AMI 2015 Rewind - Eric Small: Visualize a Lipid Bilayer in Cinema 4D

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Eric Small of Nucleus Medical Animation demonstrates how to visualize a lipid bilayer in Cinema 4D.

In this live presentation from the Association of Medical Illustrators 2015 Conference, Eric Small of Nucleus Medical Animation demonstrates how to visualize a lipid bilayer in Cinema 4D. You’ll learn how the MoGraph Cloner, Target Effector and Random Effector combine with the Displacer Deformer to create a lipid layer. You’ll also see how to link an object’s location to the deformed position of another object’s polygon. Eric demonstrates how the ChanLum shader can provide fast Subsurface Scattering effects, and also how a Cloned grid can be optimized based on the camera angle.

00:50Modeling a Lipid
04:41Using Cloner to set up a lipid layer
06:50Using Target Effector to Repel Lipids from Protein
09:09Adding Radomness to make this more organic
11:42Using Displacer deformer to add undulation
13:31Creating the bilayer
15:25Linking to deformed polygon location
20:55Adding random movement with Vibrate tag
25:10Q: Rigid Body Dynamics
26:09Lighting and Materials, ChanLum Subsurface Scattering
34:22Optimizing Clones further from the camera

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Transcript

- [Presenter] I work for Nucleus. I'm the technical director for the animation department. So I do a little bit of animating here and there. From time to time. What I'm going to go through today is a lipid bilayer setup using Mograph and a little bit of Xpresso. I'll just play this. This is a little clip from an animation that we did. There's tons of different ways to set up Lipid Bi-layer. And you know what way is the right way is what solves the problems that you're looking for. The setup that I'm going to show you how to do here if you look... If you watch these proteins as I play through, they move through the lipids. And they actually push them out of the way. For the animation that we're trying to do that was key because we wanted to show that these proteins were not actually static. They were free to roam around throughout the lipids. So I'm going to start with just a sphere. I'm going to go into a different viewing mode here. Girard shading with lines. That way we can see the polygons. I always like to work with a hexahedron. It's just personal preference. By using this, this way I have all Quads. Whereas the version before as standard if you look at the top, you get all of these edges converging to the pole. Which leaves you with triangles, which kind of gets a little messy if you want to use a HyperNURB to smooth it out. So we'll go with a hexahedron. I'm going to drop this down to be 10 centimeters. Nice and small. And we'll just do 8 subdivisions. So what I'm going to model here real quick is going to be the actual lipid. So I'm going to make this editable and go into my polygon mode. And at the bottom I'm going to select two polygons. And I'm going to go to -I'm sorry, I use a lot of key commands and so I'm going to try to not use key commands so it's a little easier to follow along. If I do use one and I don't tell you how to get there, I apologize. So I right-clicked here in the Viewport and I think there is... "Extrude Inner". Right there, which is what I want. I'm going to"Extrude Inner" once and then one more time, just a tiny bit. From here then I'm going to go back into my Move mode. Going to pull this down a little bit. And then in the Scale mode I'm going to flatten these out. The reason for that is when I do the extrude I wanna extrude out the tails to this lipid. If I hadn't done that they'd go all over the place. All different angles. Which is not what we want right now. So I'm going to hit the "D" key, which is extrude. Again, you can right-click and go "Extrude". And I'm going to extrude this out. It looks about good. I'm going to add a few subdivisions just by clicking there. And as soon as I get out of the "Extrude" tool, go back to the "Selection" tool. Now the extrude is complete and I've got a full polygon here. I'm gonna grab "HyperNURB". Excuse me, a "Subdivision Surface", it used to be called "HyperNURB". Just check this. It's looking alright I think. What I do want to add, though, is a little bit of irregularity to these tails. Right now they're just straight cylinders and that gets a little boring. So I'm going to grab my "Rectangle Selection" tool here. Go into my "Rotate". Now, I don't know if you guys have used C4D. This took me a while to find. But right now my axis, my gizmo, is in the middle of my selection. Of all my points. If I go into the "Modelling Axis" tab here, I can drag this all the way up. And now I can rotate it from the very top. That can be handy when you're trying to rotate specific setup points. And that way you don't have to move them as well as rotate. So shrink my selection a little bit. I'm sorry, I used a shortcut there. That is "U". And it brings up this whole selection of different things here. And what I did is I hit "K" then to shrink my selection. Shortcut keys, they're awesome. They really speed up work flow. And same thing here. Again, I'm just kind of arbitrarily bending this. Just so there's a little bit of irregularity in the tails. We'll call that good. I'm going to drop the subdivision surface here. This is smoothing it out very nicely. We have in the editor --the Viewport that we're looking at-- we have two subdivisions. It looks really good. But as soon as we start adding a whole lot more of these on-screen that's going to really start to tax the system. And you risk crashing and losing everything that you did. So we'll call that good. Well, I'm going to clone these using MoGraph but I need a place to put them in space. So I'm going to grab a plane. I'm going to make this five hundred by one thousand and zoom out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to clone each of these lipids to one individual polygon on this plane. And for cleanliness' sake I'm going to rename. Always important to do. Also I like to have each polygon in this plane here. If you look at it right now they're kind of oblong. And that's because we're five hundred centimeter by one thousand centimeter with twenty and twenty segments in each direction. So I'm going to just double that so that we have square polygons now. So let's grab ourselves a MoGraph cloner. And I'm going to... Hey, look at that. I cannot spell lipid, can I? Try that again. Still can't. There's the "D". Okay. - [Woman] It's alright. We can't see that. - Oh. Well good. - [Man] But now we all know. - Yeah well I can't spell. Spelling's overrated. Now this is a "Cloner". It by default goes into Linear mode. What I want to do is I want to clone to this plane. And now we have a whole bunch of lipids cloned to the center of each polygon. And right now something's a little bit amiss. And the reason for that - if we scroll to the side here-- all the lipids are just one their sides. That's a very simple fix. We go into "Transform" and we rotate. Let's make this the top layer for right now. So I'm gonna call that negative ninety. And if we turn off... Sorry, I use a Mac and so the keys are slightly different here. So there we go, there's our start. I'm going to fill this in a little bit more. I'm going to bump this up to like thirty and sixty, see? Yeah, that's starting to fill everything in a little bit better. So this is a good start. It's all very geometric right now. We'll get to making it organic in a second. The big thing in the setup that I was trying to do was make these lipids move dynamically as the proteins approached them. And the way that I did that was by using a Effector called "Target". Now if you look carefully, I'm going to turn off the target here again. Watch the orientation of all the clones. Right now they're all pointing to center of the screen. If I turn it off, they go back. I think we can actually just mess with... So right now, see how they twist around? That works, but I don't want all of them to orienting towards this. I'm going to use "Fall Off" and I'm going to use "Cylinder". Now what "Fall Off" does - little hard to see, I apologize. But "Fall Off", this effect will begin affecting clones that are within the yellow and it will incrementally go up until the clones that are within this red cylinder here, they'll be a hundred percent affected. We can kind of see a little bit there. I'm going to add just a stand-in for right now. We'll add a tube. Fifteen by thirty. Whoops, that didn't work. Seriously? Sorry guys, again. Mac, PC. We'll pretend that this is our protein. I know it doesn't really look like a trans-membrane protein but it'll get the effect going for right now. The thing we need to do, though, is with this tube we need to clear out the middle of this tube. Well with this Target Effector, if we go into the "Effector" tab there's a little check box here called "Repel". By turning that on wherever this Target Effector is, based on this distance it starts to push them out of the way. So what I can do, I'm going to put this at about thirty-five. And that's because we did the radius of the tube to be thirty. If I put a Target Effector as the child of the tube I can move that tube around. And now all these lipids start pushing their way out of the way as I move it. There we go. Let's zero that back out for right now. Okay. So now that everything is kind of working there, let's start making this more organic. If I go into "MoGraph" and "Effector", I'm going to grab a random Effector. And everything goes crazy. So if we go into the parameters... Right now this randomizing the location of all of these lipids by a distance of fifty centimeters. That's a little much for what we're looking for so I'm just going to make that a little bit smaller. Also going to add some random rotation. I'm actually going to bump this up to three-sixty. So they can be oriented any direction. So it's looking alright. Now if I hit "F8", which is a shortcut to play, we don't have any movement on this. And I'm going to rename this just so I know position-rotation. Re-select the Cloner, and I'm going to grab another random Effector. And we're going to shrink this down. Turn rotation to... We'll call if fifteen for now. So this is doing the exact same thing right now as this other Effector. It's just layering it on top of the other one so you're just getting a little bit more random movement. But instead of this being just static, if I go into the "Effect" tab and I go to "Random" I get these different options here. I'm going to choose "Noise". Go "Indexed". And I'll bump this up a little bit. We'll go 5-5-5. So now without setting any key frames I'm getting some nice organic movement and rotation of these lipids. Just nice Brownian motion. As a little bit of an aside, there was a study down about the aesthetics of Brownian motion. And should there be no Brownian motion? Should it be totally static? Should it be just kind of smooth, slow oceanic? Or should it be more realistic and crank up the speed? You know, like it actually is. And it seemed... The general consensus was that the most appealing, visually, that still got the point across was kind of the slow, steady, oceanic type of movement. Interesting read. If anybody wants to know more, talk to me later. Alright, back to the task at hand. So we've got these going and this looking pretty good, I believe. This is still moving. All the lipids are moving out of the way. We can check our top view. Tube's clear. Alright, so there we go. So that's looking all right. But usually, when you've got a Lipid Bi-layer you think of a living cell. And usually I think typically we think of an animal cell that does not have a rigid cell wall. And we think of the cell membrane as usually kind of undulating. So why don't we give this membrane here a little bit of undulation? We can do that very simply by going into our "Deformers". Grabbing a "Displacer". Adding a "Noise Pattern". I'm going to bump up the speed a little bit to it. Say .35. And what I also need to do is adjust the Global Scale. Right now this is only at a Global Scale of one hundred. That's really small. We're not going to see it. So if I move it up to about 12,000. Go back out. Now if we zoom out we're getting some nice wave-like undulation. Now one thing to keep in mind when you're starting to work with Cloners and you're starting add a lot of geometry on screen is that what you see in the Viewport might not be playing in real-time. We already have the FPS down here. That's Frames Per Second. And if you watch that, we're fluctuating right around twelve, fourteen frames per second. If you're in animation, you're going to be rendering at thirty frames per second. So we're actually seeing this at about half-speed. So to overcome that, if we click this button right down here and we uncheck all frames, now this will play at real speed. It still says that we're only doing twelve, thirteen, fourteen frames per second. But what C4D is doing is it's skipping certain frames so that it can play back what will be real-time that you see at thirty frames per second. This is "Gate". Call that "Layer". I did call that "Bi-Layer". I know that there's only one layer right now and we're going to fix that right now. What we can do very simply is duplicate. Sorry, PC again. And you remember when we initially adjusted this? We turned these to negative ninety degrees. Well, if we turn this to be positive ninety, it kind of works. But not quite. Now our tails are on the outside and the lipid heads are on the inside. Easy way around that. I'm going to pause this so it's a little bit easier to follow. I'll actually get rid of the random rotation and Displacer for right now. Apologies. So with this, we still have it at negative ninety. But what I want to do is I'm going to actually turn this off. I'm going to grab all of the points. "Control + A". And go into the side view here. And I want to have just the tips of the tails resting right on the origin. So if we go back into our Object Mode the actual axis to this object is now at the origin but all of the geometry is above. And by doing that what we can do is duplicate. Ninety. And now we have bi-layer. Tails are touching, heads are oriented correctly. And if we turn on our displacement again... I'm actually going to drop that down to about twenty. I think that's a little bit more... There we go. Turn on our Random Effectors. Hit "Play". And now we have our nice bi-layer. And our Target Effector is still working with our Gate. Turn that back on. If we move... I'm sorry, that's the plane. If we move that we're still pushing all of the lipids out of the way as we move. The one issue, though. If you look here when that noise pattern comes over-top. What's happening? Well the lipids are moving up and down in the "Y" direction but the cylinder is staying still. It's not moving. What if there was a nice way that we could somehow stick that gate to the plane? If we turn this off. Turn our plane back on. If we could somehow stick this gate to a specific location on this plane then we wouldn't have to worry about the gate getting lost as the lipids rise and fall. Well we can do that using a little bit of Xpresso. And I know Xpresso is a little bit intimidating sometimes. But if you think about it logically it's node-based scripting. And so if you have any experience scripting it should make a fair amount of sense. But even still, it's as complicated as you want to make it. And what I'm going to show is still fairly simple, fairly intuitive. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to... Let me back up. If I want to stick this particular Gate to a location on this plane what I'm going to choose to do is I'm going to stick it to a particular polygon. Every polygon in C4D has an index number assigned to it. So I'm going to tap into that polygon number on this plane that's undulating here. And in order to do that I need to somehow get some user data and decide which number polygon I'm going to apply it to. So I just grabbed a Null here. I'm going to go to "User Data", "Add User Data". And all I need to do is type in whatever I want to call it. So I'm going to call it "Polygon Number". Data Type is fine. Interface is fine. I don't want a percent, I want an actual number. So "Real Number". And I know that I have way more than one thousand polygons on this plane. So I'm just going to uncheck this limit maximum. And I'm not going to hit "Cancel". Sorry. "Polygon Number". "Real". Uncheck. Okay. Alright, there we go. So from there, let's call this "Gate Null". Now I want to tell C4D to stick this Null that I have as a parent of this Gate. I'm going to stick it to the plane based on whatever Index Number of polygon that I put in right here. So if I put in "fifteen hundred", whatever polygon number is number fifteen hundred, that's where this gate will stay. So in order to that, I will need to make this editable. So this is a polygonal object now. And I will grab the plane. I need to access the polygon. So I'm going to go through and get myself a polygon node. And instantly this turns yellow. And the reason for that is I need to tell the polygon node which object to look at and link that to the plane. And I want the user data that I just created. So I go down to "User Data", "Polygon Number". And that's going to be linked to the Polygon Index. And now I want the output--the polygon center--to control the Global Position of the Null that is parenting the Gate. And what happened right there? We should be at fifteen hundred. Let's see if this is working. There we go. So now as I change this number here, if I want to go to polygon one thousand, there we are. Somehow this got moved out of the way. There we go. Centered that back. So now as I change this number it's moving along. And it's just going to whatever polygon number. Nine seventy-three. This is Polygon Index number nine seventy-three. Now the one thing that it's not doing is it's not going up and down. Well that's an easy fix. If we go back into our Polygon Node there's a check-box here, "Use Deform Points". We're deforming this plane by using a Displacer, so we need to follow the deform points. One thing that's a little odd that I'm not a hundred percent sure why. But this setup works for some reason works better as a Generator instead of an Expression. That has to do with priority issues in C4D and the order in which things are calculated. It's easy to change. Instead of an Expression, we make it a Generator. So there we go. Now as this is bouncing up and down--make that a a little more extreme--we can see what's going on. And if we turn on our Cloners again... Sorry. I will get this down before the end of the presentation, I promise. I will turn off the plane. And there we go. Getting a little bit of clipping. Sometimes we'll need to adjust the height of the...or the location of the Target Effector. That's just going to be dependent upon the exact setup and the motion that you have going on in your scene. Now this is going up and down. And that looks good. But it would also be kind of nice if it tilted with the undulation of the bi-layer as well. And that also can be done through Xpresso. If you guys are familiar with polygons, you know that polygons have Normals. And Normals are little directional calculations that come straight off of each polygon at a perfect tangent. So what we can do is we can link the rotation, effectively, of this tube to the Normal of the polygon that it's being stuck to. If we look back in our Polygon Node we actually have "Polygon Normal" right here. And we need what's called the "Global Matrix". I learned that just by trial and error with this. I don't know exactly why, my math skills are not what they used to be. As far as why we need it to be a matrix, but that's the way that it works. And if I go to connect these it doesn't work. If I hover my cursor over this it pulls up "Polygon Normal Vector". So that means that this is a Vector and this is -as I hover over it- a Matrix. I need an Adapter. I need something that goes Vector to Matrix. And if I look in here. I'm going to scroll through. And "Adapter". At the bottom there I've got one that looks promising, but it's "Vectors". It's plural. I only have one vector so I need to keep looking. And if I go down to "Calculate" I've got "Vector to Matrix". So now if I link this... Now in my Vector to Matrix Adapter it's going for the "Z" axis. My tube is oriented on the "Y". Change that and there we go. One curious thing happens. Now as I change this number here... The polygon number that it should be stuck to on this plane. Turn that back on. It should be zipping across the screen right now but it's actually staying in its place. It's took me a while to figure out what the heck was going on, but it's a priority issue. What order are things being calculated? It's very minute. In our Xpresso editor I need to grab the Global Matrix, move it above the Global Position and now it's working again. And this time as I move it you can see it's changing its orientation. It's tilting as it moves. The question was, "Can I still move this gate around when I'm using Xpresso?" And the answer is actually technically no. But I do have it set up currently to have a nice work-around for that. So if I grab this Null that is stuck to the plane I can't move it. But what I can do is I can grab the Gate that's below it and I can move it around. So what I actually would like to do is I want to give some relatively random motion to this. If I go into "Cinema 4D Tags". Grab a "Vibrate" tag. Enable the position. Now this is going a little fast but it's randomly vibrating. Lets slow this down a bit. I'll actually shut this off. That's a little bit easier to see I suppose. So now grab a few more frames too. So now as this is undulating up and down it's also randomly moving side-to-side. I did not do anything in the "Y" direction because I don't want it bouncing up and down. That's being taken care of by our Displacer. That's basically all it really is to setting up the actual... The Lipid Bi-layer itself. You know if we look at it. The Lipid Bi-layers themselves. There's three Effectors, a Target, and two Random Effectors. One Random Effector that is covering the position and the rotation. Random Effector that is adding a little bit of Brownian motion. And then the Target Effector that is pushing the lipids out of the way as it goes. The question was, "Are there any rigid body tags or any sort of dynamics to this that would be preventing any clipping?" The answer is, "No". And the reason for that is that it's really just not needed. In the render that I've got here this is the exact same setup. And yeah the clones are clipping into one another. They're bumping into one another. But it's not noticeable. There's so many of them and it's not exactly the focal point of this particular animation. So I didn't worry about that. If that was the focal point of your animation then yes, you might want to get into doing a physics simulation. But it just wasn't necessary for this so I didn't bother with it. So we've got some extra time if you want to light this. You want to add some materials to it? - Just colors. - Okay. Let's get some color going. I mean, grey is fun but it's only so fun. - That's gonna really tax the machine. We can try it though. We'll see how it does. So I'm just going to make two materials. Actually show a little bit of a cheat that I like to use. Subsurface Scattering looks awesome. But it really ups your render time. So you're a Gate. Purple. Purple sound good? Sounds good to me. And lipid. I don't know, for some reason I always think of like a yellow-orange when I think of Lipid Bi-layer. - It's fat. - It's fat. So we'll... We'll call that good for now. So zoom out a little bit here. Reorient. And "Command + R". Wait. There we go. I'm going to change one thing real quick. And I'm going to go into the "Project Settings". There's this little check box here, "Render LOD in Editor". "LOD" is "Level of Detail". So basically by checking this box all of our HyperNURBs or Subdivision Surfaces have... I'm going to drop them to 2. In the editor we have zero subdivisions. But in our render we have two. So right now our Viewport is super low poly. Everything runs really good. But if I go to "Render" then now everything is smoothed out. So you're taking that render-time level of detail and being able to see it in the Viewport. It's really nice to have. It's not necessary but this way you don't have to go to your picture viewer every time that you want to see your render. So I'll throw in a light. I like to use spotlights. Just personal preference. And one thing I like to do when I'm positioning my lights. If I go up to "Cameras", "Set Active Object as Camera". Now I'm looking through the light. My "H" key, what that does is it just kind of frames everything in the scene. But now I can see where my light is shining. You know I'm not moving it and then flipping over to the "Rotate" tool and then moving it back and so and so forth. I'm just navigating as I normally would but from the viewpoint of the camera. - And where was that item again? - To get to that is if you go up to "Cameras", "Set Active Object as Camera". - Is that new? - No, that's been a feature that's been around for quite a long time actually. But it's kind of a hidden feature. So I'm just changing my light settings a little bit. Add in Shadow Maps. With a scene this size I'm probably going to be better off using a one thousand by one thousand Shadow Map. And my sample radius I always bump it up to "6" by default. And I start from there. Sometimes I even have to go higher just to make the shadows a little bit smoother. So I'm going to create a camera. Look through it. And where did I set my key light? There we go. We'll do "Standard Medical Illustrator Practice Upper Left Light Source". We're at the MI for crying out loud. Alright so right now let's see what this is looking like. Pretty dark. Pretty lame. We can add some Subsurface Scattering. I'm going to add that to the luminance of the lipids. And I'm probably not going to even let this actually render. I'm just going to show you here how much longer this takes. So we're sitting. We're waiting. Not much is happening. Since we just built this from scratch, this would effectively be animatic. This would be very early on in the stages and you don't really want to take the amount of time that Subsurface Scattering typically takes to render at this point in production. In C4D there's a really cool effect down here. It's called "ChanLum". And what that does is it bases the color of the object or luminance in this case since we have it in the Luminance Channel based on the shadow that is falling on the object. Probably easier if I just show you. I'm going to add a Colorizer to this. And we'll "Command + Render". So now where the light is actually falling and hitting the object is yellow. If we look over here our mid-tone or shadow core is going to be read. And then where absolutely no light is hitting it is going to be black. We can actually use this to simulate Subsurface Scattering. So if we go make kind of our regular color. And see what would be a good color to... Probably something semi-saturated. This would be like our mid-tone is in our Subsurface Scattering where the light is penetrating the most. And then the farthest color. Let's see how this looks. It's not looking bad. You know I might actually move this light just a little bit. I'm going to go up. Set "Active". Rotate around a smidge and then go back to my camera. At this point it gets to be just kinda of a push a pull getting your materials to look the way that you want them to look. But if we do look carefully here there's a lot of speckling. There's a lot of noise in this. In order to get rid of that we have to go into the ChanLum settings. I like to use the rules of doubles and halves. So right now I'm only using 8 samples and my sample radius is 20. So I'm going to double that to 16 samples with a radius of 10. And by doing a render again that should get rid of all that noise. We can actually get a little closer. Why don't we? That smoothed everything out now. - It gives a nice, natural texture to it. - Yeah and this is a great way to fake your Subsurface Scattering without having to suffer through the Subsurface Scattering render times. - [Inaudible 00:32:23]] - This render was actually done using ChanLum. So it can be a perfectly viable solution all the way through your final render. The big thing too is if you're comfortable using a compositing program. Get things looking pretty good in C4D and then push and pull the color and tweak it in post. After Effects. Nuke. Whatever you're comfortable using in. That's something can be done just a lot faster. But as this is a C4D talk, do it all in C4D. - Can you put Colorizer into the Luminance Channel just like you would Subsurface Scattering? - I'll show that again. In the material that I've got going for the lipids here I just have a flat color in the color channel. And then in the Luminance Channel. I'm going to copy that real quick. And by default it looks like this. So I add the ChanLum but then I go back in and I add a Colorizer on top of that. And what that does it just kind of puts it over top of the ChanLum. And I want to pace back that gradient I had because it kind of looked alright. And change these again. Because remember we doubled the samples and we halved the radius so that way we got rid of the speckling and the noise. And there we go. - Nice. - So the benefit of this by not using dynamics is that it's a much faster render. You don't have to sit through calculation times waiting for everything just to find out that everything explodes and you have to re-tweak your settings and re-cache. This still plays relatively quick. I'm navigating just fine in the Viewport here. Not having any lags. There's one thing that you can actually do this beyond this too, like if I had a much larger Lipid Bi-layer. There's a lot of unseen geometry in this scene that really isn't necessary. You know if my camera is up here. Let me just get out of the camera and we'll focus the whole thing. My camera is up here and it's looking at the front edge. If that's going to be my focal point there's no need to have all these lipids back here. All of these tails. It's just extra geometry that C4D has to calculate at render time. So what we can do. Pause. Figure out what's going to be the best solution. Instead of using all of this geometry why don't we just use spheres? That's what the lipid heads look like. That's all that we're seeing. So we'll just some spheres as stand-ins for the back. So remember back to when we started modelling. Started with a hexahedron with a diameter of 10. I'll just leave that at twenty-four for right now. Turn these off. And actually you know what? I'm going to duplicate this top one. I'm gonna call this "Bi-Layer Fake". And I'm going to delete out this lipid and I'm gonna put this sphere. So if I turn that on now I have a whole bunch of spheres cloned to this plane. But now they're all in the same place as these lipids. Well that's a very simple remedy. If I look at the plane. Go into my Top Mode. And I'm going into my Top Mode so I can see where my camera is. If I select the plane and into Polygon Mode. I'm going to select the first... I don't know, how many is that? 4, 5 rows of polygons. And I'll go into "Select" and "Set Selection". Now what that does is it creates a tag over here off the side of the plane. If I click off... Sorry, just trying to use my shortcuts. So if I've got a whole other selection of polygons over here but I need to get that other selection back that we just set if I click on the tag "Restore Selection". Gets the selection back. But this can also be used within our Cloners. I'm actually going to name this real quick. We're going to call this "Front". And if I go into my bi-layer here. Into the "Object" tab. I have right here an empty box that says "Selection". If I drag this in there, now these clones are only cloned to the polygon selection. Now likewise I'm going to hit "U" and then "I". That's going to be the keyboard command to invert my selection. Make sure that I'm not checked on this polygon selection here. Because if you go and try to set another Polygon Selection while you're still on your other Polygon Selection tag it will just override. Whereas if you're unchecked then it will create a new one. So call that one "Back". And the bi-layer "Fake". Drag in this one. And we're a little off there but that can be remedied. Wrong direction. There we go. Just kind of bring that up to the same level as the heads of the lipids. Or the actual lipids I should say. And if we turn this back on. I'm going to apply the material that we created. Just a second. And if we hit "Render"... There's really no difference. You can't really tell where the fake bi-layer starts and the real one begins, or vice versa. So by doing this then we're getting rid of all that extra geometry that is not seen anyways. And we're going to save ourselves a lot of computational power when it comes to render time. And even just working in the Viewport. I guess that's about all I've got. Unless we want to get into a little bit more Xpresso. - No. - No. - Okay. Thought I'd make the offer. [Clapping]
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