to his tutorial
and he'll show you why these things do
the you know speed things up and do the
things they do and the same thing for
the pyro cluster here number one you can
change the color because right now it's
just white to white we can actually
change this go in here and get this nice
kind of you know blue here so we have
this gradation you can see that update
in this little viewer here we can change
our volume to 90 so it's a little bit
less
give it a little bit more transparency
give it a little bit more luminance and
just increase the density so it's a
little bit more dense of a puff an age
we're not gonna use any age effects
we're just gonna uncheck that distance
don't need that don't deem that distance
as well shape we can go in here and just
bring it down a little bit so this used
particle team is very important when
you're wanting to work with mograph
effectors with your matrix object to
affect these the thinking particles so
without this chak dhayn effectors are
not going to work or affect anything
that is produced with thinking particles
through the matrix object with this
select with this turned on you can use
effectors and i'll show you a little bit
of that later on but this is very
important to make sure you have enabled
so that when you do apply effectors to
your matrix object it actually affects
the thinking particle geometry so keep
that in mind so very important make sure
that's checked on so next we're gonna go
to our illumination options and I'm just
going to turn this on
change it to wrangle it's a little bit
faster render mode if I remember
correctly and I'm just gonna change the
self illumination and translucent
illumination to 50 and 50 let's go down
to shadow
what's the dark and opacity negative 20
50 for brightness and this basically
gives it a little bit of contrast let's
see I think we're all good there and
then from noise we can just kind of
scale down our noise a little bit so we
get a little bit more detail and maybe
bring the detail down a little bit so it
renders a little bit faster as well and
phase we're gonna come back to phase
actually animates the turbulence in your
cloud so we'll come back to that later
so we're all good on the
cloud settings here so let's just render
and see what that looks like it's a
little bit better still need to add
lights to our scene but we'll worry
about that later so the first thing I
want to do is remember I went to that
option that particle TM and I said that
you can use effectors because you're
actually and I just figure this out a
while ago is that you're using a matrix
objects to generate all these thinking
particles so I was like alright well
you're using a matrix object I wonder if
say I wanted to add random size to these
clouds if you know what I have to go
into expresso or whatnot as a well maybe
I'll just try a random effector and if I
go into mograph random effector and make
sure that god applied to my matrix
object here and actually one thing I
need to do is go into my pyro cluster
settings and there's this preview option
so right now you see that by adding that
random effector we now see these
matrices from the matrix object but if I
turn on preview you can actually see
these little spheres that represent all
of the clouds in our pirate cluster so
enabling preview allows you to kind of
visually see a preview of where your
clouds are generally gonna be so let's
go into our matrix object again and our
count is 700 but in our max visible view
is just set at 100 so we can actually
bring this up a little bit so we get a
little bit better of an idea of our
cloud coverage on our spline here so
like I said we added a random effector
on to our matrix object and since we
have that particle TM checked we can go
to our random effector and actually
positions fine you can update remember
you need to go to frame zero to update
and turn position on and if we adjust
scale
if they bring this to - you can see that
that updates as well so now we have a
random effector randomizing the scale of
these clouds as well as the position and
actually one thing to note when you're
dealing with editing in the position and
affecting the position with effectors is
you need to go into your matrix object
and we have this particle priority and
it's set to be four effectors so the
what this means is that the particles
are being generated before effectors are
applied so for our particles to be
affected by effectors we need to change
this particle priority to after so now
you see that our particles have now been
affected by that random effector so now
if I update this that random position
moves those particles and then the
particles are applied instead of the
particles are applied then the effectors
apply and then that the position
actually doesn't move the position just
the way that thinking particles work I
don't know much about thinking particles
but that's just what I kind of figured
out by going through this but so you can
see that with the position you need to
have the after effectors position on or
probably particle priority on okay and
that's just with position as far as I
understand it so now we have our scale
and our random position coming from our
random effector and let's hit render
it's a little bit messy we need to still
kind of mess around and tweak with our
cloud settings here because it's all
really blown out but you can see that we
have the beginnings of a little bit of a
a cloud word being spelled out what we
can go and do is either change the
radius here in the pyro cluster settings
or
we can go to our scale here and adjust
the scale and our random effector as
well so we can bring this down to say 1
and we can also bring down the radius to
60 at the same time make sure that's
updated now you see a lot better that
you ie cursive word being spelled out
with clouds so next thing we need to do
you know actually handle lighting this
last but we need to animate this cloud
word being written on so like actually
inspiration for this came from the
plains the Pixar Disney planes movie and
they actually spell out words with the
contrails of the planes like the plane
smoke contrails so I just want to kind
of recreate that as with in with this
with mograph effectors so the way we can
do that and have these basically cloud
clones this these these little balls of
pyro clusters scale on with effectors is
by using a shader object or shader
effector so let's make sure that is a
plight or matrix object and we're
actually gonna bring this above the
random effector in the hierarchy here
just so the shader effector is applied
first and we're gonna change the scale
to negative 1 and right away that's
probably not going to do anything there
we go so we have to go back to frame 0
and that will update so we just changed
all of our scale of our pyro cluster
clouds to 0 so you don't see any of
those little spheres in our scene
anymore because our shader effectors
affecting all of them and changing the
scale to a negative 1 or 0 so what we
need to do is go into our shader here
our shader channel here and define a
shader that will kind of wipe an anime
the Sun so all we need to do is animate
a gradient that goes from white and then
gradually goes all the way to black from
the left to right so let's just go ahead
and create a material that does this so
this will be our shader material and we
don't need our specular here so let's
just go ahead and create a gradient so
the first thing you'll notice we
actually make this a little bit smaller
and move this over here what we need to
do first is applied this shader material
to the shader and then in the shader
options change the shader channel to
color and then we're just going to drag
in that texture that we created with
this gradient here so now you can see
this updated a little bit we have a
little bit of randomness going on it's a
little bit it's not what we're wanting
right now but if we go and change the
type from 2d u2 to DV and update this
you can see that we have from left to
right are clouds scaling down from right
to left so we need to actually invert
this because we want it to scale up from
left to right so let's invert the knots
and then update so you'll see that
whatever is white that's full scale and
then whatever is black has a scale of 0
so now all we have to do is animate this
gradient from right to left so we're
gonna do this by just creating a a
filter
let me move this down and go into our
filter and all we really need to do is
simply adjust our brightness here so if
I brighten this all the way up brighten
our gradient here an update you'll see
that actually goes backwards and
actually one thing you need to keep in
mind is that this is gonna work if you
do not enable clipping I'm not sure why
this is why this works with the gradient
like that but I think that once once you
enable clipping there's no there's
nothing higher than a hundred percent
brightness so enabling clipping will
kind of clamp everything down so that
one hundred percent brightness is just
all pure white instead of any other kind
of values or and that's why you kind of
saw that scaling on the other end
because I think it went past or kind of
looped into black again or something
like that but enable clipping works I
know that much
but so with the cut with the brightness
all the way up that means nothing's on
so all the scale is zero so now we have
to do is animate our brightness just go
to scale frame zero hit brightness
keyframe and then go to say frame 100
here and bring our brightness all the
way down to negative 100 so we have pure
black in our as our gradient and as I
kind of play this out you'll see that we
have our little spheres growing on and
you can see in our gradient that our
gradient is slowly going black or white
to a gray dated black coming down and
also that is affecting our clones and
scaling them up
from left to right with that gradient
that we are driving with our brightness
here so if we play this out you can see
that we have our spheres scaling up so
now if we go to say right here we can
render this and see how our clouds look
as they're being affected by that shader
effector and so we have our clouds
fading up and kind of being drawn on
like if a plane was flying through here
and creating this this word with with
its contrail so now we have exactly what
I have in this final render here where
the clouds scale up and right on this
word so the big revelation is that you
can use mograph effectors with your pot
thinking particles that you create with
your matrix object and you just have to
keep in mind that you have to have this
use particle TM enabled so you can
actually use those effectors to
manipulate these thinking particles that
are created by the matrices created by
the matrix object and if you're changing
position or manipulating the position of
the thinking particles with an effector
you need to make sure that your particle
priority is set to after effectors
instead of before effectors just because
of how thinking particles work and when
they're generated so you want them
generated after you move them with the
effectors okay so let's go ahead and
because our lighting is really cruddy it
doesn't look like the final render at
all let's just add some simple lighting
in here and we'll just create a few
different lights here let's position a
light over here bring the intensity down
and give this a little bit of a blue hue
to it just get a little sky blue light
here
and we'll change the shadow to an area
shadow just because it has way sexier
shadows than the other ones we'll just
duplicate this light and bring a light
over up in this corner here and we'll
just jack up the intensity there a
little bit maybe get a little bit less
blue and then we'll create another light
and we'll bring it behind our text here
and give it a little yellow hue so say
the sun's like coming from the left here
so we'll give this a little bit of
yellow oranges orange hue and bring this
down a little bit so just a little
subtle subtle effect and let's see what
we got now so it's looking a little bit
better we can play around with our
lights a little bit more let's bring
this corner light up a little bit down
increase that intensity a little bit and
bring this light down bring it a little
bit more intensity same thing with this
guy down here you get a little bit
lighter blue let's see what that does
so that's a little bit better what I do
want to do is actually bring up the
randomness a little bit more so let's
just scale up our randomness to two and
I want to change the random mode from
random to noise and change the space
from global to UV and we don't need any
animation speed at all we can adjust the
scale I just like to use a the different
random know different random mode
because you can actually have a little
bit more control over your noise so now
we have a little bit more flowy kind of
turbulence as you're scaling up the
turbulence or the noise so this looks
pretty good right there so let's see
what we have now
it's looking a little bit better I think
we might have to move
this light up a little bit and maybe
rotate it a little bit here
and bring this light down
okay so
see what that looks like
let's get in there I'm not gonna spend
all day you can play around with lights
all year all you want to get it looking
the way you want the one final thing I
do want to do well two things and one is
you can see that as these kind of fade
on they kind of pop a little bit
suddenly if we want to ease that a
little bit all we have to do is remember
we're just using effectors is just add a
delay effector and bring our blend
strength up make sure that applied to
our matrix object here yet so now you
can see that we have our clouds scale up
a little bit more softly and ease in and
don't just pop in just mechanically so
we now we have a little bit more organic
scaling up to our clouds and the second
thing you can actually add is if you
notice in it's very subtle but we have a
little bit of our clouds turbulence
moving a little bit so we have a little
bit of the cloud turbulence animating
you see right here that the turbulence
is moving just so subtly and we can
adjust that by going into our pyro
cluster and going into our noise and
just animating our this phase value so
I'm gonna go to frame zero hit a
keyframe go to frame 120 and I found
that about 1% of frame gives you a
pretty subtle look so just do 120 120
percent and then just go into our
timeline and make sure we have our phase
selected yeah and we'll just make that a
linear keyframe so we don't have ease
and you knees out and we can actually do
that with our filter gradient the
brightness of our gradient so it's not
using it and easing out it's just more
linear and we'll let the delay effect or
handle the easing in and easing out of
the
actual scale
all right so we've learned how to create
some clouds clone clouds onto a spline
or a sweep nerve here and then we've
learned that we can actually use mograph
effectors with thinking particles that
are generated with matrix objects so we
also learned that we can use a shader
effector to affect clones linearly along
a spline by using the UV settings in the
shader settings and then animating that
shader by animating the brightness of
that gradient so a lot of really handy
tips in here I'm gonna provide this
scene for a download and I'd really like
to see what you guys can come up with
write out your names whatever post it
let me see what you did and I'm anxious
to see what you guys come up with and
I'll see you next time like