Like Having a Puppet On a String... MOCCA 3

These days animated characters can be seen everywhere: Advertising, movies, websites and even on corporate presentation movies.

People love characters and there is a huge demand for those created in 3D simply because they look cool and can do amazing things.

Character animation may be one of the most demanding type of CG but MOCCA 3 makes animating characters a piece of cake!

MAXON has created a brand new engine for MOCCA 3 based on joints rather than bones. This makes rigging much easier and much more reliable. Combined with new constraint options, skin deformers and muscles, one of the easiest and most powerful character animation systems around is at your fingertips.

Use MOCCA's amazing cloth system to easily dress your characters and automatically take care of the cloth animation as your character struts its stuff!

DVD Training Advanced Character Rigging

In addition to the multitude of video tutorials already made available for Release 10, MAXON is proud to introduce a brand new training DVD for Release 10.5!

Together with the French character animation specialists at WiPix, more than five hours of high-quality instruction on rigging and animating a character was created.

Eleven chapters of in-depth instruction ranging from creating the first joints to IK setup and weighting are included. This is all crowned by the creation of a complete walk cycle - an essential skill for all burgeoning character animation professionals working with CINEMA 4D's MOCCA to create high-end animations.

These tutorials are available in the languages English and French

Jiggle It Just a Little Bit! New Deformers

Jiggle

CINEMA 4D R10.5 includes powerful new deformers for character animation, including a Jiggle Deformer for easily creating secondary motion without bones or joints.
Simply apply the Deformer to an object and you will automatically see the object react with secondary motion. You can refine the effect using vertex maps and parameters for defining stiffness, structural integrity and drag. You can even specify falloff, just as you can with MoGraph Effectors.

Squash and Stretch

The Squash and Stretch Deformer helps animate objects that should adhere to the basic principals of character animation but themselves do not have to be rigged, e.g. a bouncing ball. This Deformer's numerouns settings allow for very accurate control of the object's animation behavior and look, e.g. a bouncing ball will become wider and more flat when it impacts on a surface and will stretch and narrow when repelled.

Cluster

The Cluster Deformer links a point selection or vertex map to another object so a null can be used to transform the points. Because the Cluster Deformer and joints use separate weighting you can easily animate additional areas of a model without adjusting the overall rig. And because it is a separate Deformer it can be applied before or after other Deformers, such as Skin. Clusters can be very useful in facial animation and offer a more consistent workflow in conjunction with other 3D applications.

Point Cache

With the Point Cache Tag and Deformer you can store the results of deformers and simulations such as Cloth and dynamically apply them via the same falloff parameters as the MoGraph Effectors. This allows you to easily deform a simulated mesh or mix between two simulations. Caching the point data also allows you to remove entire rigs and simulations from a scene for faster workflow and more reliability when rendering across a network.

Squash & Stretch

One of the fundamental principles of character animation is squash and stretch, a technique used to show dynamics and speed. Until now, adding squash and stretch to characters could be a somewhat tedious process.

In Release 10.5, squash and stretch settings are included within IK tags and the Skin Deformer to easily add squash and stretch dynamics to a fully rigged character. For simpler applications you can apply the new Squash & Stretch Deformer directly to the object.

You can easily control Squash & Stretch with parameters and falloff to create realistic or comical effects. The deformer always maintains a uniform volume so your characters never appear to be growing or shrinking for a consistent look to your animations.

Paint Tool and Improved Weighting

Vertex and weight maps are used throughout CINEMA 4D to control how various effects are applied.

Release 10.5 includes a new comprehensive tool for painting vertex maps, with additional paint modes such as Blur, Bleed and Intensity. Save time by painting weight symmetrically on both sides of a model and work faster with graphics tablets using pressure sensitivity.

Users of the MOCCA module will also benefit from enhancements to joint weighting, including a new Symmetry painting mode. Multiple weight tags can be used to accommodate different character animation tasks, and can be blended as necessary with a simple slider. A new option in the weight tag also makes it easy to clean up a rig by removing joints that don't have any weight applied.

Users of the MOCCA module will also benefit from enhancements to joint weighting, including a new Symmetry painting mode. Multiple weight tags can be used to accommodate different character animation tasks, and can be blended as necessary with a simple slider. A new option in the weight tag also makes it easy to clean up a rig by removing joints that don't have any weight applied.

Character Rigging

MOCCA 3 offers a multitude of tools for easy rigging. Joints are the way to go! Simply select where your character's joints should be and MOCCA will figure out the flexing defaults automatically. Joints do not even need to be placed in a specific hierarchy!

The new Auto Weighting and Binding options make a character animator's life so much easier. It will save you hours of work compared to manual weighting.

New constraint options and spline IK help create a flexible and powerful character rig. Face or body morphing is now easier than ever before!

Rigging has been made up to 50% faster and far more flexible.

Muscle System

In MOCCA 3 not only the skeleton deforms the mesh, the muscles deform it as well. Having muscles under your character's skin automatically creates a much more realistic animation.

Muscles are 'pinned' to the skeleton and act like real ligaments. The movement of the sekeleton will automatically cause the muscles to bulge and stretch accordingly. You can easily adjust the muscles' contraction or relaxation states by adjusting the muscle parameters.

For even more realism, ligaments (the pins) can be attached far away from the muscles. As in reality, the muscles that move the fingers are actually located near the elbow.

Morphing

The MOCCA 3 morphing tools offer a solution for any problem. Various facial expressions and poses can be created, referenced and animated quickly and easily.

Morph targets do not require much memory and can be created as absolute, relative or rotational morphs (e.g. to prevent an eyelid from intersecting an eyeball when it closes).

Animators can quickly achieve breathtaking results when using morph targets in conjunction with the HUD and the Visual Selector.

Clothilde

What would a real character be without proper clothing? Clothilde, your digital tailor, provides needle and yarn to dress your character with style.

Clothilde is an amazingly powerful clothing solution, which is very easy to use - just like everything in CINEMA 4D.

Cloth can many types of characteristics - stiffness, flexion, friction, etc. Cloth can stretch or break, just like any real fabric would do, be it wool or satin, cotton or silk.

Aerodynamic forces can also influence cloth and create stunning animations. Cloth can even collide with elements in your scene as well as with itself.
Cloth NURBS (comparable to HyperNURBS) smoothes your cloth, so low-resolution geometry can be used to ensure a speedy workflow. You can even add thickness to the fabric.
Thanks to Clothilde's unique algorithms, most simulations can even be viewed in real-time in the Editor View.
Clothes are more than just cloth. Clothilde has all the tools you need to make you a digital fashion designer - Dress-O-Matic.

Design the very basic shape of a shirt or a dress with just a few polygons and then use CINEMA 4D's amazing new modelling features to modify it by stitching and sewing the seperate parts together. Time for Dress-O-Matic! This tool ensures the perfect fit for your design. Tight or loose - whatever you prefer. You can even belt a dress or trousers to a character's geometry!

After getting to know Clothilde you will want to visit your local News Agent for the latest fashion magazines and the hottest new sewing patterns!

Visual Selector

Even with CINEMA 4D's layers and hierarchies to tame your scenes you still need quicker and easier access to handles and controls when animating characters.

Visual Selector gives you this quick and easy access without having to sift through long lists to find them.

To start, just use the standard visual selector image or create your own. Then place the respective symbols on top via drag & drop. You can add handles, morph tags, cameras and more.

Once everything is in place you can animate without needing to know how the scene or the character has been set up technical.

Cappucino

Break out of the keyframe box with MOCCA's Cappucino tool. With Cappucino you can quickly "sketch" character animation in real-time. As your animation and soundtrack play you can use your mouse or graphics tablet to manipulate any number of 3D objects and create a rough motion track that can be refined as your scene progresses.

Capture the entire animation at once, or focus on individual objects while the rest of the scene plays back for reference.

A keyframe reduction tool helps to tame the abundance of keyframes created by Cappucino or your motion capture application.