From the course: Learning Cinema 4D S22

Deformers overview

- In this video, we're going to have a little overview of Deformers. But before we get into that topic, let's refresh our memory on a core concept when learning Cinema 4D, the hierarchy of objects. So just using nulls as an example, I'll create a few null objects. And we'll just name them accordingly. So we have parent, we have child, and we have peer or sibling if you want to call it that. So as you build a scene in cinema 4D, you will create objects that need to act on an object at one of these levels in the hierarchy. Let's create a cube and we'll use this object in conjunction with the Deformer. Deformers are objects which operate on their parent or peer allowing you to modify objects like this cube in a non-destructive way. Another way of saying non-destructive is to say, procedural. And you may hear this term again, as you expand your learning. It allows for a more flexible approach to object creation, because the steps you take to get you from concept to completion are broken down into smaller processes, which can be toggled on or off, or re-arranged to produce a different result. Ultimately, it's a more flexible way of working. We can use Deformers to reshape objects by bending, twisting, and to open them, to name but three. A Deformers icon is predominantly colored light purple, and will sometimes have white elements in it. This is important to remember. There are other objects in Cinema 4D that aren't in this list, but can act like Deformers on objects, and you can spot them because they have the same colors in their icon. So we'll pick the first Deformer in this list to become familiar with how Deformers work. I'll create a bend. Let's just look at the attributes of this. We have size and mode, strength, angle, and keep Y axis length. All of these will become apparent as we work with the object. To set it up, we need to remember that Deformer will work on its parent or its peer. So it either needs to be a child of the cube, or it needs to be at the same level of hierarchy as the cube. Now, currently it's not at the same level of hierarchy because there is no parent for the cube. If we create another null object, and we'll bring this down, and then I'll grab the cube and the bend Deformer, then this should work because they're at the same level of hierarchy. They are peers. So let's just increase the strength and see what happens. Okay, well, it is starting to bend the cube. The thing is we can't bend a single polygon, which is what we've got here. So on the cube, we have to increase the Y segments. And if I show the grouch shading with lines, we get the Y frame overlay. As I increase the segments in Y, you get a smoother result. So the bend is kind of acting as we'd expect now. So let's just take that bend and make it a child of the cube, and you can see it still remains the same. Everything works as expected, and you can see, I can move these objects around and rearrange them. We can actually move the cube through the bend Deformer when it's like this. And this is so cool. We couldn't do that when the bend was a child of the cube, because when we move the cube, we move the bend as well. That's a brief overview of how Deformers work. You can deform an object by placing the Deformer as a child, or pair off the objects in the hierarchy. And when working with Deformers, it's important to remember the geometry going into the Deformer needs to have enough segments in order to deform properly.

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