A wooden world…

It has been a while since the release of Cinema4D r12 and I must apologise for the lack of blog posts. To be honest, I’ve been absolutely snowed under with work. Lots of really great projects that will hopefully be online at the Luxx website as soon as I have time to update it.

Exclusive!

I worked with TWP on a long piece that is all about a wooden world for GE Fleet Card. Created some cool jellyfish animations that were projected onto Queens House in London for Bombay Sapphire via Ultrascope in the UK.

Jellyfish

Spent a few weeks with the lovely people over at MTV Networks Australia working on their promo for the Aria’s. Worked on a typography and infographic based animation for another great client who I cannot mention yet (shhhhh!)  Soon I’m off to spend some time working with the talented crew over at Umeric for another exciting new project.

Pollution!

In between all of this creative mayhem, I’ve been planning and recording my next set of training. You are gonna love this! Release 12 saw the addition of some exciting new Dynamic features, possible one of the greatest additions to the application for a long time. Lucky for me, I was involved throughout the development process helping to beta test the new features along with the other members of the Maxon Beta team. During this period I managed to develop some awesome tips, tricks and techniques for working with Dynamics and I thought it would make an ideal subject for my next training series. This new set of training will be based around several complete projects that cover many of the aspects of Dynamics. From the initial creation of simple rigid bodies, through soft bodies, connectors, springs, motors and of course plenty of Xpresso to compliment the toolset. We start with an empty scene and develop an animation using Dynamics from start to finish. Not only is the dynamics toolset covered in detail, but I also discuss workflow, materials and shaders, tons of mograph, caching and rendering the projects.

I’m in the process of proofing all of the new tutorials and will be sending out a few teasers soon. I have a huge free tutorial recorded and set to go live as a taster of what to expect in the new training. So follow me on Twitter for updates and don’t forget to check back here regularly.

In the mean time I have been digging about in my hard drive to find some interesting presets to share… I posted this Thinking Particles preset earlier today and I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks.

Have fun!

So as promised, here is another preset for Thinking Particles. This is from the old HYPA archive that I am slowly resurrecting.  I told you I’d get them online eventually, my apologies that it is taking some time!  I’ve been pretty busy lately with projects and some new training, but more about that later.  On with the particle goodness!

Thinking Particles Fire?

This preset uses the P_MotionInheritance node. It also covers a few other TP / Xpresso tricks.

The Start Group Xpresso

The particles are emitted and they take on a cone shape.  The cone shape is forced to point in the direction of travel using the PAlignment node. PGravity and PScale are used to… well give the particles gravity (upwards via some spherical gravity) and affect their scale.  The PBubble node gives the particles a little deviation from their paths as they move along.

The top few nodes use PData to obtain the particle position, this is then compared with the Y position of a null object.  Once the particles are above this null, they are moved from the Start group into the End group.

Check the Height of the Null

Once the particles are moved from the Start group into the End group the second set of Xpresso takes over.

The End group Xpresso

This is fairly simple, firstly the particles change shape to become cubes.  They also scale down using the PScale node.  The PMotionInheritance node is used here.  Basically there is a null object in the scene that is rotating around.  This is then referenced by the PMotionInheritance node and the motion is applied to the particles.  This makes the cubes swirl around as they rise up.

Here’s a quicktime movie that shows a render of the result.  I used GI for the render and you can see that the ‘fire’ is the main source for illumination.  Of course there are a lot more creative uses for this technique, but hopefully this simple example is enough to spark your creative juices and encourage you to play more with those lovely Thinking Particles!

You can download the scene file here.  It is saved with r11.5, but I’m sure it will be ok with r11 and r12 too.