New in Cinema 4D R20: Create Chiseled Type using C4D's Spline Field

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Instructor Cineversity

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  • Duration: 05:16
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  • Made with Release: 20
  • Works with Release: 20 and greater

Chisel Type Effect using the Spline Field as Mask in Cinema 4D R20

You can use Fields in Cinema 4D Release 20 to control the strength of deformation, and with the new Spline Field you can easily create chiseled type. The rig is totally parametric, and you can change the text or font at any time.



With the Field system you can easily control the strength of deformation effects, and one of the things I'm really excited about with the new Field system and the Spline Field is the ability to easily create chiseled text. Let me show you how easy it is to set this up. The first thing that you're going to need is some text - and we're going to set it up with a text spline and extrude object rather than using MoGraph's MoText object - and that's because we need access to this spline. And what we're going to do is set up a few options here within the Caps tab. The first thing you need to make sure to enable is Create Single Object, because that's actually going to connect all of the individual pieces - the extrusion and the cap - together and deform it all as one single piece. And also because we're going to be deforming this text we need a fairly dense mesh. So we're going to set the polygons for the cap to quadrangles and we want to turn on the regular grid option. And we're going to use a pretty small width so that we get a very dense grid. Now this is going to depend on the size of your text - I used a width of 1 centimeters so that I could get a grid that's pretty dense and even on the face of this text. And you can adjust this as necessary to get a smooth deformation. Now we need to actually apply a deformation and for this. We can use a number of different deformers - the displace deformer will work, the formula deformer will work. I'm going to use the Plain Effector but put it into deformation mode because i think this is probably the simplest and maybe even the fastest way to get this effect. So we're going to go ahead and add a Plain Effector and we're going to drop it in as a sibling of the extrude object. That's going to make the deformer act on the extrude, but we need to tell this Plain Effector that is going to act as a deformer. And we do that here in the deformer tab by switching deformation to point. Now you can see that that moved all of the points up on the y-axis. We can switch here into the parameter tab to change what happens to the points, and in this case what we want to do is instead of moving them on the y-axis we want to move them on the z-axis. And that's because the z-axis for these points is the direction the normal faces - so basically by moving all of these out on the z axis we're going to explode this text outward. But in order to get our chiseled effect we need that to only happen in certain spots, and to do that we're going to use the spline as a field. So here in the falloffs tab we're going to create a new field by dragging the spline shape down into the fields list. Now you can see something started to happen here immediately but right now the spline is in the curved shape. Let me switch to another scene really quick and show you how this basically works. In the curve shape here we're setting up a falloff along the distance of the spline basically. We can also do it based on a radius from the spline or we can do along and radius. If I switch into the mask mode we're actually using the spline itself as a mask. Now the first thing we need to do is set the projection - so in this case we want to project the mask down along the y-axis and the case of the text we want to use the z-axis - and then we can choose whether we want this to falloff outside of the spline shape and we can basically blur the effect outward or we can blur the effect inward by setting the inside option. And this here is the key to getting our chiseled text effect. Now you can see that this distance here basically is the amount of blur so when we go and switch back to our chisel text rig we can switch the spline shape here to mask and we can set the mask projection to Z. We want to use the mask falloff inside and there you can see we've got chisel text. Now we can adjust the amount of chisel by it tweaking the distance parameter here and if you increase it enough you're basically going to get a complete chisel. Now you can also jump in here to the remapping tab and use the remapping controls to get even more control over the shape of the chisel. We'll set the contour mode here to curve and now we can use this Bezier spline to actually adjust and dial in the exact shape of the chiseled effect. The beauty of this is that it's a completely parametric effect so I can go back to my text spline, change the text, change my font, and all of my setup continues to work. So I am super excited about being able to create chiseled text in Cinema 4D Release 20 thanks to the new Field system. If you're excited too please like and share this video and make sure to check out our entire playlist on to find out all of the great new features in Cinema 4D Release 20.
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