 So I may or may not know how to tie my own shoes, but I did figure out a way that I can tie really cool looking knots inside of Cinema 4D that I'm going to share with you. In this video, I'm going to show you all the steps to creating this procedural knot twist animation using the new Cinema 4D rope dynamics and how you can easily iterate and create any type of rope knot animation that's in your twisted little head. Now if you want to follow along, you can support me by downloading the project files that I'm using in this tutorial. You can find the link to that in the description below. Let's dive right in. All right, let's create some twisty rope. Let's start out with a spline that will turn into a rope. Let's start out with a circle spline here. Let's bring the radius down and let's use an ellipse as well so we can adjust both the X and the Y here so we can go a little bit something like this. And what we're going to do is let's actually grab a sphere and let's look through it. Let's turn on our Superman X-ray vision here. What I want to do is I want to create this sphere and have these circle splines turn into rope, have some of the splines be attached to the surface of the sphere, then we're going to shrink down the rope and by having all these splines shrinking down, they will intersect with each other and wrap around each other and create some really nice knots. Okay, so you might not believe me just yet, but follow along. It'll all make sense soon. So if we create a whole bunch more splines, let's go and grab a cloner. Let's clone the circle spline and let's actually clone onto an object. That object will be this sphere. So now we have all these splines cloned onto the surface of this sphere. Let's actually change the up vector to positive X and that's just going to change the axis that these circle splines are facing on our surface of our sphere and let's bring down the count as well. And so all of our circle splines are at the outside of our surface, so let's bring them on the inside by going to our transform and adjusting the position Z. If we shrink this down enough, or if we move these in offset these enough, you can see that now we're having some of the edges of our circle spline on the outside and some being on the inside. And so what we're going to do is we're going to build connections to some of the bits of the spline to the surface of the sphere and then shrink the rest and again create those knots. So let's go ahead and let's go to the object tab and we can always adjust the random seed here to create different configurations and this is nice to like art direct and create different types of knots. So again, we're going to build a connection. We're going to first make our spline into rope and we're going to do that by right clicking on the cloner, going to simulation tags and we're going to go to rope. And so now we'll have rope dynamics applied to our spline can see that our ropes just fall. So let's actually just turn off gravity so we don't have stuff just falling down. So a command and control D and go to our simulation tab, go to our scene wide simulation settings and just zero out gravity. Okay, so now we have all these dynamic splines. And we want to do is attach some of the edges to the edge of the sphere and then shrink down the rest. So let's talk about how we can shrink down this rope. And how we can do that is in the rope tag settings, we have this target length option here. And if we shrink this down, you can see that we're actually bringing down the length of our spline to 47% of its initial size. So what we can do is let's right click on the arrow here to bring this back to its default value. What we can do is set a key frame at frame zero at 100% of target length. And then bring this down, let's just start with 50% of our target length. And you can see now we're shrinking down our splines, we got this nice little kind of ball of splines in the middle there are balls of rope. Right now, we're not really getting any type of knots or anything like that. Because remember, we still need to have bits of our spline or a rope attached to the surface of the sphere. So it can have some kind of anchor, and then shrink down from there to create those knots. So we need to build a dynamic connection between our rope in our sphere. So we're going to use something called a dynamic connector. So if I right click on the sphere, or I can add this tag to either of these objects, simulation tags connector, what a dynamic connector does, it's very aptly named it creates connections between dynamic objects. And right now, we only have one objects that's dynamic. So we're not going to be able to create any connections to the sphere, unless we also make it dynamic. So let's go ahead and do that right click, simulation tags, cloth. And so now, if I go and you're not going to see any connection show up in your viewport, unless you choose update live, and if I increase the size here, this is the search radius. So once the connector finds two vertices that are within this search radius, it's going to build a connection, as you can see here in yellow. So if I go to display, grad shading lines, you can see that wherever there is a vertices that is within this search radius of another vertices, so a vertices on the sphere, and the vertices on the spline, it's going to create a connection. Okay. And so once we do that, if I hit play, you can see that some of our spline is connected to some of our sphere in the sphere is just doing a little sphere twist, right there. And we don't actually want the sphere to move at all, we just want it to be dynamic. So to pin our cloth in place, we're going to select our cloth tag, go to mix animation and turn on with pins. And this is like your follow position, follow rotation of your old dynamics. And you can see now we have our splines connected to some parts of our sphere. And they're shrinking down. And we're not actually getting any nice like intersections here, no nice twists, no knots. So we can tweak this a little bit more. So there's two things we can do. Number one is our sphere has vertices that are more clumped together on the top and bottom, we can even out these vertices by choosing a different type of sphere. So we can go in change this to a hexahedron. Now you can see the vertices are more evenly spaced. And you'd see that our dynamic connector is kind of all out of whack. And this is just a little gotcha with a dynamic connector. Is that anytime you change anything, so like the vertices placement on a sphere, you just jiggle the search radius here a little bit, and then it will update. And it's a little bit of a pain because of this glitch. What I like to do is I like to click and drag the search radius, drag it into the viewport, twirl this up. And then so this stays up all the time, going to right click, go to show always. And so if I change anything like the seed here, you can see how the connections are all out of whack. Instead of having to go back into the tag, I can actually just jiggle this right here. And you can see those update. You can also go and update the max connections here. And you can see we can only make so many connections because our circle spline has a very low amount of subdivisions or intermediate points. You can see that the spline's kind of chunky. So I'm going to update this to let's do like 55. And again, we're just going to jiggle this. And you can see now we have more vertices of the spline to connect to single vertices of the sphere. Okay, so let's go ahead and let's hit play now. And we're starting to see, we're starting to see some little intersections there, which is looking pretty good. Let's actually turn off the sphere from viewport view and render view. And let's see what we can do at this point. So the first thing we can do is on the rope tag, we can up the friction value here. So the ropes will, when they collide with each other, they're going to want to stick to each other a little bit more. So if I bring this down, you can see what's going on. So let's actually see if we can get away with shrinking down our rope even more because I think there's too much slack here. So let's go to our timeline. And we already set some keyframes to our rope target length here. So it's at 50. Let's go to about 30%. And let's hit play. And now you're seeing that everything's just going to snap in not even intersect with each other. And that's because our dynamic simulation is going too fast. And it's not accurately calculating all the collisions. So when you have dynamics going really fast, sometimes the intersections and the collisions won't register. So in that case, you'll need to up some of your simulation settings. So let's do that by hitting command and control D. Let's go to our simulation tab simulation. And we're going to up some of the settings here. So smoothing iterations going to help everything kind of calm down and remove jitter from our simulation. So let's bring this to like 20. And the damping is going to add a little bit more drag to our scene. So let's actually bring this all the way to 100%. So it's going to look like everything's underwater. And the real thing that we're going to worry about here is the collisions. So if we up this to like four and two, let's see if the fast moving dynamics will actually calculate those collisions. And voila, the collisions are taking hold. And you can see these nice little knots that we're getting right here. So this is looking really, really great. But of course, we just have splines at this point. Let's see what these knots will look like with actual geometry swept along our splines. So keyword, we're going to sweep some geometry across our splines. So let's add a sweep. Let's add our profile spline that will sweep along our circle splines here. So let's grab an inside. And let's go drag the sweep in there. And then the cloner. And we got to bring the inside down quite a bit. And you'll see that this is only going to sweep one of the splines. Because right now, the sweep objects not recognizing the cloner and all of the clone splines, it's just recognizing one. So to fix that, we're going to do one thing. And that is add a connect object, throw our cloner in the connect object. And that's going to say, Hey, sweep object, I'm going to connect all these clones together. And you're going to see it as a single spline, you're going to sweep all those splines with this inside. Okay, so you can see that our inside radius is a little bit too big. And the thickness that is used to calculate the collisions is this radius right here. So point five is actually a good number. So we can actually just update the radius to point five as well. And now you'll see this is all perfectly flush. We got these really nice knots going on. And you can see that we can probably up the sides here. So we're adding some more definition here. And that's looking pretty nice. And at the end of the day, we can always throw all of this in a subdivision surface and really smooth all that out. And you can also see there's like this little twist happening here. Sometimes that'll happen. And what I found fixes it sometimes is if you go to your sweep and uncheck banking, that will kind of help. But so right now, we got all these really nice looking knots. Before we get any further, I just wanted to say if you're digging this tutorial, I would really appreciate a like. And if you would gently just nudge the subscribe button, you don't want to smash it because that's abuse. And I'm sure the subscribe button would really like it if you would take it easy on it because it has feelings just like you and me. And at this point, you could go in here and like compose a shot. And there might be like this spline right here that might be in your view. And so what you'd want to do is like try to remove that spline that might actually not even have anything to do with these knots here, and try to clean up the composition. Now maybe you think this composition looks great as is. But what I want to do is show you how you can art direct and remove some of these clones. So what I'm going to do is select my cloner right here, I'm going to go to MoGraph, MoGraph selection. And if I just click once in my viewport, you're going to see hopefully you can see all these little gray dots. All these dots represent one of these clones. So if I select one of these dots, it's going to highlight yellow means it's selected, I can hold the shift key down and add to the selection. And what I can do is with those two clones selected, and the cloner object selected as well, I can go back to the MoGraph menu, and go to hide selected. And that's going to create a plane object that's going to automatically hide those selections. So if I toggle this, you can see I actually selected two splines that are actually part of the knot here. So if I turn this on, so I'm actually going to hit the commander control key and try to remove these and actually need to remember I need to select the cloner. And then I can hold the commander control key and then deselect those clones. But I can go in, select this clone, and actually that hid a spline that we won't need in this view. Let's hold the shift key down, add to selection. And that's actually a spline that's in our knot right there. We got some clones down here, I'll select that. That's actually part of it. What about this one? Nope. This one? Nope. This one is part of it. So hold the shift key down, we're adding to selections. And I'm just undoing if it's actually part of this knot here. Yep, that's part of it. That's part of one two. That is as well. So is that so we have a lot of splines as part of this little knot here. So it looks like we're not able to remove too much more. Yeah, because we got all these all these part of it. But we actually, you know, took care of removing some here. So let's actually go back here. So you can see we remove some splines from this, but all the other splines are actually a part of this knot we have here, but we can still try to art direct and crop in. Let's go and use redshift here. And let's grab a redshift camera, look through it. And if we go a longer lens here, and flatten everything out, you can see how we can kind of crop out all the other splines on the side there. And so we can get some really nice looking dynamic looking compositions with all these splines compose your shot. Now the one thing I want to mention is that when we do this and you remove some of the clones, it's actually going to remove it from the simulation as well. So if we go, let me just turn on garage shading, you can see that this is, you know, the simulation is still running pretty good. But if you wanted to first have the sim run, and then remove the clones, what we'll do is we'll unhide the selection, and we can cache our simulation as well. And you might want to, you know, up the amount of frames we have here as well, and go to cache scene. And this is going to cache the simulation with all of the cloned ropes. Okay, so we're going to get the same consistent simulation here. And you see this is pretty like it's not very jittery at all, which is really, really nice. So we don't have like any popping going on, because we updated those settings. I'm just going to let this play out here. And so now we have the cache simulation. And then once we have this done, we can then go and turn back on our, or hide selection there, and compose our shot. So turn back on our subdivision surface. And that's looking pretty good. If you lost all of your money investing in Dogecoin like me, you know it's important to save money when you can. And that's why I'm here to tell you all about the three day sale that Maxon is having, where you can save 40% off of Maxon one subscriptions, or 30% off of new annual subscriptions of individual products can find the link to save all those monies in the description below. And really quickly, I want to show you if you want to say art direct this and say like, Oh, I actually don't like that not. How can we go and randomly get another type of situation going on here? So I'm going to go clear scene cache. And then remember, we went into this cloner. And we can adjust the seed here. Again, we're going to need to adjust the connector search radius there to toggle and update the dynamic connector there. And we can try this configuration and see what kind of knots we get. And so you can see we're getting totally different knots. This is actually with the hide selection still on. So this is like a whole different cool not set up here that I'm actually digging a lot. So maybe this works for a simulation as well. And so there's a lot of possibilities here by simply just adjusting the cloner seed, the count of the amount of splines you have, and get all these type of really unique looking knots. And it's very, very simple. It looks like a very complex animation, but it's not at all. It's simply just cloning a bunch of circle splines onto a sphere. And you get something looking cool like this. So hopefully this inspires you to create some nice looking rope simulations. And I'm not going to really cover here's a here's another example of a nice little knot simulation here. And I'm not going to cover the lighting or anything like that, but I am using some GSG grayscale gorilla plus paracord materials that I highly recommend you use for any rope simulation because they just look freaking beautiful. So I'm going to link to a GSG tutorial that covers how to add these materials to your rope and also how to light your scene as well. Because Nick did a great job doing that aspect of it. But at least you have a really nice rope simulation that you can go and apply those textures to and make really nice looking rope knot simulations. So there you have it. It's pretty incredible what you can do with the new simulation systems inside of cinema 4D. I know I'm having a lot of fun exploring and sharing all of the things that I'm learning about the new simulation systems with you also. I hope you're enjoying it. If you are, please like the video and leave a nice comment. Give me the thumbs up emoji in the comment. I really appreciate that. And as always, really appreciate you watching and all the support that you give me. Thanks for watching. I hope to see you again in another tutorial real soon. See ya!