This project was all about understanding how particles can be emulated to appear liquid. Specifically used in advertisements and other cinema 4D visuals, the aim was to create an aesthetically pleasing animation that would highlight the natural forms of liquid suspended in gravity.
Have you ever seen one of those super cool edgy ads for perfume and wondered holy shit how did they even do that? The answer is Cinema 4D.
- Particles are small objects (often points) emitted from a source and behave according to defined rules. They’re often used for effects like smoke, fire, rain, swarms, or any effect requiring many small instances.
How They Work in Cinema 4D:
- Emitters: Particles originate from an emitter object, which defines the starting point, direction, and spread of the particles.
- Voxels are 3D pixels, essentially cubes, that divide a 3D space into a grid. They’re used for effects that require volume-based data, like fluids, smoke, fire, or sculpting.
How They Work in Cinema 4D:
- Volume Builder and Volume Mesher: Cinema 4D’s native voxel tools allow you to create volumetric effects where you change the values to make the particles of the emitter appear pixel shapes from the input they receive.
With this in mind and a little know-how with cinema 4D and how splines work i set about creating a helix-shape to highlight some nice shapes and altered the size and height to appear something a little like this.
After correcting the position and being satisfied with the overall look I inserted a normal emitter lined the emitter up with the bottom of the helix set a field force assigned to the helix then assigned the emitter to the field force, hit play and we have the basic particles following the helix spline.
so the question is what can we do with this next?
Lets alter the emitter settings and play around with a few values maybe try shot mode and set the value to 10'000 and hope it doesn't implode my pc.
Yeah, that's not what we wanted, this is calculated by the trajectory of each particle emitted from the origin point we don't want to see that its trash, turn this off under display to get a better visual of what our particles are doing.
Hopefully, it will look something like this, so the next stage is to increase the volume in increments so it doesn't crash i started with 10'000 and it gave a nice volume of particles to work with.
Now we are getting something that could maybe resemble liquid, after adding some turbulence and increasing the volume we had some scattering of the particles but it was still a little too fast, we add friction to slow them down and add some disparity and the particles are slowly becoming liquid.
The final test is to increase the volume even more to somewhere around 20-30'000 and hope and pray it holds it together, a good tip when trying new parameters is to always save a copy of your work.
So now the add the volume builder and adjust the voxel size, the volume builder uses the values of the particles and emulates a pixel-based animation to resemble the data, this in turn appears as an almost cartoonish appearance.
After adjusting some radial settings and playing around the values and using a tool built into the volume builder called sdf smooth i managed to get a nice shape that could resemble liquid.
I almost immediately had this idea of a storm in a teacup as i watched the animation of the liquid, i managed to find a good 3D model of a coffee mug and placed my now animated voxels inside to recreate this effect of the coffee stirring outwards from the mug.
Added a few RS Lights and a backdrop and here is the final result.
using the same method I decided to experiment a little further with the emitter particles and attempt something a little more complicated, i started by creating several overlapped circles in the shape of a dome doubled the emitters used corrected the volume builder, and started sculpting a scene.
It started as this with a 3D model of a hand underneath the liquid chrome effect but later after adapted into a joint project with Dec Booth who just so happened to be experimenting with 3D modelling, Dec re created a mask of an iconic rapper MF Doom, with the two projects combined we imported his model into Cinema4D to get a nice clean render.
"A visual always brings a first impression. But if there's going to be a first impression, I might as well use it to control the story. So why not do something like throw a mask on?".
- MF Doom- 1971-2020
