In this article we deal intensively with Cinema 4D and the MoGraph module. When Maxon introduced it at NAB some time ago, everyone was thrilled and we’re trying to find out if it meets the users’ expectations. The MoGraph module plays an important role in 3D configurator projects.
We have used Cinema 4D in the past from versions 5.21 to 8, but then abandoned it after a while for internal reasons. With this faded knowledge in mind, and a few years in which we haven’t used the program in the meantime, we’ve wanted to include it back in our arsenal for quite some time. We followed its development constantly and downloaded the demo versions regularly. We have always had a great interest in organic structures based on iterative mathematics, so xFrog was one reason we had to look and we will certainly buy it one day. In addition, Cinema 4D has one of the most complete and user-friendly tool sets for creating painted or illustration-like scenes using Sketch & Toon. This is useful for both graphic animation and our other “serious” work with technical visualization. And as if that wasn’t enough, we now have MoGraph.
We’ve been using Cinema 4D again for 3 weeks now and it feels like old times. It complements our work so well and although we won’t use it for all our tasks, we will certainly spend a lot of time on it.
Cinema 4D continues to grow.
Before we move on to the good part, let’s have a look at Cinema 4D 9.6. This release is mainly what other companies call a “maintenance release”. It doesn’t boast many new exciting features, but it polishes the material introduced in 9.5 and focuses on extending the underlying technical processes (the core of the program) to open it up for future development. MoGraph is one such module that already benefits from the improvements.
Another welcome addition is the introduction of a “split” mode for splines. Technically this calculates more intermediate points per force and leads to clean models if you use e.g. an Extrude NURBS object in combination with Deformer. Unlike in the past, their cap faces don’t get crazy and don’t break off. This revitalizes the use of deformers in areas where they have not been used in the past either for the above reasons, which could only be used with highly subdivided polygonal geometry.
This release is motion graphics and compositing heads for us, there is no doubt about that. This is further underlined by some additional functionality for this type of work. First of all we would like to mention the support for another compositing application – Eyeone`s Fusion 5. If you choose this option, Cinema 4D will write a *.comp file for you. The new External Compositing tag falls into the same category. So you can easily mark any object as a placeholder for a 3D layer e.g. in After Effects. In the past, you had to use lights as a workaround. The next two elements are relevant for rendering: The compositing tag now includes the option to mark each object to which it is applied as a matte object, making it easy to create custom matte renderings from a scene without having to apply new materials to an RGB matte pass. Finally, it is now possible to output motion factors that can be used with the most popular motion blur filter in your compositing tool.
What’s in the box?
MoGraph comes on a DVD, which is a first timer around Cinema 4D. This is mainly due to the included royalty-free music. On the diskette you will also find the installer for the update 9.6 and of course the installer for MoGraph. The documentation is included as a PDF file and some additional demo scenes are provided. That’s pretty much all.
Tools in abundance.
Cloner, Matrix, Instance.
To create what we normally call “structured noise”, you need many elements that make up this noise. The Cloner, Matrix, and Instance objects make sure that it all happens in its own way. While some people would say that these are at the heart of MoGraph, it can’t be further from the truth. In fact, these tools all work on their own, but are much nicer in combination with effectors. Let’s look at them in more detail.
The Cloner will be your weapon of choice. As the name suggests, it takes any object (or objects) dropped into it and arranges it in different ways. Built-in are simple modes like linear, radial or grid, but if you’re serious, you’ll find that object mode is inevitable in many situations. This allows you to arrange your clones along a spline or along the surface of another object for even more control. In addition to arranging your objects, the cloner also changes them using a number of parameters. But the power doesn’t end there. Thanks to Cinema 4D’s parametric approach, you can drop a cloner into a cloner and create clones of an already cloned structure. You can extend this concept, but of course at some point in the end you will have so many clones that your system will find it hard to keep up.
The Matrix object offers similar functionality to the cloner, but is handled a little differently. A small disadvantage of the cloner is that the cinema treats its hierarchy as a composite object. This can lead to unwanted distortions of the clones if you use e.g. deformer objects in combination with such a setup. As the name suggests, the matrix object only provides a mathematical matrix that can arrange the objects, but leaves their shape intact.
The last of the three is the instance object. A track of animation states of an object is created. This sounds interesting at first, but unfortunately the control is very limited, so you may not use this tool too often.
Effectors.
Effectors are their best friends at controlling all these hordes of clones, and they also hang on to some of the other tools. Some of them can overwrite the settings made in the clones, but more often you just keep changing them according to different criteria. This can be anything from simple randomness to controlling your clones based on sounds to give them unique shading properties. There are literally infinite combinations and it would be impossible to cover them all. Therefore, you should stay up to date when we go through them in detail in the videos. Let’s just list them here for the sake of completeness.
Random: Parameters vary randomly.
Step: Create steps or mixed variants.
Spline: Limit clones to spline shapes
Formula: Control clones based on mathematical formulas
Target: Target clone on a target object
Inheritance: Imitates the behavior of a “master” object.
Delay: Animate clones with a temporal falloff.
Time: Automatically animate variations over time.
Group: Synchronize multiple effectors without additional keyframes
Shader: Use textures and materials to control clones
Sound: Drive effects based on audio files.
Tracer.
The tracer object is a way to create a large number of fully animatable spline paths by tracking objects or nodes. This eliminates the need to use PLA, which would be very tedious to set up more than just a few splines. Since the entire animation is derived from other objects, it also facilitates things like the animation of dangling hoses and ropes.
Text object.
At first glance, it may seem superfluous for MoGraph to introduce its own text object, since Cinema 4D already has a parametric spline-based text object, but of course there is a reason for that. Most importantly, it can react to effectors that the old text object can’t. This gives them the ability to manipulate any letter, word, or line of text in a way similar to After Effects text animators. Second, it also has built-in options for extrusions, caps, and fillets, making it easy to create 3D text without having to create a hierarchy of objects.
Spline Wrap, Displace, Extrude, and Fracture Object.
These three represent deformation objects that complement MoGraph. There are similar third-party tools available, either for free or as part of commercial packages, but Cinema 4D has not yet had these features active. Since they are deformers, they can also affect cloners and all other MoGraph tools, as well as all other object types.
Spline Wrap deforms objects along a spline, similar to a snake. This sounds boring and certainly not so exciting, but it’s quite useful and one can only wonder why it hasn’t been included in the basic package for a long time.
Another such tool that has long been missing from the Arsenal is the Displace Deformer. Apart from the fact that it offers a very general possibility to deform your objects with shaders and materials under full consideration of their projection/mapping modes, the great thing about this tool is that you can let clones dance on an animated surface, for example, since it fully supports animated textures of any kind.
Perhaps the most exotic tool in the entire package is Extrude. It works similar to classic matrix extrusion, but remains fully editable. For even more control, it can even be connected to splines as a guide. This makes it an ideal choice to create different “scribbles” for background elements like neuron paths, fur balls, random spikes and other alien looking things.
Finally, there is the Fracture object. It works similar to the Deformer Shatter, Explosion or Explosion FX, but can be influenced by the effectors. Care is also taken to preserve contiguous connected objects instead of randomly “crushing” their objects into smaller pieces. Users of After Effects will be familiar with this procedure if, for example, you use the Effect Shatter in combination with a vector graphic that is continuously rasterized and switched on.
MoGraph is supplied with 3 shaders, each of which is tailored to the respective application. The simplest of them is the Color Shader. The main purpose is to give them access to the color variations that you can define with effectors and cloners and to use this information in any material channel and not just in color.
Next on the list is the Multishader. In contrast to the Color Shader, this does not only vary individual material channels, but entire materials. For example, if you drop three different materials into the multishader and assign it to an effector, you can have different textures on each clone without first creating different clone elements. This is especially useful if you’re in an experimental phase and haven’t yet decided on your final look.
The last shader is the Beat shader – as the name suggests, this creates cyclic “beats”, as they often appear in a piece of music or on flashing displays a la “Star trek”.
Spline mask.
This special tool doesn’t really fit into one category with the others and its name is also a bit misleading. It doesn’t really mask anything, but is a means to create booleans with splines. This not only eliminates the need to prepare your vector graphics in external programs like Illustrator, but since each spline element remains separate, you can interactively edit and even animate them in Cinema 4D.
XPresso Nodes.
To complete the picture, MoGraph brings its own nodes to access its internal data structures. So if you’re one of those XPresso geniuses, you can create your own crazy setups using that data.
As you can see, the extension of the functionality that MoGraph offers in Cinema 4D is quite extensive and impressive. This is especially true in areas that not only benefit graphic animators, but can also facilitate many other common tasks. The Tracer, Displace and Spline Wrap are good examples of this and can be worth the investment in situations where you can’t use other tools to get your results. It is also partially integrated with other modules such as Thinking Particles, giving you even more options.
Mograph is not Jenna and Jenna is not DiTools.
We are currently discussing what motivated Maxon to produce MoGraph and how the toolset fits with the current market. Although we can’t give a deeper insight, especially since we only used the demo versions of these tools, let me share my views with them anyway.
Cinema 4D has been very motiongraphickly for quite some time. There are several reasons for this, be it the simplicity of creating 3D text and logos (because the spline tools simply work), the ease of creating a large number of objects or flexible deformers. Even the fast renderer could be included. This trend became even clearer when the Multipass system and the export of after-effects compositions were introduced. After this development, MoGraph seems to be the next logical step.
Then there is the other side. DiTools and JENNA are both tool sets that offer many features similar to MoGraph. Both also have some problems that can’t be reversed under the carpet. As you may know, JENNA is no longer available. Since the development is stopped, you couldn’t buy it with the amount of features you wanted. There is no guarantee that it will work with future versions of Cinema 4D. The biggest problem with DiTools is that it lacks proper documentation. Even after studying it thoroughly, we couldn’t understand some of the features. Furthermore, the development seems to be rather sporadic, as the developer now seems to concentrate on PhyTools.
Wouldn’t it be logical for Maxon to offer a tool like MoGraph? We think so. There is a degree of security for the future, as it is unlikely that the company creating the main program will dispose of any of its modules. As a site, you really know who to contact if you have a problem or would like to request a feature. After all, Maxon’s documentation has always been among the better in the industry, which is of course very helpful. But where there’s light, there’s always shadow. In this case, the negative aspects are very limited, but still the small hurdles you will encounter are worth mentioning.
Things we missed and didn’t like.
At the risk of contradicting ourselves, MoGraph lacks the documentation. We think it has something to do with its depth, and while the manual explains the technical basics to them and is well done and illustrated in this respect, it fails to give them hints on their practical application in everyday work. We really believe that some kind of tutorial guide is needed, ideally as a training DVD.
There are also some decent example scenes missing. The few example scenes that are provided not only do MoGraph justice, they are also not very well thought out. We were really disappointed and angry to get a warning about missing plugins just because we don’t have an advanced renderer or save paths that try to write to non-existent directories and scenes that play automatically when opened from the content browser. This is not “professional” from a commercial product. Our general impression is that this aspect has been rushed and these annoyances could have been avoided.
Since Maxon sells this as a big feature, let’s take a look at the music, or more precisely, have an ear for it. Most of the pieces are electronic in nature. From house to aggressive techno sounds you will find everything. There is no depth and finesse and everything sounds rather uninspired like the many CD collections with “royalty-free, movie-like music” that we all used now and then when we had no other choice. Don’t get us wrong, it’s not a bad thing if you just want to play around and don’t have any specific needs and besides you get the loops of the tracks to mix your own tracks, but we don’t think it would have been necessary because in a production situation elsewhere we would have been looking for better material.
Now to the technical side of things. With JENNA and DiTools as inspiration, we were surprised that some of their more useful features were not implemented in MoGraph. Of particular importance are JENNA’s data tag and NICKL or some of DiTools’ crazy but useful deformers. We also found that some of the features in these two tools are implemented more easily and in line with the general paradigms of cinema. For example, in MoGraph you have to drag objects too often to link fields instead of simply placing them in a hierarchy, as you do with the other two tools. This is only a small problem, of course, but we think there could have been more elegant solutions in some places.
One problem that has not been solved to our satisfaction and causes a lot of frustration is the shading and texturing part. It’s a lot of hit & miss, especially since in many cases it’s not quite clear how MoGraph assigns colors based on the ID of the clone. We admit that some problems are due to our lack of experience with Cinema 4D, but it certainly feels strange.
What could also be included?
In the following section, we would like to discuss some of the things we have missed.
Simple and straightforward shaders that allow you to optimize multiple shading properties without having to assign a MoGraph Color Shader to each channel and another that allows you to randomly play back image sequences without destroying the simplicity of the setup would have been a good starting point. The current “To Layer” function in the multishader works, but is very uncomfortable to use for this type of setup.
Another matter that requires attention is a little more coherence in general behavior. For example, all effectors must work with any tool. Even the cloners don’t accept all the parameters of some effectors, which often makes setup more complicated than necessary, other tools like the tracer can’t use effectors at all. This is not very logical and implemented somewhat inconsistently.
Maxon should also take the time to extend the deformation part. One of our main grips here is that while the Spline Wrap Deformer is super in many situations, it cannot be combined with clones and effectors, which unnecessarily limits its usefulness. Similar limitations apply to other deformation tools, especially because they often have no idea how to place, rotate, or scale a clone.
Finally, there must be a way to handle many, many objects more efficiently. Rendering scenes with hundreds of clones can be very slow as they can also edit the scene files themselves. Some decent instances would greatly improve the workflow. We couldn’t render some of our setups because they contained so many clones that it took forever for even shadows to be calculated from a single light source. It’s not even about how to kill the renderer with Hyper NURBS objects and other effects that create more polygons.
Final thoughts.
Apart from minor problems and complaints, MoGraph is still a fantastic and powerful tool. It’s one in line with the recently released Hair module, and if Maxon continues to develop at this pace, we can expect great things and many more surprises in the future. Where others hesitate or focus on other audiences, Maxon knows how to make its users happy. The goal of all our efforts with MoGraph must now be to polish it a little and overcome some of its limitations and we are sure that the developers will work hard on it. With this in mind, we can only recommend MoGraph to any budding motion artist.
While most of what MoGraph does can certainly be done with other tools, it’s never been easier. We’re still fascinated by how quickly time flies when we work with all these clones, effectors, and other tools, because it’s just great fun.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our experts via our forum.
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