Making Giants - The Vines

Learn to create animated vines for a short film using Cinema 4D and X-particles in this video tutorial. Explore techniques for generating low-poly vines, from simple hand-drawn splines to complex particle systems. Master the use of sweep NURBS, end growth animation, and spline manipulation to achieve realistic vine growth. Discover how to adjust detail levels for different shot compositions and manage geometry to optimize performance. Follow along as the instructor demonstrates rigging a simple vine setup, adding caps, controlling taper, and preparing for more complex scenes using X-particles.

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Welcome back here comes the part of this series, where I show you something kind of cool and geeky, something that normally would just be its own tutorial with a title like growing low poly vines with X particles in cinema 4d. Now, when I have to figure out some complex effect, it's usually way easier to approach the problem when I know exactly how the effect will be seen in the context of the piece. For example, in this shot, we're just seeing a few vines start to grow, and it's such a short and simple shot. I'll probably do this one by hand or with a really simple vine rig. Now this shot is farther away and we're going to need a lot more leaves. And, uh, so it's probably gonna, you know, need some particles to help us start to fill this out a little bit. So there's not so much manual labor, and we're not hand placing dozens and dozens of pieces.
Joey Korenman : Now in this shot, we're very close to some of the vines and the leads. So the detail's going to need to reflect that this is also the first shot where we really see that the building is getting swarmed by the vines. And I don't really want to have to manually draw, you know, 50 to a hundred splines by hand all over this building. So my plan is to use X particles beginning with this shot, the last couple of shots we'll definitely be done with X particles due to the just sheer number of vines and leaves that are going to be on screen. At the same time. I may have to tone the detailed down a little bit in these shots since there's going to be a pretty insane amount of geometry. And I want to make sure I don't break my computer. So let's start by rigging a simple vine setup.
Joey Korenman : So the first technique I'm going to show you is what we'll use on the easier shots. Uh, and it's, it's a lot simpler and you have a lot more control. So we're going to start by just drawing a spline shape like this, and then I'm going to grab an incited spline, and we're just going to use a sweep nerves, your standard cinema, 4d sweep nerves. Um, so let me grab a sweep and I want to sweep this spline through this one. And here we go. All right. And this can be our vine, and now we can animate the vine really easily just using the end growth. All right. I can just animate it on like that. Um, now I want to get rid of the Fong tags. So we have that nice kind of low poly look, let me turn online so I can see our geometry here.
Joey Korenman : Uh, I do want to add a filot cap to the end, um, so that I can have a little bit of a point on the end of my vine. And maybe I'll add another step and expand the radius in your, you know, what you'll notice is by default, when you add a fill it cap, uh, it expands and kind of makes the end bigger. If you hit constrain. Now I have to make sure I don't make this too big. If you hit constrain, it actually makes sure that your, uh, your spline doesn't get any bigger at the end. So I usually check that on. Um, and then you'll also notice here that even though we don't have a Fong tag, we're still getting that smoothing happening on the end here. Um, and so I need to make sure that my Fong angle is set all the way down to zero.
Joey Korenman : There we go, or, sorry, not zero. It has to be at least one degree and now I get that nice low poly look on the end. Okay, cool. So here's our spline and we can easily animate it using and growth. Uh, so what I want to do a couple of things really quickly just to make this look a little nicer. Um, I'm going to go into my details here and for the scale, um, you know, I'm going to want the scale to kind of taper off a little bit at the end. So I'm just holding command and clicking to add a point, and then I'm going to basically taper the shape of this using this little graph. Okay. So I'm just getting a little bit of a taper and you can, you know, you can control how much, uh, you know, how much it tapers and when it tapers.