Download the HDRI Image

Download here the HDRI Image

Project Settings

First go to the project settings and change the frame rate to 25, the Maximum Time to 500 and the Preview Max Time to 500. It will be an animation of 20 seconds.

Create a Sphere

Create a sphere, change the radius to a 1000 and segments to 100. Make it an editable object by hitting C on the keyboard or this button, go to the front view, zoom out, select the point mode and the Rectangle Selection Tool. Make sure the option ‘Only Select Visible Elements‘ is unchecked. Select the upper part of the sphere and delete it by hitting delete on your keyboard. We have created our bowl.

Material Bowl

Lets add some materials. We will make the bowl invisible. So create a new material, call it ‘Bowl‘ and uncheck all the options except ‘Transparency‘. And add this material to the bowl. Now we can look through the bowl. That will be handy if we want to look at the animation. Rename the sphere to ‘Bowl‘.

The Emitter

Now go to ‘Simulate/Particles’ and create an ‘Emitter‘. Bring it up and point it towards the opening of the bowl. Something like this. If you press play you will see that the emitter produces particles.

The Marble

The next thing we will do is create a sphere, call it ‘Marble‘ and make the radius 30 and give it 8 segments. Turn on ‘render perfect’. That means that the sphere will render perfectly round even though it has only 8 segments. Now put the sphere beneath the emitter and turn on ‘Show Objects‘. New when you press play you will see that the emitter produces the marble.

Rigid Body

Click with your right mouse button on the bowl and select ‘Simulation tags/Collider Body‘. Select in the same way for the marble ‘Simulation tags/Rigid Body‘. The collider object will hold all the marbles that fall into the bowl. So press play. As you see the Bowl does not collide the marbles. In order to solce that that go to the Collider body tag/Colission, go to shape and select ‘Static Mesh‘. Replay the timeline and now the Bowl will hold the marbles.

Emitter settings

Select the emitter and go to the ‘Emitter tab‘. Make 500 by 500. Adjust the position so the marbles won’t fall outside the bowl. Now lets fill the cup with marbles! Go to the Particle Tab.

The birthrate editor determines how much particles there will be created per second in the editor. The birthrate Renderer determines how much particles there will be created while exporting the video in the Picture Viewer. I will keep it the same and set it to 1400. This is the result.

The Stop emission setting determines on witch frame the emitter will stop producing particles. Lets change it to 450. The lifetimes determines after how many frames the particle will disapear. And the speed determines how fast the particles will be emitted. Lets boost it up to 3500. Lets play and see what happens.

Material Marble

Now we will create a material for the marble. Call it ‘Marble‘. The color can be dark blue. The specular is okay and we will add a Reflection. Click on it and change the texture to fresnel and thats it for the marble material. Drag the material to the marble and lets see what we have. Well, it can use some improvements.

HDRI

The last material will be a HDRI sky. Create a sky. You can download this HDRI Image via the link in the discription. I have a tutorial on my channel on how to make great HDRI images using Cinema 4D. But for now, lets make another material, name it HDRI, uncheck the specular, click on color and add the HDRI image. Drag the material to the Sky and render to see how it looks.

Compositing

Click with the right mouse button on the Sky and select ‘Cinema 4D tags/Compositing‘. Go tho the tab ‘tag‘ and uncheck ‘Seen by Camera‘. Do exactly the same with the Bowl. Now play the video, render it and see the result.

Now go back to the HDRI material and bring the Mix Strenght back to 5 percent. Make the color ‘black‘ and render again. I think this looks a bit better.

Anti-Aliasing

In order tot increase the quality of the animation drasticly, go to render settings, click on Anti-aliasing and select go from ‘Geomitry‘ to ‘Best‘ with the min-leven 2×2 and to max level 4×4. The higher these settings, the better the quality but the longer it will take to render.

Go back to the Render Settings. To Output and you can change the width to 1920, the height to 1080, framerate to 25 and the Frame Range to ‘All Frames‘. I prefer to save the animation as a Photoshop Sequence. After that I will adjust it in Adobe After Effects.

Well, this was it for now. In the next tutorial I will add some camera movement and let all the marbles be smashed to the ground.

My name is Ferdy Korpershoek and I will see you next time.

In this video tutorial I will show you how you can make realistic looking grass in Cinema 4D and let the wind blow through it.

Create a plane and add hair

The first thing you’ll do is create a plane. Now go in Simulate/Hair Objects/Add Hair.
Now we want to create realistic looking grass, so we have to change some settings.

Hide the plane

First I would like to hide the plane. You can do that by holding ALT on the keyboard and clicking twice between those dots so the plane will be hidden.

Hair settings

So lets render. As you see we still have a lot of work to do. Lets go to the hair object, select ‘Guides‘ and change the lenght to, lets say 35. Go to the ‘Hairs‘ tab and double the count to 10.000. Go to dynamics and enable ‘Rigid’. If we don’t do that the grass will fall like this.

Material options

After that go to the hair material and change the color gradient to a greenish gradient. At the left side we choose a darkgreen color and at the right side we choose a light green color. Furthermore we can add some variation in the grass blades by changing the Hue and Value.

After that enable Frizz and Bend. And the last thing. Reduce the specular strenght to 30. Lets see what we have right now. That looks a lot better!

Add wind

Now we want the wind to blow trough the grass. In order to get that result, go to Simulate/Particles/Turbulence.

The turbulence emitter has 4 settings.

Strenght, Scale, Frequency and Respect Dynamics Mass. In this case we will edit the upper 3 settings.

Strenght:

The strenght is simply how fast the wind blows. 10 means a soft breeze. 500 means a massive storm.

Scale:

The scaling value defines the size of the noise. 0 means a lot of noise. The smaller the noise the more randomly the grass blades will be dispersed; the larger the noise the more the blades will flow in the same direction

Frequency:

The frequency desides how the wind behaves. Lower values will cause the wind to change more slowly. Larger values will cause the noise to change more quickly.

Change the Turbulence settings

Here are 4 examples with different turbulence settings so you can see how the grass behaves with these values. So lets change the settings to: 300, 500 and 100 and see what it will do.

Example

And as you see. We have realitiatic looking grass blown by the wind. You can play around with the settings until you are fully satisfied. Thanks for watching this video. If you like it, like it and if you want to subscribe for more upcoming tutorials, feel free to do that. You can also visit my website www.c4dee.com. My name is Ferdy Korpershoek and I will see you next time.
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