From the course: Cinema 4D S22 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

Reading a scene with Fields - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D S22 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

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Reading a scene with Fields

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- [Instructor] Let's discuss how to read a scene which contains fields. If you open a scene that contains multiple fields, it can be difficult to understand what is going on because of the many dependencies that cannot be visualized in the object merger. For example, you can't tell at first glance if a field is being used by a tag. I've chosen this scene because it's super simple. And if you're new to fields, it could still be confusing. So I'm going to suggest a possible strategy you can try. First take a look at all the elements that can use field lists. In our example, we'll look at the matrix object. So from there we'll check the list of effectors in the effectors tab. These effectors each have a field list. So we'll open up the plain effector and a couple of things have happened here. So this linear field is being used by this plane effector and we get some bold orange highlighting in the object manager. If we go onto the random effector, the random field highlights because that is being used by the random effector. So you analyze the field list one after the other to find out which field affects what and how. Then move on to tags and note any highlighting. So I'll click onto the MoGraph selection, So there's no fields that are being used here just some modifier layers, and if I move on to the MoGraph weightmap tag the MoGraph selection tag is being used inside this, you can see here, and also the linear field. So it looks like the linear field is quite important to this scene. You definitely wouldn't want to delete it because everything would just break. This is a relatively simple example but the strategies outlined here still apply to more complex scenes. When learning fields it can be confusing at first as to know how object relationships work. So remember to first check objects which can use fields, and look out for the orange highlighting when selecting objects in the object manager.

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