2.1 Using Splines

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the oddly satisfying pendulum animation course. In this lesson we'll learn how to use splines to start creating our address when it starts inspired animations. So first of all, let's take a quick look at the type of animations we want to be creating, by heading over to Andreas Wannerstedt's Instagram page. You can find them easily by going to www.instagram.com/wannstedt. Here you'll find his collection of short looping animations that he's created. These mesmerizing and playful videos have become wildly popular over on the internet. So as we scroll down the different animations, let's pick out the ones we'll be taking inspiration from. So let's click on this one, and you can click on the Play button here, and you'll see in this one the swinging pendulum animation. So I really like the idea of having the swinging pendulum just sort of swing through the perfectly timed hole here. Cool, so let's get out of this. And let's see if we can find another one that we can take some inspiration from. So in this one here you can see we've got this sort of spinning wheel. Let's click on this. Cool. So here in this one you can sort of see a different shaped pendulum this time. And this time we can sort of see how we can start varying our animations by changing the shape of our pendulum. So let's keep going down here. And hopefully we can see if we can find some more. So here we've got some more swinging pendulum animations here. So this one's quite similar to the previous one. And you can see, with this one, the pendulum now is shaped like a cone. So this is the type of animation that we're going to take inspiration from for our animation. So now that we're familiar with the type of animation we want to create, let's go ahead and jump back into Cinema 4D and start with creating the pendulum. Back in Cinema 4D, we can go to the front view by pressing the middle mouse button. And then selecting the front view at the bottom here by pressing the middle mouse button again whilst hovering over it. And at the top menu by here, let's find the Pen button. Click and hold to bring up a new menu, which you will see all the different types of splines we've got here. And now this is where you'll decide what sorts of shape you want your pendulum to be. And choose whichever shape you want accordingly. If you want a different shaped pendulum you may want to choose a different shape, such as a rectangle or a star, to use the extra points and change it to the shape that you want. So for example, if you wanted to emulate the cone shaped pendulum that we saw before, we choose the rectangle spline. And here let's change the width to something like 50 and the height to something like 200, just to make a thin rectangle here. And now we want to make the spline editable by pressing on the Mic editable button here and we want to use the Point Selection tool, Right-Click on the mouse here. I'm going to choose the knife tool, or the Line Cut tool here, and cut across the shape at the bottom. So press and hold Shift as you click, to make the selection snap so it's a perfectly straight cut, like so. So this will create two new points here. If I zoom here, you can see you've got, we're highlighting two new points on the side of our spline. Now, from here we can quickly go ahead and choose the rectangular selection tool. And we want to select the top four points here. And the scale tool here to scale these points down like this, just to make it a little bit thinner like so. This is essentially the shape of the hole that we'll be making in the wheel. So you can see here we have the triangle for the triangular with a cone shaped pendulum. And the straight line here is going to be for the string. Now if you wanted to make a normal round shaped pendulum, we would choose another spline. So let's go ahead and delete this spline here. And next, we want to go ahead and go back to the Pencil and choose the Circular Spline. Zoom out here so we can see what we're doing. And here in the attributes panel, we can start to adjust the size of our circle here. So let's go ahead and make this 50 as well so just make the radius 50. And zoom back up here. And we also want to make sure that the points are adaptive, and the angle is at 5%, which should be the default. Next we wants to make the string hole. So for the string hole we want to create a new spline and this will be rectangular. And let's go ahead and adjust the size settings of this. So let's make this 200. And let's make this about 20. And let's move this up, naturally placing it on top of the circle where the string is going to be. Next we want to combine the splines together. So to do this, let's go ahead and select the spline mask at the top here, which is under the array button. So click and hold on the array button, and let's find spline mask. So let's select this and you'll see that is appears now in our list view. So you'll want to select both the rectangle and the circular spline, so hold CTRL on the keyboard to select two objects. And let's go ahead and click and drag them both into the Spline Mask, like so. And now you'll find that the both rectangular spline and the circle spline have been combined into one. So if this doesn't work for you, just make sure that under the Spline Mask attributes here, that the mode has been set to Union. So this make up our pendulum hole. The next step is to make this line editable. Now, we won't be able to go back from this step, so make sure that you're happy with the positioning of the rectangular spline and the circle spline before we move on. So select the Spline Mask and click on the Make Editable button here, or C on the keyboard. Great, and now we have our fully editable Spline Mask. The next thing we want to do is to make clones of this whole shape which goes around our wheel. So to do this, we want to go to the top menu here and select Mograph and select Cloner. And now we want to drag the Spline Mask here into the Cloner. And you'll see straight away this has made some clones of our hole which isn't quite what we want yet. So in the Attribute panel here let's go ahead and select Cloner first. And we want to change the mode from Linear to Radio. Now it's starting to take the shape of something like what we want. Now they're all a little bit clumped together here so we want to change the radius. So let's go ahead and change the radius here a little bit. And we want to change the count here to six, just to make it equal like so. So make sure that they're a little bit spaced out as we want enough time for the pendulum to move through them. So something like this, let's make this 140, great. Now let's select another circle spline. Let's go back here and select Circle. And this circle spline that will make up the wheel. Now we want to make sure that both the circle spline and the cloner are both centralized. And in order to do this we can just click on the Cloner here. Make sure that the axis is centralized. Do this, go to mesh, axis center, and click on Axis Center and click Execute. Now the circle spline as we just spawned it will already have the access set to its center. And now we can check the positionings here so everything should be zero and same with the Cloner. And you'll see, if things are slightly out of place here, all we have to do is select the axis which is not 0. Press 0 on the keyboard, and there you have it, it's centralized. So now, let's go ahead and scale the circle to the size that we want. We don't want the wheel to be too big, so make sure that the circle is selected. And we can scale up the radius up slightly like so. So let's make this about 300 centimeters. Cool, now we want to make the holes appear in our circle here as part of the spline. So to do this we want to create a another spline mask. So let's go ahead and find our Spline Mask here like so. And put both the circle inside the Spline Mask and the Cloner inside the Spline Mask as well. Now make sure that the circle isn't in on top of the Cloner. And inside our Spline Masks Attributes, instead of Union, we wanted to put the mode to A subtract B. And straightaway, you'll see that's it's combined our masks together and we have the holes inside our wheel shape, like so. Excellent, so that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to make a 3D wheel object out of the splines that we've just created. See you all there.