From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Rigging mouth using clusters - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Rigging mouth using clusters

- [Instructor] Hello and welcome back to another Cinema 4D weekly. Facial rigging can be hard, but today I'm actually going to show you and easy way to rig up not only mouths, but any kind of facial features using something called clusters. So what are clusters? Well what they allow you to do is select certain points and create a null that will then control those points. So use a null to actually drive point movement which is really cool. So for our little face here let's just say we wanted to control this mouth. So let's go ahead and let's just select some points. I'm just going to select points and add to my selection by holding the shift key down and just getting in here and maybe selecting these four points there. So you can see with those points selected if I just move this around you can see we get some kind of mouth movement there. I'm just going to go ahead and undo that. So let's just say we wanted to actually animate those points very easily without having to go back and select them all the time. That's where clusters come in. It's basically a cluster of points. So where you can find clusters is up in your character menu. And if I go down to Create Cluster with those points selected you'll see two things happen. Let me just give myself a little bit of room in my object manager here. You can see there is my head that I just selected as points on. If I twirl this down here it'll reveal a child object here which is our cluster object. And you can see that we also created this null. Now if I go to my model model and move this head cluster null around you can see that by moving this head cluster null, I'm actually moving those points that we had selected. So this is all working through this cluster object here which is really cool. There's also a really interesting setting here where we can actually adjust the fall off of the influence of those points, okay. So what we can do is go to our fall off and instead of choosing num, we can say surface, and this will actually spread the influence of that cluster object across the surface of this object. So if I have this radius of 20, you can see that it just grew the point selection out here by a radius of about 20 centimeters here. So we're really affecting a lot more space than just our points here, okay. So let's go back, select our null here again. And you can see that's a lot of space. We're kind of deforming areas up here. So if I go back to my cluster I can just bring this radius down to say about five and now you can see that we got more of this lip over here. And that's looking pretty good. Now not only can you move this cluster null here positionally, we can also hit the R key to bring up the rotation tool and we can also go to object mode and if I hit T for scale I can actually scale these points up and down. So you can then go ahead and animate all of these properties on this cluster null. Now it's probably a good idea to rename this. So we can say cluster right lip, okay. And we can go ahead and say rename this as well. So this is the right lip cluster. And we can still add other clusters to control different points here. So before I go ahead and create a new cluster, I'm going to go into my null objects object tab, and for the display I'm going to change this to a sphere, and change the orientation to XY so it's kind of facing in the XY direction. Now I can just go ahead and grab this null here and move this around. It's much more easy to select when you have a different display mode for your null. So I can go ahead and just adjust the size here, okay. So let's go ahead and create another cluster. So maybe we want to have the left part of the lip here, the character's left lip. So I can just select these points again and go ahead to character, create cluster, and there's my cluster left lip. Okay. And again I can move that around. You can see that going on. And go to this new cluster here, and I should rename that but I'm just going to do this for sake of speed and you can see that we can adjust that now. So we can control both the right and left lip and we can keyframe all these things. So what we can do is just keep selecting points, creating clusters, and being able to have a full facial mouth rig. We can do eyebrows if we select different parts of the head or the face up here. There's all different types of things you can do. You can select multiple objects, multiple points on multiple objects and have two different clusters kind of moving both objects at the same time. So clusters can be used in so many creative ways other than just mouse, so I encourage you to experiment with all those types of use cases. So have fun 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 mo graph inspiration, and keep up to date on all my latest mo graph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you here again next week.

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