This week, I wanted to learn about thinking particles in Cinema 4D. They are programmable in XPresso, a Quartz Composer like environment in Cinema 4D.

 

I was inspired by the work of Mountstar and this tutorial, then ended up following the ever so great tutorials on thinking particles by Greyscalgorilla's Chris Schmidt (Part 1, 2, 3 and Part 4, 5, 6). I am always so grateful to those who take the time to create videos of how they use Cinema 4D (or other tools).

 

Then, I ran into another tutorial by Chris on using Sketch and Toon with particles and I ended up experimenting with that a lot, focusing on the rendering of the particles. In the end, I went for a different aesthetics that I was starting on at the begining of the project when making (some) progress on learning thinking particles.

Here are three renderings (1 above and two below) of the same scene at different camera angles. The background is created with thinking particles, even though I could probably have used default particle emitters for a simple effect like this.

 

The thinking particles position is traced by the Mograph Tracer object, which turns the particles trajectory into splines. A Sketch and Toon material strokes the splines and creates the effect I was looking for (slightly wavy rain traces, with a larger droplet at the end).

 

The red head in the center is a deflector, even thought I ended up not wanting as much rain bouncing around as I initially thought. The deflector is the reason why rain drops do not go below the head, as they are stopped (actually deflected) at the back of the head.

Using Sketch and Toon is pretty challenging, but it is a lot of fun. There are a lot of controls, and it is by tweaking these controls (like the stroke thickness in particular) that you can achieve all kinds of graphical, brush, pen or pencil effects. I relied on that for the tears, the rain tracing and the head strokes (black on red).

The head is derived from the standard head mesh that comes with Cinema 4D. I simply removed some of the upper body chest and then used the polygon reduction and the displacer deformers to create a simpler shape.

 

The flat rendering is coming from the use of a single ambient light and no shadowing.

As mentioned above, I started this project wanting to create a rain effect because I found the pictures by Mountstar beautiful. As I was working, I started to realize that rain carries some element of sadness and I thought I'd try to capture something sad with the rain. So this is what I came up with, one interpretation of what sad feels like.

 

One of the things that I find fascinating is how a few graphical elements can carry a lot of meaning for those looking at them. Probably our built-in empathy that makes us feel compassion for (or at least understand) something which afterall, is just a visual stimuli.