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Fully Dynamic Popping Popcorn Tutorial 81 Comments

In this “Tag Team Tutorial”, Chris and I show you how to model and texture a dynamically popping popcorn kernel and get them to behave like real popping popcorn. Just in time for summer blockbuster season. Based on this lovely render by John Robson

Part 1: Modeling, Dynamics Texturing and Animation

Part 2: Baking, Lighting and Compositing

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81 Comments

  2. C4D Weekly

    When I saw Chris’s tutorial couple of weeks ago I thought it is pretty cool. But Nick, your prettified version is just fantastic. I really dig it! Thanks guys, both of you.

    Reply

  4. makosx

    Thanx! Just… are these popcorns barbecue flavor or what? Seems like a little… red, isn’t?

    Reply

  5. Ryan

    So rad! These tag-team tuts are really great! As always, thanks.

    Reply

  10. flippyfloop

    Anyone else having problems with proximal shader when cloner active ?

    Reply

    • Richie H

      Yep. As soon as you put the popcorn in the cloner the proximal doesn’t work. Might it have something to do with the time offset in the random effector?

      Reply

  11. Hands On Music

    Thanks Chris, and Nick for the excellent tut! You guys have stepped it up a notch with the tag team tuts. Please keep em coming!
    Love the audio talk, it is an essential part of the creation process, plus we are musicians first!!! lol

    Reply

  13. Spencer Schmalz

    What I would really like to see is Chris make more detailed tutorials on rigging, joints, bones, things like that. Start from the beginning so anyone can learn it! I would love to see that.

    Reply

  15. Baris

    Please help us proximal shader won’t work inside the cloner. What’s wrong with us?

    Reply

  16. Ramzes

    Chris you explain tutorials too fast, slow it down man!:)) and some of your steps you don’t mention,you should mention them too, kind of hard to fallow.Thanks for your sharing .

    Reply

    • Chet

      The great thing about videos is that you can pause them. You can always slow tutorials down to your pace, but you can’t speed them up. I say err on the side of being too fast, those who are slower can pause and it keeps it interesting to the more advanced viewers.

      Reply

  17. baris

    Hi Chris Ramzes is right :)
    I didn’t follow you. You’re too fast for me :)
    And thank you for your all efforts.
    I didn’t figure out proximal shader cloner problem :)

    Reply

  18. flippyfloop

    I’ve been through this part 1 tutorial a few times now. Still can’t get Proximal to work with cloner ! Driving me mad ! I’ve been using C4D for many years since R8 so not a noob. Maybe Chris has some preferences changed on his version of C4D ? Be great to get this sorted…

    Reply

  19. Baris

    I found something it’s not cloner it’s about random effector problem when i turn of random effector
    it’s looking ok. And i try to put plain effector and that one also not working well with proximal shader…

    Reply

  20. Jan

    What do you think about optimizing Chris´s Video look ( proper whitebalanced, a more structured backround setting etc)

    would it support the tagteam- idea or just reduce the contrast between their presented attitudes?!

    Reply

  21. Cookey

    Great tutorial. Thought I’d give it a go but fell at the first hurdle… when I increase the sphere segments it doesn’t smooth the displacer effect it intensifies the displacement… where am I going wrong? Any ideas? (I’m using R13 and copied all the settings)

    Reply

    • Cookey

      Working in mm seemed to throw the shader scale. It worked fine with a much bigger global scale on the noise. Also the proximal shader worked fine but not when the cloner was turned on – got around that one by animating the texture tag U and V Lengths from 100 to 0 over three frames.

      Reply
    • The Gorilla

      The Gorilla

      I think it looks awesome. I haven’t played with it though. Tools will always push our field forward. Never be afraid of tools that make your job easier. It gives you more time to do better work.

      Reply

    • flippyfloop

      This looks really cool. Will speed up workflow a lot.

      Reply

    • Hands On Music

      pratheesh you spamming this blog page was useless because:
      1. you don’t have to post multiple times when Nick gets notified about any and all comments on his blog,
      2. he hasn’t responded to your numerous requests anyway, and
      3.- It’s an insult, and I would ban you from posting on this blog , if it was mine!

      You are not paying for any service, and it’s selfish and immature to demand someone to respond to your requests.
      So please, GROW UP!

      Reply

        • pratheesh

          he is my teacher not only mine everyone’s.And I’m a student, so student can ask his teacher any doubts.before this request i posted 4 requests but he didn’t replied any,he may haven’t seen my requests.this time I’m little selfish!! sorry man I’l try to grow up!

          Reply

  24. Adam

    I enjoyed watching the tutorial. but I was a bit disappointed by the final result.. I dont think it looks like popcorn. the example they were trying to replicate is a much better..

    Reply

    • rohit

      dont get disapointed. nick give a rough idea. u can tweak them!!

      Reply

  25. flippyfloop

    Proximal shader still not working when Random / Cloner introduced.
    I’ve been over the tutorial multiple times to see if I missed something. Spent hours trying to solve this but no luck. Help !!

    Reply

    • jibin

      nick will not help!!he will not reply.he is always busy.he replies to comments once in a while. dont waste ur time by poting help.try it urself man.
      good luck!!!!

      Reply

      • flippyfloop

        So I can now confirm that this proximal technique doesn’t work when the random effector is introduced. See the thread via the link above. You can also see that Chris’s render ( frame 31.34 on Part 1 ) is also broken. Look at the kernels !
        Just to be clear, I’m not having a dig at Chris & Nick’s fine work. Learnt a shed load from you guys.
        Just thought I should clarify this particular problem as it had confused me for about a week & may for other people.

        Reply

  26. mabad

    Thanks for this tutorial, I found the proximal technique quite interesting.
    To speed up viewport playback rates once dynamics are baked, you can uncheck the enabled option of all the dynamics tags. With this C4D will use the baked scene but won’t recalculate dynamics speeding up the playback.

    Reply

  27. Javacs3

    Hi,Nick. I meet a problem that I never met before. I’m used to render still image. But when I render Animation with GI-On,I found my animation flashing all the way. And I found if I changed GI mode into IR+QMC(Full Animation) mode everything will be OK. But It takes much more time. Is there any better way to solve this?

    Reply

  28. Avs

    Hey Nick! Great tutorial as always! I remember seeing those car/demolition derby renders a few weeks ago. Any chance you could provide a tutorial on those next? Thanks!

    Reply

  29. Simeon

    Hi Nick,

    I cant find any other way of getting this request to you so I hope this is the right place to put it up!! Sorry if isn’t. Just really to say that it would be great to see the techniques behind this showreel here: http://www.umeric.com/. Its been about for some time and you may have seen this already, but as I am now moving into motion it would be great to see the techniques used in the piece from about 01:19mins into the piece with the hair/ fur shooting out tentacles and then 01:28mins in with the forming of the shoe. The opening scenes are good too but I think some of the principles have been covered in your Vimeo title sequence tut and some others. If you think its a valid request then it would be appreciated in a tutorial. Your tuts are top class for all levels hence why I resist no more to comment! Thanks for it all.

    Reply

      • Simeon

        Yeh, Umeric do some nice work. Check out http://www.pabloalfieri.com from motion studio Plenty (Argentina). Amazing. I’ve set myself the challenge of getting my textures as luminent and fluorescent like in some of his work just to train myself in C4D. It’s not going quite right though. Ideas anyone………. Nick? :) Thanks

        Reply

        • Simeon

          The project he did with for the Alcohol drink with the modelled numbers, those textures are so attractive. I can get the basic colours but to get the glow and pop like that before taking into AE is not going to plan! And those bespoke diamond shapes are so cool. Nick, how would you build something as basic as this but make it look so good? Thanks from a newbie!!

          Reply

  31. Tman

    How do you make your renders so smooth? when i render mine, it either only renders a certain amount of frames and keep trying to render them whilst other frames are dispearing, or when i get it to not do that, it’s all stuttery. could you tell me/everyone how you do that?

    Reply

  32. Rovino

    Yo Nick, You mention Chris Robson, but did you realize @hackeyesup had a hand in this also? if I remember correctly he did the coke bubbles in TP.

    Reply

  33. Danny

    Hey Nick, another great one! Thanks for all of the tutorials, they’re really useful.
    Not sure if this is the right place, but I just wanted to ask you something. I want to build a workstation for video editing and motion graphics. Can you give me some directions for components, specs ? Preferable PC, because budget is not infinite.
    I will be very grateful! Thanks.

    Reply

  35. Shallon

    I was working through this tutorial and found that it was hard to follow. It seems he was explaining the steps slower than he was making them. Like when he said that you have to add a deformer, but he was already three steps ahead. It just makes it tough to learn from speed tutorials. It took me 3 hours to go through the first video. I had to stop and go back to make sure that I did not miss a step. When he was explaining the difference between soft body and ridged body collisions, he mixed them up and was very confusing. I am just trying to learn how to do particles and animations, so I am a little new at this, but I know enough of Cinema 4D to be a generalist. I do appreciate these tutorials A LOT! Just wish they where easier to follow.

    Reply

  39. sd

    hey GSG thank you so much for these tutorials, they’re amazing.

    I wanted to request a more in depth tutorial on proxies if possible, I’ve heard that render proxies are one of the main perks of c4d and I can’t find that much on the internet about how to use them.
    thanks!!

    Reply

  40. kevin

    Thank you guys SO much for all of your amazing tutorials. I am very grateful for your willingness to share your techniques with all of us.
    As several others have posted: I too am having an issue with the Proximal Shader when it’s added to the cloner. With the cloner off, the unpopped kernel looks great, but as soon as I enable the cloner, the multiple kernels look like little Rollo candy pieces. Could I maybe have missed a setting?
    Again, I understand if you can’t reply to all of our questions. I really appreciate the time you share with us!

    Reply

  41. modafinil

    CLONER AND PROXIMAL SHADER PROBLEM SOLUTION:
    put the cloner object in the proximal shader instead of the sphere

    Reply

  43. PedroMZG

    Help, please!
    I’m having a problem with the Random effect. I’ve applied it and use pretty much all the values used in this tutorial (Position-scale-rotation), but when I try to see frame by frame how it works, the kernels just don’t move. Am I missing something? Please Help!!! (I’m using R13 btw)

    Reply

  44. kyle

    i love the tutorial but chris went way to fast for me i couldn’t keep up and in had to go back and watch it over and over. but still its a very great tutorial and watching it over and over is what gets you good at it i guess

    Reply

  45. Teddy Schaffert

    Hi! I simply wish to offer you a big thumbs up for your great info you have got here on this post. I will be coming back to your web site for more soon.

    Reply

  46. Kaushal

    Great tutorial … can u plzzzzz give a tutorial that shows how to create the extraction of pizzza cheeeeezzzzzzz from the pizzzzaaaaaaaa . i mean the effect that can show the original look when the pizzza piece is extracted …. that cheeeez looook …. thanks alot :)

    Reply

  47. magnesio5

    Hi everyone ….. How are you? …… I have this situation…. When I use a fracture plugin….(xplode or Nitro) and I make very small pieces,these have problems with dynamic.The problem is these pieces never stop moving…..

    Whenever this happens to me, in the end I fix correcting it piece by piece.And this is very cumbersome.
    Somebody knows what I’m talking about,and Know a more practical solution than the mine.

    Best regard,

    Reply

  48. Mbrk Madhi

    I just stopped at 20:15
    my popcorn is not popping ! what’s the problem?

    Reply

  49. Marcelo

    Hi
    can you make a tutorial to modeling and texturing a Peanut?
    It´s dificult to make the material :(

    Thank you.

    Reply

  50. Loay Emad

    Thank you both for the great tutorial.
    I think the sound is a little out of sync (at least in part one so far). thought you should know

    Reply

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Comment Rules

This is a friendly community. Please treat everyone with respect. We don't all have to agree, but we do have to be nice. Criticism is fine, but rude comments and name calling will be deleted. Use your real name and don't be spammy. Thanks for adding to the conversation.