From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Text inflation animations - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D Weekly

Text inflation animations

- [EJ] Welcome to Cinema 4D weekly where I'm going to be sharing tips and tricks to help inspire you and push your 3D animations to the next level in Cinema 4D. Today I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to create pillow text using the often overlooked C4D cloth tag. So here I just have a extruded text spline here. And basically what I want to do is just remove the movement all together. So we're just going to make this a flat panel. Now if I go into the display gouraud shading lines what we need is more subdivisions here so we can get some really nice cloth deformations. So what I'm going to do to actually create more subdivisions is go to my caps tab, go to the type and change this to quadrangle and turn on regular grid. And you can see we have all these added subdivisions. Let's bring down the width to three centimeters and then let's go to our actual text spline and change the intermediate points to subdivided. And then we'll also match this maximum length to match the centimeter width on our caps, which is three. So I'll go back to my spline and let's just change this to three. And sometimes I like to just bring up this angle to 90 degrees. And you can see now we have all these really nice subdivisions. Now we can go ahead an check on this create single object. Click on our extrude, hit C to make this all editable. And now we can right click and go to simulation tags, cloth, and hit play. And you're going to see that our text just kind of drops to the ground. So what we need to do is actually pin some of the points so it's stationary, so we can let the rest of the cloth kind of billow out. So what I'm going to do is go into point mode, hit U and L for loop selection. And you need to make sure your select boundary loop is checked on. And now I can select all the edges of my text and go back into my cloth tag, let's go to dresser and I'm just going to hit fix points, and hit the set button. You'll see that all those points turn to purple. Now if I hit play you can see that those points are now fixed, and now we've got something looking pretty cool. So let me go into just normal gouraud shading and let's go and start tweaking some of these settings. So the first thing I'm going to do is get rid of gravity all together. And let's go ahead and let's add a force to be able to blow out our text. So what I'm going to do is go to simulate, particles, and wind. And let's make sure our wind is actually facing and blowing towards us. And let's just rotate this 180 degrees and hit play. And let's increase the wind speed to about 50. So you can see we have something going on, let's keep tweaking some of these settings here. Let's go into the tag tab, and let's go ahead and the one thing that's going to make a dramatic difference is uping this size to say 120. And you can see now we have all of this billowing cloth. What the size allows us to do is allows the cloth to kind of stretch and grow to 120% of it's original size, or all of those polygons can inflate to 120% of their original size as well. So what we can do is go and remove the stiffness, this is just the overall stiffness of the springs creating this bouncy kind of cloth movement. Deflection is creating this flexing kind of movement on our cloth, and I actually don't like that kind of look, so I'm just going to remove that. And rubber allows our cloth to kind of stretch or add a little bit more give. So I'll bring that to about 5%. Now you can see that our cloth is kind of springing a little bit. What we can do to dampen that is to go to our forces, and let's just up the drag to about 5%. You can see that now we have way less springy-ness and our cloth inflates and kind of comes to a rest much quicker. So you can see everything looks kind of chunky and kind of rigid, so what we can do to smooth this all out is go and grab a subdivision surface, and we'll place our letter inside there. You can see that we smooth everything out. And if we just go ahead and add a symmetry object, I can just drag and drop my subdivision surface under there, and let's just change the symmetry to mirror plane on the X and Y. And now you can see we have this back part of our text. And with just using the cloth tag and few different settings to be tweaked inside that cloth tag, we can have this really cool cloth inflation kind of look. And if you wanted to just have a still, basically we can just let this play and have the inflation do its thing. I'll hit the escape key. And if I want to just keep this deformation as is, I can just go ahead, delete that cloth tag, and now we have our nice inflated cloth text. So by just using the cloth tag we can have a pretty complex looking inflated text animation, with utilizing an extrude object and the cloth engine with minimal edits to the default cloth settings and create something really cool like this. So stay tuned to the next video where I'm going to show you how to build on this effect and be able to control the cloth using Mograph 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 again here next week.

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