From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Intro to R20 volumes - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Intro to R20 volumes

- [Instructor] Welcome to another C4D Weekly. This week, I'm going to cover one of the biggest features in my opinion at least, that was added to C4D R20, Volume Modeling. Now volumes totally change the way that I work as well as gave me the ability to take on types of work that I otherwise wouldn't have due to my lack of modeling skills. I'm not that great of a modeler, so Volume Modeling is that whole new way of modeling and it's really perfect for organic surfaces, and the best part is, is that it's totally procedural and you can model very complex objects using only primitives, so let's go ahead and check out how Volume Modeling works. So you can see in my scene currently I just have a cylinder, a couple capsules, and then a sweep object that is sweeping along a helix spline and that's basically making up my ice cream, and then I have a couple drips right here, but right now, it just looks like I'm just hodgepodging together a bunch of primitives because that's exactly what I'm doing, so to make this look way more organic and look like an actual soft-serve ice cream, what I'm going to do is grab my Volume Modeling tool. So what I'm going to do is, the workflow is going to start by building up a volume using a Volume Builder. So I'm just going to add the Volume Builder to my scene and then to add objects to this Volume Builder, I'm simply going to select all of the objects I want to add and then just click and drag them as children of the Volume Builder and now you're going to see we have this kind of globby mess of all these little pixels, it looks like, these flat planes that are always facing the camera. What these are called are voxels and we click on the Volume Builder, you can see we have this Voxel Size here. Now basically, what voxels are, are 3D pixels, and you can see that we have some pretty low resolution here because our voxels are so huge. So just like with normal pixels, if we have big pixels, we're not going to be able to see that definition of the image, so what we're going to do to get back the resolution of our original objects, is just decrease this Voxel Size. So if I take this to five, you can see our voxels are much smaller and we're getting more of the original form of all of our objects. Now we can bring this all the way down to say one, and now you can really see the original form, let's just change that to one again, and the one thing you're going to notice is that now you're starting to see all these little ripples in here, all these little ribbed areas, and that's basically due to the segments on your primitives, if I go ahead and say, up the primitive smoothing here, you can see we're kind of getting low resolution there, let's change the Rotation Segments to say six, and you can still see those edges, so let's add a little more definition, say 32, and now you can see it's nice and smooth. Same thing with the ice cream here, we can up the resolution by decreasing the angle and having more subdivisions on our spline here, and you can see that smoothed everything out. Another way to smooth things out other than just upping the subdivisions on primitives and splines, is going into our Volume Builder layer list and adding a smooth layer. And what that's going to do, if I click on the smooth layer that I just created, is it's going to allow you to blur those voxels just like you would blur pixels to kind of blur the edges between things, but this is doing it in 3D and you can see that the filter type is Gaussian and that should be a familiar term for folks that are used to Gaussian blurs in After Effects or Photoshop. But basically what we can do is say, up the blur distance and really smooth out the areas between all these objects here, so now we're getting a much more organic looking object, our drips are looking more realistic, and everything's looking really great, and the best part about this is, is say I wanted to move this drip down or even animate it, this is completely live and procedural so we can do those edits or even add more objects to our volume here. So if I wanted to add yet another drip, I can go ahead and Command + Click and drag to duplicate that capsule, maybe move this forward, and just place it right there, and what you're going to notice is that when I click on the Volume Builder again, you're going to see that the newly created capsule is above the smooth layer. Now smooth layers are like adjustment layers in Photoshop or After Effects where it only affects everything underneath it, so for this smooth layer to affect this new capsule, I'll just need to drag and drop this capsule below the smooth layer, and now you can see it's nice and smooth. Now, and again, I can still go in here and edit this object or any other object I want in here, say I wanted to thicken the circle that is being swept along the helix, I can bring this to say, 45, and thicken everything up, and this just gives you so much control over the modeling process and allows you model things that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to modeling using traditional methods. Now if I go ahead and render this, you're going to see that nothing renders because voxels do not render at all, so to be able to build a mesh out of the voxels, what we're going to do is with the Volume Builder selected, I'm going to go to my menu up here, and I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and create a Volume Mesher and what that will do is make the Volume Mesher a parent of the Volume Builder and I can go ahead and drag and drop a texture onto my Volume Mesher and now I hit Render, and now you can see we actually have geometry which is really awesome. So the Volume Mesher meshes the voxels and creates an actual piece of mesh geometry. We can go in here and if I bring up the Garage Shading Lines you can see how dense that mesh is, we use this Adaptive mode on the Volume Mesher to kind of clean up or remove some of the edges there, all the subdivisions there, I found that upping the Adaptive to 1% removes a lot of the excess polygons that you don't need but still maintains that nice detail, so sometimes I like to just keep an Adaptive percentage of one, and you can also adjust this Voxel Range Threshold to make this thicken up or kind of make it collapse in on itself a little bit. Now this only what volumes can actually add to the modeling process, but there's actually so much more that can be done using Volume Modelings, but this is going to totally change the way I work, and I'm no longer going to be hesitant to sign up for gigs that require modeling skills because Volume Modeling gives me so much more confidence and ability to create what I want to without needing to worry about, oh how am I actually going to physically model this thing, which is really huge, so I hope you have fun playing around with volumes, and I'll see you next week. 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.

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