I’ve always had a soft spot for the 3D metaballs. It may come from the fact that as a teenager I watched way too many Amiga demos, where the metaball rendering was nearly always present.
The setup for this piece is fairly simple: a ball, bunch of array repeaters driven by a random movement – everything enveloped with metaball and smoothing modifiers. The pearl shader and HDRI lighting give the whole render a nice, shiny look (don’t we just love these specular reflections?)
Edited to the hip breakbeat tune “Pulsar” by Little Bitchard.
very col
Love this, would love to see somme of your 4d effects in tutorials. Especially this one, would love the heads u on the scene. .
Hey Paul, thanks for the kind words.
To be honest with you, I am still a Cinema 4D noob and I don’t feel like my current skills entitle me to tutor anyone in this subject.
The Metabulbs piece is built on some very basic C4D techniques: I used a MoGraph Cloner to create multiple copies of a sphere and moved them in X and Y axis using a Random Effector. The whole thing was enveloped in a Metaball node, making the geometries merge when close to one another.
The whole thing was lit using HDRI map on a Sky Object and rendered with Global illumination and Ambient Occlusion.
I rendered 6 different passes, using different amounts of balls in the cloner each time and then edited the whole thing together in After Effects.
[…] really thought of the scale of the things I was building. It did not matter whether in Cinema 4D my abstract metaballs were an inch, a meter or a millimeter across. As long as they made sense in relation to the objects […]
[…] thought of the scale of the things I was building. It did not matter whether in Cinema 4D my abstract metaballs were an inch, a meter or a millimeter across. As long as they made sense in relation to the objects […]