Michele Learns Cinema 4D: Squash & Stretch

Greyscalegorilla Cinema 4D Animation Fundamentals, Lesson 1: Squash & Stretch

Our first lesson of Animation Fundamentals With David Brodeur was the Squash & Stretch deformer, making a cube jump and bring it to life with a cartoon bounce. The lesson explained how to keyframe the Y position of the cube and the Factor parameter on the Squash & Stretch deformer. We used the F-Curve editor to adjust the ease in/ease out/curve of the values to achieve a believable cartoon bounce. In addition, I swapped out my cube for the Toolfarm TF, just for fun.

The assignment was not about the lighting or camera movements, but about creating a nice jumping cube. So far, with just one lesson, I learned a lot. I’m still new with Cinema 4D and this is an area that I haven’t really explored a lot yet. Lesson one was a lot of fun!

The sound effects were from FreeSound.org and are public domain.

More about Squash & Stretch

The Khan Academy has a great series from Pixar called Pixar in a Box. Below: the Squash and Stretch video.

For Cinema 4D specifically, there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube. Here’s one from David Rogers.

Some new features in R20

MoGraph Fields

Offer unprecedented content creation possibilities to the procedural animation toolset in MoGraph. The Fields feature in Cinema 4D R20 makes it possible to efficiently control the strength of the effect using any combination of falloffs – from simple geometric shapes to shaders and sounds to objects and mathematical formulas. In addition, mix and combine fields with one another in a layer list. Re-map and group effects in multiple Fields, too, to control Effectors, Deformers, weights, and more.

Volume-based modeling

The OpenVDB-based Volume Builder and Mesher in Cinema 4D R20 offer an entirely new procedural modeling workflow. Any primitive or polygon object (including the new Fields objects) can be combined to create complex objects using Boolean operations. Volumes created in R20 can be exported sequentially in OpenVDB format and can be used in any application or render engine that supports OpenVDB.

Node-based material system

More than 150 different node-based shaders offer customers a new and streamlined workflow to quickly and conveniently create shading effects from simple reference materials to highly complex shaders. The existing standard material system’s interface can be used to get started with the new node-based workflow. Node-based materials can be made available as parametric assets with a reduced interface.

CAD Import

Cinema 4D R20 offers seamless drag and drop import for common CAD file formats such as Solidworks, STEP, Catia, JT, and IGES. The scale-based tessellation feature of the import function offers individual control of the level of detail for impressive visualizations.

ProRender improvements

The GPU-based ProRender in Cinema 4D lets customers utilize the power of the GPU to create physically accurate renders. In R20, key features such as Subsurface Scattering, motion blur, and multi-passes are now available. Other enhancements in ProRender include updated code, support for Apple’s Metal2 graphics technology and the use of out-of-core textures.

Core Modernization

The modernization efforts of the Cinema 4D core architecture and foundational technologies MAXON announced in 2017 are now more tangible and mature in Release 20. This is marked by a series of significant API adaptations, the new node system, and the modeling and UI framework.

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