Intro to decay and delay fields in R20 - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Welcome to another C4D weekly. A few weeks ago, I introduced you to fields. Fields are the brand-new way to control the influence of effectors as it's applied to your clones, or objects, in Cinema 4D R20. In this video, I'm going to cover some of the new delay and decay modifier layers that unlock a whole variety of new animating possibilities. So let's go ahead and just start by adding a plain effector to our cloner to start effecting some of our clones here. So with my Hemisphere Grid Cloner selected, I'm going to go to the MoGraph menu, go to Effector, and go to Plain Effector. And go to the Parameter tab, uncheck Position, and what I want to do is just effect the rotation value of this hemisphere, have it spin 180 degrees, so we can see the colored side. So what we're going to do now is control the effect of our effector by going to the Falloff tab, and let's add a Spherical Field. Now if I increase the scale of the spherical field by clicking and dragging this little handle, I can now control which hemispheres or clones are being effected by this plain effector. So this is something we've been able to do for quite a long time, but we can now do it with fields and add however many fields we want and effect all these clones. But let's dive into this little section here. I just clicked and held on this little Decay button. It might look like another type of little modifier layered icon here, but if you just click and hold on the most right-side button, you can see we have all of these different modifier layers. And let's go ahead and start with the decay modifier layer. Now it's aptly named, what the decay modifier layer allows you to do is, if I move this around, and I need to hit Play first so I can see this in my viewport, but basically what you can see if I swing this through really quickly, you can see a subtle delay in the speed in which the spherical field strength leaves the hemispheres, or these clones. So let's make this a little bit more pronounced. And let me crank up the effect strength to, say, 90%. And let me just swing this on through again. And now you can really see, as I swing the spherical field through, the strength of the plain effector slowly decaying over time. And this is the basic functionality of the decay modifier layer. Now one other thing that's really cool that I can do is actually allow you to paint on the influence of an effector. So if I bring the strength all the way to 100%, watch what happens. If I click and drag, you can see, as I move the spherical field through, it paints on the influence of the plain effector, and then it stays that way. It actually doesn't go back to decay. So now you can paint on the influence just like so, which is really, really cool. So let's bring the strength maybe to say, 70%. So they will fade back to 0% strength over time. And let's add yet another modifier layer, and one that adds a lot of fun animation to your clones. And that is the delay modifier layer. Now this might sound familiar because there is a delay effector. So they work similarly. They have the Smoothing mode, you can see down here. And basically what that does is smooth out the animation coming from the effector. So you can see that these hemispheres are slowly kind of fading back. But if I go ahead to my Plain Effector, go back to Delay, and change this to Spring, we should get some nice springy movement now. So let's go and just bring up the delay strength. So maybe 80% so we can really see this pronounced. And as I swing this through, we're going to have that slow decay back to 0% strength coming from the decay effector, or decay modifier layer. And we also have the springy movement coming from the delay modifier layer. But one thing you're going to notice is, as this rotates, we're actually not getting that negative rotation value. We're not having it swing back and forth. And this is due to the fact that if I go to my Plain Effector, we have this little Clamping value option here. Now what this does is it clamps all of the values coming from our plain effector to positive values. So you can see that because we have, in our parameter here, a positive 180, we're actually not getting any negative rotation values, and that's why you're seeing this kind of snapped movement. We're not getting that swing of the hemispheres going the other direction. But if we go ahead into our Falloff, uncheck the Clamping, and deactivate it, you can now see we have our hemispheres swinging back and forth. So that's kind of important to realize is, if you're not seeing something correctly, see if unchecking the Clamping will help there. So with this, with the decay and delay modifier layers, we can have this really fun animation that we're using just a single spherical field combined with the decaying strength effect from the decay modifier layer, and then the springy movement coming from the delay modifier layer. So these new decay and delay modifier layers allows for the draw and effect that has never been achievable before, and really allows for a ton of possibilities for a bunch of interesting animations. And if you want to take a really giant deep dive into all of the new features in Cinema 4D R20, be sure to head over to cineversity.com and check out all of their expansive training videos on R20 features. They're always updating the content there, so be sure to head over there frequently. 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.