What can I say? Cinema 4D deformers are cool.
When we see our favorite larger than life, life defying transformations that make an 'Avavtar' movie or simply make us gasp and giggle when a product advertisement takes on life, there's probably a deformer in the box.
What's more, deformers come with a pretty easy introduction.
Like so many effects we can produce with Cinema, deformers are part Art, part Science with the Art being your imagination and experimentation.
Because you can do many things with the deformers, you really need to experiment, read 'play' a lot to get some ideas of the possible and to get some ideas brewing.
Getting started, like all of Cinema 4D's menu 'families', you can unlock the group and place it where you like.
If you are going to work with a specific group, it will be much easier to access all the submenus displayed in your workspace then continually opening and reopening.
To apply a deformer to your chosen object, simply make it a child of the object target.
For example, create a cube, from the primitives menu, then choose 'Bend' from the top of the deformers list.
Drag your new bend object under the cube making it a child.
With your bend deformer active, you will see it's orange 'control handle'.
Drag it back and forth a bit.
Well, it certainly deforms but it's not particularly impressive and not really anything you can use.
Let's try this one adjustment.
Choose your cube object and in the object panel under the attributes, change the Y number of segments from the default 1, to 20.
When you do this you are assigning 20 segments to the vertical, Y dimension of your cube.
Now choose your deformer and drag it's orange control handle and you will see quite a different result.
You can give this simple object much more elasticity and flexibility in it's vertical dimension so when you use the deformer it is distributed across all these segments equally producing a much more flexible structure.
Picture an arc which is one of our most famous geometric shapes.
Whether it appears over a passageway as a keystone, the famous addition to architecture in early ages of design, or simply in the novel shape of a candy cane, creating an arc is a fundamental modeling tool.
As you explore all the possibilities in Cinema 4D, one of your best friends will be the 'Edit->Undo', or keyboard shortcut 'CtrlZ' from 'MS DOS' keyboard days long ago, as you experiment, in this case drag a deformation, then quickly undo your changes to see the same effects as you add more 'Y' segments for example.
Deformers help you create dynamic, wild shapes that might result from a storm but they help just as much as you create classic architectural shapes that appear every day in all the objects we use, in all of Nature's expressions.
We'll explore more deformers and more adjustments tips in our next article.
When we see our favorite larger than life, life defying transformations that make an 'Avavtar' movie or simply make us gasp and giggle when a product advertisement takes on life, there's probably a deformer in the box.
What's more, deformers come with a pretty easy introduction.
Like so many effects we can produce with Cinema, deformers are part Art, part Science with the Art being your imagination and experimentation.
Because you can do many things with the deformers, you really need to experiment, read 'play' a lot to get some ideas of the possible and to get some ideas brewing.
Getting started, like all of Cinema 4D's menu 'families', you can unlock the group and place it where you like.
If you are going to work with a specific group, it will be much easier to access all the submenus displayed in your workspace then continually opening and reopening.
To apply a deformer to your chosen object, simply make it a child of the object target.
For example, create a cube, from the primitives menu, then choose 'Bend' from the top of the deformers list.
Drag your new bend object under the cube making it a child.
With your bend deformer active, you will see it's orange 'control handle'.
Drag it back and forth a bit.
Well, it certainly deforms but it's not particularly impressive and not really anything you can use.
Let's try this one adjustment.
Choose your cube object and in the object panel under the attributes, change the Y number of segments from the default 1, to 20.
When you do this you are assigning 20 segments to the vertical, Y dimension of your cube.
Now choose your deformer and drag it's orange control handle and you will see quite a different result.
You can give this simple object much more elasticity and flexibility in it's vertical dimension so when you use the deformer it is distributed across all these segments equally producing a much more flexible structure.
Picture an arc which is one of our most famous geometric shapes.
Whether it appears over a passageway as a keystone, the famous addition to architecture in early ages of design, or simply in the novel shape of a candy cane, creating an arc is a fundamental modeling tool.
As you explore all the possibilities in Cinema 4D, one of your best friends will be the 'Edit->Undo', or keyboard shortcut 'CtrlZ' from 'MS DOS' keyboard days long ago, as you experiment, in this case drag a deformation, then quickly undo your changes to see the same effects as you add more 'Y' segments for example.
Deformers help you create dynamic, wild shapes that might result from a storm but they help just as much as you create classic architectural shapes that appear every day in all the objects we use, in all of Nature's expressions.
We'll explore more deformers and more adjustments tips in our next article.