Making Foam (Circle Packing) in Cinema 4D Scene Nodes

[@Quick_VFX]

That was a very Houdini-esque Cinema 4D tutorial, I wasn't even aware of these features. Thanks.

[@sdimaging7854]

this is great we need more of this.. much much more - thank you!

[@bhavana01123]

Athanasios, what a terrific way to add a circle-packer+++ functionality to C4D. Congrats and thanks to Andreas as well.

[@Yangsu-h5w]

Wow...Awesome! Thank you!!

[@ledoublea]

this is amazing, I'm mindblown by the capacities and power of nodal editor

[@EffingtonCouldBe]

Thank you for this tut! You are brilliant.

[@legolamll]

Huge kudos to you for sharing these knowledge! Been a long time professional C4D user since collage and tutorials about scene nodes are really scarce. Please post more tutorials about scene nodes, even better a more introductory one for the UI and logic. Keep the good tuts coming!

[@geraldgutberlet1844]

Love it. And no warning that it is still evolving. Will test tomorow. tx mr NM

[@noseman]

it's still evolving... BTW

[@hannan8396]

Very cooool!!! FANTASTIC!!! And well explained as always!!! 😍😎😍

[@Brian-dg3kz]

Already envisioning using this in some way for liquid product shots - some kind of surface bubble. Thanks!

[@friedpixels]

Was quickly able to adopt to this different types of situations, the connector always being key when trying to use different source types and interactions. Most excellent.

[@LookAlikeDolls]

well explained!

[@edjachimowicz8462]

Awesome. It's amazing to see what C4D can do in the hands of someone who knows (his) stuff. Saved the video and going to give it a go to see what I can make with this knowledge. Much appreciated you sharing this.

[@jcspotlight_design]

Awesome Video! What if I need 2 or more different shapes scattered around and not just spheres? How can I do that?

[@ranko91287]

This is amazing! Thank you!

[@charisbci7445]

Είσαι παίχτης!! ✌✌👏👏

[@shawnastrom]

Perfect! More like this!

[@r3feel]

This tutorial is STUNNING!!!!

[@endlesslovingmovement]

Amazing! I was playing with the Circle Packer of xparticles the other day and thought how this could be done without xparticles, purely with the native C4D functionalities. Here is the answer, and it looks like I can do much more with this here - with a bit further exploration. Very cool! Would it be possible to do this with squares or perhaps even hexagons??

[@foureyez247]

🙌 nice one!

[@BenDaleTV]

Perfect tutorial

[@justsuperjl]

So cool thanks for your time!

[@ExpressoMechanicTV]

Fab - thanks so much for sharing!

[@kuunami]

This reminds me of the Houdini workflow. It's pretty cool.

[@Quick_VFX]

no offence but would be much easier to do in Houdini...Cinema 4D node workflow looks messy

[@moh1t]

Great tutorial

[@loganpenciu7317]

Really cool info, thank you for sharing!

[@doseofmotion]

Thanks Aquaman 🙏🙏

[@andreasgaschka]

On point! 👏🏼

[@diegom.bonati8001]

Great tutorial, all very clear, thank you! I wonder if it can be done with two or three different cloned objects.

[@bojassimalmuhanna3611]

Thank you so much

[@matteoforghieri]

Super cool!!

[@marcoleone.]

Thank you! I have a question, is it possible to keep all the circles inside the disk shape?

[@regilh]

Thanks a lot. I love it.

[@stracknl]

Love it!! Thank you🙌

[@sima_jk]

Great tutorial! I'd like to take this further, do you have any pointers how would I go about doing this with set sizes of circles/spheres? Say I want to pack them like this, but I have available only 0.2, 0.4, 0,6 and 0,8 scale spheres of the original. And could I do this on a 3D Shape rather than a disc?

[@sammoore9024]

Thanks for this video Noseman! Is there a way that you could have multiple shapes being distributed? I'm thinking this would make a great set up for a condensation droplets and it would be awesome if you could have a variety of droplet shapes.

[@noseman]

You could but it's not very straightforward. You need to create a switch node with various object inputs and use the index to select which object to clone in each position. The other issue is that the packing only calculates circles and spheres so any non circular/spherical objects won't be adjacent to each other. I was planning to do more tutorials on the subject but have been very busy.

[@sammoore9024]

Thank you for the reply ​@@noseman. Interesting but, like you say, sounds complicated! I did find a good workaround though, which is simply to swap the circles / spheres for an object with a single vertex and then link a cloner to the object group and set the distribution to vertex. Works a treat and opens up access to all the potential of using effectors with the cloner.

[@sammoore9024]

@@noseman of course, all of the objects in the cloner have to conform to the same size circle, but I was expecting that to be the case :)

[@michaelkonomos]

Pure genius

[@noseman]

I cannot deny that...

[@theActionMovieKid]

How does he know so much about this program??! I love it.

[@noseman]

He doesn't... he's very good at pretending he does.

[@kuunami]

Because he's Knowsman.

[@MrOmarniaz]

@@noseman Haha.. really you are one of the best tutors man

[@sicfxmusic]

Noseman Nodes!!

[@SK-hj1xh]

How to create geometry node modeficator or script that solves the problem of the intersection of one geometry with another. So far, the best manual way I do this is through the volume builder and the shrink wrap modifier + smooth the result. It would be very cool to have such a flexible tool that would get in a few clicks and options to get a new shape without crossing objects

[@orcunakman]

Awesome

[@petersunna5206]

Great stuff! I'm trying to replace the disc with a text/spline but I can't get it to work properly. Any ideas how to fix this? Thank you!

[@stemfourvisual]

Maybe because those are splines, and it needs Geometry - so you'd have to extrude or sweep the text/spline, then probably put that in a Connect Object, and use that in place of the disc.

[@petersunna5206]

@@stemfourvisual Thank you!

[@TheDannycoyne]

Right from the start, I'm stuck 😥. Totally new to C4D, but has 'Object Group' been removed from the latest version or is this not available in C4D Lite?

[@konstantintwardzik519]

Is there a way to have the Connect functionality already build inside the scene nodes? Trying to do a stitches generator and I want to give out a spline, which then can be rendered with the curve settings in the RS Object Tab. But I cant get it work so the curve tab showing up from operator group, but its showing up if you put the operator group into a connect Object.

[@igis92PL]

Is it possible to pack different shapes together and control their rotation? I managed to stack few different ellipses but not sure how to treat these as separates that do not overlap

[@endlesslovingmovement]

Is there a way to define that all objects distributed on the surface are not overlapping the surface? Right now all the circles/spheres are going beyond the edge of the disc.

[@danielschmid8530]

1:42 is the part where he explains how to add a port with a nested Geometry port. Every couple months I come back to this spot so I better make this timestamp for myself.

[@subframestudio]

Great tutorial. Would be great get kind of solver node inside scene nodes.

[@subframestudio]

@@blendersarelikevegans actually maxon also added new solvers. Cloth, Rope, Pyro. All gpu.

[@noseman]

@ZEJ ...but did you like my tutorial?

[@BrandonLeeSmith]

is there a way of controlling the spacing on these and also adding softbody dynamics so it grows outward?

[@edmungbean]

Can we have a 3D (volumetric) sphere packer the same way?

[@1SubZeero]

Excellent! How did you come for this?

[@Cookofmotion]

Very good tutorial man!!! Thank you for this!!! How could I do to animate the "POP" of the spheres, how would you recommend me to do it?

[@noseman]

Although it's not real popping, increasing the "Improved Packing" percentage gives the impression of popping.

[@Cookofmotion]

@@noseman Thanks man!!!

[@ziyorokhmanov]

wow

[@UON]

Unfortunately if I render anything with this surface scale blue noise effect, I can't stop the render or all the circles move to different positions when I restart it again. Is there any way to cache this effect to avoid the circles losing their place?

[@noseman]

Did you try "Bake as Alembic"?

[@UON]

@@noseman that's the first thing I tried, it kept crashing c4d and generating huge files as my sample count is 200k. I ended up having to bake it to .orbx which is a bit smarter in how it handles instances. Would like to find a way to fix the behaviour in the node graph itself, but i'm brand new to C4d 2023 (I upgraded from r20 hahaha)

[@noseman]

@@UON Without a project file it's hard to tell what's going on, but even in that case you're using Octane. If you can reproduce the issue with Standard render or Redshift, let me know. Also, I assume you're generating a varied number of circles. Remove any Octane related things and if it still crashes please report it to Maxon Support.

[@JMach4217]

Is it possible to restrict the scaling to 1 axis? For example....if you were using squares / rectangles instead of spheres / circle splines.....is it possible to have it scale only on the X axis or only the X and Z axis, making them all the same height?

[@noseman]

No. This is a specific algorithm that packs Circles by scaling their radius

[@JMach4217]

@@noseman Thanks for the quick reply!

[@markusg3588]

more like this :D

[@hoaeto2180]

You should start a scene node full course for people who can't understand it like me Too much nodes in the browser don't know how to use it and when Please accept this request

[@tvchris]

This is fantastic. How would you go about, say, adding a random color to each sphere based on a ramp? I was able to assign a color in nodes and then tie that back into redshift but couldn't figure out how to integrate a ramp based on index (or whatever)

[@noseman]

Good question. I am planning some follow-up tutorials on how to expand this setup, use it with MoGraph and more. Showing how to Colorize based on various parameters seems like a nice thing to add...

[@legolamll]

@@noseman Second this! Is it possible to show how to randomize the rotation as well?

[@КонстантинКлишин-з3к]

I'm sorry. Could you please say how did you assign different colors to this group? thank you)

[@SupSupa10]

Nice. But limitation is that geometry parameter in input only can read pure geometry, not cloner, null ( including geometry ), vdb.... etc.

[@UON]

Put it in a connect object

[@rudybertazzo]

In C4D 2023 there's no "propagate port" option when dragging the ports on the left, only "add new input".

[@noseman]

It should do the same thing.

[@serpsystem]

I want more!!!

[@omni_frame]

interesting. will this break when using non-planar surfaces to scatter on?

[@noseman]

Did you try it? 🙂

[@erikjohnson7361]

Thanks for this... I usually try to Avoid the Noids.

[@nuncatto]

The tutorial is amazing, but the amount of clicks in to hidden menus we need to do just to start making the set up really shows how stupid this node system is...

[@heraxvot6609]

OMG , it's Json Bourne!

[@noseman]

You should see what I can do with a wrapped Newspaper...

[@sikliztailbunch]

funny. It puts out squares where the circles are supposed to be. No matter what i do or often i repeat it. What do i do wrong?

[@noseman]

I have no idea...

[@DesmondHolt]

Use nside instead 👌🏿

[@3datonement687]

no toggle node type :( in r25

[@VladislavBespalko]

I do right click and dont see button " Toggle the node type ". Help please )

[@noseman]

did you right click at the top of the node? Which version of C4D are you using?

[@VladislavBespalko]

@@noseman r25.113

[@noseman]

@@VladislavBespalko This feature was introduced in 2023. There have been many changes and improvements since R25...

[@VladislavBespalko]

@@noseman ok, thank you

[@mobiusstrip1054]

We can do this with a solid as well 🤙

[@heraxvot6609]

This node system is too confusing and illogical. I was so happy when this system was announced in the form of material nodes, and after buying redshift it all died. Physical render is dead, prorender is dead, bodypain is dead, UV editor is still extremely unstable..... So much inconsistent action from maxon. Athanasios thank you for still releasing such tutorials even though it's not a production solution yet. P.S You as the head of the company would bring much more to the users. If you ever create your own software I will be the first customer !

[@isabellacolt3014]

why I am not gettting toggle name type option?

[@noseman]

because you're using an older version of C4D.

[@isabellacolt3014]

@@noseman I am using cinema 4d 25

[@noseman]

@@isabellacolt3014 You need C4D 2023 and above

[@isabellacolt3014]

@@noseman thank you

[@Ricardo-de9ju]

Do you really believe there is someone who can learn this? Maybe someone with super powers, haha.

[@DesmondHolt]

I dropped a textured gem in the setup. Does not apply texture. Now I'm down a rabbit hole 🕳

[@Demisart1]

Η αλήθεια είναι ότι γκρίνιαξα πολύ για μία τέτοια δυνατότητα... δε μετάνοιωσα καθόλου 😅

[@edrevvvv]

not working

[@patrushevcom]

My Cinema 4D (both 2023.2.2 and 2024.1) constantly crashes at 1:47 when I right click. Does anyone else have the same problem?