Intro to Morph deformer - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this week's Cinema 4D Weekly, I'm going to build off of the technique I introduced last week where I showed you how to create an inflated cloth text animation. So if you haven't checked that out yet, be sure to watch that and then come back to this video. All right, so basically what I'm going to show you this week is how to be able to control the cloth inflation by utilizing fields to create a more dynamic and art directable cloth inflation using something called a Morph Deformer. Now, what the Morph Deformer allows you to do is morph between different object poses and control that morphing using fields. So let's create our two poses. So what we're going to do is create the flattened state, and then the inflated state. So what I'm going to do is just command click and drag to duplicate my subdivision surface here. And then I'm just going to delete this cloth tag to store that distorted, inflated text in this object right here. So let's just rename this X Inflated. And then I'll just go back to frame zero, and let's just hide our inflated text. So when we go back to frame zero, our text inflation has not started yet. So what I can do is just delete the cloth tag on this original, flattened X. And here we go, we just have our flat X right there. So let me rename this X Flat. And now what we can do is add a pose morph tag that will allow us to morph between these two object states. So let me right click on the X Flat object here. And let's go to Character Tags, and go to Pose Morph. Now here's where you can store and mix a whole bunch of different attributes together. The only attribute we're going to need is points, so I'm just going to click on Points, and that'll bring us to our Tag tab, and we already have our base pose and then a pose we can morph into. And what we're going to do is just double click on this pose and let's just name this Inflated. Okay? And then, if I bring down and twirl down this Advanced tab, basically what we can do is drag and drop an object to have this pose be the target of. Okay? So all we need to do is drag and drop that inflated X into that target state. So what we're going to be able to do now is morph from that base pose and morph into this inflated pose. So if I click on the inflated pose, and adjust the strength here, you can see I'm basically editing the strength of that inflated pose, which is really great. But the only way we can really animate this is going to the Animate tab, clicking that Animate Mode, and then basically key framing this inflated state by, say, clicking a key frame right here. But if we want way more control, that's where a Morph Deformer comes in handy. Let's go ahead and grab our Morph Deformer. And you can find it right there. And remember, this is a deformer, so to have it act upon an object, we're just going to drag and drop this and make this a child of this X Flat object here. And you can see because I had that Pose Morph tag already selected, that Morph Deformer already has the pose morph in here. If it's not, just make sure to go and drag and drop that right into this morph field. And now what we can do is utilize falloffs to control our morph poses. So I'm just going to go to Falloff, let's add, say, a linear field. And now you can see that now I can control the morphing between these two poses, just like that, so I can reveal on that inflation, which is super cool. So let's go ahead and let's change the direction to negative X, and let's just keyframe this linear field. Let's just set a keyframe in the X, and have this go about 15 frames, move this off to the right there, set another keyframe. And we can just delete this wind object there. Don't need that anymore. But now we have this really cool inflation. But it looks really flat at this point. It doesn't look like cloth at all. So what we're going to do is introduce back in some of that really nice springy movement. And what we're going to do to achieve that is go and grab a jiggle deformer, which is right here. And we'll just make this a child of that X Flat. And what we will need to do is just make sure that that Morph Deformer happens first and then the jiggle. So I'll move that Morph Deformer up and the jiggle second. And now you can see what happens is when this springs out, we get this really nice, springy movement coming from our jiggle deformer here, which is really cool. So we can go ahead and maybe remove some of the stiffness, up some of the drag, even, and now we have this really cool kind of undulation kind of thing goin' on. And what we can do is maybe even increase the strength to say 130, hit Play, and we got some really cool stuff happening here. We can even go and add a smoothing tag and make this a child of the X Flat and have this happen after the jiggle. And basically what we can do is kind of smooth all this out a little bit by upping the stiffness here. There we go. Some really cool stuff. Now, what's really awesome about the Morph Deformer is we can even bring up the inflated percentage of that strength of that pose. So, say I want to bring this to 200%. Let's go back to frame zero. Now I'm basically getting 200% of that inflated pose. So you can see how much more inflated this text is. So you can have a lot of fun with keyframing the inflation strength, and maybe keyframing this from going from 200 down to, say, 100, over the span of a bunch of frames here. So we can get this really dramatic looking text inflation animation and control it and art direct it using fields. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn Library, visit my website, eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily MoGraph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest MoGraph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you here again next week.