Cinema 4D Tutorial - How to Make Disco Ball Type Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

hey everybody its EJ from my design comm
and in today's tutorial I'm gonna be
showing you how to create some really
cool disco type and how you can use it
and build it in a procedural way to make
some disco e goodness in your mograph
let's check it out
[Applause]
all right it's time to disco and this is
what we're gonna be creating today
nice little disco text very easy to make
let's check out how to do it alright
bringing open a new project and let's
create our text so we'll go to the
mograph menu go to mo tex and right away
let's go into the object tab here and
we'll change the alignment from left to
middle so it's nice and aligned in the
center and then we'll change this text
to disco and we want a little bit more
chunkier text so let's go and choose a
different font
I found the font that's looks pretty
dang good is this future t dem mobile or
oblique and just rotate around here and
that's looking pretty good what I want
to do now is kind of make this a little
bit more of a heavier looking object a
little bit more dynamic so I'll add a
lot more depth to this and I'll just
kind of crank this up see what looks
good maybe about you know 60 or so I
think that's some good extrusion length
and we can also go in here and check on
this kerning and kind of do some kerning
which is always kind of neglected in 3d
but we'll just kind of touch each of
these letters to make sure they get a
little bit of kerning love and let's go
ahead to our caps and add some really
nice thick fill it caps here so I'll
change the start in the end and change
this to fill up caps and I think for
right now the steps of 1 is just
perfectly fine we'll have a very sharp
bevel there but what I want to do is
kind of up the radius here make it a
little bit thicker so maybe well we'll
settle on 7 I think that that's looking
pretty good and I'm
remember this number because we're gonna
have all these little disco ball glitter
pieces and I want them to fit kind of
nicely along not only are the caps of
our object but also along the philip cap
here as well so if I make this radius
seven whenever I make my little glitter
piece I'll keep in mind that all right
that needs to be about seven centimeters
to fill in that gap there so let's go
ahead and see if we can do a little bit
more kerning here just adjust this after
we added that thick thick Philip cap
there and I think that's looking pretty
good so now we got our text looking good
let's just rename this disco text with
an exclamation point because this is
just so it's it's exciting we're just
going all right so we're gonna now
create our low glitter piece and how
we'll do that is just a very thin cube
so again our cap radius or Philip cap
radius is seven so what I'll make this
cube is seven by seven and then a very
skinny thickness in the Z size so maybe
like point two or something like that
you can see how skinny that is and the
point of having some thickness and
instead of not you know using a cube
versus a flat plane is the ability to
add this nice little fillit or this nice
little rounding and what I'm gonna do is
just bring this fill it subdivision down
just a little bit and you can see when I
turn that on or off kind of adds this
really nice rounding and adding this
nice rounding and in making it a little
the surface more smooth rather than
sharp is gonna help us with our
reflections getting some really nice
reflections when we actually apply some
gold materials to that so adding that
rounding gives that nice little glint
you can see the difference between how
flat that flat cube is before and after
that fill it all right so that's the
point of that and we have our little
glitter piece and now we need to clone
it along
the surface of our disco text here so
I'll go to the mograph menu go to cloner
and drag and drop the glitter underneath
the cloner and then I'll just have this
Kohner mode from linear and set this to
object mode drag and drop or disco text
in there and you're gonna notice
something kind of odd it's kind of just
cloning a glitter piece on each
individual letter and it's not
recognizing say like the cap face or any
of the polygons or anything like that so
the problem with mo text then in trying
to use object mode is that there's no
way for the cloner to read the edges on
a mo text object so what we need to do
is place a place our mo text object
inside of a connect object now just go
ahead and grab an a connect object drag
and drop our disco text in there and
basically what this is gonna do and you
can see that some funky stuff happened
right here what I'm gonna do is just
quickly go into my caps here and just
make create single object and that's
gonna kind of fuse the caps with the
extrude and get rid of all that
funkiness that happens with the connect
so that's kind of what is going on there
so basically what a connect object does
is allows a generator object like a moe
text object to be treated like it's a
polygonal object and that way our cloner
object can actually read all of the if I
turn on the lines mode here can actually
read all of these subdivisions here so
if I go in instead of the disco text
object being in the cloner object I can
change this to connect and now we have
all these new options here and you can
see our little glitter pieces have now
cloned onto the vertex all the vertexes
on all of our objects here so one thing
you're gonna notice is that we don't
have any subdivisions on the front caps
and no subdivisions on the X
Jude this isn't space very evenly so
what I'm gonna do to have this space a
little bit more evenly instead of
cloning on vertex I'm gonna clone on the
polygon Center and you can see that this
is looking a little bit better but what
we need to do is do a little bit more
work on our mo text object here to
distribute the polygons a little bit
more evenly and again our front caps of
our text are just a single polygon so
that's why you see these individual
glitter pieces just kind of front and
center there and not actually cloning on
the center so let's go ahead and let's
take care of the fact that we only have
a single polygon in the extrude length
here so to change that we're gonna
actually create some more subdivisions
here and we can just increase here and
you can see that we're adding more
subdivisions and because we're adding
more sub more polygons we can actually
clone more of the little glitter pieces
because we're again cloning on the
polygon center alright so that added a
little bit more to our extrude
subdivision I'll just add one more just
even that out okay so next thing we want
to do is kind of adjust how this is kind
of bunching up along the edges here so
what's controlling the subdivision on
the rounding parts here is our
intermediate points and right now it's
actually subdividing by angle so if the
line between two points or the angle
between two points gets below or gets
below five degrees it creates a
subdivision so what we actually want to
do is not subdivide by angle of two
points we actually want to subdivide
based on maximum length of a of two
points so to get that we'll go to
subdivision here or subdivided here and
we'll change this angle all the way to
90 degrees and we can change our maximum
length to whatever we want right now
it's some
divided every five centimeters you can
see how nicely everything's kind of
subdivided there okay so what I'm gonna
do is just to stay consistent is use
that seven centimeter value there so it
kind of subdivides nice and leave only
we have these really nice gaps here
looking really good you can also tell
that you know we're not getting really
nice subdivisions on the front caps
there so we need to go to the caps and
change the subdivision cap type from end
gone to something like quadrangle and
with that that allows us to kind of
slice up the caps of our object and what
we can do with that is check on this
regular grid and this will then space
and slice everything up evenly along the
front caps and create a really nice grid
so I'll change this width again to about
seven and that's looking pretty good so
far
well so I'm gonna do to kind of clean
this up is go back to our garage shading
mode there and let's actually see how
this is looking when we place like a
texture on there so we'll add a nice
gold texture so I'll double click and
the material manager here just named
this gold and then what I'm gonna do is
just worried about the reflectance
Channel so I'll uncheck the color and
remove this default specular and I'll go
ahead and add a Beckman which is just
your plain run-of-the-mill reflection
layer and I'll go into the frontier and
luckily they have some really nice like
metal presets and you can unlock those
by going to the layer for now going to
conductor and then we actually have all
these different metal types of
reflection I'll just choose gold there
and let's go and just apply this to our
little glitter pieces there and now you
can see that we have all these really
nice gold reflections here and you can
definitely tell
and I just rendered that and that
doesn't look very good because we have
nothing in our scene to reflect because
reflection is all about the surrounding
or the environment that an object's in
so everything's dark there's no
HDR image or any kind of environment at
all so everything's kind of dark but you
can see with even the little preview
reflection in our viewport that we have
these nice little rounded edges and you
can see that that is all due to the nice
little Filat you can see how flat that
reflection is and you know just turning
on the fill it adds all that really nice
detail there all right I'll just zoom
out so let's go ahead and add an
environment for our gold material to
reflect all right so let's go ahead and
let's first create a sky object and you
can see that everything kind of went
dark in our little reflection preview
and that's because the sky is completely
flat it's just a flat default gray color
so I'll double click on the material
manager again and we'll just create a
simple gradient okay and we're gonna
place that in our luminance channel so
it's just a bright flat color and I'll
go and navigate to a gradient and let's
just go ahead and just apply this to our
sky and see what's happening so far so
right now it's just a black and right
black and white gradient and it's going
horizontally so I actually want this to
be vertically spaced and what I can do
now is start playing around and what
I'll do is go to my for up view and you
can see how my viewports kind of slow to
speed everything up when you're using a
lot of clones and one thing I should
have done from the get-go is turn on
this render instances and that's going
to handle clones much faster than not
having that on so that was kind of
bogging down my system there let's go
ahead and let's turn on interactive
render region so we can see exactly what
our reflection is looking like so I'll
just drag this bounding box area I'll
bring up this little triangle here and
this is the quality slider and we can
see how that reflection are the
gradients acting on that reflection so
what I can do now is just start messing
around with the gradient bands here
maybe add in a few
other knots by double-clicking and just
kind of choosing random colors maybe
like dark Browns maybe some darker
Browns here adjusting the spacing
between each of these little knots and
all that good stuff you can see what
that looks like
so we're it's looking a little bit nicer
we got a nice highlight because our of
how our gradients kind of spaced if I go
and kind of rotate and look up you can
see there is the top of my gradient and
it's acting as a really nice bright
reflection on the top so looking good
and as it's getting darker on the bottom
you can see our sky kind of doing its
thing there so depending on where you
have the little bright spots where you
have some of the dark spots here is
gonna determine how the reflections
gonna look on your text okay you can see
that our gradients a little bit dark
darker heavy by the fact that half of
you know more than half of our gradients
pretty dark so again just kind of tweak
this to your liking maybe see what
having a lighter color at the very
bottom is gonna do so you have from
lights to dark to a little bit lighter
again and again we're dealing with a
linear gradient so what I'd like to do
to kind of spice up the turbulent spice
up the gradient a little bit add less
uniform kind of shading gradient is to
just introduce some turbulence so if I
bring this up to 100 you can see how
nutty that looks and how that kind of
broke up our gradients so we're getting
a lot more interesting reflections going
on there we can also adjust the scale of
that the smaller the scale number
percentage here the smaller the the
movement or the strength of that
turbulence so I can change this to say
35 and get some change in the strength
of the turbulence there and I think that
you know that's looking pretty good I
would say maybe back off on the
turbulence a little bit but so far so
good
the one problem with
our gradient here though I'll just get
out of interactive render region here
really quick because actually our
viewport in our 19 can represent
reflections pretty well just in the
viewport with the OpenGL stuff the one
thing I'm seeing right away is there's
some gaps here on our text and what I'll
do with that is because there's no
texture on our actual text object
so I'll just ctrl click and drag
duplicate that gold I'll make this maybe
a darker gold apply this to my connect
object here and you can see I'm filling
in the gaps there maybe make this a
little bit darker gold so how I can do
that just bring down the brightness
there and you can see it's just kind of
darkening it a little bit a little bit
more contrast there the one thing that
is bugging me is everything super
uniform all those little glitter pieces
super uniform so what I'm gonna do is
add a random effector so we'll go up to
effectors go to random and everything
kind of explodes out we need to go to
our parameter tab here and by default
positions turned on and actually I don't
want to change position at all the main
things I am worried about in the random
effector is maybe randomizing the scale
a little bit you know I'll just check on
uniform scale so it scales uniformly and
maybe I'll just do like a rate just a
subtle randomness in the scale of like
negative point negative 0.1 and then
rotations really where this special
sauce is as far as getting some really
nice randomized reflections and really
get Matt disco ball
look so watch what happens when I start
kind of introducing some rotation values
in here you can see even in the viewport
that it's kind of breaking up the
reflection we're getting all these
really nice glint II glinting nest
happening the glinting this new word I
claim it and then adding a little bit of
random rotation in the bearing here so
maybe just this you know slight subtle
kind of thing maybe 3233 something like
that that's looking really good one
thing you're gonna notice though
is we have some geometry intersecting
here so to fix that we'll just go to our
corner and adjust the transform I
believe if we just make this positive Z
like a value like 1 centimeter what
that's gonna do is kind of push these
clones one centimeter away in the Z so
away from the actual surface of the
object and see if we can get away with a
point five and hopefully we don't have
any intersections or anything going on
there
I think that's looking good zoom out and
let's actually see what this looks like
if we render this so you can see it's
looking pretty rough still so far I'm
looking pretty flat just because we have
that gradient kind of acting on
everything I think what I want to do is
maybe adjust the fill it's subdivision
two like one and get a little less of
that rounding happening so that's
looking a little bit nicer it's not so
soft there okay so what we can do now is
add some lighting we have no lighting
happening in our scene so it's our
reflections fairly flat so let's go
ahead and add a area light and what I'll
do is bring up the four up view and
let's go and activate the interactive
render region here just so we can see
what's going on and I'll just position
this area light kind of angle it forward
and you can see we have this little kind
of invisible box here if I adjust the
little dots here I can adjust the size
what I can do this is actually the area
shape of the light and by default if I
go into my light settings and go to the
details tab you can see that that box
shape is only showing in the specular
and it's not showing up in the
reflection but our texture is all
reflections so we need to activate this
before we can see that little box shape
which is almost like a little softbox
show up on a reflection there you can
see that it's very subtle it's not very
bright so we have what's called
visibility multiplier and if we just you
know maybe crank this up to 800 you're
gonna see that that's a nice hot bright
softbox kind of brightness coming just
from our area light there which is
looking really good so now we have these
really nice glint e spots there as I
adjust you know the positioning and the
rotation of how this area light is
affecting and reflecting off the text
here other thing I can do is maybe add
some realistic fall-off here so I'll go
and change it from none to
inverse-square and probably not gonna
affect that much because we're dealing
with reflection here so actually you
probably just turn that off that's
really not making any kind of change or
anything like that
the one thing I want to do is hide the
sky hide this gradient from showing up
in our render and create a new
background so to do that I'm gonna right
click on the sky go to semaphore D tags
and go to compositing tag and this is
going to help us with compositing
objects and stuff in our scene and what
I can do is uncheck scene by camera and
when I render this you can see that our
disco our gradient that we're using to
reflect get all those nice shiny
reflections on the disco type is now
hidden from render so now we can go
ahead create a background and you'll see
just some default gray show up there and
I'll double click in the material tab
and just create a new background
material I'm gonna load this in the
luminance and I'll just create a
gradient choose a circular gradient here
and then I'll just adjust the colors
here so I'll just double click we'll
make this maybe a dark blue something
like that then I'll kind of contrast
with the gold and then just make this a
pretty dark blue on this end so we got
just a subtle amount of gradient apply
this to the background see what that
looks like see this maybe it's a little
too subtle so I'll just bump up the
brightness there now you can see a
little bit better
but that really pops a lot better the
yellow the yellow gold text really pops
off that black background a lot better
than it did with that like creamy
background we had in the gradient so now
we can go ahead and maybe I just want
more hot spots on the top so I can again
just adjust my light here so you get
some really nice
blinky stuff happening something like
that I'm not sure what happened with
that little thing right there did you
see that
that was weird I don't know what that
was that's that's really weird
okay so what we can do now is go ahead
and add maybe like a backlight and let's
go ahead and like some volumetric
backlight so I'll just create a light
this will just be our volumetric and
we'll just place this behind our light
something like that and turn on
volumetric so we'll see some volumetric
visible light here you can see that
happening right back there looking
really good the one thing I want to do
is kind of make this scale in the X so
it's a little bit wider and kind of
fills up all behind our text here so
I'll just go in the Y and just increase
the length and the X there as you can
see and now we should have some lit up
background going on right there now I'm
gonna do is uh maybe make this a little
bit of an orange kind of thing just a
worn hue just to have that give it a
little bit more interesting looks there
we need to go to visibility here and
that's where we can adjust some of this
stuff and crank this up see if we can
get some more nice little rays or
something happening keep moving this
forward seeing what this looks like so
you can see now we're getting some nice
little rays and stuff which is looking
pretty cool I think I want to just
shrink this down though and we can
this in the relative scale so just kind
of shrink it down and why there and now
we have a thinner bit of glow happening
from our volumetric light but we still
get these really nice light beams
occurring let's just go to full up view
see if we crank up the strength if we
can see the little glint a little bit
better so that's looking pretty good and
you can see how we have these really
nice glints on the little glitter pieces
for more Filat let's turn it off
and you can see how boring and flat that
looks so fill it looking really good
adds that nice little glint ëpeace right
there alright so now we can go ahead go
to our render settings and make us a
little bit mo bettah
and change this renderer from standard
to physical or not some crazy
third-party renderer I'm gonna go into
that all these settings you'd probably
want to change and up but I'm just gonna
leave them the same right now the one
thing I want to call out is something
about a me inclusion it would not work
for a scene like this because it's fully
reflective a meet occlusion does not
occur in real life on glass on
reflective materials or a mirror so you
don't even have to worry about something
like that with a scene like this the
only effect I'm gonna apply and I'm not
going to apply a mean inclusion is glow
now typically you would want to do glow
in post but since we're in cinema 4d I
just want to kind of apply the effect
and see what it looks like just so you
can see what it would look like if you
rendered this out and added the glow in
posts so we got our little thing
rendering here and then after it's done
rendering BAM we got this really nice
disco glow looking really good I would
say if I'm gonna change anything I would
tone down how hot this light is because
it's being reflected pretty hot right
there and then probably bring down the
intensity so I can do that really quick
bring down the intensity to seven maybe
bring down this light intensity as well
to maybe eighty seven and maybe even
bring down that visibility multiplier
that is that brightness of that hotbox
texture or the hotbox reflection that's
kind of happening on our reflection
there
I think that's looking looking pretty
good I could tweak this to I couldn't
week this forever but I'm not gonna bore
you guys with that the one thing I do
want to point out is a couple things
number one being again everything relies
on the gradient so if I change this
gradient turbulence to zero and it's
just flat again it's gonna totally
change the look of our text sometimes
that's good sometimes that's bad so I
recommend you experimenting here the one
last thing I want to cover is this is
all built procedurally meaning we can go
back and change the test text to gold
and that will update and apply the
clones and all that good stuff and
you'll see as this renders since
everything is set to polygon in our
cloner it's just gonna automatically
update so you can change your text and
this one is rendering pretty slow but
let's just you know show this gold we
can change it to I don't know I don't
know I'll just change it to I don't know
and then just scale that down and while
the text scales down everything else is
intact
all the grid size glitter size all that
stuff stays the same so that can be a
little chunky so and you just kind of
update the size of the glitter and then
you probably have to update all the
spacing stuff here so maybe the maximum
length you need lower and in the width
of the regular grids just so
everything's not so chunky but let's
just go ahead and do one last render
with I don't know alright so there's how
you can create some cool disco type
using some cloners simple cube and some
super reflective materials and some
fancy lighting so if you have any
questions
anything I covered in this tutorial
please leave them in the comment
sections below and if you make anything
using this disco type effect definitely
show me I'd love to see your disco type
out there always really enjoy seeing
what you guys are making out there and
if you like this tutorial please hit
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views and all of your support so that's
it for me for this time I'll see you all
in another tutorial bye everybody