1. Rendering Images and AnimationHow the CINEMA 4D render engine works| 00:00 | A 3D render engine is a very complicated piece
of software that's designed to simulate how
| | 00:05 | light and how cameras and how other
types of objects behave in the real world.
| | 00:11 | Now when you hit the Render button in
Cinema 4D, some very important things happen.
| | 00:14 | Now I have a simple scene here of a green
light shining down on the sphere and I've
| | 00:18 | got a camera pointing at that, and I'm going
to hit the Play button here in the interface.
| | 00:23 | Now when you hit the Render
button, a couple of things happen.
| | 00:27 | The first thing that happens is, from the point
of view of the camera and from the point of
| | 00:30 | view of the light source,
| | 00:31 | the render engine sends out these little
mathematical probabilities called rays, and those rays
| | 00:36 | are designed to figure out what types of
pixels are going to be drawn in the frame.
| | 00:42 | Let's look through the camera by pressing
the active Camera icon and we'll get this
| | 00:45 | cute little animation that pops us right
into the point of view of the camera.
| | 00:48 | And you can see that from the camera's
point of view, these lines represent the rays.
| | 00:53 | There's really a lot more rays in that that go
out, but these are designed to simulate that.
| | 00:58 | The white rays in the scene represent
the rays from the camera's point of view.
| | 01:02 | The green rays in the scene
represent the light's point of view.
| | 01:05 | The whole point of the rays is to report back
to the render engine what they encounter in
| | 01:09 | the scene, and to tell the render engine what
type of pixel they're supposed to draw there.
| | 01:13 | So if a ray goes out into the world and strikes
a polygon then it reports back to the render
| | 01:18 | engine hey! Render engine, I have
found a polygon at this location.
| | 01:21 | It has a material on it that looks like this.
| | 01:23 | It had lights shining on it from this angle.
| | 01:26 | Therefore, you should draw pixel at this
location on the screen of this value.
| | 01:30 | Now that happens over and over
again for every pixel in the frame.
| | 01:34 | Now some of the rays will travel
off to infinity and not report back.
| | 01:38 | For all of those rays, you get black on the screen
and that determines what your background looks like.
| | 01:42 | Some of the rays will strike the ball from
the camera and some of the rays will strike
| | 01:45 | the ball from the light.
| | 01:47 | The combination of those two reports is what
tells the render engine what type of sphere
| | 01:51 | and what types of pixels to draw on frame.
| | 01:54 | I'm going to click the
Render and Active View button.
| | 01:56 | When I click that, you can see that we have a
perfectly drawn sphere with a green light shining on it.
| | 02:02 | The sphere's material is actually gray.
| | 02:04 | The render engine knows to draw it green because
the gray material on the sphere combines with
| | 02:08 | the green light from the light
source to make for a green sphere.
| | 02:13 | Once the render engine has drawn those pixels,
then you have to get the pixels out of the
| | 02:17 | application in order to do something with them
in another compositing program like Photoshop
| | 02:22 | or After Effects or Nuke.
| | 02:24 | In order to do that, the render engine has to take
those pixels and convert them into a file format.
| | 02:28 | Cinema 4D can write down a lot of different file formats.
The most popular ones are QuickTime and Photoshop.
| | 02:34 | However, regardless to the file format, the
render engine is still going to go through
| | 02:37 | that same motion everytime you hit the button.
| | 02:40 | Keep in mind that I'm tremendously over
simplifying the actual process of rendering an image.
| | 02:45 | I'm doing this to help you
understand how it works.
| | 02:49 | How the render engine works really helps you
to understand how the lights behave and how
| | 02:52 | the materials behave and
how object should be shaped.
| | 02:55 | All of these ideas combine
together to help you produce your images.
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| Working with render settings| 00:00 | The render engine converts the objects and
lights and textures that you have in your
| | 00:04 | scene file into pixels, and those pixels have
to be saved into a file format that can be
| | 00:09 | used by another application.
| | 00:10 | All of the documentation about what file format,
how big the render is supposed to be, how
| | 00:15 | many frames you're going to render, all of
that information is stored in something called
| | 00:19 | the render settings.
| | 00:20 | Every scene file that you create, when you go
to render it out, you have to be very precise
| | 00:24 | about your render settings in order to
control what it is you're going to be sending out.
| | 00:28 | I've got a simple scene file of a fish
swimming past this render settings type and you got
| | 00:35 | a little bit of motion on the camera to
give it sort of a floaty underwater feel.
| | 00:38 | I'm going to click the Render in
Active View button to render this scene.
| | 00:43 | The button I just clicked, the Render in
Active View button is there for testing purposes.
| | 00:47 | It is not an actual render that
you can save out of Cinema 4D.
| | 00:52 | It's there so you can just get a preview of how
things are going to look when you do actually render.
| | 00:56 | The actual Render button is the one right next to it
and that's the Render to Picture Viewer button.
| | 01:02 | Before you click on this, you have to be very
specific about your render settings so that
| | 01:06 | you know what type of image
you're going to be saving out.
| | 01:09 | The Render Settings button is the one right
next to that which is this icon right here.
| | 01:13 | Let's go ahead and click that to
bring up the Render Settings window.
| | 01:17 | The Render Settings window
is divided into two parts.
| | 01:20 | On the left, we have the settings categories,
and then on the right we have the actual
| | 01:25 | categories themselves.
| | 01:26 | So for example, as I click on each of these
words on the left, Output, Save, Multi-Pass,
| | 01:31 | you'll see the settings on the right-hand
side change and it shows me the contents of
| | 01:36 | each of these main categories.
| | 01:38 | At the very top of the left-hand
side is a Renderer pull-down.
| | 01:41 | If I click on that, I've got some choices
about what type of render engine I can use.
| | 01:46 | Standard is the default and that's going to be
working great for most of things that you do.
| | 01:50 | There's a brand new render engine if you have
the Broadcast or Studio versions of Cinema
| | 01:54 | 4D, called the Physical render engine.
| | 01:56 | The Physical render engine makes the Camera
object and the render settings themselves
| | 02:00 | behave in a slightly more
physically correct way.
| | 02:03 | The Software Renderer allows you to render
exactly what you'd see inside the Editor window.
| | 02:08 | For example, if I wanted to get a shaded
view, I could render out a Software Render.
| | 02:12 | A Hardware Render gives me the same view
except with the little words Perspective and the
| | 02:17 | directional indicator down
here at the bottom-left.
| | 02:20 | The CineMan render setting is an advanced
setting that allows you to render to a third
| | 02:24 | party render engine.
| | 02:25 | For the purposes of this course, we're going
to be staying primarily with the Standard
| | 02:29 | and the Physical Renderer.
| | 02:30 | So those are the two that you want to
concentrate your efforts on understanding.
| | 02:34 | I'm going to leave the Renderer set on
Standard for now and talk about the Output settings.
| | 02:39 | The output settings are where you control
the size of your rendering and the aspect
| | 02:44 | ratio of your rendering, and also how
many frames you're going to be rendering.
| | 02:48 | So you can see we've got
three basic sections here.
| | 02:51 | We've got the Width and Height section, we've
got the Aspect Ratio section and we've got
| | 02:55 | the Frame Range section.
| | 02:57 | So Width and Height is how many pixels
or centimeters or millimeters or inches.
| | 03:02 | I always render to pixels though.
| | 03:04 | This is how many pixels across and up
and down you're going to be rendering.
| | 03:09 | Cinema 4D, just like all other image-based
programs, renders to a rectangular format.
| | 03:13 | No matter what type of image you render
to it, has to be some sort of rectangle.
| | 03:18 | The Lock Ratio button
allows you to lock that ratio.
| | 03:20 | So for example, if I'm going to render to a
16x9 aspect ratio, I'm going to change my
| | 03:24 | Width to 1280 and then I'll hit the Tab key
over and I'll hit the Tab twice to get to
| | 03:31 | the Height, and I'll type in 720 and when
I do that, that changes the Film Aspect.
| | 03:39 | The Film Aspect Ratio is determined by
the ratio of the width to the height.
| | 03:43 | In this case, our ratio is 16x9.
| | 03:46 | When you're working with a camera in Cinema
4D, the very first thing you should do is
| | 03:50 | come to the render settings and set your
aspect ratio, and then lock the ratio off so that
| | 03:55 | you can't accidentally change it.
| | 03:57 | Now no matter what I change these values to,
I'll always have the same aspect ratio, which
| | 04:00 | is going to determine my field of view
or what the camera sees when it renders.
| | 04:05 | Now if I change my Width and Height, let's
say I'd make it 640, I'm going to get 360
| | 04:09 | as the Height, that's a great little button
there and I always turn it on for my projects.
| | 04:14 | The Film Aspect section shows you the ratio
of the width to the height, and 1.778 is the
| | 04:20 | numeric way of expressing 16x9 aspect ratio.
| | 04:23 | There are some other pull-downs here.
| | 04:25 | Generally speaking, I always render to
16x9, so I don't use any of these others.
| | 04:29 | So I'm going to leave it alone at 16x9.
| | 04:31 | The Pixel Aspect Ratio
should always be one square.
| | 04:36 | In the early days of television and 3D
animation for that matter, there were a lot of times
| | 04:40 | where people used to have to render something
called D1 Aspect Ratio, and that was 0.9 aspect
| | 04:46 | ratio, and this aspect ratio was implemented
to compensate for how images were compressed
| | 04:51 | onto a television screen.
| | 04:53 | Thankfully, modern televisions that display
HD signals, all display in a square aspect
| | 04:59 | ratio, so most of the time you're
not going to have to worry about that.
| | 05:03 | So let's leave that alone at one.
| | 05:04 | The Frame Rate is how many frames per
second you're going to be rendering.
| | 05:08 | For most of your purposes,
you're going to render at 30.
| | 05:10 | There are some times where you may want to
render 24, but this will be specified for
| | 05:14 | you ahead of time, depending on the
type of project that you're working on.
| | 05:17 | The Frame Range allows you to select how many
frames of the image you're going to render.
| | 05:21 | In this case, I'm going to render
the current frame which is frame 50.
| | 05:25 | As you can see when I move the Time slider,
the numbers in the fields here will change
| | 05:29 | to match the Time slider.
| | 05:31 | I can also render a Frame Range by putting
in a Manual Frame Range and I can tell it
| | 05:37 | to render from zero to say 29.
That'll give me 30 frames.
| | 05:41 | You can see it calculates the
number of frames for you down here.
| | 05:45 | The Fields pull-down should
almost always be left off.
| | 05:48 | This is another hold out to the old days of
television and thankfully, the whole idea
| | 05:54 | of Fields is starting to go away.
| | 05:56 | So for most of the things you will be working
on, you'll leave the Fields pull-down alone.
| | 06:00 | The Annotations window allows you to leave
notes for people based on these render settings.
| | 06:04 | The next most important
window is the Save dialog.
| | 06:07 | This is where you tell Cinema 4D
what format and where to put it.
| | 06:11 | These are all the different
formats that Cinema 4D can write out.
| | 06:13 | Normally though, I render to Photoshop sequences,
or still frames, or I'll render to a QuickTime
| | 06:20 | Movie, right down here.
| | 06:23 | The Bit Depth, you can
render all the way up to 32 bit.
| | 06:27 | If you're doing an image that has a lot of
gradients in it, you may want to render out
| | 06:30 | to 16 bit. 8 bit will suffice for most of
the things that you'll be doing though.
| | 06:35 | The Name format, I generally leave this alone
and I typically have the same sort of name.
| | 06:41 | And then the Image Color Profile is something
that's very important to the linear workflow.
| | 06:45 | We're going to talk about
that later on in this course.
| | 06:49 | Alpha Channel is specified with this
button in a Straight or a Separate Alpha.
| | 06:52 | Generally speaking, you don't ever render
Separate Alpha anymore, but there maybe a
| | 06:56 | time you would want to do that.
| | 06:57 | And then the Compositing Project
File fields are very, very important.
| | 07:01 | These are where you determine your interaction with
the compositing program that you're working with.
| | 07:04 | Now I work with After Effects and so I'm going
to leave my pull-down set for After Effects,
| | 07:08 | but you can also write out Nuke or Final
Cut or Motion or Shake files as well.
| | 07:13 | Later on in this course we'll talk
more specifically about these buttons.
| | 07:16 | The Multi-Pass render settings are going
to come into play later on in this course.
| | 07:20 | So I'll skip over them for now
and talk about the Anti-Aliasing.
| | 07:24 | Anti-Aliasing is a concept that allows software
to smooth out the transitions between blocks
| | 07:30 | of color on your monitor, and it's a very important
render setting. It determines how smooth your images look.
| | 07:37 | Typically speaking, for a lot of things you'll do,
the geometry and Cubic (Still Image) settings
| | 07:42 | will be okay, but if you start to notice
blocky behavior, you're going to want to come to
| | 07:46 | your Anti-Aliasing and
change it from Geometry to Best.
| | 07:50 | The Stereoscopic option allows you to create true
3D stereoscopic images right here in Cinema 4D.
| | 07:57 | It's definitely a more advanced feature
and we're going to skip over it for now.
| | 08:00 | Down at the very bottom here we have a
render setting, it's called My Render Setting.
| | 08:04 | You can actually have multiple render settings
and just like on the Camera object, this little
| | 08:08 | white icon indicates what it is
that you'll be rendering out.
| | 08:13 | Now I could add a new render setting by clicking
here and going New and I can name that render
| | 08:17 | setting and calling it New Render Setting.
| | 08:19 | And this new Render Setting is now active, you can
see that it's active because of that white box.
| | 08:23 | If I want to switch back to the old render setting,
I can click on that and you'll see it'll change.
| | 08:30 | And in this new render setting, the default
Output is set to 800x600, so you can see that
| | 08:34 | my field of view is going to
change when I click on it.
| | 08:37 | So if I make the new render setting active, you'll see
that the field of view will change for the image.
| | 08:42 | When I make it the My Render Setting active,
it goes back to the 16x9 aspect ratio that
| | 08:47 | it was set there.
| | 08:49 | Now that you have a basic understanding for
the Render Settings window, let's put them
| | 08:52 | to use in some concrete examples.
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| Rendering still images and animation| 00:00 | There are going to be many times in your design
process where you're going to want to render
| | 00:04 | both still images and
animation out of your project.
| | 00:08 | For example, you might be working on
storyboards and you need a still image for Photoshop to
| | 00:13 | create a version of the logo and
still form that the client can approve.
| | 00:17 | Then once the project is approved, you may
need to go and animate that and then render
| | 00:21 | out that animation for After Effects.
| | 00:24 | One of the great things about C4D's render
settings is that you can have multiple render
| | 00:27 | settings inside of a single project.
| | 00:29 | What we're going to do is start off by
setting up our still image rendering and then come
| | 00:33 | back and create an
animation in the same project.
| | 00:37 | What I've got is a simple file here that is
just a logo flying over the camera and settling
| | 00:43 | into position and then rotating gently.
| | 00:46 | What I want to do is to create a still
image of the logo for the client to approve.
| | 00:51 | And the frame that I want to render is
somewhere is around here right around 39 or so.
| | 00:55 | The logo is nice to straight
on, easy for them to see.
| | 00:57 | Let's hit Command+R or Ctrl+R so we can
see what we're going to actually be rendering.
| | 01:02 | So we've got a very simple logo and it's got a
nice gradient on there, and some reflections,
| | 01:06 | and it looks pretty nice.
| | 01:08 | Now I need to render that still for Photoshop so I can
get that into a format that the client can approve.
| | 01:13 | So let's go to the render settings. You click
on this last icon right here, that's the Edit
| | 01:17 | Render Settings button, you can also
hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on the keyboard.
| | 01:20 | When we do that the
Render Settings pop up here.
| | 01:24 | Now over here on the left-hand side,
we've got a Render Settings categories.
| | 01:27 | On the right-hand side, we see
the contents of those categories.
| | 01:31 | I've got my output
already to set to 640x360.
| | 01:34 | I did that when I started working
with the Actual Camera Object.
| | 01:38 | The very first thing I do in any project
when I add a camera is to set the aspect ratio
| | 01:42 | so that I know what it is I'm
going to be looking through.
| | 01:46 | So I've got that already set but I know for my
still image I need a little bit more resolution,
| | 01:50 | so what I'm going to do is disregard the aspect ratio
for the still and render out a much larger image.
| | 01:55 | So I'm going to go to the Width and
change that to be, let's call it 1,000.
| | 02:01 | So I'm going to change the Width to 1,000
and I'm going to leave the Height alone.
| | 02:05 | That gives me a very interesting aspect ratio
but you can see that my logo fits nicely inside
| | 02:10 | this rectangle and it should give me enough
resolution to work with inside of Photoshop.
| | 02:15 | Now that I've got my render settings set
correctly, I want to make sure that I'm always going
| | 02:19 | to be rendering out the correct frame.
| | 02:21 | Right now, the Frame Range is defaulted to current frame
but I know that I want to probably render frame 39.
| | 02:27 | Its one frame earlier and I know that the logo is
just a little bit more straight on to the camera.
| | 02:33 | So rather than leave it to chance that I
might accidentally move that slider, I'm going to
| | 02:37 | change the Frame Range to Manual
and change it to be 39 by 39.
| | 02:42 | I'll leave the Fields alone and now I need to
tell it what file format I want to save out.
| | 02:48 | So let's go to the Save dialog and then in
the Save we're going to tell it first where
| | 02:53 | to go and in order to do that we'll
Click the Save Image button down here.
| | 02:58 | When we click that and we're going to navigate
to our Desktop > Exercise Files >
| | 03:04 | rendering folder, and in the C4D-Renders
folder, we're going to leave it loose here.
| | 03:09 | I'm going to call that file Logo-STILL, now
hit Save, and you can see that Cinema 4D now
| | 03:17 | has the actual file path already highlighted here, and
that file path shows us where the file is going.
| | 03:26 | Now to change the format, we're going to go to the
Format pulldown and we will select Photoshop (PSD).
| | 03:32 | So we've told it where to go. We
told it what file format to save.
| | 03:35 | We know that our logo right now, if I hit Command+R
or Ctrl+R, it's rendering over black. I want
| | 03:41 | to be able to lift it off of this black
so I can put it in a new environment.
| | 03:45 | So I need to add an Alpha Channel
and I need to turn on Straight Alpha.
| | 03:49 | The Straight Alpha option will give me a slight
bleed around the edges of my logo and that's
| | 03:53 | going to give me a much cleaner
composite inside of Photoshop.
| | 03:56 | I've covered all of the big important options.
| | 03:58 | I've told it how big our frame to render,
I've told it which frame to render, I've told
| | 04:02 | it where to put that frame and what format to put
it in, and I've told it to have an Alpha Channel.
| | 04:06 | I think we're good to go
there with the render settings.
| | 04:09 | Let's Save this file before we go any further,
I'm going to go to the File menu and do a
| | 04:14 | Save As and on the rendering folder, on the
Desktop, in the exercise files, let's call
| | 04:21 | this one Still-image-
animation and then WORKING.
| | 04:26 | Now that we've saved we
can go ahead and render.
| | 04:27 | It's always a good idea to
save before you render.
| | 04:30 | Cinema 4D is a very stable
program but accidents happen.
| | 04:33 | So you'll always want to save before you do
something important like rendering.
| | 04:36 | To render for real we need to do
something called a Render to Picture Viewer.
| | 04:40 | The icon for that is right next to the Render
and Active View button, so this is Render and
| | 04:44 | Active View and this is the Render to Picture
Viewer, and you can see the shortcut is Shift+R.
| | 04:49 | Now when I click and hold on that button you
see that we have a bunch of options there
| | 04:52 | but it's really the Render to
Picture Viewer that we want to do.
| | 04:55 | So when we click that Icon, the Picture
Viewer pops up in our image renders.
| | 04:59 | It renders pretty quick because it's a simple
scene and you can see that my logo looks like
| | 05:03 | it's getting chopped off a bit, but if I just click
and drag left to right I can slide my image over.
| | 05:09 | We're actually looking at it at 100% so it's not
quite fitting in the open frame that we have.
| | 05:14 | If we navigate out to the Finder and we go
to the C4D-Renders folder in the rendering
| | 05:19 | subfolder, you can see
there's our still image, PSD.
| | 05:22 | If we open that in Photoshop, you can see
that we'd have a logo with an alpha channel
| | 05:27 | burned in and we'd be in great shape.
| | 05:29 | Let's go back to Cinema 4D.
| | 05:31 | Here in the Picture Viewer inside of Cinema
4D, one of the things you may have notice
| | 05:34 | is that we have a very crunchy edge around the
logo that we rendered, and that's the Straight Alpha.
| | 05:40 | The Straight Alpha bleeds it around and it
doesn't need to worry about actually making
| | 05:43 | that bleed pretty.
| | 05:45 | It just needs to make sure that it's bled.
| | 05:47 | I can check my alpha channel by going to the Layer
options and then clicking on the Single-Pass button.
| | 05:54 | If I click on Alpha after that you can
see that my Alpha is nice and clean.
| | 05:57 | If I go back to the background, you can see
that it's just a little bit larger than the
| | 06:01 | alpha and it's got this crunchy bleed all the way
around, and that's the Straight Alpha Channel.
| | 06:06 | Let's go ahead and Save, Command+S or Ctrl+S,
and now that we've got our still image
| | 06:10 | rendered, let's render an animation.
| | 06:12 | The process for rendering animation is really
pretty straight forward. Just like the still
| | 06:15 | image we want to make sure that we tell it
how big, where to put it, what format, plus
| | 06:20 | one additional setting
which is the Frame Range.
| | 06:22 | So let's go ahead and close up to Picture
Viewer and let's go back to Render Settings.
| | 06:26 | If yours aren't already
open hit Command+B or Ctrl+B.
| | 06:29 | I'm going to use these render settings as a
starting point for my next render settings.
| | 06:33 | So what I can do is hold down the Ctrl key and
Ctrl+Drag a copy of the render settings down,
| | 06:38 | and I'm going to make the one I just copied
Still Image, and then I'll make the one that
| | 06:46 | is remaining, we'll call this one, Animation.
| | 06:49 | Now I can tell the Animation render setting
is active by looking at which icon is white
| | 06:55 | and you can see the icon is
white next to the word Animation.
| | 06:58 | So I know that this is the render setting that
will get used when it comes time to render.
| | 07:01 | Now in this render setting, the first thing we
want to change is under the Output and the Width.
| | 07:07 | So let's go back to our size of 640, so 640,
that's going to give us our 16 by 9 aspect
| | 07:12 | ratio and then we're going
to change the Frame Range.
| | 07:17 | And I'm going to render all
the frames in the animation.
| | 07:19 | You can see that animation goes up to frame 89
basically and so we're going to go render from 0 to 89.
| | 07:28 | We'll leave the Frame Step at 1.
We'll leave the Fields alone.
| | 07:33 | Now we can go back and tell
it to put it in a new place.
| | 07:36 | Let's go back to the Save Image dialog and
let's put it in the C4D-Renders folder but
| | 07:41 | let's put it in its own subfolder.
| | 07:43 | We don't want to put it loose in here because
we'd end up with the whole bunch of individual
| | 07:47 | PSD files. One for each
frame of our rendering.
| | 07:51 | So let's change this from Logo-
STILL to Logo-ANIM, A-N-I-M.
| | 07:56 | So I made a little mistake here after telling
you how important it was to have the stuff
| | 08:00 | in its subfolder, I forgot
to make that subfolder.
| | 08:03 | You can see that it's going to go right loose
in the C4D-Renders folder, so let's go back
| | 08:06 | to this dialog, and in the C4D-Renders let's
make a new folder and call that one Animation
| | 08:13 | and let's hit Save.
| | 08:15 | Now it's going to go to the right location.
| | 08:17 | We still want our Alpha; we
still want our Straight Alpha.
| | 08:19 | One thing I want to verify before I render
an animation is the Anti-Aliasing settings.
| | 08:23 | Let's click on Anti-Aliasing.
| | 08:24 | You can see that I've already set them for Best and
then the filter is set for Gauss or Animation.
| | 08:30 | That's going to give me much cleaner lines
and the Animation Filter is going to just
| | 08:34 | soften the image just a little bit, and that's
going to help smooth out so they don't get
| | 08:38 | any kind of buzzing on the
lines that become too small.
| | 08:41 | Let's go back to the Save Dialog and we've
told it where to put it, we've told it what
| | 08:46 | format which is a PSD sequence.
| | 08:48 | And then we're going to tell it also to save
out the After Effects project file and we're
| | 08:54 | going to turn all four these buttons On and
that's going to give us an After Effects composition
| | 08:58 | that we can import into After Effects.
| | 09:00 | And that camera that we import in will match our
C4D camera exactly and that's really valuable
| | 09:05 | technique for motion graphics, being able
to take 2D elements from After Effects and
| | 09:10 | have them match your 3D camera moves and
Cinema 4D is a really powerful way to work.
| | 09:14 | So let's just review, we've told it what size
to render the image. We told it how many frames
| | 09:18 | to render. We've told it where to put those frames
now I think we're just about ready to render.
| | 09:22 | Let's go ahead and Save.
| | 09:23 | Command+S or Ctrl+S on the PC and
let's hit Shift+R on the keyboard.
| | 09:28 | We can click on the Render and Active View
button, we'll use the keyboard shortcut this
| | 09:31 | time, Shift+R and that brings up the Picture
Viewer, and you'll see the Picture Viewer will
| | 09:35 | start to crunch through those frames.
| | 09:37 | This is going to take a little bit of time so we'll
speed up this animation and go right to the end.
| | 09:41 | The rendering is done and so now we can scrub
through the rendering here. We can actually
| | 09:46 | see our animation. We can hit Play and
preview it here in the Picture Viewer.
| | 09:52 | Let's navigate to the Finder and
see what actually rendered out.
| | 09:56 | So here in the C4D-Renders folder, in the
Animation subfolder is our animation sequence.
| | 10:01 | You can see there's all the individual frames
in the animation plus this little file called
| | 10:07 | Logo-ANIM-aec, and this is the After Effects
composition file that was saved out by Cinema 4D.
| | 10:12 | This is the file that we'd import
in the After Effects to work with.
| | 10:15 | We're going to talk about that in
more detail in the chapter on Workflow.
| | 10:19 | The important thing to remember about this
process is that you can have multiple render
| | 10:22 | settings in Cinema 4D.
| | 10:23 | A big gotcha is to make sure and check which
render setting is active by looking at the
| | 10:28 | active Render Setting icon.
| | 10:30 | Let's go back to Cinema 4D
and I'll show you that.
| | 10:32 | I'm going to close up the Picture Viewer and
here in the Render Settings window we've got
| | 10:38 | Animation and Still Image.
| | 10:39 | Right now, the Animation render setting is
active, and I want to activate the Still Image
| | 10:43 | render setting, and you can see that I can
go back and forth between those two.
| | 10:46 | It's very important for you to look at the
active Render Setting icon. That will determine
| | 10:50 | which render setting you're actually using.
| | 10:52 | The highlighted render setting is the one that
you're currently looking at or working in.
| | 10:56 | So be very careful about
those two different settings.
| | 10:59 | In the next movie, we'll talk a little bit
more about a more advanced technique called
| | 11:02 | multi-pass rendering.
| | 11:04 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up multipass rendering for still images| 00:00 | The concept of multipass rendering involves
the idea that the images that CINEMA 4D produces
| | 00:06 | can be broken down into layers and those
layers can be recombined in a compositing program
| | 00:10 | to produce the same image
that you saw in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:14 | The advantage is that you can adjust those
layers to control how the rendering looks
| | 00:18 | without having to comeback to
CINEMA 4D to re-render everything.
| | 00:21 | I'm going to be rendering a very simple still
image into Photoshop to introduce you to the
| | 00:25 | concept of multipass rendering.
| | 00:27 | And then in the next chapter we're going to
talk about multipass rendering for motion
| | 00:30 | graphics working with After Effects.
| | 00:32 | So in the scene I've got this fish that
swim pass the Multipass Workflow type.
| | 00:36 | We're going to be rendering out frame 50.
| | 00:38 | There's a little bit of movement on the camera but
we're going to render frame 50 for this purpose.
| | 00:42 | And so the multipass rendering
workflow starts in the render settings.
| | 00:46 | So let's go to the render settings, Command+B
or Ctrl+B on the keyboard, and here in
| | 00:51 | the Render Settings we're going to start
of by telling it how big and what frame.
| | 00:56 | Now I'm going to leave it on 800x600 because
this is going to be a still image and that's
| | 00:59 | going to be fine for these purposes.
| | 01:01 | I want to make sure that I always render frame
50, so I change it to Manual and change the
| | 01:06 | From and To to 50, and I'll hit Enter.
| | 01:10 | So I've told it how big
and what frame to render.
| | 01:13 | Now I can go to the Save dialog.
| | 01:15 | The interesting thing about multipass
rendering is that for the saving you do not have to
| | 01:19 | worry about this Save image.
| | 01:20 | When I activate the Multi-Pass option over
here on the left-hand side, I'm going to get
| | 01:25 | a new Save window, so let's activate that, and look
at that, I now have a new Save section here.
| | 01:30 | If I turn Multi-Pass off it goes away,
turn it back on again and there it is.
| | 01:34 | This is the Save area that we're going to
worry about for a multipass rendering.
| | 01:38 | If we did have an Alpha Channel in our image
we'd want to make sure that this was turned
| | 01:41 | on but we're going to be
saving the file from down here.
| | 01:44 | So let's click on the Save Image button and
we're going to navigate to our Desktop to
| | 01:50 | the exercise files, so Desktop > Exercise
Files > rendering, and then in the C4D-Renders
| | 01:55 | folder we're going to save it loose
here and let's call it Multipass-still.
| | 02:02 | We've told it where to save.
| | 02:04 | Now for the Format we're going to
render to Photoshop, so PSD is good.
| | 02:07 | For the Bit Depth, because I don't have a lot
of really strong gradients, I'm going to leave
| | 02:11 | it at 8. That's going to give me a
slightly better file size to work with.
| | 02:16 | When you're rendering your still images for
Photoshop, Multi-Layer File is the preferred way to go.
| | 02:20 | However, if you're going to be rendering After
Effects you want to make sure that Multi-Layer
| | 02:23 | File is always off. After Effects will not be
able to read a sequence of Multi-Layer Files.
| | 02:28 | And also because of rendering a still image
to Photoshop, we don't have to worry about
| | 02:31 | the Compositing Project
File information down here.
| | 02:33 | We can leave that twirled closed.
| | 02:35 | So we told it how big and what frame, and we've told it
where to put the file and what format to put it in.
| | 02:40 | We've left off the most important step
and that's the Multi-Pass settings.
| | 02:45 | Turning on Multi-Pass is not enough. We have to
tell it what Multi-Pass layers we want to render.
| | 02:49 | So let's go ahead and click on the word Multi-
Pass and we're going to Add all Image Layers.
| | 02:55 | Don't be scared by this super long list.
| | 02:56 | I'm going to break it
down for you just a second.
| | 02:58 | When we add all image layers, we get another
long list of stuff underneath Multi-Pass.
| | 03:03 | Now some of these we're not going to need
and the way we're going to tell that is by
| | 03:06 | doing a test rendering and looking to
see which rendered layers are blank.
| | 03:11 | The better way to know is by doing an analysis
of the textures that you have on your scene,
| | 03:16 | and based on the textures and lights that
you have in your scene, that will tell you
| | 03:19 | what renders passes you'll need.
| | 03:20 | But we're going to do a test render now so
you can see just what those settings do.
| | 03:24 | So we've got the Render Settings set.
| | 03:26 | Let's do a Save As before
we move on any further.
| | 03:28 | Let's go to the File menu and do a Save As,
and let's navigate to our rendering folder.
| | 03:33 | We will call this
Multipass-still-image-WORKING.
| | 03:37 | Now we're ready to render.
| | 03:39 | So let's do a Shift+R on the keyboard.
| | 03:41 | We could also click on the Render to Picture
Viewer button here but let's do Shift+R, it's
| | 03:46 | the same for Mac or PC.
| | 03:48 | So now that we've rendered this, the
file has been saved to the hard drive.
| | 03:53 | How do we know that we've done a Multi-Pass
render? Well, the easiest way to do is to
| | 03:56 | check your layers.
| | 03:58 | Right over here on the right-hand side of the
Picture Viewer is this panel, and the panel
| | 04:02 | can display different types of information.
| | 04:03 | Now if your panel isn't visible for some reason,
you can click on this icon up here at the
| | 04:07 | top to make it active.
| | 04:09 | We're going to click on the Layer option and
the Layer option shows us all of the layers
| | 04:14 | that we have with our image.
| | 04:15 | Let's raise this up a little bit so
we can see what's going on here.
| | 04:19 | If I click on each of these I can't
actually see them until I turn on Single-Pass.
| | 04:24 | Right now it's showing us the
result of all of these layers.
| | 04:28 | If I turn on Single-Pass then it
shows me the layer that I click on.
| | 04:32 | The thing you'll notice as I click through
each of these layers, they represent a different
| | 04:35 | component of the final image.
| | 04:38 | So Atmosphere is all of the undersea murkiness that
we see and that's based on the environment object.
| | 04:43 | Atmosphere (Multiply) is what this atmosphere
object multiplies into to give it the color
| | 04:48 | that you see in the final image.
| | 04:50 | The Refraction is blank.
| | 04:52 | We don't need the Refraction layer.
| | 04:54 | The reason we don't need it and the reason it's
blank is because I don't have any transparent
| | 04:57 | objects in the scene.
| | 04:58 | The Refraction layer relates to transparency.
| | 05:01 | There's no transparency so
I don't need refractions.
| | 05:03 | I know that I can turn that
off in the render settings.
| | 05:06 | As I click through each of these you'll notice
that there's a blending mode here and these
| | 05:09 | blending modes are very important.
| | 05:11 | They determine how the image will finally
behave when you go into Photoshop, and they're
| | 05:16 | already set for us. You
don't need to change them here.
| | 05:19 | If you change them it's going to change the
way your image behaves and you want to do
| | 05:22 | that in Photoshop not
here in the Picture Viewer.
| | 05:24 | So these are really just to let you
know how it's going to get saved out.
| | 05:28 | Reflection relates to the reflective surfaces
in the object and the type is the only thing
| | 05:32 | that has reflection on it, so
that's the only thing you see here.
| | 05:35 | Ambient Occlusion is a pass that I haven't turned
on yet for this image but it would be sort here.
| | 05:41 | So we can turn off this pass or activate
Ambient Occlusion for the final rendered image but
| | 05:45 | I think we'll just turn it off for now.
| | 05:47 | We're also not losing Global
Illumination or Caustics.
| | 05:50 | Ambient relates to the
illuminates channel of your materials.
| | 05:53 | I have illuminate channel in one of the materials
on my type and that's what you're seeing there.
| | 05:58 | The Shadow pass relates to the shadows that
are being cast for the lights in your scene.
| | 06:02 | The Specular Highlight is all of the specular
highlights that are on your object, and then
| | 06:07 | the Diffuse is the base level of color.
| | 06:10 | So if I go and turn all of these off, and then
go to Multi-Pass, I can now build up my image
| | 06:17 | and you see that I have Diffuse, if I turn
on Specular, and now suddenly I've got some
| | 06:21 | Specular highlight.
| | 06:22 | I can turn on my Shadows, I can turn on my
Ambient, I can turn on my Caustics--that's
| | 06:28 | blank so that does nothing.
| | 06:29 | Same thing for Global Illumination and
Ambient Occlusion. I can turn on my Reflections, I
| | 06:33 | can turn on my Refraction--that
does nothing so I'll leave it off.
| | 06:37 | I can turn on Atmosphere Multiply and then
Atmosphere, and you can see there is my full image.
| | 06:41 | It is the result of all of those layers.
| | 06:44 | The beautiful thing is that I can take these
layers into Photoshop and manipulate them.
| | 06:48 | Let's go into Photoshop and
see how this image stacks up.
| | 06:51 | So here we are in Photoshop.
| | 06:52 | Let's go to the File menu and go to Open, and
I'll navigate to my rendering folder out here
| | 06:58 | and let's go to the C4D-Renders,
and there is our Multipass-still.
| | 07:02 | Let's open that up and
here's our rendered layers.
| | 07:05 | The rendered layers are all here just
like they were in the Picture Viewer.
| | 07:09 | Let's say I don't like how
reflective the type is.
| | 07:11 | I can go to the Reflection channel and then
either turn it off or even easier I can just
| | 07:18 | dial it down in Opacity.
| | 07:19 | If I take the Opacity slider and bring it
down by say 50% I'm cutting the amount of
| | 07:24 | reflection on the type.
| | 07:26 | Then normally if I wasn't using multipass
rendering I'd have to go back to CINEMA 4D,
| | 07:30 | go into each of the materials, dial down the
Reflection value, and then re-render everything.
| | 07:35 | That's the beauty of multipass rendering.
It allows you to make changes to the image
| | 07:39 | right here in the Compositing application
without having to go back and re-render.
| | 07:44 | One more example, let's say I wanted
to have a slightly stronger shadow.
| | 07:47 | I can go to the Shadow options and right now
my shadow is at 100%, you can see that the
| | 07:51 | blending mode is set to Multiply.
| | 07:53 | I can just duplicate this layer by hitting
Command +J or Ctrl+J on the PC and you can
| | 07:59 | see that my shadows got darker.
| | 08:01 | Each time I do Command+J or Ctrl+J
my shadows will get darker still.
| | 08:05 | So I can easily darken up those shadows
without having to go back to CINEMA 4D and changing
| | 08:10 | the light intensity.
| | 08:11 | So as you can see Multi-Pass
workflow is really a strong way to work.
| | 08:15 | It gives you tons of flexibility.
| | 08:17 | There's a little bit more to set up on the
front end but it makes the backend in the
| | 08:21 | compositing application much, much easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Render Queue to batch render multiple files| 00:00 | When you're working as a motion graphics artist or
even a visual effects artist, working efficiently
| | 00:05 | is really important.
| | 00:06 | There'll be many times in your projects where
you'll have to render out multiple files or
| | 00:10 | even multiple versions of the same file.
| | 00:12 | That's where CINEMA 4D's
Render Queue comes in.
| | 00:15 | I've got four files open here and
they're just simple animations.
| | 00:18 | I've got a one and then if I go to the Window
menu and switch to--here's a two, and I've
| | 00:24 | got a three, and a four, and this is very
typical of the kinds of things that you'll
| | 00:30 | have to do in motion graphics.
| | 00:32 | A lot of times, for example, if you're
working for a television station you'll have to do
| | 00:35 | multiple versions, you know, Saturday Night, Coming
Up Next, those kinds of versions really add up.
| | 00:41 | If you can do an efficient rendering
process you'll save yourself a lot of time.
| | 00:45 | Let's go to the Render Queue and the way you
get there is by going to the Render menu and
| | 00:50 | then going to the Render Queue sub-menu.
| | 00:52 | When I do that I get this Render Queue window.
| | 00:55 | The Render Queue is an
interface for managing your renders.
| | 00:59 | It acts independently of the scenes that you
have opened and it's really almost like a
| | 01:03 | little mini program.
| | 01:04 | What I want to do is to load in the jobs that
I want to render into this window and then
| | 01:09 | I'll be able to manage both the render paths
and the render process itself from this window.
| | 01:14 | And before we start our Render Queue process I want to
take a look at the render settings in these files.
| | 01:18 | Let's close up the Render window and in Q4
here, let's go to the render settings, hit
| | 01:23 | Command+B or Ctrl+B on the
keyboard to bring up that window.
| | 01:27 | I have two render settings in number four.
| | 01:30 | I have a Still Image render setting and an
Animation render setting and that's very important.
| | 01:34 | We're going to use both of
these in the Render Queue.
| | 01:36 | The Still Image is going to give you a 2000x1125
rendering of frame 20 of this animation.
| | 01:42 | So if I go to 20 you see it's
going to render this frame.
| | 01:46 | The Animation render setting is going to
render the entire animation 0 to 89 and it's going
| | 01:51 | to do a 640x360 rendering.
| | 01:53 | And it's going to save it
out as a QuickTime movie.
| | 01:56 | The file path that I have set here is different
than what I'm going to be using for my final
| | 02:02 | file path and that's on purpose.
| | 02:03 | I want to show you how you can change
that file path in the Render Queue.
| | 02:06 | So basically I have similar render settings
in the other projects with the exception of
| | 02:10 | the Still settings.
| | 02:11 | Let's go to the Window menu and
just check number two for example.
| | 02:13 | Hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on the keyboard and
you can see that they just have one render
| | 02:17 | settings, so the only one that I have
two render settings for is number four.
| | 02:21 | So let's bring up the Render Queue again and
go to the Render menu and go to Render Queue.
| | 02:26 | And here in the Render Queue I'm going to
go to File > Open, and I can navigate to my
| | 02:32 | Exercise Files folder to the rendering,
and there is my Queue 1, 2, 3, and 4.
| | 02:36 | So let's grab Queue-1 and then let's add Open
> Queue-2, let's go to File > Open > Queue-3
| | 02:45 | and the File > Open > Queue-4.
| | 02:51 | Now that I've got all four of these files
open you can see that their status is red
| | 02:55 | and it's got an error message.
| | 02:57 | Now even if you're not seeing an error message
on your side the most important thing to do
| | 03:01 | before you start to render is to
verify where the files are going.
| | 03:06 | So we're going to go through each one of these
files and tell it where to put the renders.
| | 03:11 | And the error in most instances is that
the files are going to overwrite something.
| | 03:16 | Most likely it can't find the correct file
path because this file path is from a different
| | 03:19 | project entirely. So what I
want to do for each of these is
| | 03:23 | start off and change the file path.
| | 03:25 | So let's click on number one and I want to
go to the Save Image dialog, and you notice
| | 03:30 | I can also choose which
camera I want to render from.
| | 03:33 | I can also choose which render setting.
| | 03:34 | Well this file only has one render setting
so I'm going to go to the dialog here and
| | 03:39 | change where I want it to save.
| | 03:41 | So let's go to rendering, to C4D-Renders, and then
I'm going to Save it, here loose in the folder.
| | 03:47 | It's going to render a QuickTime movie so I'll just
get one movie here in the folder. Let's hit Save,
| | 03:51 | and so you can see now it's going to
render that movie into that location.
| | 03:55 | And you notice that the status has changed.
It no longer shows an error and it's gray.
| | 03:59 | The gray means ready to go.
| | 04:01 | Let's click on number two
and do the same thing.
| | 04:04 | Navigate the C4D-Renders and we'll do it loose in there,
Save, and let's do the same thing on number three.
| | 04:13 | Now for number four, number four has multiple
render settings and so what I want to do is
| | 04:19 | I want to set up a rendering for both
the still image and the animation.
| | 04:22 | So let's go to the still image and select
that, and then tell it where to put it, and
| | 04:27 | we'll put it loose in the folder,
you can see its named 10-03-still.
| | 04:30 | Let's change that name from 10-03
and call it Four-still.
| | 04:35 | And then we want to duplicate this.
| | 04:38 | So if we duplicate this job we can simply hold
down the Control key and drag a copy down.
| | 04:42 | And this is the exact same
project but now it's just copy.
| | 04:45 | And so we can select that and
change the render setting to Animation.
| | 04:49 | And now, let's tell it where
to put that animation.
| | 04:52 | Let's call that, instead of 10-03-animation,
let's call it Four-animation or anim for short.
| | 05:00 | So now that I've set up all four of those
renderings I'm ready to tell it to go ahead and render.
| | 05:05 | Now these projects don't need
to be open in the background.
| | 05:07 | I can actually close them all up.
| | 05:09 | I'll go to the File menu and do Close
All and now they're all closed up.
| | 05:14 | I could even continue working
during this process if I wanted to.
| | 05:17 | But now I can go to the Job menu
and tell it to Start Rendering.
| | 05:21 | So what's going to happen is that CINEMA 4D is
going to render these projects in the background,
| | 05:26 | and in order to see the status of that
project I have to click on it up here.
| | 05:30 | Now you can see that there's the progress.
| | 05:31 | I've got a progress bar and I can see which frame it's
working on by looking in this little preview window.
| | 05:37 | So what the Render Queue is going to do is it's
going to go through each of these one at a time.
| | 05:42 | So when it finishes it's going to mark it green
then uncheck it from the status column on the left.
| | 05:48 | So when it hits Render Queue item number four
that's just the still image, it's going to
| | 05:51 | go by really quick.
| | 05:55 | Now that the renderings are done, you can see
that they've all been marked green and finished.
| | 05:58 | If we've had any error
messages at all we'd see that here.
| | 06:01 | So the real purpose of the Render
Queue is to allow you to be efficient.
| | 06:06 | When you've got a whole bunch of renderings
that you have to do being able to stack them
| | 06:09 | up like this and start on rendering, and then
walk away from your computer for a long time,
| | 06:14 | it allows you to go do something else, or work
in another application entirely, or even work
| | 06:18 | in another C4D project,
| | 06:19 | all while these renderings are
going off in the background.
| | 06:21 | So let's go up to the
Finder and see what happened.
| | 06:24 | If we navigate out, let's check our C4D
Renders folder and here in the rendering folder is
| | 06:30 | each of the renderings that we set off.
| | 06:32 | So there's One, and there's Two, and the Three,
and there are each QuickTime movies and there's
| | 06:36 | our Four-anime and then
the Four-still frame 20.
| | 06:40 | So you can see that our frame one went off
without a hitch and each of them looks great.
| | 06:45 | So just a recap, the whole purpose of the
Render Queue is to allow you to be efficient.
| | 06:50 | You can stack up a whole bunch of renders
and then walk away from your computer knowing
| | 06:54 | that they're going to go off without a hitch.
| | 06:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the linear workflow| 00:00 | As things go in the 3D world, linear
workflow is a fairly controversial subject.
| | 00:06 | It was introduced in CINEMA 4D two versions ago,
and it dramatically changed how 3D images
| | 00:11 | are rendered in the render engine.
| | 00:13 | Rather than go through a lengthy discussion
about the technical aspects of linear workflow,
| | 00:18 | I want to focus on it
from an artist perspective.
| | 00:21 | Linear workflow relates to the way that images
are displayed on a computer screen and that
| | 00:25 | method involves something
called a Color Profile.
| | 00:28 | It can be really daunting for an artist who's
not technically-minded to even deal with the
| | 00:33 | idea of linear workflow.
| | 00:35 | But the most important thing to remember about it
is that it changes how the lights and materials
| | 00:40 | behave and it also changes how the blending
modes behave when you get into After Effects.
| | 00:45 | So I've got a scene here and linear workflow
is on, and linear workflow has been on for
| | 00:50 | all the renderings that I've been
showing you so far in this course.
| | 00:53 | And where you adjust the linear
workflow is in the project settings.
| | 00:56 | Now if your project settings aren't visible,
you hit Command+D or Ctrl+D on the keyboard
| | 01:01 | to bring up the Project settings.
| | 01:02 | And let's raise this window up just a bit.
| | 01:05 | Right here at the very bottom is this
little unassuming button, Linear Workflow.
| | 01:09 | Unfortunately, that button defaults to on.
| | 01:12 | That is not a big deal
for a lot of situations.
| | 01:15 | If you're going to be rendering just a still
image with no multipasses, then linear workflow
| | 01:19 | is not a big deal, because what you see is
what you will get when you go in After Effects.
| | 01:23 | However, when you start to get into multipass
rendering, linear workflow becomes crucial,
| | 01:28 | and that button will have a dramatic impact on how
the images behave when you get into After Effects.
| | 01:33 | So before we get in to After Effects, let's take
a look at linear workflow, both off and on.
| | 01:38 | So I've got linear workflow on for this rendering
and I'll hit Command+R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard.
| | 01:42 | You can see my rendering looks pretty good.
There is a nice murky sort of overtone to
| | 01:49 | the image. It's under water, and we've got our
fish swimming past the linear workflow type.
| | 01:54 | Now let's turn it off and you
can see a very different image.
| | 01:57 | First thing you'll notice is
that the work space changed here.
| | 02:01 | The materials changed on the material manager
and when I render, it's going to look very
| | 02:05 | different as well, Command+R or Ctrl+R again.
| | 02:08 | You should notice that the image is darker.
| | 02:12 | The number one thing that linear workflow does is it
changes how the lights and materials add together.
| | 02:17 | It's going to be easier to see this
with the side-by-side comparison.
| | 02:20 | So I've got two different renderings, one
with and one without linear workflow that
| | 02:23 | we're going to open in the Picture Viewer.
| | 02:25 | So let's go to the Window menu and
you can then go to the Picture Viewer.
| | 02:28 | And let's go to the File > Open, and let's navigate
to our rendering folder in the exercise files.
| | 02:34 | And let's grab linear-workflow-
OFF and then Open that one.
| | 02:38 | And let's do that File > Open again, and then
grab linear-workflow-ON, and then Open that one.
| | 02:44 | Now over here in the history, we can see
we've got linear workflow off and on, and we can
| | 02:47 | click back and forth between these two, and you can
see the dramatic difference between the renderings.
| | 02:53 | Now there is technically no
right or wrong answer here.
| | 02:56 | To me, personally, the wrong answer is
that linear workflow is on by default.
| | 03:02 | What happened when it was introduced a couple
of versions back is that it changed how the
| | 03:05 | renderings behaved by default.
| | 03:07 | If you opened up old projects that had
linear workflow off then they would come in with
| | 03:12 | linear workflow off.
| | 03:12 | But anytime you created a new project, linear
workflow would defaults to on, and so, when
| | 03:17 | you got into After Effects with a multipass
render, your renderings will behave differently.
| | 03:21 | And a lot of folks didn't understand how to
deal with that, so that's what I want to focus
| | 03:24 | on today, is how to deal
with that linear workflow.
| | 03:27 | Let's close up the Picture Viewer.
| | 03:29 | Now I've got the render
settings all set for linear workflow.
| | 03:33 | Let's bring up the Render Settings here by
hitting Command+B or Ctrl+B on the keyboard.
| | 03:35 | And before I go any further, I want to turn
Linear Workflow back on, so that I leave
| | 03:40 | it on for this demonstration.
| | 03:43 | I've got my Render Settings set, I've got
Object Buffer set, I've got my RGB image.
| | 03:47 | I've got all my elements
rendered here correctly.
| | 03:50 | Rather than render this image out and go through the
time-consuming process, I've pre-rendered it already.
| | 03:54 | And you can see under the Output
dialog that I've rendered frames 45 to 89.
| | 03:58 | I wanted to minimize the file size
for download of the project assets.
| | 04:02 | When it comes down to working with linear
workflow, there's two very important options
| | 04:05 | under the Save options of the Render Settings.
| | 04:08 | Let's click on the Save option and
the first one is the Bit Depth.
| | 04:12 | Now the Bit Depth should always be 16 bit.
| | 04:15 | And because it has to be 16 bit, it
limits the options for your format.
| | 04:19 | You have to use a format
that supports 16 bit depth.
| | 04:23 | QuickTime does not support 16 bit depths so
you have to render to an image sequence.
| | 04:28 | The preferred image
sequence for me is a Photoshop.
| | 04:30 | The next most important
setting is the Image Color Profile.
| | 04:34 | It defaults to sRGB.
| | 04:35 | And to be honest, I
normally just leave it on that.
| | 04:39 | For other color profiles, you can load one in,
if you've been sending a specific color
| | 04:42 | profile for a project.
| | 04:43 | You can also low run from your monitor
that you're currently working with.
| | 04:47 | The problem with that though is that most
folks don't have their monitor set correctly,
| | 04:50 | so you want to be really careful.
| | 04:51 | I generally leave mine on sRGB, because it's
a good generic starting point and it creates
| | 04:56 | an even base for my work.
| | 04:58 | So those are the two most important settings
when you're working with linear workflow.
| | 05:01 | Linear Workflow should be on.
| | 05:02 | You just need to render to 16 bit and you leave
this image color profile set the way it is.
| | 05:08 | So with these render settings,
I rendered the image out.
| | 05:11 | Let's move over to After Effects
now and import that rendering in.
| | 05:14 | So here we are in After Effects and I'm going
to go to File menu and do an Import > File.
| | 05:18 | So I'm going to navigate to the exercise files,
to the rendering, to the C4D Rendering, to
| | 05:23 | the linear workflow, and let's scroll all the
way down and grab the linear-workflow.aec.
| | 05:29 | Now if this aec file is grayed out for you,
that means you do not have the correct After
| | 05:33 | Effects import plug-in
installed in After Effects.
| | 05:36 | I'm going to cover this in much
more detail in the next chapter.
| | 05:40 | So for now, if your aec file is grayed out,
then just follow along. Let's hit Open.
| | 05:45 | It's going to think
about it for just a moment.
| | 05:47 | And now I get two folders in the project window,
Linear Workflow and Special Passes; it's called
| | 05:52 | linear workflow, because that's what I
named my rendering inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 05:56 | I'm going to take the Special Passes folder
and drag it into the Linear Workflow folder.
| | 06:00 | That's the first step I
always do when I import.
| | 06:02 | And I will twirl that open. You could
see I have a linear-workflow comp here.
| | 06:06 | Let's double-click on that and I'm seeing
black here at the top, because of the render
| | 06:11 | settings that I had in CINEMA 4D.
| | 06:13 | In CINEMA 4D, I had adjusted my render settings
in the Render Settings window to render just
| | 06:18 | frame 45 on, and I did not adjust my
preview range, so it gives me this gap here.
| | 06:23 | I'm going to scrub through this gap to the
very first frame, which is at frame 45 or
| | 06:28 | 115 on the timeline, and you can
see that I've got a very dark image.
| | 06:33 | This is what you'll see if your linear
workflow is not set correctly in After Effects.
| | 06:37 | In order to see what it's supposed to look
like, let's import the linear workflow on
| | 06:41 | JPEG from our Project Files folder.
| | 06:44 | Hit Command+I or Ctrl+I on the keyboard and then in
the Project Files folder is the linear-workflow-ON.
| | 06:51 | So once again, this is inside the exercise
files and rendering, and then loose in there
| | 06:56 | is linear-workflow-ON.
| | 06:57 | Do not accidentally
import linear-workflow-OFF.
| | 07:00 | We want that on one.
| | 07:01 | So let's hit Open.
| | 07:04 | And if I double-click on that, I'm going to see
what my rendering is supposed to look like.
| | 07:08 | When you're not dealing with
multipasses, linear workflow does not matter.
| | 07:12 | You will see the correct image from CINEMA
4D and this is a great example of that.
| | 07:16 | This JPEG comes in just how it's
supposed to look in CINEMA 4D.
| | 07:20 | So that begs the question, how do we
get it to look right in After Effects?
| | 07:24 | The way we do that is a multistep process.
| | 07:27 | So here's our composition.
| | 07:28 | We have to go to the File and go to
Project Settings at the very bottom.
| | 07:34 | And in the Project Settings, let's raise that
up, the very bottom of the Project Settings window
| | 07:39 | is getting cutoff because of the
resolution of the screen record that we're doing.
| | 07:43 | But you can see I've got OK
down there at the bottom.
| | 07:46 | So the linear workflow starts
by changing the bit depth.
| | 07:50 | The linear workflow cannot work in anything
less than 16 bit, so we're going to go to 16
| | 07:55 | bit and that matches our
rendering from CINEMA 4D.
| | 07:57 | So we turn on 16 bit.
| | 08:00 | Now we can change the working space to match
the render setting that we had in CINEMA 4D.
| | 08:04 | If you remember, I pointed out two very
important settings in CINEMA 4D render settings for
| | 08:09 | linear workflow, and that involved the color
profile, and this is the color profile that
| | 08:14 | matches the one we used in CINEMA 4D.
| | 08:16 | So when we select that, now we get this
button active that says Linearize Working Space.
| | 08:22 | We're going to turn that on and then when
we hit OK, now we see the image that looks
| | 08:27 | the same as it did from CINEMA 4D.
| | 08:29 | And you see if I click through, this is a
different frame of the animation, but if I
| | 08:34 | go back here, you can see that my rendering now
looks the way it's supposed to in After Effects.
| | 08:39 | Whether you like it or not, linear workflow
is here to stay, and if you're going to be
| | 08:42 | working in CINEMA 4D and After Effects, you
need to get used to either turning it off
| | 08:46 | or dealing with it.
| | 08:47 | For some projects I'd like to have it off.
| | 08:49 | For some projects that I know are going to
have a lot of gradients, or if I'm going to
| | 08:52 | have to have a do lot of manipulation of the
multipasses, I will leave Linear Workflow on.
| | 08:58 | I'll let the client know ahead of time
though that I'm dealing with linear workflow, so
| | 09:02 | that they know ahead of time, if I have to
deliver the project files to them, they need
| | 09:05 | to adjust their workflow internally as well.
| | 09:08 | So regardless of what you decide to do, the
important thing is to be specific and be proactive
| | 09:13 | about it, and deal with
those settings upfront.
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|
|
2. The 3D Animation and Compositing WorkflowUnderstanding the 3D animation workflow| 00:00 | CINEMA 4D is an amazing application for
generating images, but is not made for manipulating them.
| | 00:07 | When it comes time to manipulate your images,
you need to move to a compositing program
| | 00:10 | like Photoshop or After Effects, or even Nuke.
| | 00:13 | CINEMA 4D's rendering and compositing controls allow
for tight integration with compositing applications.
| | 00:19 | This means that you can change your images
dramatically inside the compositing program
| | 00:23 | without having to go back
to CINEMA 4D to re-render.
| | 00:25 | So this is a rendering I created in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:28 | I'll hit 0 on the numeric keypad.
| | 00:33 | This will generate a RAM preview.
| | 00:38 | That's not a bad looking rendering, but I want it to
have a little bit more of a dramatic feel to it.
| | 00:43 | And so what I created here inside of CINEMA
4D was this, I darkened it down a little bit,
| | 00:48 | I adjusted the colors a little bit better, to be a
little more monochromatic and less saturated.
| | 00:54 | This is a RAM preview for that.
| | 00:56 | The other thing you'll notice is that I added
some type, and that type is a 2D element here
| | 01:02 | in After Effects.
| | 01:03 | I want to be able to change out
this type on a regular basis.
| | 01:06 | Right now it says external compositing tag,
but what if I wanted it to say coming up
| | 01:10 | next or Saturday? Well, I can do that
because that type was generated in After Effects.
| | 01:14 | I don't have to go back to
CINEMA 4D to re-render that type.
| | 01:18 | And that is the power of using After
Effects to manipulate your images.
| | 01:22 | You have total control over what you can change
by using the compositing tools inside of CINEMA
| | 01:27 | 4D; things like object buffers,
external compositing tags.
| | 01:31 | They allow you to manipulate in post without
having to go through the hassle of re-rendering.
| | 01:36 | This entire chapter is dedicated to the
process of working with the compositing program.
| | 01:40 | Now I work with After Effects, but a lot of
the principles I'm going to use here will
| | 01:43 | work with both Photoshop, or any other
compositing program; Nuke or Smoke or Flame.
| | 01:49 | The ideas are the same.
| | 01:50 | The main idea is that you're not stuck with
the image that you get out of the 3D program.
| | 01:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Compositing tag and creating object buffers| 00:00 | This is the image that we're going to be
creating based on our original CINEMA 4D render.
| | 00:06 | And this is the original rendering,
and this is the revised rendering.
| | 00:11 | What allowed me to change the color of the
type without affecting the cubes is something
| | 00:15 | called an object buffer.
| | 00:16 | An object buffer is simply an alpha channel
for an object within your CINEMA 4D scene.
| | 00:22 | It's different than an alpha channel for the entire
scene, it's an alpha channel just for a single object.
| | 00:27 | Here in the project window,
we've got a Special Passes folder.
| | 00:31 | This was generated when we imported our
CINEMA 4D file from our Renders folder.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to double-click on workflow_object_3,
and this is the object buffer for the type.
| | 00:42 | You could see that it's just a black and white
matte that only highlights the type, and this
| | 00:47 | allows me to control the color of the type.
| | 00:51 | The process for making this
matte is pretty straightforward.
| | 00:53 | It involves something
called the Compositing tag.
| | 00:56 | The Compositing tag is the most powerful tag in all of
CINEMA 4D; it's the most important in my opinion.
| | 01:01 | It allows you to do dramatic
things with your rendering process.
| | 01:06 | Let's move over to CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:08 | So this is our scene file in
CINEMA 4D, Compositing-Tag-START.
| | 01:13 | Here's my type element.
| | 01:14 | What I want to be able to do is to have
an object buffer for that type element.
| | 01:19 | So what I'm going to do is right-click on
the Extrude NURBS that represents the word
| | 01:22 | Compositing and go to CINEMA 4D
Tags, and then Composting tag.
| | 01:28 | Now this gives me this little tag that looks
like a clapboard. On that tag is a property
| | 01:32 | called object buffer.
| | 01:34 | I'm going to activate object buffer number 3.
| | 01:37 | Now I could put any
number that I wanted in here.
| | 01:39 | I can make this 3,000 or
27; it doesn't matter.
| | 01:43 | The important thing is that the
object buffer is a two-stage process.
| | 01:46 | We have to have a number here that
matches a number in our render settings.
| | 01:50 | We're going to make that number in
the render settings in just a moment.
| | 01:52 | First, we're going to set our numbers here,
and then once we've got them all set, we'll
| | 01:56 | confirm those numbers in the render settings.
| | 01:58 | So now, I want to have workflow
in the exact same object buffer.
| | 02:03 | So rather than go through the whole process
of right-clicking again, I can just hold down
| | 02:06 | the Ctrl key and drag a copy of the
Compositing tag down onto the word Workflow.
| | 02:11 | So now I have the exact same Object Buffer
settings for these two words, just what I want.
| | 02:18 | Now let's do an Option+R or Alt+R on the PC,
and bring up our interactive render region,
| | 02:24 | and let's enlarge it just a bit.
| | 02:27 | Now if your Quality setting is set to halfway, go
ahead and raise that up to full quality there.
| | 02:32 | That's that little triangle there.
| | 02:34 | I'm going to bring that down
so I can see the entire frame.
| | 02:39 | You'll notice that when I render, I can't
actually see my type, that's because of this disc.
| | 02:45 | There's a disc in the scene, and I'll uncheck the
Visible in Editor dot in order to see the whole thing.
| | 02:51 | This disc is causing a
highlight on the surface of my type.
| | 02:55 | You can actually see that right
here in the reflection on the type.
| | 02:58 | I call this a highlight disc.
| | 03:00 | It's a common technique in motion graphics.
| | 03:02 | These discs are used all over the place to generate
little highlights on the surfaces of your type.
| | 03:06 | I don't want this highlight disc
to be visible on the rendering.
| | 03:10 | The Visible in Editor and Visible
in Render buttons only go so far.
| | 03:14 | I can hide this disc here in the
Editor window by making this top dot red.
| | 03:18 | I'll click twice on that.
| | 03:19 | This bottom button though, if I were to double-
click on that, that would make my disc not visible
| | 03:25 | in the rendering either.
| | 03:26 | Watch, I'll double-click, and make it red
and you can see that my disc goes away.
| | 03:30 | That defeats the purpose
of having the disc there.
| | 03:33 | So what I want to do is to create a
situation where the disc shows up in the surface of
| | 03:38 | the compositing workflow but does not show up in the
type itself. It also shouldn't show up in the floor.
| | 03:45 | So I need a Compositing tag for that.
| | 03:46 | So let's first off make the bottom dot
gray again, so that the disc shows up.
| | 03:51 | Then we'll right-click on the disc,
and go to CINEMA 4D tags > Compositing.
| | 03:56 | The Compositing tag is incredibly versatile.
| | 03:57 | There are a lot of settings in it.
| | 03:59 | Underneath the tag properties for that, we're
going to turn off Cast and Receive Shadows,
| | 04:04 | we're going to turn off Seen by AO, that's
Ambient Occlusion, and then we're going to
| | 04:09 | uncheck Seen by Camera.
| | 04:11 | When we do that, watch what happens.
| | 04:15 | Now you can see that the disc shows up in
the surface of my type, but it's not visible
| | 04:19 | in the rendering.
| | 04:20 | That's really important.
| | 04:22 | I'm going to uncheck the Active Camera icon, and
let's take a look at the scene from a different angle.
| | 04:26 | One of the things that happens as we
move through, let's go right here.
| | 04:30 | You'll see that the disc is also visible in
the floor; when this gets done redrawing,
| | 04:35 | you'll see that I can see my disc in the floor, and I
don't want that, that's this blue gradient right here.
| | 04:42 | The Compositing tag has another very
important option called Exclusion.
| | 04:45 | If I go to the Exclusion option, there is an
Exclude pulldown here; it says Include or Exclude.
| | 04:51 | I want to leave it on Exclude.
| | 04:53 | What I want to do is tell this disc to
not affect the reflections of the floor.
| | 04:58 | So if I take the floor object and drag it
in here, watch what happens to this area of
| | 05:02 | the rendering as it finishes.
| | 05:05 | You can see that the disc no
longer shows up in the floor.
| | 05:10 | That's a really important option.
| | 05:12 | Let's go back, and look through the camera.
| | 05:14 | Click on the Active Camera icon.
| | 05:16 | Now you notice that right here at the bottom
of the type, that little dark spot right there
| | 05:22 | is a reflection from the cubes
showing up in the surface of the type.
| | 05:26 | So I don't want the cubes to show up
on the surface of the type either.
| | 05:29 | So what we need to do is to add a Compositing
tag on the Hero Cube to have it not show up
| | 05:34 | in the main type.
| | 05:36 | So let's right-click on the Hero Cube and go
to CINEMA 4D tags, add a Compositing tag.
| | 05:41 | And in the Compositing tag, under the Exclusion
option, I'm going to say don't affect Compositing,
| | 05:48 | and don't affect Workflow.
| | 05:51 | And you notice that got rid of a little bit
of it, but it looks like I've also got these
| | 05:57 | main cubes as well to deal with.
| | 05:59 | So what I'm going to do is
right-click on this null here.
| | 06:03 | This null is the null that holds
all the other cubes in the scene.
| | 06:06 | Let's right-click on that and go to CINEMA
4D tags and then do another Compositing tag.
| | 06:11 | So let's add a Compositing tag.
| | 06:12 | Now in the Exclude options, let's drag in
Workflow and drag in Compositing again.
| | 06:17 | And watch what happens, that's going
to clean up the face of our type.
| | 06:23 | There we go! You see we no longer
have that black splotch down there.
| | 06:26 | That was based on the reflection
probably from this cube right here.
| | 06:30 | Next step, we want to make sure and set object
buffers for the other important elements in the scene.
| | 06:34 | Now I know that I may at some point I want to
add a glow to this cube or just do something
| | 06:39 | to it, change the color, who knows.
| | 06:42 | So I'm going to add an object buffer to this.
| | 06:43 | A lot of times when I add object buffers,
I may not end up using them, they're just
| | 06:47 | preventive measures.
| | 06:48 | It's much better to have an object buffer and not
use it than need an object buffer, and not have it.
| | 06:53 | So I'll often times set an object buffer even if
I am not sure if I'm going to need it or not.
| | 06:58 | So on this Hero Cube, let's
make that object buffer number 1.
| | 07:04 | And then I'm going to go to the main cubes,
and set that object buffer to be number 2.
| | 07:12 | So object buffer 1 is the Hero Cube, Object
Buffer number 2 is the rest of the cubes,
| | 07:17 | object buffer number 3 is the type.
| | 07:19 | So we've got our object buffers and
we've got our Compositing tags all set up.
| | 07:23 | Now what we need to do is to make sure that we have
those object buffers covered in the Render Settings.
| | 07:27 | Let's hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on the
keyboard to bring up the Render Settings.
| | 07:32 | And my Render Settings are
pretty basic right now.
| | 07:34 | All I have done is set the Aspect Ratio of
the scene, so I know that I'm going to need
| | 07:38 | to render from 0 to 89.
| | 07:40 | So let's go and render from
0 to 89 for my Frame Range.
| | 07:45 | Now what we need to do is
to activate Multi-Pass.
| | 07:48 | So let's activate Multi-Pass and then in the
Multi-Pass options, let's click on that, and
| | 07:53 | go to Object Buffer, and
we'll add that three times.
| | 07:56 | There is number 2 and there is number 3.
| | 08:01 | Unfortunately, the object buffers will always be
numbered. Uou cannot name your object buffers,
| | 08:05 | but what you can do is name them here in the
render settings so that you at least have
| | 08:09 | a reference for what they are.
| | 08:11 | So let's first start off by
highlighting each of these.
| | 08:14 | I'll click on the first object buffer, hold down the
Shift key, and click on the last object buffer.
| | 08:18 | That brings up all of
their IDs at the same time.
| | 08:21 | Now I can go through and name
1 number 2, name 1 number 3.
| | 08:26 | The only thing that links them back
to the object buffers is this number.
| | 08:30 | This number links it to the
Compositing tag that's over here.
| | 08:33 | As long as the numbers over here, match
some numbers over here, then you're going
| | 08:36 | to get something in your object buffer.
| | 08:37 | It's very important that these numbers match.
| | 08:40 | Now what I'm going to do is
to name my object buffers.
| | 08:43 | So object buffer number 1 which is this guy,
we're going to call it 1 and Hero Cube.
| | 08:49 | I'll use the down arrow and call
this next one 2 Other Cubes.
| | 08:55 | Let's call this last one 3 Type.
| | 09:03 | So that is the basic object buffer setup.
| | 09:06 | So we first set object buffers to eliminate
any sorts of odd reflections, then we set
| | 09:12 | up our object buffers for the
main elements in our scene.
| | 09:16 | Sometimes you set up object buffers for things
you know you're going to need, sometimes you
| | 09:19 | set up object buffers for
things you might need.
| | 09:22 | Then once we had our object buffer
Compositing tag set up, we went to the render settings
| | 09:26 | and made object buffer settings for each one of
the numbers that we used in the Compositing tags.
| | 09:32 | Those are the most important steps
for setting up the Compositing tag.
| | 09:35 | The next most important tag in CINEMA 4D for
working with compositing programs is called
| | 09:40 | the External Compositing tag.
| | 09:41 | We'll take a look at that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the External Compositing tag| 00:00 | In our final image in After Effects, we want
to have the ability to have 2.5D type from
| | 00:05 | After Effects stuck onto
the face of this cube.
| | 00:10 | In order to do that, we need to know the exact
position in 3D space of the face of this cube.
| | 00:16 | Back in the old days before the tight
integration with After Effects, you used to have to make
| | 00:20 | notation of the location of the face of that
cube and write it down, and then After Effects
| | 00:25 | put down that number numerically on the null
object, or thing that you wanted to stick
| | 00:29 | to the face of that cube.
| | 00:31 | As long as that object didn't move,
then everything would work out great.
| | 00:34 | But if the object moved at all,
then everything broke down.
| | 00:37 | Eventually though, we got something
called the External Compositing tag.
| | 00:40 | And the External Compositing tag allows you to
send the position information of any object
| | 00:46 | in CINEMA 4D out to After Effects.
| | 00:49 | And this includes null objects, it
includes clones from MoGraph, you name it.
| | 00:54 | If it has position in CINEMA 4D, you can get
that position into After Effects, and that's
| | 00:59 | a really powerful thing.
| | 01:01 | So it's a very simple thing to set up.
| | 01:03 | Really, all you need to do is add the
External Compositing tag to an object.
| | 01:06 | But in the case of our cube,
it's a little bit different.
| | 01:10 | If I select the cube object, and
let's uncheck the Active Camera icon.
| | 01:17 | I'm going to get rid of the Interactive Render
Region by hitting Option+R or Alt+R on the keyboard.
| | 01:23 | You can see that our cube has its
axis point right exactly in the center.
| | 01:28 | The trick to External Compositing tag is that
whatever you put that tag on, it will send
| | 01:33 | the exact position of, wherever the axis
point is in space, that's what you'll get.
| | 01:38 | I want to have something stuck to the
outside edge of this cube, this face right here.
| | 01:44 | That's not where the axis is.
| | 01:46 | If I put the Compositing tag on the cube, I'm
going to get this location, not this location.
| | 01:50 | So what I need to do is add a null object
that's going to be in the right location and
| | 01:55 | then put the External Compositing tag on that.
| | 01:57 | So let's add a new null object to the
scene and let's call this one Hero cube face.
| | 02:04 | So let's make that null a
child of the Hero Cube.
| | 02:09 | Then what we do is right-click on the Hero
Cube face, and go to CINEMA 4D tags, and then
| | 02:14 | External Compositing.
| | 02:17 | The External Compositing tag
has a few settings under it.
| | 02:19 | The Children setting will give you the
position of all the children in the scene.
| | 02:23 | So for example, if I put the External
Compositing tag on this cube's null here, it would give
| | 02:28 | me the position information for all of
these children if I check that box.
| | 02:34 | I don't need that right now,
so I'll leave it unchecked.
| | 02:37 | The Cache option, we'll leave on, the
Anchor Point, we want to leave in the center.
| | 02:41 | Now you can position it any one of
these locations, we'll leave it in center.
| | 02:45 | And then, you can generate
either a solid or a null object.
| | 02:48 | It generates a null object by default.
| | 02:50 | You can have it generated solid if you want.
| | 02:52 | Now I'm going to have it generate a solid just so we
have that exact position, and it's easy to spot.
| | 02:57 | I'm also going to make that solid square.
| | 02:59 | So I'll make it 200x200.
| | 03:02 | I'll leave the color red, so
it's nice and easy to spot.
| | 03:05 | So what I'll end up with After Effects is a
red solid that's 200 pixels by 200 pixels
| | 03:10 | with its anchor point in the exact center.
| | 03:13 | It will also have the exact
name of the Hero Cube Face.
| | 03:17 | Now that we've got the External Compositing
tag set on the null object correctly, we need
| | 03:21 | to position the null
object in the right location.
| | 03:24 | In order to do that, I want to select the
Hero cube face null and go to the Coordinate
| | 03:29 | Properties in the Attribute Manager.
| | 03:31 | And then what I'd like to do
is zero out its position.
| | 03:34 | That's going to bring the null object from way
over here on the right-hand side of the screen.
| | 03:38 | It's at 0, 0, 0, and you can tell that because that
little blue arrow is pointing off camera at the object.
| | 03:45 | We want to get that right to the center of
this cube, and then we're going to position
| | 03:48 | it on the outside.
| | 03:49 | So if we go to the Coordinate Properties and
Select that and hit 0, Tab, 0, Tab, 0, and
| | 03:55 | you can see that the null object
jumps right to the center of the cube.
| | 03:59 | Then, if you go to the X property and type
in -400, you're going to see that the null
| | 04:06 | object jumps right to the
outside edge of that cube.
| | 04:08 | I knew that because the size of this cube
is set to be 800 units across and so -400
| | 04:14 | is going to put it right on the outside edge.
| | 04:16 | And if I middle-mouse click, and go to the
top view, and let's dolly in, I'll hold down
| | 04:21 | the 2 key and drag to the right here,
and then pan over with the 1 key.
| | 04:26 | You can see that my null object
is right on the outside edge.
| | 04:29 | And so if we click back in the center here,
now I know that, that null object is going
| | 04:34 | to be exactly in the right place
for us when we get to After Effects.
| | 04:37 | Now rather than import that in After Effects
right now, we're going to do that in a later movie.
| | 04:42 | In this movie, I just wanted to
focus on getting the tag applied.
| | 04:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up a multipass render| 00:00 | Multipass rendering is the process of breaking
your image from CINEMA 4D into specific layers
| | 00:07 | that correspond to the image
channels that make up your final image.
| | 00:12 | What we're going to end up with is the ability to
control virtually every aspect of our rendering
| | 00:16 | inside of After Effects.
| | 00:18 | It takes a little bit of set up in the render
settings here in CINEMA 4D, but it's worth the time.
| | 00:22 | This is our Multipass-render-START file.
| | 00:24 | It's based on the previous movie.
| | 00:26 | So we've got our External Compositing tag
set, we've got our Compositing tag set with
| | 00:29 | our object buffers.
| | 00:30 | Everything is ready to go.
| | 00:32 | So let's go into the Render
Settings, Command+B or Ctrl+B.
| | 00:35 | And first thing we want to double check is
under the output options that we're going
| | 00:38 | to be rendering, the correct size and the correct
number of frames, and we are; 640x360, and 0 to 89.
| | 00:45 | Now what we want to do is to
go to the Multi-Pass settings.
| | 00:49 | The Multipass is on and you can see that
I've got my object buffers already set up.
| | 00:53 | So 1 is the Hero Cube, 2, 2 is the
other cubes, 3 and 3 are the type.
| | 01:00 | Now if I go to the Save option, you can see
that I've got a Multi-Pass Image Save dialog.
| | 01:05 | Now this is going to default to having
the Multi-Layer File check box active.
| | 01:09 | We are not rendering a still image, so this
has to be unchecked. After Effects will not
| | 01:15 | work if this is turned on.
| | 01:18 | Next thing, if I hit Command+D or Ctrl+D on
the keyboard, and I'll scroll down in the
| | 01:22 | Project settings, you can see that I have
Linear Workflow turned off for this scene.
| | 01:28 | That means I don't need to render 16-bit.
| | 01:30 | So I'm going to turn the 16-bit
render from 16-bit to 8-bit.
| | 01:34 | I'm also going to change
it to QuickTime Movie.
| | 01:37 | Yes, I know, some of my students are probably
thinking, Rob, you always say to render it
| | 01:42 | to image sequences.
| | 01:43 | Sometimes I don't.
| | 01:44 | This is a very fast
render relatively speaking.
| | 01:46 | And it's much easier for members with access
to the Project Files to manage a folder of
| | 01:50 | QuickTime movies than a folder
of thousands of image files.
| | 01:54 | So I'm going to render to a
QuickTime Movie sequence for this project.
| | 01:58 | Now the next thing I need to turn my
attention to are the multipass layers.
| | 02:02 | So I'm going to go under the
Multi-Pass option and click and hold on that.
| | 02:06 | When I do that, I get all of these
choices, and there are a lot of choices.
| | 02:11 | At the very bottom is
something called the Depth Map.
| | 02:13 | So let's go down here to
highlight the Depth Map.
| | 02:16 | The Depth Pass gives us a grayscale image
that corresponds to the Z-distance of all
| | 02:20 | the objects in the scene from the camera.
| | 02:22 | It can be used by a filter in After Effects called
the Camera Blur filter to generate depth of field.
| | 02:29 | It's very useful.
| | 02:29 | I may or may not need it for this project
but I always want to have it just in case.
| | 02:33 | Let's add the depth.
| | 02:34 | Then, we're going to go to the
Multi-Pass options, and do Add Image Layers.
| | 02:39 | The Add Image Layers is going to
add in a whole list of things.
| | 02:43 | Now we don't need all of these things.
| | 02:45 | Basically, the way you know what you need and
don't need is you ask yourself some questions
| | 02:49 | about your scene.
| | 02:51 | So the Ambient Pass relates
to the Luminance Channel.
| | 02:54 | If you have the Luminance channel in any of your
materials, you need to have the Ambient Pass.
| | 02:58 | So if I click on this material right here, you
can see that it does use a Luminance Channel.
| | 03:03 | So I know I'm going to need the Ambient Pass.
| | 03:05 | The Diffuse Pass is the base
level of color in your scene.
| | 03:08 | All my materials have the Color channel
turned on, so I know I need the Diffuse Pass.
| | 03:13 | Same thing goes for Specular, all my
materials have it. I need that on.
| | 03:17 | I am casting shadows, I need that on.
| | 03:19 | I do have reflections on my
materials, got to have that.
| | 03:23 | Refraction; I do not have any transparency
in the scene, so I don't need Refraction.
| | 03:27 | So I'll select the word
Refraction, and delete.
| | 03:30 | Let's scroll down just a bit.
| | 03:32 | Ambient Occlusion, you
notice I have not turned on.
| | 03:36 | Let's add that effect because I know
that I want that on for the scene.
| | 03:40 | So let's click on that, and
go to Ambient Occlusion.
| | 03:44 | Now with the Ambient Occlusion turned on,
I know I'm going to need that pass.
| | 03:48 | Next step is Global Illumination.
| | 03:50 | I'm not using Global Illumination
as an option so I can delete that.
| | 03:53 | Then I'm going to go to Caustics.
| | 03:55 | I'm not using Caustics.
| | 03:56 | Caustics is another property of transparency, and
we're not using any of that, so I'll delete that.
| | 04:02 | Atmosphere and Atmosphere (Multiply) relate to
the environment object that I have in the scene.
| | 04:07 | That's what's causing the fog that you see,
that's kind of giving a hazy look to our render.
| | 04:11 | So I need both of those.
| | 04:13 | I don't have any post effects, things like
Depth of Field or Motion Blur turned on, so
| | 04:17 | I can delete that as well.
| | 04:19 | And that's pretty much all
the settings that I need.
| | 04:22 | So I've got Depth, Ambient, Diffuse, Specular,
Shadow, Reflection, Ambient Occlusion, Atmosphere,
| | 04:26 | and Atmosphere (Multiply).
| | 04:28 | Next thing I need to do is
tell my render where to go.
| | 04:32 | So I'm going to go to the Save option,
and I'll click on the Save Image button.
| | 04:37 | Let's navigate to the desktop, to the exercise
files, to our Workflow, and then in the C4D-renders.
| | 04:43 | I already have a workflow render here set up,
so let's make a new subfolder and call
| | 04:49 | this one Workflow-working, and hit Create.
| | 04:54 | And in that Workflow-working folder, let's
call the rendering Workflow, and hit Save.
| | 05:01 | And that's pretty much all there is
to setting up a multipass render.
| | 05:04 | The most important thing to remember about
this process is that you have to ask yourself
| | 05:08 | questions about your scene file, and what
it is you're going to need to have control
| | 05:11 | of in After Effects.
| | 05:13 | Once you've answered those questions, you
should have all your settings complete.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering and importing elements into After Effects| 00:00 | In the previous movies we've set up our scene
file for rendering for After Effects and we're
| | 00:05 | just about ready to actually render.
| | 00:07 | Before we do anything else though, we have
to do a very important thing and that's to
| | 00:10 | look through the correct camera.
| | 00:12 | Right now we've been looking through the
editor camera in order to see some of the effects
| | 00:16 | that our tags were having.
| | 00:17 | So let's click on the Active Camera icon right
here and look through our Rendering Camera.
| | 00:23 | Now we're going to be
rendering through the correct camera.
| | 00:25 | The very last thing we need to do before we
render is in the Render Settings Hit Command+B
| | 00:29 | or Ctrl+B on the keyboard, is that we need to
activate our compositing project file settings.
| | 00:35 | Now I'm in the Save options for the render
settings, at the very bottom is this little
| | 00:40 | guy right here, Compositing Project File.
| | 00:42 | I'm going to turn on all of these check boxes.
| | 00:45 | And now that I've got those
on, I'm ready to render.
| | 00:49 | So in order to render our scene, I'm going
to do a File > Save As, and then save this and
| | 00:56 | call it AE-import-WORKING.
| | 00:58 | It's always a good idea to actually save
your file before you start rendering.
| | 01:03 | So I'm going to save it out.
| | 01:05 | And now in case anything bad happens,
I can always get back to where I was.
| | 01:09 | So now we're ready to actually render.
| | 01:10 | So I'm going to hit the Render to
Picture Viewer button, which is right here.
| | 01:13 | I could also hit Shift+R on the keyboard.
| | 01:14 | I'm just going to click that button right now.
| | 01:17 | When we do that the Picture Viewer comes
up and it starts rendering our scene.
| | 01:21 | Now we can actually see the
frames as they're being rendered.
| | 01:23 | You can see those little squares are called
Render Buckets and it's moving through the
| | 01:27 | scene pretty quickly.
| | 01:29 | You can actually check your multipass rendering by
clicking on the Layer option on the side panel.
| | 01:35 | If your side panel is not visible, then you can
click this button right here to make it visible.
| | 01:40 | Now within that Layer
option is the Single Pass.
| | 01:42 | If you click in Single Pass, you can
now look at the individual passes.
| | 01:46 | Mine is looking at the Depth Pass right now and you
can see the Depth Pass is a pretty cool render.
| | 01:51 | This allows us to use Depth of Field filters
inside of After Effects, but you can also
| | 01:58 | click on any of the other passes to check
to see if they're rendering correctly.
| | 02:04 | I'm going to click on Object Buffer 1.
| | 02:06 | You can see that that's the Hero Cube.
| | 02:08 | Object Buffer 2 is all the other cubes
and Object Buffer 3 is the type itself.
| | 02:13 | So you can see I've got all my object
buffers set and my image is rendered correctly.
| | 02:17 | I already have this rendering
set inside of After Effects.
| | 02:21 | I don't need to render it here, so if you're
following along at home, let this render finish
| | 02:26 | and then continue with the next movie.
| | 02:28 | But I'm going to stop this render, because I
have it already pre-prepared, kind of cooking
| | 02:32 | show style, so that we can actually
move on to the After Effects import.
| | 02:37 | So I'll go to the File menu and
select Stop Rendering and tell it Yes.
| | 02:42 | So once your rendering is done, you can
confirm the files that were rendered.
| | 02:45 | Let's go to the exercise files and go to the
workflow folder and in the C4-render subfolder.
| | 02:51 | The Workflow working folder is the folder
I created, while I was showing you how to
| | 02:55 | set up the render settings.
| | 02:57 | I'm going to go to the workflow folder.
| | 02:59 | This has a completed render pass.
| | 03:01 | Now when CINEMA 4D finishes rendering, and
you've checked all of the compositing project
| | 03:05 | file options, the last thing
CINEMA 4D writes is this workflow-aec.
| | 03:11 | This file is what we're going to
be importing in to After Effects.
| | 03:15 | After Effects needs a special plug-in in
order to be able to correctly import this file.
| | 03:20 | There are two places you can get that file.
| | 03:23 | Place number one is in the applications
folder, where your CINEMA 4D is installed.
| | 03:28 | Now I'm going to go to Applications and then
type in MAX to bring up the MAXON Folder.
| | 03:34 | Now I have a bunch of older
versions of CINEMA 4D installed here.
| | 03:37 | I'm going to go to my 14 folder, and then in
the Exchange Plugins, under After Effects,
| | 03:43 | I've got both an importer for
OSX and Windows and a C4Dformat.
| | 03:49 | I'm going to take the contents of each of
these folders, the CS5, CS6 zip file and then
| | 03:55 | the importer folder for OSX, CS5 and CS6,
and I'm going to put the contents of that
| | 04:03 | zip file into my After Effects Plugins folder.
| | 04:05 | So I'll unzip that file.
| | 04:07 | In the Mac, I can double-click.
| | 04:09 | It's going to do the same thing on most
versions of PC, and I'll take this file along with
| | 04:14 | the file from the other folder and put them
into my After Effects Plugins folder, then
| | 04:18 | I'll re-launch After Effects.
| | 04:20 | Once I've re-launched After Effects I'll
be able to correctly import that file.
| | 04:24 | So now let's move over to After Effects and
import the file that CINEMA 4D rendered out.
| | 04:29 | So I'll go to File > Import File,
and you can see I'm already in the exercise
| | 04:34 | file in the workflow folder.
| | 04:36 | So let's go to C4D-renders and then go to
workflow and then scroll down at the very
| | 04:40 | bottom and there's that AEC file.
| | 04:43 | Now if your AEC file is grayed out, you need
to install that plugin and then restart After
| | 04:48 | Effects in order to be able to import it.
| | 04:51 | Let's import that AEC file.
| | 04:52 | I'll hit Open, and when I do that I get some
folders, and the folders that I get correspond
| | 04:58 | to the settings that had in the renders.
| | 05:01 | The Solids folder contains any type of Null
Object References or Solid References that
| | 05:06 | I had in my External Compositing tag.
| | 05:09 | The Special Passes folder contains
the Depth Pass and the Object Buffers.
| | 05:13 | I'm going to take that Special Passes
and move it over to the workflow folder.
| | 05:17 | Then, the workflow folder itself now contains
the Special Passes folder, plus a composition
| | 05:23 | called workflow, that has
the same name as the render.
| | 05:25 | It also has all of the different
multipasses that were setup in the render setting.
| | 05:29 | If I open the workflow composition, this
workflow composition now contains the full rendered
| | 05:37 | image, and you can see that
I've got my rendering set up.
| | 05:39 | And because I was rendering without Linear
Workflow turned on, this rendering looks like
| | 05:45 | it did in CINEMA 4D.
| | 05:46 | Each of these layers adds up, and if I toggle
my switches and modes you can see that there
| | 05:51 | are different blending modes here.
| | 05:53 | For example, I can look at the
reflection passes using the Add Lighting mode.
| | 05:57 | If I decide I want fewer reflections, I can
hit T on the keyboard and just dial down the
| | 06:02 | reflections here.
| | 06:03 | You can see that my reflections get dimmer.
| | 06:05 | Now I'm going to leave those at 100% for now.
| | 06:08 | The next thing I want to do is I
want to duplicate this workflow comp.
| | 06:12 | There may be a time when I want to get back to
the original layout, and so I want to always
| | 06:17 | have a copy of the original workflow comp.
| | 06:19 | So let's hit Command+D or Ctrl+D on the keyboard and
call this composition workflow-orig, as in original.
| | 06:26 | Then I'll take this main workflow
comp and drag it out of the scene.
| | 06:31 | And it's a little bit tricky to do, I need
to make my Window a little bit bigger here,
| | 06:35 | and I can drag this workflow out here.
| | 06:37 | And then I can twirl these other guys closed.
| | 06:40 | That's it for the basic
import of the scene file.
| | 06:42 | The most important thing to remember is that
you have to click the Compositing Project
| | 06:45 | File options in the C4D-renderer, and you
have to have the correct version of the C4D
| | 06:51 | importer installed in your After Effects
Plugin folder in order to make it all work.
| | 06:55 | Once you got those settings,
importing stuff from CINEMA 4D is a breeze.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Compositing 3D renders in After Effects| 00:00 | Now we get down to the nitty-gritty and that's
manipulating or compositing our images inside
| | 00:05 | of After Effects.
| | 00:06 | We've got our files imported.
| | 00:08 | Now what do we do with them? We want to be
able to have total control of our image.
| | 00:12 | Well, our goal is to make this scene a little
bit more dramatic and we want to be able to
| | 00:18 | change the color of the type and also give a little
bit of darkening around the edges of the scene.
| | 00:23 | So the first step in that process is
to do something called pre-composing.
| | 00:27 | I'm going to grab all of the layers here.
| | 00:29 | I'll select the first one and hit the
Shift key and click on the last one.
| | 00:33 | And I'm going to hit Shift+Command+C or Shift+Ctrl+C on
the PC, that's going to bring up the Pre-compose window.
| | 00:40 | I want to call this Workflow
and then PRE, let's hit OK.
| | 00:45 | And you see we now have a composition, and
this composition is the sum of all of those
| | 00:50 | layers that we had from our multipass render and
they're now composed in a single composition.
| | 00:55 | It's going to treat them just like one layer, just
like a single movie that has everything in it.
| | 01:01 | In the project window I'm going to take this
Workflow-PRE and drag it on the new folder
| | 01:04 | button and call that
folder Pre-Comps. Here we go.
| | 01:10 | Now what I want to be able to do is
to change the color of the type.
| | 01:13 | Let's take things one at a time.
| | 01:14 | Let's change the color of the type first.
| | 01:16 | To do that, we need to be able to
use an object buffer on this Type.
| | 01:19 | So let's find our object buffer first.
| | 01:22 | Let's go to the workflow folder and then the
Special Passes folder is object buffer number
| | 01:26 | 3 and that's the object buffer for our type.
| | 01:28 | So let's drag that into the composition down below the
Hero Cube Face, you can see there it is our type.
| | 01:36 | If we turn that off you can see it
lines up perfectly with our type.
| | 01:39 | So next thing we want to do is to duplicate this layer,
Command+D or Ctrl+D on the keyboard, we'll do that.
| | 01:45 | We're going to use the Track Matte settings to
use object buffer number 3 as a Track Matte
| | 01:49 | for this Workflow-Pre layer.
| | 01:50 | So if your Track Matte options aren't visible,
you can click on the Switches Modes button
| | 01:54 | to make them visible.
| | 01:56 | Then I'm going to click on the Track Matte
pulldown for the Workflow-Pre layer and tell
| | 02:00 | it to use a Luma Matte for
workflow_object buffer 3 three.
| | 02:04 | It looks like nothing has happened.
| | 02:06 | If I click on the Solo button right here you can
see that I've soloed out compositing workflow
| | 02:11 | all by itself, and that's because it's
using that Track Matte as an alpha channel.
| | 02:15 | Let's uncheck the Solo button to get back.
| | 02:18 | Now we can change the color of the type.
| | 02:20 | If we select Workflow-Pre, let's go to the Effects menu
and then go to the Color Correction and do CC Toner.
| | 02:29 | CC Toner is a TriTone plugin and for some bizarre
reason, it defaults to this yucky brown color.
| | 02:36 | Now I am going to change that, I want to have
something that's a little bit closer to the original scene.
| | 02:39 | I don't want to shift it dramatically.
| | 02:40 | I just want to shift it a little bit.
| | 02:42 | So let's make a nice sort of
desaturated kind of purple.
| | 02:46 | So I'll go into this range here and then get a
little more blue and then pull out some of the color.
| | 02:52 | And there's no real wrong answer here, you can
pretty much do whatever you feel like here.
| | 02:57 | If you wanted to make it green, you can go
right ahead and make it green. I'll hit OK.
| | 03:01 | So I've made my type purple.
| | 03:03 | The thing you can see now is that my
reflection no longer matches my type, so I need to go
| | 03:08 | into the original reflection layer and
change that color to match my type here.
| | 03:13 | To do that I need to go into the Workflow-Pre
comp, let's double-click here and go in to
| | 03:17 | Workflow-Pre comp and
select the reflection layer.
| | 03:20 | I'm going to go to the Effect menu and go to Color
Correction and I'm going to go to Change Color.
| | 03:27 | In the Change Color filter, first we have to
do is tell it what color we'd like to change.
| | 03:31 | The color we'd like to change
is this reflection down here.
| | 03:35 | So let's solo out the reflection pass and
then click on the eyedropper and then navigate
| | 03:40 | to one of those colors down there.
| | 03:42 | Let's pick that one, something
that's in the middle range.
| | 03:45 | And now we can start to
shift those colors around.
| | 03:47 | We want to make them the
same as that original purple.
| | 03:51 | So let's shift the Hue, and you can see that we're
going to go quickly through the color wheel to purple.
| | 03:57 | That looks pretty good.
| | 03:58 | We're going to come back towards blue just a
little bit and then we'll desaturate. Not bad.
| | 04:07 | And then we can adjust the softness, the matching
softness controls, how much of it is actually changing.
| | 04:12 | You can see we're getting a little bit of
crunchiness up here and so let's pull that softness way up.
| | 04:20 | In fact, we can probably pull up all the way
up, because it's not going to really matter.
| | 04:23 | We're changing the color on the type
here using the TriTone CC Toner filter.
| | 04:29 | So I think it will be okay just
by cranking that up all the way.
| | 04:32 | Now we can go back to our main workflow
composition and you'll see that not only have we changed
| | 04:39 | that color of the reflection, we've changed that as
well, but we've forgotten to un-solo those layers.
| | 04:44 | So let's go back to the Workflow-Pre comp,
uncheck the Solo button, and then go back
| | 04:49 | to the main composition.
| | 04:50 | You can see that we've changed our Compositing
Workflow type and we've changed the reflections as well.
| | 04:55 | And don't worry that the reflection
is a little bit bright, that's okay.
| | 04:58 | Now what we want to do is add our 2.5D
type to the front of the cube.
| | 05:02 | So let's go Command+T or Ctrl+T on the
keyboard to bring up the Text tool and I'm going to
| | 05:07 | click any place in the Window and type out
the word external compositing tag, and I'll
| | 05:12 | do it all lower case.
| | 05:14 | And I'll do the word compositing.
| | 05:16 | It's a little bit small.
| | 05:18 | Let's go and select All, Command+A or Ctrl+A
and let's change the size of that type.
| | 05:23 | Let's bring our type window and make it a
little bit more visible, and take the size
| | 05:27 | and crank it way up.
| | 05:30 | Let's get that and delete that space,
select all and then right to justify.
| | 05:35 | Now if I hit Enter on the
keyboard I can finish that type off.
| | 05:38 | If you have the Caps Lock
checked, go and undo that.
| | 05:41 | Let's get rid of that space there,
so everything lines up nicely.
| | 05:44 | Hit Return on the keyboard to finish that of.
| | 05:46 | Now I need to make that type a 3D layer, so
let's toggle our switches and then activate
| | 05:51 | the Types 3D check box, and when
I do that my type disappears.
| | 05:55 | What I need to do is to take that type and put it
in the same location as this Hero Cube Face.
| | 06:00 | This Hero Cube Face is in the exact same position as
the Null Object that we set inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 06:06 | Now we want to go to the parenting pick whip and
take the parenting pick whip for our external
| | 06:10 | compositing tag type and
drag it on to Hero Cube Face.
| | 06:14 | Nothing has happened.
| | 06:15 | What we need to do is to select that type
and hit the letter P on the keyboard to bring
| | 06:19 | up the position options, and we're
going to zero out the position.
| | 06:22 | So we type in 0, tab 0, tab 0.
| | 06:26 | And you can see that our type
has now moved to that location.
| | 06:30 | Now what we're going to do is to get the
orientation correct, hit R on the keyboard to bring up
| | 06:34 | the Orientation options.
| | 06:35 | And if we type in 0 here, to 0 everything
out, our type is going to be backwards.
| | 06:40 | Let's hold down the Shift key and hit the
letter S to bring up the Scale options as well.
| | 06:46 | If we scale that type up, you'll
see that it's in fact backwards.
| | 06:50 | So what we need to do is change the Y orientation
to 180, that's going to flip that type around.
| | 06:57 | Now we can move the type and you can position it
over here just a bit and then position it up.
| | 07:03 | And we're going to adjust the scale down
just a bit and scale it into position.
| | 07:09 | My type is kind of gray and that's not what
I want to have for the color of my type and
| | 07:14 | the reason it's gray is
because of the light here.
| | 07:16 | This light was imported from
CINEMA 4D, I don't need to have it on.
| | 07:19 | I'll just turn it off like that.
| | 07:21 | Now our type is stuck to the front of that
cube and you see as we move through the scene,
| | 07:26 | it is looking great. It is perfectly stuck.
| | 07:30 | You'll notice though that it does
not have a reflection down here.
| | 07:33 | So let's go ahead and make that reflection
by duplicating this text layer, Command+D
| | 07:37 | or Ctrl+D on the keyboard.
| | 07:39 | Hit the letter S to bring up the Scale
option and we're going to unlink the scale.
| | 07:44 | Then take the Y scale of that object and put a minus
sign in front of whatever scale value is there.
| | 07:50 | Now -343, yours maybe something different.
| | 07:53 | Put a minus in front of it, that's going
to invert it and flip that type over.
| | 07:56 | When I hit Return, you can see
that my type jumps upside down.
| | 08:01 | Now we can take in on the Y
axis and slide it straight down.
| | 08:04 | If you hold the Shift key down your type moves
in a much bigger increment and it should be
| | 08:09 | much easier to set.
| | 08:10 | So I'm going to put it right down there.
| | 08:13 | And then what I'm going
to do is to blur it out.
| | 08:15 | So select that, go to Effects menu, go to
Blur & Sharpen, and add a Gaussian Blur.
| | 08:21 | Then you can crank the blur up
to match the blur of the floor.
| | 08:25 | That's pretty good, right about
there. I want to try about 5 I think.
| | 08:30 | And when I deselect that, you can see that it looks
like the reflection now, it blurs in perfectly.
| | 08:36 | The last thing we need to do to our type is you
can see that it shows up on top of the cubes.
| | 08:41 | We don't really need to have it show up in the
scene until about here, we should call it frame 25.
| | 08:46 | Actually, let's call it frame 1 second even.
| | 08:50 | If we select both the type layers and hit T
on the keyboard, let's set keyframes for
| | 08:55 | the type at 1 second.
| | 08:57 | So that's what we wanted, when
we wanted to have it come on.
| | 09:00 | Let's move those keyframes forward, about
maybe 4 frames or so, 5 frames, and then 0
| | 09:07 | out the opacity and that
sets the keyframe there.
| | 09:10 | You can see that when it
hits it mark, it comes on.
| | 09:13 | Now you can do a little flicker if you
want by just adjusting the keyframes here.
| | 09:18 | We can go up to 100 and then back down to 80.
| | 09:24 | If we select both the type layers and then
time back up to 90 and then back down to say,
| | 09:32 | 15 and then back up to 100, there we go.
| | 09:39 | And you'll see that as we scroll
through, it will flicker on and be done.
| | 09:45 | Now we're ready for the final step and that is
to give a little bit of a focus on our scene.
| | 09:50 | We're going to make a new Solid layer, Command+Y
or Ctrl+Y on the keyboard to make a new Solid,
| | 09:55 | and we're going to select the Deep Blue Solid.
| | 09:56 | If you don't already have a deep blue color
picked, you can click on the swatch and then
| | 10:00 | navigate into this range here. I think it's
pretty good and maybe add a little bit more
| | 10:06 | red into it, so it's not
quite so blue, and hit OK.
| | 10:10 | And then hit OK here.
| | 10:12 | Now we've got this giant solid.
| | 10:14 | I'm going to change the blending mode by toggling
the Switches & Modes column, and change it from
| | 10:19 | Normal to Overlay.
| | 10:21 | When I do that, it's going to mix
back in to all these other colors.
| | 10:26 | That's a little too harsh.
| | 10:27 | I don't want it to mix into
everything, so let's make a matte for it.
| | 10:30 | Let's click on our Matte options and go to
the Ellipse tool and with this Solid layer
| | 10:34 | selected, I'm going to draw out a mask for it.
| | 10:37 | Then I want to invert that mask, and so I
click the Inverted button, and if I twirl
| | 10:41 | up in the Mask options, the Mask Feathering,
I'm going to Feather out to about 150-ish.
| | 10:46 | You can see now we have a
really nice feather on our scene.
| | 10:52 | So this changes the color of the scene file
overall, but still leaves the center of the
| | 10:55 | frame intact, as we can read that 2.5D type
really nice. It pops off the scene and draws
| | 11:01 | our eye towards it.
| | 11:03 | So that is the basic process for
compositing things inside of After Effects.
| | 11:07 | Now your scenes maybe more or less
complicated, but the basic process is the same.
| | 11:12 | Once you've got your render settings done
in After Effects, you've got your Multi-Pass
| | 11:16 | options, you have your object buffers, any
additional passes like Depth or Ambient Occlusion,
| | 11:21 | you can keep all those things together in
After Effects and you can really have total
| | 11:24 | control over your final image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing camera data from After Effects| 00:00 | CINEMA 4D has tremendous After Effects
integration and that extends both from CINEMA 4D into
| | 00:06 | After Affects, and now from
After Effects into CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:10 | I learned how to do 3D animation at the same
time I was learning how to do After Effects,
| | 00:14 | but there are lot of people out there that
have been working in After Effects for years
| | 00:17 | and are not necessarily comfortable with the
camera options inside of CINEMA 4D. They'd
| | 00:21 | much rather start their work in After Effects.
| | 00:23 | Also, with the new tracking options in After
Effects you may be generating camera information
| | 00:28 | and then needing to get that
camera information into CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:31 | Well there's a fantastic export
option that allows you to do just that.
| | 00:35 | I've got a very simple camera move here in
After Effects and it's just the word camera
| | 00:40 | zooming back into position.
| | 00:43 | And before we can this camera move into
CINEMA 4D, we have to make sure that we have the
| | 00:48 | export plugin installed correctly
in the After Effects plugin folder.
| | 00:53 | Where you get that plugin is from one of two
places; you can either get it from the MAXON
| | 00:56 | website from their downloads page, or you can
get it from the Exchange Plugins folder where
| | 01:02 | your CINEMA 4D is installed.
| | 01:04 | What I mean by that is here on the Macintosh
I'm going to go to the Applications folder
| | 01:09 | and then type in M-A-X to
bring up the MAXON folder.
| | 01:13 | And in the 14th folder you can see I've got a lot of
different versions of CINEMA 4D installed here.
| | 01:17 | Now you may only have just one, but in each
of those folders there's something called
| | 01:21 | Exchange Plugins and in the Exchange Plugins
folder is an After Effects subfolder and there
| | 01:27 | is a C4Dformat folder.
| | 01:29 | This is the one for After Effects to
export CINEMA 4D formatted files.
| | 01:34 | And so in that OSX folder, in the CS5-
CS6 folder, is this guy right here.
| | 01:40 | If I double-click that zip
file I get the C4Dformat plugin.
| | 01:43 | I want to put this plugin into
the After Effects Plugins folder.
| | 01:50 | If you're working on a PC, you're going to put it
in the After Effects Plugins folder on your PC.
| | 01:55 | Those are going to be in the program files
folder in the same location where all your
| | 01:58 | other After Effects plugins are installed.
| | 02:00 | Once you've got that plug-in installed, you
need to re-launch After Effects and then you'll
| | 02:04 | be able to do this export correctly.
| | 02:06 | So back in After Effects, I've
got my plugin installed correctly.
| | 02:10 | Now I can go to the File menu
and do Export > C4D Exporter.
| | 02:17 | If you don't see this list, that means you
don't have the correct plugin installed, and
| | 02:21 | you need to install the C4Dformat file
into your After Effects plugins folder.
| | 02:26 | I'm going to do that. There's no options that
come up, it simply asks me where would I like
| | 02:29 | to send that file.
| | 02:31 | And I'm going to send that to my workflow
folder in my Exercise Files folder, and we'll
| | 02:36 | call this one EXPORT in all caps.
| | 02:41 | And I'll hit Save and away it goes.
| | 02:45 | So let's jump over to CINEMA 4D.
| | 02:47 | Now we don't really need to do an import.
| | 02:49 | It's actually saved out in actual CINEMA 4D
files, so all we really need to do is to do
| | 02:53 | a Command+O or Ctrl+O and open the files.
| | 02:56 | We go to workflow and we navigate and find
our Export file that we just exported, and
| | 03:01 | hit Open, and now we get the scene file.
| | 03:05 | If you twirl open this null object here,
you see we've got a bunch of objects.
| | 03:09 | There's our Cam Parent and our
camera just as it was in After Effects.
| | 03:13 | And if we back out in our animation,
you can see that there's our animation.
| | 03:18 | These planes that you see are placeholders
for the existing compositions that we had.
| | 03:24 | If I navigate back to After Effects, you'll
see that I have these pre-comps here that
| | 03:29 | are holding my type, so the Exporter interpreted those
as just plain files and they are great placeholders.
| | 03:36 | So now what we can do is we can
use this camera information.
| | 03:39 | Let's uncheck the Active Camera icon and
see what the camera is actually doing.
| | 03:42 | We back out a little bit here.
| | 03:44 | You'll see that our camera is starting off
zoomed in and it zooms out, orbits smoothly
| | 03:49 | around on central axis and it comes
to a halt at the very last frame.
| | 03:54 | So what we want to do is to
get a logo into this position.
| | 03:57 | I happen to have a file already to go.
| | 03:59 | Let's hit Command+O or Ctrl+O on the keyboard
and in the Exercise Files folder is this file
| | 04:06 | AE-cam-export-COPY-PASTE.
| | 04:09 | And this is just a logo that's pre-lit.
| | 04:11 | I've got the Environment object in there,
that's got a Compositing tag on it, so it
| | 04:15 | doesn't show up in the render.
| | 04:16 | It's all set to go.
| | 04:18 | It looks like this.
| | 04:20 | There's a very important thing though.
| | 04:21 | In this file I've got Linear Workflow turned
off and so we need to make sure that's off
| | 04:27 | in the other file,
otherwise it won't look correct.
| | 04:29 | So let's grab all the objects, copy them to
the clipboard, Command+C or Ctrl+C, and then
| | 04:34 | go to the Window menu and go back to our Export
file and then paste them down, Command+V or Ctrl+V.
| | 04:41 | Then let's go to the project settings, hit
Command+D or Ctrl+D on the keyboard and make
| | 04:46 | sure that Linear Workflow is turned off.
| | 04:48 | So let's turn off Linear
Workflow by clicking that check box.
| | 04:51 | Now our logo will look the same.
| | 04:53 | If we twirl open the Null, we want to kill
those planes by deactivating their check marks
| | 04:59 | and then we can look back through the camera and we can
see that our scene now will render this logo file.
| | 05:06 | So let's get the render settings set up, Command+B
or Ctrl+B on the keyboard and you can see
| | 05:11 | that it's got the exact same composition
settings from the previous file, and we're going to
| | 05:16 | go to the Save option and
we're going to tell it to save.
| | 05:21 | Let's navigate out to the exercise
files in our C4D-renders folder.
| | 05:26 | We're going to save it loose and just call
this one logo, and then we're going to make
| | 05:30 | sure and save it to a QuickTime Movie, and
with an Alpha Channel and a Straight Alpha.
| | 05:35 | That's going to give us a little bit of bleed,
so that we can see our image on the background.
| | 05:40 | Now we can go back to the Output options and
verify that we are rendering frames 0 to 149.
| | 05:46 | So we've told it how big, how many frames,
we told it where to go and what format, now
| | 05:52 | we can save this.
| | 05:53 | And let's do a File > Save As and call this
one EXPORT-working and now we can render.
| | 06:01 | I'll hit Shift+R on the keyboard
to render to the Picture Viewer.
| | 06:05 | That rendering took a little bit of time,
so we've cross dissolved to the end here,
| | 06:09 | and we've got this logo.
| | 06:11 | Let's go back into After Effects and import
it, and match it up with our camera move.
| | 06:15 | So here I am back in the Export file, let's
go and double-click to Import in the Project
| | 06:19 | window and let's navigate to our workflow to C4D
-renders and there's our logo and hit Open.
| | 06:25 | Let's tell it it's a Straight Alpha Channel,
because we know that it is, we rendered it
| | 06:29 | out with the Straight
Alpha Channel and hit OK.
| | 06:31 | And now we can take this and drag it right
into the Composition and there it is, it lines
| | 06:36 | up perfectly with that type
that we had done already.
| | 06:41 | You can see everything matches exactly.
| | 06:43 | So this workflow going from After Effects
into CINEMA 4D is fantastic for visual effects
| | 06:50 | pipelines or when you need to track
motion graphics into a live action scene.
| | 06:54 | It is incredibly powerful, but the key is
to have that correct export file installed
| | 06:59 | in your After Effects Plugins folder.
| | 07:00 | Once you've got that,
everything else is a snap.
| | 07:03 |
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