IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! I'm Rob Garrott.
| | 00:05 | Welcome to Cinema 4D Essentials
Cameras Animation and Deformers.
| | 00:09 | The 3D animation process is a really interesting
combination of both cinematography and traditional
| | 00:14 | 2D animation techniques.
| | 00:16 | Understanding how your objects look through
the lens and how they move through the scene
| | 00:20 | in your 3D space is really important
to communicating with your audience.
| | 00:24 | In this course, we'll start off by
introducing the idea of a keyframe, how to create them
| | 00:28 | and how to make objects
move through the scene.
| | 00:30 | Then we'll examine the camera object and how
it allows you to view your scene as well as
| | 00:34 | control images elements like Depth to Field.
| | 00:37 | Finally, we'll use deformers to modify objects and
create complex movements with just a few steps.
| | 00:42 | Whether you're creating visual effects,
character animation or motion graphics; looking through
| | 00:46 | the lens while animating your objects gives
you complete control over your 3D world.
| | 00:50 | So let's get started with CINEMA 4D
Essentials Cameras, Animations, and Deformers.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a Premium Member of lynda.com, then you've
got access to the exercise files for this course.
| | 00:06 | I 'm working with them on my Desktop and the
files are organized in the subfolders that
| | 00:10 | go with each chapter.
| | 00:11 | Inside each subfolder will be the files used
in that chapter and you'll notice that the
| | 00:15 | files in each chapter's folder will be
different based on the needs of each chapter.
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1. Keyframes and AnimationWhat is a keyframe?| 00:00 | The word keyframe is a term that is used all
the time in computer animation, but it has
| | 00:04 | it's origins in traditional animation.
| | 00:08 | When an animator draws an animation on paper,
rather than try and draw all the frames at
| | 00:12 | once, he'll draw out something called a
keyframe and that's an important moment in a cycle
| | 00:18 | of movement for a character.
| | 00:20 | And that's where the terminology comes from.
| | 00:23 | A keyframe is an important moment in time.
| | 00:26 | That's the same for traditional animation
and it's the same for computer animation.
| | 00:29 | Now, I'm here in AfterEffects and I've got
this little scribble character that I've drawn
| | 00:34 | that is going to be jumping up in the
air and then landing back on the ground.
| | 00:38 | In this first composition I've got just
the key moments in the animation drawn out.
| | 00:44 | So you can see he's going to start with his
hands up in the air, he'll squat down and
| | 00:49 | then he'll squat down a little bit further in
anticipation of his jump up and he'll jump into the air.
| | 00:55 | He'll hit the top of his jump and then he'll
anticipate falling back down to the ground again.
| | 01:01 | Now, if I do a RAM preview this,
I'll hit 0 on the numeric keypad.
| | 01:06 | You can see that all the moments of the jump are there
and it looks like our little guy is doing his thing.
| | 01:12 | But you can see that the animation
is really not very fluid or smooth.
| | 01:15 | In this next composition, I now have all of
the frames in the animation drawn out, not
| | 01:20 | just the keyframes.
| | 01:21 | And in fact, I've got the
keyframes highlighted red here.
| | 01:24 | Let's scroll up here a bit.
| | 01:26 | You can see there's a lot more frames to
this animation than there were before, and the
| | 01:30 | reds are just what we saw in
the previous RAM preview.
| | 01:33 | So let's make that a little bit bigger.
| | 01:35 | I'm going to change my view to Fit up to 100%.
| | 01:38 | Now I'm going to hit 0 on the numeric keypad
to RAM preview and as you can see now our
| | 01:42 | guy is jumping up in the air and all the key
moments are there, but in between those key
| | 01:46 | moments are series of frames that add a
whole bunch of fluid movement to our cycle.
| | 01:53 | That's where the personality and the
information about what kind of jump he's doing, how the
| | 01:57 | character moves, they all come
from those in between frames.
| | 02:01 | The keyframes tell us where our character is
going to be, that's where that information
| | 02:05 | comes from is the in-between frames.
| | 02:08 | Let's switch over to CINEMA 4D let's see what
that means in terms of computer animation.
| | 02:13 | Now I'm going to add a cube to the scene and
I'm going to animate this cube travelling
| | 02:18 | from left to right across the frame.
| | 02:22 | The first step in animating an object is to
determine where it's going to come from.
| | 02:25 | So let's move this cube over
here on the negative X axis.
| | 02:29 | Now I'm going to click this red button right here that
has a key on it, and it says Record Active Objects.
| | 02:35 | So when I select the cube and switch to the
Coordinate Properties, now you can see that
| | 02:38 | I have these red dots on all the parameters.
| | 02:41 | Let's undo that for a second, so
you can see what was there before.
| | 02:44 | What was there before were gray dots and
those gray dots indicate that that parameter can
| | 02:48 | be changed in a keyframe, but right now we
don't have any keyframes on these parameters.
| | 02:53 | So, when I Click the Record Button, those dots
turn red and now we're parked on a keyframe
| | 02:58 | at that moment in time.
| | 03:00 | Now, let's take the Time slider and move it
forward in time to the end of the preview range.
| | 03:06 | Now you can see that those red dots have
turned to red circles and that indicates that this
| | 03:11 | parameter has a keyframe track on it,
but were not parked on a keyframe.
| | 03:16 | So let's take our cube and
move it on the positive X axis.
| | 03:19 | Now, I can click the Record Button.
| | 03:22 | Now you can see that those
parameters have changed again.
| | 03:25 | They've changed from red circles to red dots.
| | 03:28 | Let's Undo that and try it again to
point out some other interesting facts.
| | 03:31 | So I'll hit Command+Z or Ctrl+Z on the
keyboard and we're still at frame 90, so let's move
| | 03:37 | that over here to the positive X axis.
| | 03:40 | When I moved that, I changed the position on
the X axis, you can see that this position
| | 03:44 | X is highlighted yellow.
| | 03:46 | That indicates to me that the value
has changed since the last keyframe.
| | 03:50 | So, now when I click the Record Button; that
is going to set that value into a keyframe.
| | 03:57 | If I were to move the Time slider before setting
that value, then my animation would jump back
| | 04:01 | to its last setting, in fact,
let's see that action happen.
| | 04:04 | I'll undo to change the keyframes.
| | 04:06 | Let's move our object to the positive X axis
and then if I move the Time slider even one
| | 04:11 | frame, look, our object jumps back in time.
| | 04:14 | Now, the reason it jumped back is because
everytime Cinema 4D draws a frame of animation
| | 04:19 | on the screen, it has to evaluate
the keyframes that it hasn't seen.
| | 04:23 | The only keyframe it has is the keyframe that's
at time 0, so it puts the cube where the last
| | 04:29 | keyframe tells it is supposed to be.
| | 04:31 | So let's move it back over here to the positive X axis,
and then set a keyframe using a Record Button.
| | 04:38 | And now you can see we have an animation path
and these series of dotted lines that connect
| | 04:42 | point A and point B are the animation path.
| | 04:45 | Now because our object is moving in a
straight line, the animation path is straight, but
| | 04:49 | it won't always be.
| | 04:50 | Another thing to notice about the Animation
Path are these series of black dots on there.
| | 04:55 | The tighter the black dots are,
the slower the animation is going.
| | 04:58 | The farther apart the dots are,
the faster the animation is going.
| | 05:01 | So you can see that the object starts off
slow and then picks up speed, and I'm going
| | 05:06 | to move this guy off to the
right here so we can see it.
| | 05:09 | You can see that it picks up speed and as
it hits its mark at position B, it starts
| | 05:13 | to slow down again.
| | 05:15 | Let's see what that looks like in movement.
| | 05:17 | Now if I move my Time slider, it's going to
jump back to the location, that's why I wasn't
| | 05:20 | worried about moving that cube.
| | 05:21 | And so now when I hit Play on the
keyboard, you can also hit F8.
| | 05:25 | When I hit Play, you can see
my object starts to move.
| | 05:30 | Sure enough, it starts off
slow and finishes slow.
| | 05:36 | Now that is a default behavior for
CINEMA 4D, it's called Smooth Interpolation.
| | 05:40 | Any time CINEMA 4D draws a keyframe; it tries
to create a very smooth transition from the
| | 05:45 | data in the keyframe to the next keyframe.
| | 05:48 | So when you create a simple animation like
this, you're always going to get that ease
| | 05:52 | of motion as it starts and an
ease of motion as it ends.
| | 05:56 | So those are keyframes, they tell the object where
to be at a specific moment in time and how to be.
| | 06:03 | That's where those parameters come in.
| | 06:05 | What happens in between the keyframes in CINEMA 4D is
controlled by something called the F Curve Manager.
| | 06:10 | The F Curve Manager is sort of the flipside to
the timeline, so let's bring up the timeline.
| | 06:15 | I'm going to switch my layout from
the Startup Layout over to Animation.
| | 06:19 | And when I do that, CINEMA 4D hasn't quit
and re-launched; what it's done is rearranged
| | 06:24 | its windows and manager, so that I can now see
the Windows Manager associated with keyframes.
| | 06:30 | So down here at the bottom, I've got my
timeline and across the top there's my Object Manager
| | 06:34 | and my Attribute Manager.
| | 06:36 | Let's raise this up a bit so we have a
little more room to work within the timeline.
| | 06:40 | So now you can see that I've got
keyframes here in the timeline.
| | 06:43 | This is keyframe right here and
this is a keyframe over here.
| | 06:47 | If I switch to the F Curve Manager, I can do
that by clicking on this icon right here.
| | 06:53 | I now can see what happens
in between the keyframes.
| | 06:55 | If I click on the cube, you'll see
that I've got these colored lines.
| | 06:59 | Let's hit the letter H on the keyboard, that's
going to frame up the curves and there's our motion.
| | 07:04 | The F Curves really allow you to see what
is happening in-between the keyframes.
| | 07:08 | So this gray dot is a keyframe,
that gray dot is a keyframe.
| | 07:11 | This is what happens in
between those two keyframes.
| | 07:14 | It starts off slow, it picks up speed and then
it slows down as it travels into the keyframe.
| | 07:18 | We're going to go into a lot more detail on
the F Curve Manager in later chapters, but
| | 07:22 | for now, the important thing to remember is
that a keyframe is a single moment in time
| | 07:27 | and the F curve is what
happens in between those keyframes.
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| Manipulating keyframes in the Timeline| 00:00 | Now animating in CINEMA 4D is all about keyframes
and keyframes are manipulated in the timeline.
| | 00:05 | Before we can get over to the timeline to
take a look at that process, we need to have
| | 00:08 | some keyframes to work with.
| | 00:10 | What I'm going to do is animate this word
KEYFRAME traveling along the Z axis and spinning
| | 00:14 | from off into distance to its mark
here at the center of the world.
| | 00:18 | In order to do that I'm going to use
something I called Backwards Animation.
| | 00:21 | I know that I want my KEYFRAME word to
be here at the center of the world.
| | 00:25 | I just have to figure out
when I want it to be there.
| | 00:27 | I'm going to park my Time slider on frame
60, that's where I want the KEYFRAME word
| | 00:31 | to hit its mark at time 0.
| | 00:34 | So let's go ahead and set keyframes for
the word KEYFRAME at that moment in time.
| | 00:38 | So I'll select the object, so now here in
the Coordinate Properties I'm going to set
| | 00:41 | a keyframe for the Position Parameters so
I'll click on the P hold down the Ctrl key
| | 00:45 | and click on this gray dot.
| | 00:47 | That changes it in to a red dot.
| | 00:49 | Now I know that I've set a keyframe for that.
| | 00:52 | Let's go ahead and set keyframes
for the other parameters as well.
| | 00:55 | Because I already have this selected, I can
hold down the Shift key and highlight over.
| | 00:59 | I don't have to set keyframes for each of
these individually, I can also highlight them
| | 01:03 | all and then hold down the Ctrl key and Click
on one of these gray dots, and now I've set
| | 01:07 | key frames for all of
those parameters at once.
| | 01:09 | So, I know that my keyframe object will be at frame 60
at that location and space facing that direction.
| | 01:16 | Now what I can do is go back up in time and
then decide where I want it to come from.
| | 01:21 | That's where the
backwards animation comes from.
| | 01:23 | So let's backup in time to time 0 and at time 0,
let's take the object and move it along the Z axis.
| | 01:30 | So let's grab this word and drag it
along the Z axis off into the distance.
| | 01:36 | And at time 0, I'm going to
set keyframes for everything.
| | 01:39 | Even though I didn't change the scale of rotation,
I'm going to do that soon, I still say keyframes
| | 01:43 | for everything at that point in time.
| | 01:46 | Now what I can do is decide
how I want it to rotate.
| | 01:49 | Now I want my word KEYFRAME to spin around its Y
axis as it moves to the center of the world.
| | 01:54 | So the parameter that I want to change is the
rotation H, that's the rotation around the Y axis.
| | 02:01 | So in order to do that, I'm going to go to
rotation H and then I'll change the rotation
| | 02:06 | H 0, from 0 to -720.
| | 02:11 | Now it's going to look like nothing has
happened that's because 720 is two times 360.
| | 02:15 | So to the camera, the object has not changed
rotation, but numerically it has rotated 360
| | 02:21 | degrees in the minus direction.
| | 02:23 | So let's set a keyframe now for the
rotation to lock that in position.
| | 02:28 | Now we want to change the scale, let's
change the scale down to 0, so it's 0 by 0 by 0.
| | 02:32 | So I'll highlight that
one and go 0 tab 0 tab 0.
| | 02:37 | And now my object is small, I can't
see it; let's set a keyframe for that.
| | 02:41 | Now when I hit Play, I have an object that
starts off as nothing, starts to move, spins
| | 02:49 | as it's moving, scales up into
position and hits its mark and stops.
| | 02:53 | Now that we've got those keyframes created, let's
switch over to the Timeline to see how that looks.
| | 02:59 | I'm going to select the Layout
menu and go to the Animation Layout.
| | 03:04 | Now that I'm here in the Animation
Layout, I can now see my actual keyframes.
| | 03:08 | Right now, my animation layout is set
to be showing the F Curve Manager.
| | 03:13 | So I'm going to switch
over to keyframes right now.
| | 03:15 | There's a great keyboard shortcut
for that and that's the Spacebar.
| | 03:18 | If I press the Spacebar once, it switches to
the F Curve Manager, if I press the spacebar
| | 03:22 | again, it switches to keyframes.
| | 03:24 | Now if you remember from earlier chapters,
the Spacebar also cycles us between tools,
| | 03:29 | but that's only when we're
here in the perspective view.
| | 03:32 | If I hit the Spacebar up here, t goes
from tool to Selection tool and back again.
| | 03:37 | When I hit the Spacebar down here, it
goes from F Curve Manager to Keyframes.
| | 03:41 | So this is the Keyframe Window and
these little rectangles are keyframes.
| | 03:45 | In fact, there's something called a Summary
Key frame and this is the Summary Line here
| | 03:50 | in the Keyframe Editor.
| | 03:52 | Now this Summary Line tells us that at time 0,
we're parked on a keyframe and there are
| | 03:57 | parameters for those
keyframes underneath these.
| | 04:01 | If I twirl open the word Keyframe and twirl
open Position, you can see that not only do
| | 04:05 | I have a Summary Keyframe for the overall
point in time, I have a Summary Keyframe for
| | 04:09 | the Object and a Summary
Keyframe for the Parameter.
| | 04:12 | And then underneath that Parameter are each of
the individual keyframes that make up where
| | 04:16 | that object is supposed to be at time 0.
| | 04:19 | Let's say I wanted to have this
animation start a little bit later in time.
| | 04:23 | I could take this Summary
Keyframe and drag it to the right.
| | 04:27 | Now I'm moving all the
keyframes from time 0 to time 20.
| | 04:31 | In fact, now you'll see that my object doesn't start
to animate until 20 frames after the beginning.
| | 04:36 | So let's Rewind back to 0 and hit Play. B oom!
| | 04:41 | So once it hits first keyframe, it
starts it process to get to this keyframe.
| | 04:46 | Let's take a look now what would happen
if we wanted it to go back to time 0?
| | 04:50 | Let's move these keyframes back to 0 and then
let's say we wanted to have the whole thing
| | 04:54 | happen more quickly.
| | 04:56 | We can Time Compress the keyframes by grabbing
all the Summary Keyframes and you notice this
| | 05:00 | orange bar linking the two
groups of keyframes together?
| | 05:04 | This tells us that we can now
move this keyframes as a group.
| | 05:06 | I can take the entire block of keyframes and move it
to the right or back again to the left at time 0.
| | 05:12 | I can also take this handle of the
orange bar and drag to the left.
| | 05:16 | I'm Time Compressing the
keyframes when I do this.
| | 05:19 | There are two big gotchas when it comes to
manipulating keyframes inside of CINEMA 4D's timeline.
| | 05:24 | The first gotcha is the
idea of keyframe alignment.
| | 05:28 | When you're just starting out with animation,
you want to make sure that all your keyframes
| | 05:31 | -- in this case we just got two, all line up.
| | 05:34 | You notice that I have separate
keyframes for position X, Y and Z.
| | 05:37 | I don't ever want to
accidentally do something like this.
| | 05:40 | I'm going to select the single
keyframe on position Y and move it over.
| | 05:44 | I never want to have these keyframes out of
alignment, it's okay to have the scale and
| | 05:48 | rotation out of alignment, but I never
want to have this keyframe out of alignment.
| | 05:51 | The reason is that it can create awkward bumps
or challenges to your animation and it's much
| | 05:57 | better to have those keyframes lined up
vertically within a given keyframe Track.
| | 06:03 | Let's move that back again and take a
look at moving other keyframes around.
| | 06:07 | Let's take this Scale and Rotation, also highlight
the Summary Keyframes and move them forward in time.
| | 06:12 | Now you can see that it starts moving, scales
up quickly, hits its mark and continues to
| | 06:17 | spin and scale while it's at it's
location at the center of the world.
| | 06:22 | So, as I finish the animation,
there it is right there.
| | 06:27 | Let's hit Play real quick again to
see that animation in real time.
| | 06:34 | Another big gotcha in the timeline
are these little Twirl Down Handles.
| | 06:37 | When I twirl open this handle here, I see
something that look suspiciously like an F Curve.
| | 06:43 | Never touch these curves here in the timeline.
| | 06:46 | You only ever edit F
Curves in the F Curve Manager.
| | 06:49 | The reason for that is this is as big as you
can make this window and you can't really
| | 06:53 | get a good representation for the movement
of your object with such a small curve.
| | 06:57 | The F Curve Manager is dedicated to
manipulating curves and it does a much better job.
| | 07:01 | Let's twirl that close and
never twirl it open again.
| | 07:05 | While I select the keyframe, you'll notice as
I hover over, it shows me some information.
| | 07:10 | That information is what value is
contained within that keyframe.
| | 07:13 | Remember, that this timeline is basically
just a spreadsheet and the keyframes are cells
| | 07:17 | within that spreadsheet.
| | 07:19 | And if I select a keyframe, I can now see the
parameters that are associated with that keyframe.
| | 07:25 | Here in the Attribute Manager, I can see that
I've got Key Time that's the location time
| | 07:29 | of the keyframe and the Key Value.
| | 07:32 | What is that keyframe
telling the object to do?
| | 07:34 | In this case, it's telling our object to be
at 0 on position Y in the timeline, and in
| | 07:39 | fact, that's where our object is.
| | 07:42 | Now if I wanted to change that value, I could
highlight the keyframe, select the Key Value
| | 07:45 | here and put it some other numeric value, 50.
| | 07:48 | You can see that now my object is moved
up 50 units on Y at that moment in time.
| | 07:54 | So, as I scrub back to the animation, I can
scrub forward again, it hits its mark, but
| | 08:00 | you can see that it's spinning 50 units over
the top of the ground plane, and that's because
| | 08:06 | of the value that I changed in this keyframe.
| | 08:07 | If I go back to that keyframe and change the
Key Value to be 0, then there it is back on
| | 08:12 | the ground again.
| | 08:13 | So you don't have to set
keyframes over and over again.
| | 08:16 | You can actually manipulate the values in the
keyframes when you know exactly what they need to be.
| | 08:21 | Now that you have a basic understanding of
the Timeline and how to manipulate keyframes,
| | 08:25 | we can move over to the F Curve Manager in
the next movie to look at what happens in
| | 08:29 | between the keyframes.
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| Working between keyframes with the F-Curve Manager| 00:00 | The F Curve Manager is where you control what
happens in between keyframes when you're animating.
| | 00:06 | The in-between of the keyframes is where all
the personality of the movement of the animation
| | 00:10 | comes from and it's crucial to get an
understanding of how to manipulate that information before
| | 00:16 | you can really become an advanced animator.
| | 00:18 | I've got a series of words here all lined up
along the X axis and I'm going to hit Play
| | 00:25 | here, and you can see that they hold there
for a moment and then they all advance at
| | 00:31 | the same rate and hit their
mark along the X axis here at 0.
| | 00:35 | Now, I'm in the F Curve Manager right now.
| | 00:38 | If I hit the Spacebar I can get back to the
KeyFrame Editor and if you're already in the
| | 00:42 | KeyFrame Editor then leave it there.
| | 00:45 | You can see that my keyframe don't start until
frame 20 and they stop at frame 70, so I know
| | 00:48 | exactly where my objects are going to be
at 20 and where they're going to be at 70.
| | 00:52 | What happens in between these points is
handled by something called Interpolation.
| | 00:57 | CINEMA 4D tries to figure out what is going
to happen in between those keyframes, it does
| | 01:01 | that automatically for you.
| | 01:03 | The default method for that is
something called Soft Interpolation.
| | 01:08 | Right now all of the objects have soft
interpolation assigned in them, because they're all at the
| | 01:12 | default and you can see that.
| | 01:13 | In fact, they all do move
in the exact same way.
| | 01:17 | I'm dragging on the Time slider here in the
timeline in order to make these objects move.
| | 01:24 | So how do we change that?
| | 01:25 | We changed that by going
to the F Curve Manager.
| | 01:28 | Right now they all have the same and we're
going to take a look at some different types
| | 01:31 | and we're going to change them one at a time.
| | 01:33 | The first one we're going to change is LINEAR.
| | 01:36 | So let's highlight the LINEAR by selecting it
in the object manager and you can see that
| | 01:40 | it's still got its animation keyframes on
there, and as we scrub backwards in time,
| | 01:46 | there's our object moving.
| | 01:47 | The default interpolation in CINEMA 4D tries
to create smooth movement between keyframes
| | 01:52 | and that's what creates the ease out of motion,
as it starts off on its journey and the ease
| | 01:57 | in to motion, when it hits its mark.
| | 01:59 | We can change that by manipulating the curve,
so the first curve we're going to manipulate
| | 02:03 | is the Linear Curve.
| | 02:04 | If we hit the Spacebar to move over to the
F Curve Manager and select the word LINEAR
| | 02:10 | here over on the left-hand side, these are the F
Curves associated with that animation for that object.
| | 02:16 | Let's hit the letter H on the
keyboard to frame up our animation.
| | 02:20 | Now we can see these curves nicely.
| | 02:21 | If I take and draw a rectangle around all the
keyframes, I can hit Command+A or Ctrl+A on the keyboard.
| | 02:28 | I can see these black handles.
| | 02:30 | These black handles are Tangency Handles; they
control the tension of the curve between the keyframes.
| | 02:35 | I can manipulate them by dragging
them up and down in the timeline.
| | 02:38 | You can see, as I do that it
changes the behavior of the object.
| | 02:42 | If I leave them down like that and I hit Play,
you're going to see that object do a crazy
| | 02:46 | wiggling animation.
| | 02:49 | Let's Rewind back to 0 and hit Undo.
| | 02:51 | So I'll hit the letter H again, I
accidentally moved my F Curve Manager.
| | 02:56 | What I want to be able to do is to
convert this into a Linear Movement.
| | 02:59 | A Linear Movement is one
that has no curvature.
| | 03:01 | It travels in a straight line
from one keyframe to the next.
| | 03:05 | So what I can do is right-click
and tell these curves to be linear.
| | 03:10 | That kills those Tangency Handles and now I
have a straight path from one to the other.
| | 03:15 | Let's hit Play and see what that looks like.
| | 03:19 | Now, in this context, it looks as if the word
LINEAR is doing a funny movement that's because
| | 03:27 | all the other objects in the scene are starting
off slow, picking up speed and finishing slow.
| | 03:32 | LINEAR is traveling at a constant rate.
| | 03:34 | Let's check that optical illusion.
| | 03:36 | I'll stop the Playback and let's
hide all these other objects.
| | 03:39 | So I'm going to hold down the Opt or Alt key
and click twice on that default status, and
| | 03:46 | then I'm going to hold down the Opt key and
click twice and hold and drag down and that
| | 03:52 | hides all the others.
| | 03:53 | Now, when we hit Play, you'll see that LINEAR
moves smoothly in a linear fashion from one
| | 04:00 | point to the other.
| | 04:01 | That optical illusion is gone.
| | 04:03 | So let's hold down the Opt or Alt key and
click and drag up and un-paint all those objects.
| | 04:09 | So now we can see that our animation has changed just
by changing these lines here in this F Curve Manager.
| | 04:15 | Now let's take a look at Ease In.
| | 04:17 | The Ease In Option is where
we ease into a keyframe.
| | 04:22 | The keyframe information that you see in here
can be thought of as a spreadsheet but that
| | 04:25 | spreadsheet only moves in one direction.
| | 04:27 | It moves from time 0 forward.
| | 04:30 | You can play animation backwards, but it really
analyzes the data from time 0 forward in time.
| | 04:35 | And so the data travels into the keyframes from
the left and out of the keyframes to the right.
| | 04:40 | So when you're talking about an Ease In, you're talking
about data traveling into a keyframe from the left.
| | 04:45 | So the only place we have data traveling into
a keyframe from the left is right over here.
| | 04:50 | So in order to get in a true Ease In, I'm
going to select all the keyframes and then
| | 04:55 | I'm going to go right-click in
there and go to Spline Types, Ease In.
| | 05:00 | When I do that nothing happens.
| | 05:02 | The reason that nothing happens is
because this was already eased in over here.
| | 05:07 | This had an ease out on it already, so
that didn't really change anything.
| | 05:10 | So let's Undo that.
| | 05:11 | You notice that the black handles on the
tangency has changed, but that's all that happened.
| | 05:16 | So in order to get the real thing, let's
take these keyframes here and then right-click
| | 05:21 | and tell them to be linear.
| | 05:24 | You can't do that because the Linear Button will
linearize the entire curve and that's not we want.
| | 05:30 | So let's Undo that.
| | 05:31 | Now I did that to prove a point.
| | 05:33 | Let's right-click one more time and then
this time, instead of going to LINEAR, what we
| | 05:37 | want to do is to go to Zero Tangent Length,
and when I do a Zero Tangent Length, now I've
| | 05:43 | linearized just that one keyframe and now
I've created an Ease In just on this keyframe.
| | 05:50 | So it's going to start off hard and
then ease in to its motion right here.
| | 05:54 | And if I hit Play, you'll see it happen.
| | 05:57 | Let's select that one, so you can highlight it,
so it starts off fast and then catches up slow.
| | 06:07 | Let's take a look at the next one, Ease Out.
| | 06:09 | Ease Out is going to have a similar problem
as Ease In and that the curves are already
| | 06:13 | setup by default.
| | 06:14 | Let's go to Ease Out.
| | 06:15 | Remember data flows out of the keyframe so easing
out of this keyframe and into this keyframe.
| | 06:19 | So to get a true Ease Out on this, we have to
go to this keyframes over here, right-click
| | 06:25 | and do a Zero Length.
| | 06:28 | Now we've got a true Ease Out of this motion.
| | 06:31 | We're easing out of this keyframe;
we're doing a hard in on this keyframe.
| | 06:34 | So let's hit Play and
see what that looks like.
| | 06:39 | You see it starts off smoothly, and then bam!
| | 06:41 | Hits its mark at frame 70, boom!
| | 06:47 | So let's stop Playback again.
| | 06:48 | Let's check Easy Ease.
| | 06:50 | Easy Ease was designed originally to behave much
the same way that Easy Ease were in AfterEffects,
| | 06:56 | but the default behavior that we see in CINEMA 4D
creates an Easy Ease when you have just two keyframes.
| | 07:02 | We don't really don't need to change anything on this,
because we already have an Ease Out and an Ease In.
| | 07:08 | The next one up is CLAMP, and if we select
the word CLAMP and if we click on it down
| | 07:12 | here on the F Curve Manager as well, right
now, we've got the default Interpolation.
| | 07:16 | What we want to do is
create a small pause here.
| | 07:19 | The way the CLAMP works is that it's going to
clamp the values that are in the tangency handles.
| | 07:24 | So let's say for example, I'm going to use the 2
key on the keyboard to scale my F Curve down.
| | 07:32 | Now, if I take this F Curve right here, I'll
grab them all and I'm going to drag them up
| | 07:39 | and you can see that when I dragged it up,
it does a wild animation on my object.
| | 07:43 | Let's hit Play and see what that does.
| | 07:45 | So it's going to take off -- whoa, and then
come back down eventually, so it takes off
| | 07:49 | really fast and then
hits its mark really slow.
| | 07:55 | So now what I want to do is Clamp these value,
so if I draw a Rectangle around all those
| | 07:59 | keyframes, right-click and do a Clamp, you
see that it clamps the value down to flat,
| | 08:05 | and I can't move these anymore.
| | 08:09 | They're locked in place.
| | 08:10 | They're clamped and I can no longer move them.
| | 08:12 | So Clamp is something I don't normally use
because I don't necessarily want to be limited.
| | 08:16 | I don't want the computer
to tell me what I can't do.
| | 08:19 | I want it to be able to do
anything and then choose not to do it.
| | 08:22 | So I don't normally use Clamp,
but it's there if you need it.
| | 08:24 | Last up is CUSTOM keyframes and CUSTOM keyframes are
where you manipulate the actual curves by hand.
| | 08:32 | In order to see what that looks like, we're
going to add a third keyframe into the mix.
| | 08:37 | And so let's click on the word
CUSTOM here and click on Custom here.
| | 08:41 | And then about halfway through the animation,
somewhere around 45, we're going to add a
| | 08:47 | keyframe on the Y axis.
| | 08:48 | So let's take our object and drag it up on Y,
and then hold down the Ctrl key and set
| | 08:53 | a keyframe for all of these.
| | 08:55 | So I want to click on the word P,
hold on the Ctrl key and then bam!
| | 08:59 | I've just set a parameter for that.
| | 09:01 | What I've got now is a curve that has three
points on it, and let's make this smaller
| | 09:07 | so that we can see what's going on.
| | 09:09 | And see our animation, our
object travels up on the Y axis.
| | 09:15 | Custom handles are ones that you
adjust the tangency for yourself.
| | 09:18 | So to adjust the tangency, let's hit the letter
H on the keyboard, so we can see all our curves
| | 09:22 | and now we can take and
manipulate these handles.
| | 09:25 | So I can grab this
keyframe on the Z for example.
| | 09:27 | Got a little bit of a dip right there, so
I'm going to smooth that out, to make sure
| | 09:32 | that I've got a nice smooth
tangency traveling through there.
| | 09:35 | Now this Y value, I want to move that up or
down to get a little bit more motion in it.
| | 09:42 | And you can see that it's going to overshoot
its mark, hit the keyframe and then continue
| | 09:47 | downward to undershoot and
then eventually slide to 0.
| | 09:51 | If I want to create a sharp movement in this
animation, I can select these handles like
| | 09:55 | I've done, hold down the Shift
key and I can break the tangency.
| | 09:59 | And now what I have the ability to
do is to create a bouncing motion.
| | 10:02 | Let's orbit around this little
bit so we can see what's going on.
| | 10:05 | You can see that my curve on Y reflects the
motion that the object is going to do here.
| | 10:10 | So now as I Play the animation -- I'll just
scrub through it, you can see it, it hits
| | 10:13 | mark right there and then it goes over the
hump and then back down again, if I hit Play.
| | 10:20 | And you can see that they all take off at
the same moment in time, but they all have
| | 10:25 | subtle variations in how they move and that
subtle variation is controlled with the F
| | 10:29 | Curve Manager.
| | 10:30 | And that's the beauty of it; it allows you to
control what happens in between the keyframes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Pausing animation with curves| 00:00 | One of the interesting quirks about working
with the F Curve Manager in CINEMA 4D is this
| | 00:04 | idea of Soft Interpolation.
| | 00:07 | Soft Interpolation is what CINEMA
4D does when it creates keyframes.
| | 00:10 | Is it tries to create a
smooth motion between keyframes.
| | 00:14 | Normally this is okay if you're just working
with two keyframes, but when you want to create
| | 00:17 | something like a pause in your animation the
soft interpolation can become problematic.
| | 00:22 | Now what I wanted to show you is an example
that illustrates this idea of how problematic
| | 00:26 | it can be and how you can
correct it using the F Curve Manager.
| | 00:30 | What I have is a simple word traveling along the
Z axis, and I'll hit Play so you can see that.
| | 00:35 | So what I'd like to do is
to create a Pause here.
| | 00:39 | The first thing I need to do is create a keyframe for
this moment in time and there's a great way to do that.
| | 00:43 | If I hold on the Ctrl key, I can Ctrl+
Click right here in the timeline, boom!
| | 00:48 | And I've just made a keyframe for
that track at that moment in time.
| | 00:52 | If I want to make a Pause, let's drag this
keyframe back to frame 40 and let's make a
| | 00:55 | nice long 10 frame Pause.
| | 00:58 | Hold down the Ctrl key and I'll drag it over.
| | 01:01 | Now I'll just Ctrl+Drag
the copy of that keyframe.
| | 01:03 | So you'll hold down the Ctrl key and drag left
to right and that makes copies of keyframes.
| | 01:08 | In AfterEffects, that would be all you need
to do, you can Copy and Paste the key frames
| | 01:11 | and that would make your Pause.
| | 01:12 | Let's see what happens in
CINEMA 4D when I do this.
| | 01:14 | I'll Rewind back to 0, let's hit Play.
| | 01:18 | And you notice when it hits its mark, where
it's supposed to pause, instead of pausing,
| | 01:23 | it does this crazy yo-yo movement.
| | 01:25 | And that yo-yo movement is being caused by the
F Curve Manager and that smooth interpolation
| | 01:30 | that we talked about.
| | 01:31 | So let's switch over to the F Curve
Manager to see what that looks like.
| | 01:34 | I'm going to raise up my interface here,
so I have little more room to work.
| | 01:38 | Down here in the Timeline, I'm going to hit the
Spacebar and that switches me to the F Curve Manager.
| | 01:42 | Now I can click on the word
Position, I can see my movement.
| | 01:46 | Let's hit the letter H on the
keyboard to see what's going on.
| | 01:50 | On this track, I have Z animated and because Z is the
only thing animated, all the other curves are flat.
| | 01:58 | So the curve that stands out
is the Z curve automatically.
| | 02:01 | But what I want to do is isolate this curve
sometimes, so I can twirl that open and then
| | 02:06 | click through these guys and
look at them one at a time.
| | 02:08 | So you can see, X, Y, Z, RGB, the
curves are colored on purpose.
| | 02:13 | Let's click on the word Position and I'm
going to hit the letter H on the keyboard.
| | 02:18 | The reason that we're getting that strange yo-yoing
action is because of the shape of this curve here.
| | 02:22 | Remember CINEMA 4D tries to draw smooth arc
between points, but the tension from this
| | 02:28 | curve is combining with the tension from this
curve, which is combining with the tension
| | 02:32 | from this curve and creating
this overshoot and undershoot.
| | 02:35 | This is called an undershoot, because it
travels below the previous keyframe value.
| | 02:39 | This is an overshoot, because it
travels above the keyframe value.
| | 02:41 | So it undershoots and then
overshoots creating that yo-yo motion.
| | 02:46 | The way we'd like to fix this is by
adjusting these tangent handles.
| | 02:49 | Now I could adjust these manually by moving
these curves by hand and adjusting the flatness
| | 02:54 | of them to get them to move smoothly from
one to the other, or I could use a command.
| | 03:00 | So let's Undo that to get it back to
where it was before. There we go.
| | 03:03 | I just hit the Ctrl+Z or Command+Z three
times to get back to my previous selection.
| | 03:08 | What I want to do is draw a rectangle around
all these keyframes here and I'm going to
| | 03:12 | right-click in here and I'm going to do 0 angle,
0 angle is going to flatten my curve out.
| | 03:18 | Now that it's done that, you can see that
my animation pauses at that moment in time.
| | 03:23 | So let's play that and see what it does.
| | 03:29 | So it hits its mark and then smoothly
transitions out of that mark to the next point in time.
| | 03:37 | So that's probably the biggest
gotcha with the smooth interpolation.
| | 03:40 | Most of the time it's a very cool thing with
CINEMA 4D, but when it comes to making pauses,
| | 03:44 | it can be problematic.
| | 03:45 | It's super easy to fix, you just have
to know how to work the F Curve Manager.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animation exercise: Creating bouncing movement| 00:00 | In order to be a great animator you have to
really learn how to control your animation
| | 00:05 | with the F Curve Manager.
| | 00:07 | This is a very simple exercise that I like
to do that'll illustrate the power of the
| | 00:11 | F Curve Manager and also how easy
it is to control your animation.
| | 00:14 | What we're going to do is create some
bouncing movement, we're going to take this sphere
| | 00:19 | and bounce it down these stairs a little bit
like the game Q*bert from back in the day.
| | 00:23 | So we're going to go from this step to here, to here,
to here, to here, to here and then off the screen.
| | 00:29 | And in order to do that, we want
to animate in a very specific way.
| | 00:34 | The idea of creating a bouncing movement is
a really interesting challenge, because we
| | 00:38 | don't want to add too many keyframes.
| | 00:41 | Animating with keyframes is a lot like drawing
paths in Illustrator or Photoshop, the fewer
| | 00:45 | points that you use; the easier
it is to manipulate that path.
| | 00:48 | So, what we want to do is to create our
animation with these few keyframes as possible.
| | 00:52 | We're going to start off by animating our
sphere down the steps and it's at the right
| | 00:57 | location in space, so let's go ahead
and set a keyframe for its position.
| | 01:03 | Now make sure you're at time 0 and then select
the P Column, hold down the Ctrl key and click
| | 01:08 | on the gray dot to change them all to red.
| | 01:10 | We're not going to worry about Scale or Rotation right
now; we're only going to concentrate on Position.
| | 01:14 | Now that's our location for frame 0,
now we can move forward in time.
| | 01:18 | Let's go ahead and move forward
in time to about frame 15 or so.
| | 01:23 | Next, we need to figure out where our
ball needs to be at this moment in time.
| | 01:26 | So it's going to hit this top step, so the
first thing we need to do is in the top view,
| | 01:31 | move our sphere over the step.
| | 01:33 | So let's switch to the Move tool, hit E on
the keyboard and in the top view, I'm going
| | 01:37 | to grab the Z handle for the cube.
| | 01:40 | So the first thing we need to do is
to move our sphere over that step.
| | 01:45 | So this is the very first
step that it's going to hit.
| | 01:47 | So there it is in space over that step.
| | 01:50 | In the right-hand view, I can now move it
down on Y, until the ball just touches the
| | 01:55 | top of that step and you can zoom in a bit to
navigate and see the ball touching the step.
| | 02:01 | It's a little bit hard to tell with these
orange outlines around here, but we've got
| | 02:05 | it just touching.
| | 02:06 | Now, we can set a keyframe for our object
at frame 15, so I'll select the sphere and
| | 02:11 | then make sure these guys are all highlighted
yellow, and then I'll Ctrl+Click to set a keyframe.
| | 02:17 | So that's Step 1.
| | 02:18 | Now we can repeat the
process for each of the steps.
| | 02:20 | So we're going to go from here, to here, to here, to
here and then here and off the steps, o ut of frame.
| | 02:27 | So let's go ahead and repeat
that process all the way through.
| | 02:30 | Let's move forward in time about 15 frames
and then I'm going to use the Move tool and
| | 02:35 | move it over that step, then in the right
hand view I'm going to move it down, so that
| | 02:40 | it's touching the step, and
then I'll set a keyframe.
| | 02:44 | Let's move it at 15 frames again, and then
move it forward to the next step, which is
| | 02:50 | this one right here, so let's move it on the
X axis right there, and then down to that
| | 02:56 | line, that's where it needs to touch next.
| | 02:58 | So let's go down here, here we go,
and then we'll set a keyframe.
| | 03:02 | Now, don't forget to move the Time
slider after each keyframe you set.
| | 03:07 | Now I can have that animate downward to the next
step, so let's move it over here and then down.
| | 03:14 | One of the things you shouldn't worry
about is what the Animation Path looks like.
| | 03:20 | You'll notice I'm not checking my animation.
| | 03:22 | All I'm doing is moving it to a location in
space and time and then setting a keyframe.
| | 03:27 | So now let's move it forward again and there
are 15 frames or so, down to the next step,
| | 03:34 | so let's go over here.
| | 03:35 | Let's go over a little bit more, and then
forward in time a little bit, so it's not
| | 03:41 | intersecting that step and
then down. Here we go.
| | 03:46 | Make sure we're hitting the right step, I
wasn't, I was missing the step, that's the
| | 03:49 | one I want to hit right there.
| | 03:51 | Let's move it down just a bit.
| | 03:53 | Now we can set keyframes and now we can move
forward in time to the last keyframe and what
| | 03:58 | we'll do is take it and move it on the X axis
off this way, on the Y axis down off screen,
| | 04:05 | then we'll set our last keyframe.
| | 04:07 | That is the process for making
keyframes, it's really that simple.
| | 04:10 | Let's review our animation
and see what it looks like.
| | 04:12 | So let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 04:14 | I'm going to make the Perspective View full
screen, and let's hit Play in the interface here.
| | 04:20 | And you can see that our animation is
not doing quite what we wanted it to yet.
| | 04:24 | It's doing this crazy zig-zag sort of floating
movement down the steps, but that is not important.
| | 04:30 | What's important is where it is at the key
moments in time, and the key moments in time
| | 04:34 | for this animation are when it
makes contact with the steps.
| | 04:37 | For those moments in time, it's perfect.
| | 04:39 | Now what we can do is tell it what to do in
between those keyframes with the F Curve Manager.
| | 04:45 | So let's switch our layout over to the Animation
Layout, so I'll go from Standard to Animation
| | 04:50 | and now I've got the animation layout
and I can work in the F Curve Manager.
| | 04:54 | I'm going to start off by raising my
interface up here a little bit, just highlight that
| | 04:57 | line and drag up.
| | 04:59 | And now I can switch to the F Curve Manager,
let's hit the Spacebar down here in the Timeline,
| | 05:04 | and then on the word Sphere I'm going to twirl
open the position track and select position Y.
| | 05:10 | The track we want to focus on is position Y
; if I click on the Position and hit the
| | 05:14 | letter H, you can see that all of our
curves are doing something slightly different.
| | 05:19 | If I cycle through these, you can see that
there's our floating movement on X, here's
| | 05:23 | our position Y and our floating movement on Z.
| | 05:26 | Now, the Y is what's going to allow
us to create that bouncing movement.
| | 05:30 | We want to create an arc up into the air on
each of these bounces and that's going to
| | 05:35 | happen on the Y axis.
| | 05:37 | So now we can use the tangent handles on
each of these keyframes to make that happen.
| | 05:42 | So draw a selection around the keyframe, hold
down the Shift key and then break that tangency.
| | 05:47 | So now when I break that, I get a
little bit of movement on that keyframe.
| | 05:52 | Now let's do the same thing on the
other side and make a nice arch.
| | 05:55 | And you notice that everytime I make a change
like that, watch these paths up here, as I
| | 06:00 | move that one up, I create a nice little arc, and
then I can do the same thing on the other side.
| | 06:05 | I'm holding down the Shift key
as I move these. There we go.
| | 06:11 | And then I'm going to grab
this one and move it up.
| | 06:14 | I forgot to do this one over here, so
I'll grab that one and move it up too.
| | 06:17 | As each time I do that, I'm going to try
and have it dissipate a little energy.
| | 06:22 | You don't want all the curves to be exactly the
same size; you want to just kind of diminish
| | 06:26 | with intensity over time.
| | 06:28 | So I'm going to take this last one and make
it a little bit shallower. There we go.
| | 06:34 | And this one here is going to bounce up and this
last one is going to bounce into an arc like that.
| | 06:43 | And so now you can see that these bounces
here look a lot like the bouncing of a ball,
| | 06:47 | and you can see that these arcs are
also reflected in the Perspective View.
| | 06:51 | Let's rewind back to 0.
| | 06:52 | I'm going to make my interface a little bit bigger
here and let's rewind back to 0 and hit Play.
| | 06:57 | You can see there's our ball
bouncing down the stairs.
| | 07:03 | Now, there's one last thing we want to do
before we call this animation complete.
| | 07:08 | You can see that as it moves down the steps it still
has a little bit of a floaty movement on X and Z.
| | 07:15 | It's bouncing really nice on Y, but
it's floating a little bit on X and Z.
| | 07:19 | Let's raise this up a bit and click on
X and look and see what it's doing.
| | 07:23 | You can see there's lots of soft, smooth
movement here, and that's not what we want, we want
| | 07:26 | our ball to hit each stair and bam,
bam, bam, bam, right on down.
| | 07:30 | So, in order to correct that, we're going
to convert these keyframes from the smooth
| | 07:35 | floaty curves like that and get
rid of the tangency handles.
| | 07:39 | Now we can do on both these
curves at the same time.
| | 07:41 | So if we click on position X, hold down the
Ctrl key and click on position Z and hit the
| | 07:46 | letter H on the keyboard, now we're looking
at both of these tracks at the same time.
| | 07:51 | Let's hit Command+A or Ctrl+A
to grab all of those keyframes.
| | 07:55 | Now right-click in the
Interface and do a Zero Length.
| | 07:58 | And when I do that, I've now
linearized these keyframes.
| | 08:02 | Now, let's work at our animation again.
| | 08:06 | Rewind back to zero and hit Play.
| | 08:11 | You can see that our motion is a lot more crisp
and much less floaty as it moves down the steps.
| | 08:17 | That's really all there is to it.
| | 08:19 | The most important thing when you're working
with the F Curve Manager is to really have
| | 08:22 | a good vision in your head for how
you'd like your object to move.
| | 08:25 | Is it floaty, is it bouncy, is the movement
sharp and staccato, or is it very long and
| | 08:31 | smooth flowing?
| | 08:32 | When you have that clear vision, the curves
will really naturally match that movement.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Through the Lens: Working with CamerasThe editor camera vs. the camera object| 00:00 | Up until this point in CINEMA 4D we've been
working with something called the Editor Camera.
| | 00:05 | The Editor Camera is a virtual camera that's
provided by the software in order for you
| | 00:10 | to be able to look at the
world that you're working in.
| | 00:13 | When I navigate around the scene, I'm
moving that virtual camera called the Editor.
| | 00:17 | When I add a cube to the scene, I'm looking
through the Editor Camera to actually see
| | 00:22 | the space that the cube is sitting in.
| | 00:24 | Now the Editor Camera is fine and dandy for when
you're modeling or building your world out.
| | 00:29 | But when it comes time to animate, it's
absolutely crucial that you start to work with something
| | 00:32 | called a Camera Object.
| | 00:33 | A Camera Object is specifically designed to be a
reproducible changeable object in the scene.
| | 00:40 | One of the big problems with the Editor Camera is
that you can't numerically control where it is.
| | 00:45 | So there's no way to animate it.
| | 00:46 | So how do you know what
camera you're looking through?
| | 00:49 | Up here in the Viewport menu is the Cameras
menu and under the Use Camera submenu, you
| | 00:55 | can see that there's the Default Camera listed and
that's the Editor Camera that we're looking at right now.
| | 01:00 | I don't have any other cameras in the scene, so
that's the only thing I can look through right now.
| | 01:04 | So let's add a camera to the scene.
| | 01:05 | Now a very big gotcha, when you're in a four
way view like this, the Active view is the
| | 01:11 | view that has a white line around it.
| | 01:15 | If I click up here in the top view, you
can see that the top view is now active.
| | 01:19 | You never want to add a camera in one of the
Orthographic Views, unless you specifically choose to do so.
| | 01:25 | You always want to add a camera in the
Perspective View, so make sure that's the active view
| | 01:29 | and then click on the Camera icon.
| | 01:32 | When I do that, I now get a camera in the
scene, you can see that I have a physical
| | 01:36 | Camera Object, it's listed in the Object
Manager and it shows up in the Viewports.
| | 01:42 | Now I'm not actually looking through that
camera yet, it's just in the scene and if
| | 01:46 | I'd back out here in the Perspective View, you
can see that the camera is there in the scene.
| | 01:52 | If I move the camera on the X axis, it
moves around, everything works just fine.
| | 01:57 | When I grab the handles, I can move the camera
around, but you don't see the Viewport changed
| | 02:01 | based on the Camera view.
| | 02:03 | In order to do that I have to look through
the camera, there's two ways to do that.
| | 02:07 | I can go to the Camera menu, in the
Perspective View and go to Use Camera and then select
| | 02:12 | the new Camera Object and I get this cute little
animation that pops me around to the camera position.
| | 02:19 | And now, I'm actually
looking through the camera.
| | 02:22 | You can see that when I move the camera, when I
rotate the camera the Viewport in the Perspective
| | 02:27 | View changes along with that camera.
| | 02:30 | The second way to look through the
camera is with the Active Camera Button.
| | 02:34 | This little White Button right here on the Camera
Object allows you to choose that camera to look through.
| | 02:40 | When I Click that Button, I've just disabled
that camera and you saw that my Editor View
| | 02:44 | popped back to wherever the last position
that the Editor Camera was before you looked
| | 02:49 | through the camera.
| | 02:50 | When I clicked that button again, it goes right to
the Camera Position and now I can look through.
| | 02:55 | If I use my 1, 2, and 3 keys to navigate,
everytime I make a change, I'm moving the
| | 03:00 | camera as well as changing my Viewport here.
| | 03:04 | That's a really important distinction.
| | 03:05 | The Editor Camera cannot be manipulated, you
can move around and you can look at things,
| | 03:10 | but you can't physically touch it and that's
the most important reason for using a camera
| | 03:14 | for all your renderings.
| | 03:16 | Once you start to work with the Camera Object,
a very important menu option is under the
| | 03:22 | Perspective View menu, it's
called Use as Render View.
| | 03:26 | The Use as Render View option allows you to
tell CINEMA 4D which Viewport you're going
| | 03:32 | to be rendering from, and most of the time
you're going to leave it on this Perspective
| | 03:36 | View here, but there may come a time where
you have a very complicated project and you
| | 03:40 | want to be able to look through the camera
in a different Viewport and render from that
| | 03:44 | Viewport and keep this Viewport as the
Viewport that you're modeling and move objects in.
| | 03:49 | The way that you do that is by going to the
Window menu and selecting New View panel.
| | 03:55 | I now have a brand new Perspective View and
this Perspective View, if you go to the View
| | 04:00 | menu, is not being Use as a Render View.
| | 04:02 | You can see that this little icon
has an X to it, it's not checked.
| | 04:06 | If I go over to this View
menu, this icon is checked.
| | 04:09 | so it is using that as Render View.
| | 04:11 | So now what I want to do is I want to go to
this Viewport selected as the Use Render View,
| | 04:16 | now when I click the Active Camera
icon, it looks through this Viewport.
| | 04:21 | What that does for me if I go in this
view -- now this is another big gotcha.
| | 04:25 | You can see that in this Viewport,
I'm still looking through the camera.
| | 04:28 | I've got two viewports
looking through the same camera.
| | 04:30 | When you set the extra viewport as the Use
Render View Viewport you want to make sure
| | 04:35 | to tell this main Viewport to
be just the Editor Camera.
| | 04:39 | And so you go to Use Camera and
tell it to be the Default Camera.
| | 04:42 | Now, I'm free to look at my scene.
| | 04:45 | I can manipulate my camera here in
the Viewport and I can look at that.
| | 04:49 | Another great tip is that you can take
this Viewport and park it in the interface.
| | 04:52 | So if I grab this little grid of icons right
here and I Drag these grid of icons and I
| | 04:57 | put it just above this line, you can see that
I get this fat white line here, if I let go,
| | 05:02 | I now have a viewport right in
my interface just above there.
| | 05:06 | I can now look through my camera and change,
and I can move around in this space and always
| | 05:11 | have a viewport available to
me for looking to the camera.
| | 05:14 | I really like to work this way because it
allows me to not touch the camera and still
| | 05:18 | have a great deal of space to work in, and I
can come around here and set my lights and
| | 05:22 | do my texturing and add all my other models
and just keep a viewport dedicated to the
| | 05:25 | camera.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring important camera settings| 00:00 | If you've ever tried to use a camera in the real
world, you know that they have a lot of controls.
| | 00:05 | CINEMA 4D's Camera Object
is no different from that.
| | 00:07 | There are a ton of settings there.
| | 00:09 | I'm going to cover the most
important ones in this movie.
| | 00:12 | Before I can get started with that though, we
need to have a Camera Object in the scene.
| | 00:15 | So, let's go ahead and add one.
| | 00:17 | I'm in the Perspective View; I'm going to
click on the Add Camera Object Icon here.
| | 00:21 | And now I have a Camera.
| | 00:23 | The most important camera setting that there
is, is actually not on the Camera Object.
| | 00:28 | You can see that I've got a whole bunch of
sections here on the Camera Attributes, but
| | 00:32 | the most important one is
actually in the Render Setting.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to bring up the Render Settings
icon by clicking on this little button right
| | 00:40 | here and you can see that it
says Edit Render Settings.
| | 00:44 | I can also get to this Window
by going Command+B or Ctrl+B.
| | 00:46 | The most important Camera
Setting is the Aspect Ratio.
| | 00:50 | The Aspect Ratio is the relationship with
the width to the height to the viewport.
| | 00:54 | If you're doing still images with a 35 millimeters still
camera, then your Aspect Ratio is generally speaking 4x3.
| | 01:00 | Older DV cameras are 4x3.
| | 01:03 | Older television programs are done in 4x3.
| | 01:06 | New television programs that are done
in HD for example are all done 16x9.
| | 01:11 | Most films are done in 16x9 as well with some
variations on that for different modern Aspect Ratios.
| | 01:18 | For most of the things that you're going to
be doing in CINEMA 4D, you're going to want
| | 01:20 | it rendered to a 16x9 Aspect
Ratio if you're an animator.
| | 01:23 | If you're a print artist then the Aspect Ratio
could change depending on the type of project
| | 01:27 | you're working on.
| | 01:28 | I'm going to assume that this is an animation
project and talk about the Aspect Ratio in
| | 01:32 | terms of being 16x9.
| | 01:34 | There are some presets here and I can click
on this and go to Film and Video and I can
| | 01:38 | scroll down to one of the presets here and
use that, but I normally never ever use these.
| | 01:42 | I've been using CINEMA 4D for a long
time before this presets existed.
| | 01:46 | And I find that they get a little bit
too deep on the things that they change.
| | 01:50 | And so, generally speaking most of my
projects I changed the width and the height and the
| | 01:55 | film aspect ratio will solve itself.
| | 01:57 | So, I've got the width here which is 1280x720.
| | 01:59 | I've set this ahead of time, but the way you can
set this is by highlighting the field here.
| | 02:05 | Let's say we wanted to do 1920x1080.
| | 02:07 | I could set this to be 1920
and I can hit the Tab key.
| | 02:11 | I got to hit it twice, because the first
time I hit it, it tabs over to the pixels pull
| | 02:15 | down, and I always render pixels.
| | 02:17 | You could set it to be millimeters or anything
else, but pixel is the most relevant value.
| | 02:22 | And then I hit the Tab key
again, and I get to the height.
| | 02:25 | And when I change this, you'll notice that the film
aspect ratio is now showing a custom aspect of 2.667.
| | 02:32 | When I change this to 1080, which is the
normal HD Aspect Ratio, then I'm going to get this
| | 02:38 | new film aspect being calculated.
| | 02:40 | So, let's change this value here to 1080.
| | 02:44 | And when I hit Enter, you'll see that
the film aspect is changed to HDTV 16.9.
| | 02:49 | Now, you can click on this pull down, there's
other Aspect Ratios that you can choose from,
| | 02:53 | but for animation purposes, the
HDTV 16.9 is the most important one.
| | 02:59 | Once I've got my Aspect Ratio chosen, I click
the Lock Ratio button and now I'm locked into
| | 03:04 | this Aspect Ratio and no matter what value
I put in here, I always get a 16x9 ratio.
| | 03:09 | So for example, if I put in 640, I get a 360
Height and that still falls under the HDTV,
| | 03:16 | it's still 16x9 on the Width/Height.
| | 03:19 | So, that is the most important Camera Setting.
| | 03:22 | Whenever I add a Camera to the scene, the
very first thing that I do is come to the
| | 03:25 | Render Settings and change this Width and
Height to match the Render Settings that I
| | 03:29 | need to have for my particular project.
| | 03:32 | So let's close up the Render Settings now.
| | 03:33 | Now that we've got our camera set to the correct
Aspect Ratio, let's go ahead and look through it.
| | 03:38 | Now, I'm not looking through my Camera Body yet,
so I'm going to click on the Look through
| | 03:43 | Camera icon right there.
| | 03:45 | And now that I'm looking through
it, I'm going to zero it out.
| | 03:48 | Let's go to the Camera and to the Coordinate
Properties and zero out its Position and Rotation.
| | 03:52 | So, I'll hit 0, Tab, 0, Tab, 0.
| | 03:56 | Never ever change the scale on a camera.
| | 03:58 | It makes it do weird things.
| | 04:00 | And I'm going to change the
Rotation now, 0, Tab, 0, Tab, 0.
| | 04:03 | And you can see I can't see my type anymore,
that's because my camera actually is in the
| | 04:09 | middle of the word.
| | 04:10 | If I unchecked that Active Camera icon, you can see
that there it is right between the T and the N.
| | 04:14 | So let's look back through our camera.
| | 04:17 | And then on the Z axis, I'll just scrub this value
in the negative direction until I can see my word.
| | 04:22 | Now, I'll scrub the Y value until my word is
centered up right in the middle of the frame.
| | 04:29 | Now we can talk about the
other settings on the camera.
| | 04:32 | Under the Object Properties, the Object Properties
is where you control the focal length of the lens.
| | 04:37 | The focal length of the lens determines the
Field of View that you're going to be seeing
| | 04:41 | and also, the Length of
the lens that you're using.
| | 04:44 | So, what I mean by that is camera
lenses come in different types.
| | 04:47 | The most common is Wide
Angle versus Telephoto.
| | 04:52 | Now the default value that CINEMA 4D has here
for its Field of View and Focal Length are
| | 04:56 | considered to be a normal lens, the CINEMA 4D
equivalent of a 50 millimeter lens in the real world.
| | 05:02 | I can change the focal length in
anytime by adjusting the focal length value.
| | 05:07 | Now there are some presets that I can use
here where I can put in a specific value.
| | 05:10 | Typically I'll either go with the Wide Angle
or a more Telephoto Lens just by adjusting
| | 05:15 | these values and doing it kind of by feel.
| | 05:18 | If you're working on a visual effect shot
though, you may have been giving specific
| | 05:20 | settings by the director and you're going to
want to use those and match them exactly.
| | 05:24 | So you can put in those values for the
lenses that they used on the shoot and get very,
| | 05:28 | very close to matching that film exactly.
| | 05:31 | So if I change this from a Classic Lens to
something like a Super Wide, it looks like
| | 05:36 | my object has gotten
further away from the camera.
| | 05:38 | Really, the camera has not moved.
| | 05:41 | If I middle mouse click and change to a Four
Way View, and let's dolly out in the Top View
| | 05:45 | and let's pan in here, I'm going to zoom in
back, so I can see both my word and my camera.
| | 05:50 | You can see, there's my Camera
Object and there's my word right there.
| | 05:54 | So, you can see that the
Camera Object hasn't moved.
| | 05:57 | What's changed is the Field of View,
the Focal Length of the lens.
| | 06:00 | It's now set to be a Wide Angle
and I can see more of my scene.
| | 06:05 | If I change this back to the Default which is
36 millimeter, you can see that the camera
| | 06:09 | doesn't move, it's just changed that
Field of View and the Focal Length.
| | 06:13 | If I go back into the Field of View and
adjust that, you can see that this values change.
| | 06:18 | The Focal Length is locked to the Field of
view, so as I scrub the Field of View upward,
| | 06:23 | my Focal Length gets shorter and shorter.
| | 06:25 | Conversely, if I scrub my Field of View
downward, my Focal Length gets longer and longer.
| | 06:30 | A great rule of thumb of to use when you're
trying to pick which focal length to use is
| | 06:35 | that Wider Angle Lenses tend to give a much
more dynamic feel to your scene, and Telephoto
| | 06:42 | Lenses tend to flatten things out, and there
are some really valid design reasons why you
| | 06:45 | might want to do both of those things.
| | 06:47 | So, you can experiment with them to see
which one works best for your project.
| | 06:51 | Another important setting is
something called the Focus Distance.
| | 06:54 | When you start working with Depth of Field,
the focus distance is going to become extremely
| | 06:57 | important for determining which
parts of your image are in focus.
| | 07:01 | And the focus distance is this field here,
and it's represented by the end of this little
| | 07:05 | triangle that extends outward from the camera.
| | 07:07 | By adjusting the focus distance inward or
outward, I can determine where my camera will
| | 07:12 | be focused on, when I start
to mess with Depth of Field.
| | 07:15 | And by default, CINEMA 4D's camera is
infinitely in focus, but you can change that by messing
| | 07:20 | with the Depth of Field Settings.
| | 07:22 | And we'll talk about that
more in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating depth of field| 00:00 | Depth of field is a term that's used in photography to
describe how much of an image is in or out of focus.
| | 00:07 | An image that's all in focus is said to have
a lot of depth of field, an image that is
| | 00:12 | only partially in focus is said to
have very shallow depth of field.
| | 00:16 | In CINEMA 4D, there are three
techniques for getting depth of field.
| | 00:20 | Two of them involve using CINEMA 4D's own
Render Engine and one technique involve using
| | 00:25 | a Filter in After Effects.
| | 00:26 | I'm going to cover the first two techniques
in CINEMA 4D in this video and we'll talk
| | 00:31 | about the third technique later on
in the Essentials Training series.
| | 00:36 | So I've got a very simple grid set up here and
I've got a camera already set up in the scene.
| | 00:41 | And you'll notice that there is
a group of green objects here.
| | 00:45 | And I've set these green objects at
the focal distance from the camera.
| | 00:48 | If I select my Camera and go to the Object
Properties and look at the Focus Distance.
| | 00:54 | That is this plane right here and you could
see that there's a row of objects that line
| | 00:58 | up exactly with that plane.
| | 01:00 | And those are the objects that are green.
| | 01:02 | I've done that so we can see exactly where
that focal plane is and we'll be able to see
| | 01:07 | the depth of field effect and see how it
affects the background and see how it affects the
| | 01:10 | foreground relative to those in focus objects.
| | 01:13 | So, the first technique for getting depth of field
involves the built-in render engine for CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:20 | The way you activate depth of
field is that multi-step process.
| | 01:24 | So step one is to go to the Render
Settings and activate depth of field.
| | 01:28 | So, I'll hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on the
keyboard and in the Render Settings I'm going to go
| | 01:34 | to Effect and add Depth of Field.
| | 01:39 | Let's go to the full-screen Perspective view.
| | 01:42 | So now that we've activated Depth of Field on the
Render Setting, we can do a test render here.
| | 01:46 | I'll hit Command+R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard
and you can see that everything in the image
| | 01:50 | is still in focus.
| | 01:52 | Depth of field has not activated.
| | 01:53 | That's because I have to tell CINEMA 4D which
parts of the image I want in focus and which
| | 01:58 | parts I want out of focus.
| | 02:00 | The way that you do that is by
turning on some settings on the camera.
| | 02:02 | So let's go to the Details tab of the camera.
| | 02:05 | So let's raise this up just a
bit so we could see everything.
| | 02:08 | We've got our Focus Distance set at 2,000.
| | 02:09 | We're going to leave that alone.
| | 02:11 | So when we go to the Details tab, there is
a Depth of Map Front Blur and Rear Blur.
| | 02:16 | When I change that DOF Rear
Blur, two things happen.
| | 02:21 | The first thing that happened was I have
this new extension on the end of my camera.
| | 02:26 | My focus plane is still right here, but now I've got
this extra little bit that's attached to the camera.
| | 02:31 | If I turn that off, you'll
see that it disappears.
| | 02:35 | Let's turn it back on again.
| | 02:36 | So now when I render, let's click in the Perspective
view and hit Command+R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard.
| | 02:42 | You can see that everything beyond those
green objects is now going out of focus.
| | 02:46 | And there's a range of
values that you'd get here.
| | 02:49 | And that's what's defined by
this Start and End field.
| | 02:53 | The Start is the focal plane and 1,000 units
beyond the Start of the focal plane is where
| | 02:59 | the End of the blur field will go.
| | 03:01 | So everything beyond that setting will
become out of focus and will gradually become in
| | 03:07 | focus the closer it gets to the focal plane.
| | 03:10 | Let's activate Front Blur and
you'll see that it's much the same.
| | 03:14 | We now have this little area that's shown up
on our camera right there, and everything
| | 03:18 | in this range will now go slowly out of focus.
| | 03:21 | Let's do another rendering.
| | 03:22 | Let's bring the
Perspective view up full frame.
| | 03:25 | You see, it takes a moment to calculate, but
now you can see that the foreground objects
| | 03:31 | are all out of focus and the objects at the
focal distance are all in focus and there's
| | 03:36 | a nice range of values.
| | 03:39 | So that's the first way of getting
depth of field inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 03:43 | The next way to get depth of field involves
something called the Physical Render Engine.
| | 03:47 | So I'm going to reset some
values here on my camera.
| | 03:49 | Let's turn off the Depth of
Field Front and Rear Blur.
| | 03:52 | And that was the only
things I changed on the camera.
| | 03:56 | I'm going to go back to
the Render Settings now.
| | 03:58 | Hit Command+B or Ctrl+B on the keyboard and
I'm going to Delete the Depth of Field effect.
| | 04:02 | If you have the Broadcast, Visualize, or
Studio bundles of CINEMA 4D, then you have access
| | 04:07 | to something called the
Physical Render Engine.
| | 04:09 | If you have the Prime version of CINEMA 4D,
you don't have Physical Render Engine, but
| | 04:12 | you still can do regular depth of field.
| | 04:15 | So you can just follow along
with this if you only have Prime.
| | 04:18 | The way you activate the Physical Render Engine
is by going to the Render pulldown right here
| | 04:22 | and clicking on that and
going to Physical Render.
| | 04:24 | When I do that, let's move the Render settings
over here for a moment and hit Command+R or
| | 04:30 | Ctrl+R on the keyboard.
| | 04:31 | You can see that when I do that, it
really looks like nothing's changed.
| | 04:36 | That's because in the Physical Render properties,
when I Click on the word Physical, there's
| | 04:40 | a Depth of Field checkbox here.
| | 04:42 | So I have to turn on this
Depth of Field checkbox.
| | 04:44 | When I click that, I can now close up the
Render Settings and when I hit Command+R or
| | 04:50 | Ctrl+R again, I'll get a rendering.
| | 04:53 | It looks like nothing happened,
that's because really nothing did.
| | 04:57 | What I have to do now is start to adjust the camera
properties in order to get the depth of field.
| | 05:02 | What happens with the Physical Render Engine is
that when you activate it, the camera starts
| | 05:05 | to behave in a much more
physically correct way.
| | 05:08 | So in order to get a really strong depth of
field effect, you have to dial down your F-Stops.
| | 05:14 | Under the Physical menu on the Camera,
I've got an F-Stop setting here.
| | 05:17 | It's set for f/8.
| | 05:18 | On a real camera at f/8 on the type of lens
that I have here which is a focal length of
| | 05:23 | 36, I wouldn't have a very shallow Depth of field,
a lot of my image is going to be in focus.
| | 05:28 | So let's go back to the physical
settings and dial the F-Stops down.
| | 05:32 | I'm going to go to the F-Stops and go from 8
down to 1 and now when I Command+R or Ctrl+R
| | 05:39 | on the PC, you're going to see that
some of my image is out of focus.
| | 05:44 | Primarily, it's this area here in front.
| | 05:47 | One of the things that's a bit strange about
the Physical Render Engine is that I have
| | 05:51 | to tweak my settings a lot to get
the look that I'm going for here.
| | 05:56 | In a real camera, if you're using an F-Stop of
1, you'd have a very shallow depth of field
| | 06:01 | and things would be much less in
or out of focus than they are now.
| | 06:04 | So if I take this F-Stop and I'll dial it
down to 0.1 and then I'll hit Command+R or
| | 06:09 | Ctrl+R on the keyboard, you'll see that when I
do that, I now have an extreme depth of field.
| | 06:15 | My focus plane is still in focus, but I've
got a lot of depth of field coming into and
| | 06:20 | out of that region, going off into the distance,
things are getting out of focus, and the in
| | 06:24 | the foreground, things are out of focus.
| | 06:26 | And I did that without using the depth of
field adjustments under the Details tab.
| | 06:29 | Now in the Physical Render Engine Settings,
Command+B or Ctrl+B on the keyboard to get there.
| | 06:35 | The quality of the depth of field is controlled by the
sampling quality in the Physical Render Settings.
| | 06:41 | So under the Sampler there is a method for
sampling and then there's a Sampling Quality.
| | 06:47 | I'm going to just for right now turn the
Sampling Quality from Low to High and when I render
| | 06:53 | again, Command+R or Ctrl+R on the keyboard,
you're going to notice a couple of things.
| | 06:56 | First of all, it's going to
take a lot longer to render.
| | 06:58 | Let's move the Render Settings out of the way.
| | 07:01 | This rendering is going to take quite a bit
of time with the Sample Quality set so high.
| | 07:04 | So we're going to fast forward through the
rendering to get to the fully rendered image.
| | 07:08 | But the quality of the rendering
is going to be very, very good.
| | 07:12 | The general rule of thumb is that you have
to adjust your sample quality based on the
| | 07:16 | amount of time you have
to render your project.
| | 07:18 | Obviously, you want to always go for the
highest quality possible, but sometimes you need to
| | 07:22 | dial it down to make adjustments
for the time you have to render.
| | 07:26 | So you can see those are the two basic methods
for creating depth of field inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 07:31 | We've got the built-in Render Engine which
is available to all the versions of CINEMA
| | 07:35 | 4D and then we've got the Physical Render
Engine which is available to the Broadcast,
| | 07:38 | Studio, and Visualize versions of CINEMA 4D.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating dynamic camera movement with Motion Camera| 00:00 | New to CINEMA 4D R14 is a very special
new tag called the Motion Camera Tag.
| | 00:05 | What Motion Camera Tag allows you to do is add
dynamic motion to Camera object without any keyframes.
| | 00:11 | In order to see what this tag does I'm going
to first need to add a camera to the scene.
| | 00:15 | Let's click on the Camera object and when I
have the camera; I'm not looking through
| | 00:19 | it yet, I just have it on the scene.
| | 00:20 | Let's right-click on the Camera object and
go to Motion Camera Tags>Motion Camera.
| | 00:25 | When I do that, my camera
jumped to center of the world.
| | 00:27 | Now that's a very big gotcha.
| | 00:29 | There's a special workflow to use with this.
| | 00:30 | Right now I just want to
talk about the settings.
| | 00:33 | Let's see what this has
actually done to our camera.
| | 00:35 | We'll hit Play on the keyboard and you could
see that the camera is now kind of bouncing
| | 00:40 | and rotating as if this
little guy were moving.
| | 00:44 | And if we look through our Camera object,
I'll click on the Active Camera icon you can
| | 00:49 | see that we've actually
got movement in our camera.
| | 00:54 | That's all without any keyframes.
| | 00:57 | Let's uncheck the Active Camera
icon and look back at our guy here.
| | 01:02 | Now this cute little guy is holding
the camera over his right shoulder.
| | 01:05 | I can control the height of him
by adjusting the Height slider.
| | 01:08 | I can adjust the Parallax which is how far
off the center of his head, the object is,
| | 01:13 | and there's an X, Y, Z
value for each of those.
| | 01:16 | And I can also add additional rotation
and these values can all be keyframed.
| | 01:21 | I can adjust the Head, I can also adjust the
Camera Rotation, so he can be rotating it
| | 01:27 | based on his position.
| | 01:29 | The Link field allows you to work around that camera
jumping issue that I talk about just a moment ago.
| | 01:35 | We'll talk about that in just a second.
| | 01:37 | Within the Animation field, there are
some additional options for spline paths.
| | 01:42 | So what we have the ability to do is to
have this object travel along a spline.
| | 01:47 | So if I middle mouse-click, so I'm going to go
to the top view and draw a very quick spline.
| | 01:53 | So let's grab a B spline and
go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, like that.
| | 01:59 | Now when I go to my tag, if I take my path
spline and drag it in there, what happens
| | 02:05 | is my camera jumps to the end of that.
| | 02:07 | I now have a Camera
Position field that I can use.
| | 02:10 | If I keyframe that value, let's Rewind back
to 0 and I'll hold down the Ctrl key and set
| | 02:15 | a keyframe for camera position and then move
forward to frame 90 and then advance my camera
| | 02:21 | position to the end.
| | 02:22 | Ctrl+Click on that circle again
to set the keyframe for frame 90.
| | 02:27 | When we look through our camera, you'll see
that not only is it bobbing up and down, but
| | 02:32 | now it's moving along that path.
| | 02:33 | Now it's moving a little too
fast, but you get the idea.
| | 02:38 | Let's look through this
Perspective view window.
| | 02:42 | So in addition to the bobbing,
we're getting movement.
| | 02:45 | The tag allows for a lot of flexibility in
the style of movement that you're creating.
| | 02:49 | There's a Dynamics and Motion tag.
| | 02:52 | Underneath the Motion tag there is a preset,
and I'm going to delete the spline out of
| | 02:57 | here for now and just to get our camera back to the
center of the world so it's not actually moving anymore.
| | 03:02 | You can see that it's
just bobbing up and down.
| | 03:04 | I'm going to leave that playing for a second
and go back to the tag and under the Presets
| | 03:08 | I'm going to click on that and I'll do Calm.
| | 03:11 | Calm is basically no movement at all.
| | 03:14 | Then Steady Cam 1 is a
very nice gentle movement.
| | 03:18 | Steady Cam 2 is a variation on that
with a little bit of rotation in it.
| | 03:22 | Then you've got Ego which is a little bit
of rotation and Z movement and then we've
| | 03:27 | got Dogma Cam which has a lot more
movement in and it's a little bit jittery.
| | 03:34 | The Focus field allows you to have your
cameras focus on a specific location in space.
| | 03:40 | Generally speaking, I wouldn't use this, because
I normally want to be able to control exactly
| | 03:45 | what my object is looking at.
| | 03:47 | So I'll leave this one alone.
| | 03:49 | So let's take a look at how to use that Link
field, the control where the Camera Position is.
| | 03:53 | I'm going to go to the Window menu
and I have a file already opened here.
| | 03:57 | It's in the exercise files.
| | 03:58 | It's called motion-cam-START, and this is just
a very simple scene of some blocks, they're
| | 04:03 | frozen in space and they act of tumbling
down under this plane and there's no keyframes
| | 04:07 | at all set on this, so I'm
going to scroll back to 0.
| | 04:10 | Let's add a camera to the scene and before we look
through that camera, let's rename it Hero Cam.
| | 04:16 | Before we look through it again, let's add a
new camera to the scene and let's call that
| | 04:20 | camera Motion Cam.
| | 04:23 | The reason I called this Motion Cam is because
this is the camera that's going to hold the
| | 04:26 | Motion Camera tag.
| | 04:27 | The general workflow that you want to use is
that you first want to establish the camera
| | 04:31 | that you are looking through your scene at.
| | 04:33 | This is the angle that I'm
happy with for my scene.
| | 04:36 | I know that if I add the Motion Camera tag to the
camera, it's going to jump to the center of the world.
| | 04:41 | So let's right-click on this and go to
Motion Camera Tags and add Motion Camera.
| | 04:45 | Sure enough, there's my camera.
| | 04:46 | It jumped to the center of the world, but
this is the view that I want to look through.
| | 04:51 | I want to be looking from
this camera at the world.
| | 04:54 | If I were to look through the Motion Cam you see at
the center of the world inside one of those blocks.
| | 04:58 | The way to get around this
is through the Link field.
| | 05:00 | If I click on the tag and go to the Rig Property,
underneath the Rig Property is the Link field.
| | 05:07 | In this field, I want to put the Hero Cam.
| | 05:09 | So let's take the Hero Cam
and drop it into that field.
| | 05:13 | So what happens is the Motion Camera now
jumps to the position of the Hero Cam.
| | 05:17 | The other thing that's happening is that it's
also adding to the position, the Rig Height.
| | 05:23 | Now if I don't want to use the Rig Height I
can click the Override Rig Dimension settings
| | 05:28 | and that's going to bop the camera right
to the same location as the Link object.
| | 05:32 | I could also have zeroed out
the Rig settings there as well.
| | 05:36 | Now what's happened is that the Motion
Cam is locked wherever the Hero Cam goes.
| | 05:40 | Generally speaking, you want to have the Motion Camera
down below the Hero Camera in the Object Manager.
| | 05:46 | So wherever I move this Hero Cam,
the Motion Cam will follow.
| | 05:49 | So if I grab the Hero Cam and move it on its X axis,
you can see that both cameras are locked together.
| | 05:55 | There is my motion camera.
| | 05:58 | Let's do a very simple camera move here.
| | 05:59 | I want to set some keyframes for the Hero Cam.
| | 06:02 | And when I tried to drag it, be very careful
about which camera you're trying to drag.
| | 06:06 | The Motion Camera will not move, because it's
being governed by the position of the Hero Cam.
| | 06:10 | So make sure you actually select the
Hero Cam up here in the Object Manager.
| | 06:15 | Now I can move those guys around.
| | 06:17 | So what I want to do next
is set up some keyframes.
| | 06:19 | If I take this camera, and I'll just do
a very simple move from left to right.
| | 06:22 | I'll set some keyframes here at time
0 for the position of the Hero Cam.
| | 06:26 | Let's go to the Coordinate Properties and
I'll set Position and I'll set Rotation and
| | 06:31 | then I'm going to go forward in time.
| | 06:32 | Let's go to forward to about frame 90 or so.
| | 06:35 | I'm going to set my preview range down to
89 and then move my slider to 89 as well.
| | 06:42 | I'll take my camera and move it over here
and then use a little bit of rotation as well
| | 06:47 | and adjust the pitch as well.
| | 06:49 | So adjust it like that.
| | 06:51 | Now I'll just take the Hero Cam and set
those keyframe values at that moment in time.
| | 06:57 | I was holding down the Ctrl key
to set those keyframe values.
| | 07:01 | If I look through my Motion Camera now, I
can hide the Hero Cam and when I hit play;
| | 07:09 | let's Rewind back to 0 and hit Play, you can see that,
now we've got this really interesting motion.
| | 07:15 | Now that little ball that you see dancing
through the screen is the selection of my Hero Cam.
| | 07:20 | So if I deselect that I
won't see that anymore.
| | 07:26 | Underneath the Hero Cam if I go to the Motion
Properties I can adjust the intensity of the
| | 07:31 | Footsteps and Head Rotation
and Cam Rotation and Position.
| | 07:34 | If I add in a little bit of intensity on the
Head Rotation, let's hit Play, and we can
| | 07:39 | crank that up a little bit. There we go.
| | 07:43 | I can now also twirl these
values open and adjust them as well.
| | 07:47 | We've got a Frequency and Maximum Value.
| | 07:50 | The Maximum Value is the range in
which the object will be allowed to move.
| | 07:54 | The Frequency is how fast it
will move within that range.
| | 07:58 | So let's Stop playback for a second.
| | 08:01 | So within the Head Rotation, I'll change the
max value from 5 and let's make that say 50.
| | 08:10 | Now this is going to be way too much.
| | 08:11 | I'm just trying to illustrate a point here.
| | 08:13 | Now when I hit Play you'll see that I've got
a much wider range of rotation values that
| | 08:18 | it's allowed to move in.
| | 08:19 | Let's change the Frequency value from 1 to
say about 4 by 4 by 4 and this is going to
| | 08:25 | have the camera moving much faster.
| | 08:27 | So if you're trying to create that super
earthquake shaky cam look, adjusting the Frequency and
| | 08:35 | adjusting the maximum values will give you a
lot more range of motion on those sliders.
| | 08:41 | As you can see, the Motion Cam Tag allows
you to add dynamic motion to just about any
| | 08:45 | camera move.
| | 08:46 | Experiment with the settings to see what
kind of cool new movement you can come up with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building smooth shots with Camera Morph| 00:00 | Another new addition to the camera tools in CINEMA
4D R14 is something called the Morph Cam Tag.
| | 00:06 | The Morph Camera Tag allows you to create
smooth transitions between Camera Objects.
| | 00:11 | I'm in an empty scene file here.
| | 00:13 | I'm going to add a cube to the scene and
then just add a camera here for this position.
| | 00:18 | Now I'm in the Perspective view, I'm
not looking through the camera yet.
| | 00:21 | What I want to do is create a
transition between two cameras.
| | 00:24 | So let's add a second camera.
| | 00:25 | I'm going to orbit around a little
bit and add a camera right about here.
| | 00:29 | That's pretty good.
| | 00:31 | Then I'm going to orbit around and add a camera
down here and then I'm going to add one, and
| | 00:41 | let's also rotate this camera a little bit.
| | 00:42 | So let's adjust the banking so
that it's dutched. There we go.
| | 00:47 | So now you can see we've got
this three Camera Objects here.
| | 00:50 | Now what I want to do is create a transition from
this camera, to this camera, to this camera.
| | 00:58 | Before the only way to do that would have
been to take the position information from
| | 01:02 | these other two cameras and put it into an animation
track and have it animate along a single camera.
| | 01:08 | Now that's a bit cumbersome to do.
| | 01:10 | So rather than do that, the programmers have given us
this really cool tag called the Camera Morph Tag.
| | 01:15 | I'm going to uncheck the look through active
camera button and get out here into the world.
| | 01:20 | The way the Morph Camera Tag works is that it
needs to have its own dedicated camera to work on.
| | 01:24 | So let's add a new camera to the
scene and call this Morph Cam.
| | 01:30 | The next thing I want to do is name my
Camera Object so I don't get them confused.
| | 01:34 | So let's call this one Camera 1 and I'll up
arrow to Camera 2 and then up arrow and Camera 3.
| | 01:41 | Now that I've got those cameras named
I've got my Morph Camera in the scene.
| | 01:45 | Let's back out a bit so we can see
what exactly is going to happen.
| | 01:47 | So I've got this Morph Camera that's way up
over here and I've got this three cameras
| | 01:51 | that I want to use as the position
information for this Morph Camera.
| | 01:54 | So I Right+Click on the Morph Camera go to Motion
Camera Tags and get Camera Morph. N othing happens.
| | 02:01 | That's because I've got to
tell it what cameras to use.
| | 02:05 | Now there's two different
modes for the Morph Camera Tag.
| | 02:07 | There's the Simple Morph which where you can morph
between two cameras or we can do a multi-morph.
| | 02:13 | Simple Morph is easy enough to understand.
| | 02:15 | But let's show you Multi Morph, because once
you see Multi Morph you'll be able to do Simple
| | 02:19 | Morph with no problem.
| | 02:20 | So in the Multi Morph, you get
this new Multi Morph field.
| | 02:24 | In order to grab and put these
cameras in here, I just drag them down.
| | 02:27 | So I go from camera 1, and as soon as I did
that you'll notice that my Morph Camera has
| | 02:31 | now jumped to the position of camera 1.
| | 02:34 | Now let's add in camera 2 and put it right
below there and then camera 3 right below there.
| | 02:41 | So now I've got cameras 1, 2, and 3.
| | 02:43 | As I did that, you notice
that I now have a white line.
| | 02:46 | That white line is connecting all those
cameras and you could see I've got a tag on there
| | 02:50 | visibly that calls them 1, 2, and 3.
| | 02:54 | The way to transition from camera to
camera is by using the Blend slider.
| | 02:59 | When I do the Blend slider, my Morph Camera
which is now shown in blue, will move from
| | 03:03 | position to position.
| | 03:05 | So let's see what that looks like
looking through the Morph Camera.
| | 03:08 | So when I click on the active camera icon I can now
transition through them by adjusting the blend.
| | 03:14 | You can see I got a really nice smooth
transition from position to position.
| | 03:18 | If I want to animate that, I can
just set a keyframe for the Blend.
| | 03:22 | So I'll hold down the Ctrl key and
click on the gray dot next to Blend.
| | 03:27 | Let's move forward to frame 90 and then I'm
going to adjust the blend to be 100% and then
| | 03:33 | Ctrl+Click again to set the keyframe.
| | 03:35 | And now when I hit Play, you can see that
I've got a nice smooth motion between each
| | 03:41 | of those cameras.
| | 03:42 | So let's see that in practice.
| | 03:43 | This was a very simple example with a cube.
| | 03:46 | Let's see what that looks
like in the scene file.
| | 03:47 | So I've got a scene file open already.
| | 03:49 | It's morph-cam-START in the exercise files
and I've got my four cameras already set up.
| | 03:55 | These are the four cameras I want to look
at it from and I've got animation of a car
| | 03:59 | going down a track.
| | 04:00 | You can see the car is going around the curves and
that black line is the path that the car is following.
| | 04:07 | So when I look through the cameras; I
want to look through camera 1 first.
| | 04:11 | Now in this project file you'll notice that
when I click the Active Camera Icon that my
| | 04:15 | camera doesn't jump to the location of the
new camera, that's because I have a new view
| | 04:19 | panel set up for this scene.
| | 04:22 | So if I go to the Window menu and go to New View
panel, this new view panel is the camera window.
| | 04:29 | This is the viewport that I want to use to
look through my cameras and I'll leave that
| | 04:32 | floating right here.
| | 04:33 | I can also park it in the interface, but
it's good to just be floating right now.
| | 04:37 | Now that we got that in camera floating there,
when I click these icons for active camera,
| | 04:42 | you can see that it's going to jump from position 1
to position 2, position 3, and then position 4.
| | 04:50 | So the car is going to go pass the camera
in each of those different positions and it
| | 04:54 | creates some nice dynamic shots for me.
| | 04:57 | So now we need to add our Morph Cams.
| | 04:59 | Let's uncheck the Active Camera icon
and then add a new camera to the scenes.
| | 05:03 | So I'm going to click up here in the window
and add a new camera, and we'll call this
| | 05:07 | camera Morph Cam.
| | 05:09 | Let's right-click on the Morph Cam and go to
Motion Camera Tags>Camera Morph and we're
| | 05:13 | going to change it from
Simple Morph to Multi Morph.
| | 05:16 | In the Multi Morph field
we're going to add our cameras.
| | 05:19 | So rather than drag them one at a time, I'm
going to click the lock button on the Attribute
| | 05:24 | Manager and then select all of these and then drag
them in all at once and then click the unlock button.
| | 05:31 | Now I can click back on the
tag to see my properties here.
| | 05:34 | So when I look through the Morph Camera, this
viewport here is the one that's going to change.
| | 05:38 | So now I can click the active camera icon on the
Morph Cam and you can see it jumps through there.
| | 05:43 | Now this red line represents the path that my
camera is going to be traveling as it moves
| | 05:46 | through the scenes.
| | 05:47 | Let's orbit around that and
see what it's doing here.
| | 05:51 | When I animate that, let's adjust the
blend and have it go through those positions.
| | 05:55 | You can see it hits its marks, but there's
a spot where it actually passes underneath
| | 05:59 | the ground plane.
| | 06:01 | CINEMA 4D has a method that it's using to
interpret the space between the cameras and
| | 06:07 | that's done under this Interpolation field.
| | 06:10 | You can see that there are two different
versions, I could do linear which is just a straight
| | 06:13 | line from location to location
or I can do Soft 1 or Soft 2.
| | 06:19 | And neither one of those
really fixes my problems.
| | 06:22 | So that means I have to add in a new camera.
| | 06:24 | Let's change this back to Soft 1, because
I think that gives me the best result.
| | 06:28 | Now I need to add an intermediate camera right
here in this area to fix this spot where the
| | 06:33 | camera goes underneath the ground.
| | 06:36 | So what I'm going to do is to navigate through
the scene using the Blend Option on the Morph
| | 06:40 | Tag and so when I blend through, I'm going to
blend through to about this location here.
| | 06:47 | In this viewport, I'm going to add a new camera
and I'll click the Add Camera button and that
| | 06:52 | adds a camera right at
that location and space.
| | 06:55 | This new camera I'm going to call Camera 3.5.
| | 06:59 | That's how I know it goes
between cameras 3 and 4.
| | 07:02 | Now before I add that into
the mix, I want to adjust it.
| | 07:04 | If I just add it to the Morph Tag right now,
it's not going to do anything for me.
| | 07:08 | I need to adjust its position.
| | 07:09 | So let's look through this camera.
| | 07:12 | And in we're looking through that camera,
we're going to now move it up above the track.
| | 07:17 | You can see as I adjust it here it's
going to change its position there.
| | 07:21 | We want to have it just go up a
little bit and have it look through.
| | 07:25 | The camera that I'm looking
at is this one right here.
| | 07:28 | I want to adjust it around that way and tilt it up
that way and then I think move it back just a bit.
| | 07:36 | So let's dolly back so it's a
little bit closer to that midpoint.
| | 07:42 | So what I've done is I've put it
about midway between these two cameras.
| | 07:46 | So what's going to happen is when I add this
to the Morph Tag, this red line is going to
| | 07:50 | get drawn through this camera now and
that blue camera is going to jump position.
| | 07:55 | So let's go to the Morph Tag and let's take 3.
5 and put it right down here into the Morph
| | 08:00 | Tag and you can see that my camera jumped.
| | 08:03 | Let's take 3.5 and put it right down
here as well just to keep things neat.
| | 08:07 | In the Morph Tag now, when I blend through,
let's look through the Morph Camera and let's
| | 08:14 | scrub through it, and you can see that as
we scrub through, there's our camera and it
| | 08:19 | hits its mark right there, boom.
| | 08:22 | Now what we need to do is add some keyframes.
| | 08:25 | Let's scrub backwards in time to time 0 and
before I add the keyframes, let's hide all
| | 08:29 | this other cameras.
| | 08:30 | They're confusing up the scene.
| | 08:32 | So I'll hold down the Opt or Alt key on the
PC and I'm going to click twice and hold on
| | 08:36 | this number 1 on the steady dots.
| | 08:39 | Click twice and then drag down.
| | 08:42 | That get rids of the spline, that get rids of the
cameras, and that really cleans up my viewport.
| | 08:47 | So now I can set my
keyframes on the Morph Tag.
| | 08:51 | So let's rewind the time 0 and go back to 0
position on the tag and I'll hold down the
| | 08:55 | Ctrl key, set a keyframe for 0% at time 0.
| | 08:59 | Let's go forward to frame 90 or so and the
point at which it goes past this camera.
| | 09:04 | That's a good spot right there.
| | 09:05 | It's already gone passed there.
| | 09:07 | So if I back up it's going to be pretty much outside
the cameras field of view at this point in time.
| | 09:12 | And let's adjust the cameras so that we are at the
end of our movement which is right about there.
| | 09:19 | So let's set a keyframe now.
| | 09:21 | I'll hold down the Ctrl
key and click on that dot.
| | 09:24 | So now when we scrub through that you
can see we've got this great motion.
| | 09:27 | It feels almost like a helicopter shot as
we're flying over the track and it's getting
| | 09:31 | us a kind of motion and dynamic movement that
would be really hard to get without having
| | 09:36 | been able to set those camera positions first.
| | 09:40 | So let's hit Play and
see what that looks like.
| | 09:43 | I'm looking through this viewport.
| | 09:46 | So whichever viewport is active is the one
that CINEMA 4D is going to actually show you.
| | 09:50 | So let's click on this viewport and make it
active and see what our camera is doing.
| | 09:55 | You can see there's a little bit of a bump in
that movement there right from Camera 3 to 3.5.
| | 10:03 | So let's Pause playback for a
second and let's go to Camera 3.5.
| | 10:08 | And it's right in this
range here as where it hits.
| | 10:10 | So what we want to do is go to 3.5 and
select it and just adjust the rotation.
| | 10:17 | You notice that my Morph Camera is moving as
well and that's because when I change 3.5,
| | 10:23 | it changes the position of the Morph Cam.
| | 10:24 | I can also adjust its rotation just a bit.
| | 10:27 | And that should smooth
things out. There we go.
| | 10:33 | Boom!
| | 10:34 | It hits its mark quite a bit better.
| | 10:36 | The Morph Camera gives you a tremendous ability
to create smooth dynamic moves in a way that's
| | 10:41 | very intuitive.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Changing Shapes with DeformersThe deformer workflow| 00:00 | In an earlier module of the CINEMA 4D Essential
Series we talked about the idea of different
| | 00:05 | object types and sub-categories.
| | 00:07 | One of those is something called an Operator
Object and within the Operator Objects are
| | 00:12 | the Deformers, and Deformers are a way to
modify and distort and change the shapes of
| | 00:17 | your objects non-destructively.
| | 00:20 | I'm going to add a cube to the scene and the
Operator Objects, the Deformers, are purple
| | 00:25 | icons and if I click and hold on these, these are
all the different Deformers that we have access to.
| | 00:30 | I'm going to start off with something
very simple which is just a Bend Deformer.
| | 00:34 | The Bend Deformer allows you to bend your
objects, and if I select Bend Deformer and
| | 00:39 | go to the Object Properties and adjust the
Strength, then you can see that that Bend
| | 00:44 | Deformer is bending, but
it's not affecting the cube.
| | 00:48 | The reason it's not affecting the cube is
that Operators work in a very specific way.
| | 00:53 | Operator Objects like the Bend Deformer
only affect their parent or their peer.
| | 00:58 | That's really important to understand.
| | 01:00 | So if I take this Bend Deformer and I make
it a child of the cube, it's now affecting
| | 01:06 | its parent, the cube.
| | 01:08 | Now the thing you may have noticed is that
the cube when it bent, it distorted, it didn't
| | 01:12 | actually bend, and that's
because of a very important rule.
| | 01:16 | A single polygon edge cannot be bent.
| | 01:19 | You'll notice that my cube
is just one long edge here.
| | 01:23 | If I go to the cube and adjust the segments
on Y, along the Y axis, it's just set for
| | 01:30 | one segment now which is one
long edge from corner to corner.
| | 01:35 | Let's adjust that.
| | 01:36 | Let's make it say 10.
| | 01:38 | When I do that, I now have a much more
flexible cube and this Bend Deformer when I adjust
| | 01:43 | its Strength Property will
now bend the cube nicely.
| | 01:48 | Now the other way to use the
Deformers is in something called Peer mode.
| | 01:51 | The way that works is I need to have both of
the cube and the Bend Deformer as children
| | 01:56 | of the same objects.
| | 01:58 | Let's drop that down out of there by
dragging it out and let's add a new Null Object to
| | 02:02 | the scene and let's take both of
these objects and make them children.
| | 02:06 | So now that they're both children, you can see that the
Bend Deformer is in fact affecting the cube again.
| | 02:11 | Now this is my preferred
arrangement for using Deformers.
| | 02:14 | I almost never make them direct
children of the object I want them to affect.
| | 02:18 | The reason is that I now have a much
better degree of control over my Deformation.
| | 02:24 | One of the things that I have the ability to do
now is that I can animate the cube separately
| | 02:28 | from the Bend Deformer.
| | 02:29 | So let's see what that does.
| | 02:31 | I'm going to take the Bend Deformer and go to
the Strength and just crank it over like that.
| | 02:36 | Now watch what happens when I
animate the position of the cube.
| | 02:39 | I'll take the cube and just scrub
through the Y coordinate value.
| | 02:43 | Look what happens.
| | 02:44 | The cube actually animates through the Bend
Deformer and that's a really cool animation effect.
| | 02:50 | You can do all kinds of fun stuff with that
and that's something that you couldn't do if
| | 02:54 | the Bend Deformer were
parented directly to the cube.
| | 02:57 | Let's click and hold on this
Bend Deformer and take a look.
| | 02:59 | All of these purple icons are all
Operator Objects or all Deformers.
| | 03:03 | For the most part, they all work in the same
way by modifying their parent or their peer.
| | 03:07 | There are some more advanced ones though that
we'll take a little bit of fiddling to work
| | 03:10 | with, for example, Shrink
Wrap and Morph and Camera.
| | 03:14 | Those kinds of Deformers are a little bit
more advanced, but for the most part all the
| | 03:18 | other ones work in that super simple way.
| | 03:20 | Try experimenting with all the different
deformers and see how much fun you can have.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making a fish swim with the Wind deformer| 00:00 | The Deformer Objects in CINEMA
4D are incredibly versatile.
| | 00:04 | Some of them are passive objects that
need to be animated like the Bend Deformer.
| | 00:07 | But there's another very special Deformer
called the Wind Deformer that allows you to
| | 00:12 | create movement without any keyframes at all.
| | 00:14 | I'm going to use a Wind Deformer to
give this fish here some swimming motion.
| | 00:17 | So the fish hierarchy that I have here has
eyes and a fish NURB and all the different
| | 00:22 | parts of the fish underneath.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to twirl that closed.
| | 00:26 | Now remember the Deformer Objects work on
their parent or the peer and I prefer to use
| | 00:30 | them in Peer mode.
| | 00:31 | So I'm going to add a new Null Object to the
scene and I'm going to call this one Fish Uber.
| | 00:37 | And I'll make an umlaut by holding down
Option key hitting U and then hitting U one more
| | 00:42 | time and then go in B, E, R.
| | 00:45 | That's a little throwback to
the German origins of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:49 | So I'll take this fish
parent and put that under there.
| | 00:52 | The Deformer that we want to
use is the Wind Deformer.
| | 00:55 | So if I click and hold on this, I'm
going to go down to the Wind Object.
| | 00:58 | It looks like a flag, that's the icon for it.
| | 01:01 | When I add it to the scene, it
looks like nothing's happened.
| | 01:04 | That's because when I created this scene file,
I left it in Texture mode and over here on
| | 01:10 | the left-hand side of the
interface is Texture mode.
| | 01:12 | We need to get out of Texture mode and into
model mode to be able to see the handles for
| | 01:16 | our Wind Deformer.
| | 01:17 | So let's click on model mode and now we
can see the handles for our Wind Deformer.
| | 01:21 | Let's switch to the Move tool and let's back
out just a bit and orbit around to see where
| | 01:25 | we're at with this fish.
| | 01:26 | Now when fish swim, they wiggle
their body from the head backwards.
| | 01:32 | Now the way the Wind Deformer works is that it
creates a sine wave through an object along
| | 01:37 | the X axis of the Wind Deformer itself.
| | 01:40 | So what I need to do is to line the X axis of the
Wind Deformer up with the length of the fish.
| | 01:46 | So I'm going to take the
Wind Deformer and rotate it.
| | 01:48 | So I'll hit R on the keyboard and rotate it
around like this and I'll hold the Shift key
| | 01:52 | down to constrain the
motion to even increments.
| | 01:56 | So now I've rotated it -90 degrees.
| | 01:59 | Nothing's happened yet.
| | 01:59 | It hasn't deformed the fish that's because I need to
make the Wind Deformer a peer with the fish parent.
| | 02:05 | So let's drag Wind into the
hierarchy here right up above.
| | 02:08 | And you can see as soon as I
do that my fish is deformed.
| | 02:12 | And that's kind of funny looking.
| | 02:14 | What's going on is that the X axis of the
Wind Deformer is controlling the length of
| | 02:19 | the sine wave and then the Z axis is
controlling the amplitude of the sine wave.
| | 02:25 | So the way you do that; if you look in the
Object Properties of the Wind Deformer we
| | 02:28 | can adjust the Size and the Amplitude.
| | 02:31 | Remember the Size is along the X, axis
and we don't want to have it so short.
| | 02:35 | The shorter it is the more waves you
get in your fish and that's too many.
| | 02:39 | So what I want to do is back that out and
have it be somewhere in that area right there.
| | 02:45 | The beautiful thing about the Wind Deformer
is that it doesn't need any keyframes at all.
| | 02:49 | If I hit Play, you can see
that my fish is now moving.
| | 02:56 | The motion that I have there is
still a little bit too long.
| | 02:59 | So I'm going to scroll it down just a bit on the
Size and bring it in to about the 130 range.
| | 03:05 | I think that's pretty good.
| | 03:06 | Now the Amplitude is how big the
waves are along the Z axis here.
| | 03:11 | So those are a little bit big.
| | 03:12 | Right now I'm going to scroll
them down to about there, 19 or so.
| | 03:17 | Now let's hit Play and see what
that looks like. Very good.
| | 03:24 | That motion feels good,
but it's a little too slow.
| | 03:27 | The way we change the speed of it
is by adjusting the Frequency.
| | 03:30 | So let's take the Frequency and crank it up.
| | 03:32 | Let's try 3 for now.
| | 03:35 | I'll hit Play one more time. Not bad.
| | 03:38 | Let's make it six, let's double it again
and I'll hit Play again. There we go.
| | 03:45 | Looking great.
| | 03:48 | One of the things you'll notice about this
movement; let's orbit around here, you can
| | 03:51 | see that the fish's head is deforming as well.
| | 03:54 | Let's Pause that for moment.
| | 03:55 | I'll orbit back around and
switch to the Move tool.
| | 03:58 | As I move this around, you want to be really
careful about where you put the Deformer.
| | 04:03 | The flag motion of the Deformer is
based on the origin of the object.
| | 04:07 | So where waves from is going to be
this little location right here.
| | 04:12 | Let's move it back just a little bit behind the
eyeballs and let's hit play again. There we go.
| | 04:18 | Now we've got a little bit
more movement on the head.
| | 04:20 | You can see that he's wiggling his head back and
forth and his body is following along nicely.
| | 04:26 | And this really creates a pretty
decent sense of movement in the fish.
| | 04:30 | It's not nearly as good as creating a
dedicated rig for a fish swimming using joints.
| | 04:35 | But this is a very convincing movement.
| | 04:38 | That's pretty much all there is to
making the fish swim with the Wind Deformer.
| | 04:41 | There's a very important option though that
I wanted to talk about and that's something
| | 04:44 | called the Stick Texture Tag.
| | 04:46 | The Stick Texture Tag is a very special tag that
forces the textures on your objects to stick to them.
| | 04:52 | When I created this fish I created it
using something called Flat Mapping.
| | 04:56 | The Flat Texture Mapping that I used to
create the fish does not allow for the texture to
| | 05:02 | actually stick on the
fish when it gets deformed.
| | 05:04 | The texture normally slides.
| | 05:06 | What I've done is in the hierarchy of the fish
; for example, on the fish body and actually
| | 05:11 | on all the objects, I've right+clicked and
gone to the CINEMA 4D tags and added a Stick
| | 05:17 | Texture Tag and it looks
like this little guy here.
| | 05:19 | It's a texture icon with a pin stuck in it.
| | 05:22 | If I were to delete this tag off of the
fish, watch what happens to the texture.
| | 05:26 | Let's delete that just from the fish body.
| | 05:29 | Now when I hit Play; it's a little bit hard
to tell in this example, but the fish texture
| | 05:34 | is actually sliding along the body.
| | 05:36 | So it's really important when you're going
to deform something and you're using Flat
| | 05:39 | Mapping anything other than
UVW mapping on your textures.
| | 05:42 | Then you want to always use the Stick Texture
Tag to force that texture to stick on your
| | 05:47 | object when it gets deformed.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding movement with the Spline Wrap| 00:00 | The Spline Wrap object is a special deformer that
allows you to distort or wrap an object along a spline.
| | 00:07 | It can be use for all kinds of fun things.
| | 00:09 | In this case, we're going to use it to
add motion to the movement of our fish.
| | 00:14 | In the previous movie we created a moving
fish with the Wind Deformer and when I hit
| | 00:18 | Play here you can see that we've got a great looking
animation to our fish, but he's not moving anywhere.
| | 00:22 | He's just swimming in one spot.
| | 00:24 | The Spline Wrap object can be used to give
some really convincing movement to our fish.
| | 00:29 | The way the Spline Wrap works is it's a deformer
so it's need to be working with parent or peer.
| | 00:35 | But also needs a spline in
order for it to function.
| | 00:37 | Before we add a Spline Wrap to the scene, let's
draw a new spline to have our fish swim along.
| | 00:42 | So I'm going to switch to the four-way view
and in the top view let's back out just a
| | 00:46 | bit and I'm going to draw a B spline.
| | 00:50 | Now I normally use B splines whenever
I'm creating splines for motion paths.
| | 00:54 | The reason is that B splines create a very
smooth path through objects and it's very
| | 00:59 | hard to put a kink in them.
| | 01:00 | So I'm going to start by clicking through here
and making a path for my fish to swim on.
| | 01:06 | So the first point here that I
made is a little bit rough.
| | 01:08 | So I'll switch to the Move
tool, E on the keyboard.
| | 01:10 | I can click on that one point and just
kinda drag it over here. There we go.
| | 01:16 | Now with the Spline drawn, I can now add a
Spline Wrap to the field so under the Deformer
| | 01:20 | Objects is the Spline Wrap Object.
| | 01:22 | It looks like a little tube
being wrapped along a Spline.
| | 01:26 | So let's add it to the scene.
| | 01:27 | Now I need a new Null Object and I'm
going to call Null Object, Fish Wrap.
| | 01:33 | Then I'll take my Fish Uber and my Spline Wrap
and put them as children of the Fish Wrap.
| | 01:39 | Then I'll take the spline and move it
up above the fish in the hierarchy.
| | 01:44 | CINEMA 4D evaluates the Object Manager from
the top down so you always want to have the
| | 01:48 | thing that's driving the position of
objects above the objects that are being driven.
| | 01:53 | So in this case the spline is going to be
driving the motion of the Spline Wrap Object
| | 01:56 | which is going to control the fish.
| | 01:58 | So it's evaluating
downward in a nice smooth path.
| | 02:01 | Now what we can do is let's
back out in the Perspective view.
| | 02:05 | So we can see the entire
spline when we create this.
| | 02:08 | Now nothing happened when we first
added the Spline Wrap to the scene.
| | 02:11 | That's because on the Spline Wrap, there is a
Spline field and it doesn't know to do anything
| | 02:16 | until you put something in that Spline field.
| | 02:18 | So let's drag our Spline into that field.
| | 02:21 | And when we do that, oh boy, our
fish gets massively distorted.
| | 02:26 | The reason for that is this Axis field.
| | 02:28 | The Axis by default is the X
axis on the positive direction.
| | 02:33 | We built our fish along the Z
axis in the positive direction.
| | 02:37 | So what we need to do is
change this from +X to +Z.
| | 02:42 | When we do that, now our fish is still distorted, but
he's facing the right direction along the spline.
| | 02:47 | The next thing we have to turn off
is something called Fit Spline.
| | 02:50 | Under the modes here is
the Fit Spline pulldown.
| | 02:54 | When we click on that, we're going to tell it
to keep the length of the original object.
| | 02:58 | When we do that, we now have
our fish, but he's upside down.
| | 03:02 | That's because the Spline Wrap
doesn't really know which way is up.
| | 03:05 | There's two ways to fix this.
| | 03:06 | We could either adjust the rotation of
the object underneath the Rotation Option.
| | 03:10 | We can change the Banking to be 180
and that would flip the fish over.
| | 03:14 | The better way to do it though is to use
something called a Rail Spline and a Rail Spline is
| | 03:18 | a spline that the Spline Wrap
will use to tell which way is up.
| | 03:22 | So we're going to create a Rail
Spline based on our existing Fish Spline.
| | 03:26 | So let's take this spline here, hold
down the Ctrl key, and drag a copy down.
| | 03:31 | Let's Rename that new
copy and call it Fish rail.
| | 03:36 | On the Rail Spline I'm in Point mode still.
| | 03:38 | I want to click on a single point out here in the
editor window and then hit Command+A or Ctrl+A.
| | 03:44 | Now we've selected all this points and let's take
that Spline and just drag it up on the Y axis.
| | 03:48 | It doesn't really matter how far.
| | 03:49 | I'm going to keep it right about here.
| | 03:52 | In order for the Spline Wrap to use the Fish
rail, we have to take the Fish rail and place
| | 03:55 | it in a special field.
| | 03:56 | So on the Spline Wrap Object under
the Spline Options is the Rail field.
| | 04:01 | So let's take the Fish rail and drag it right
in there and what happens when we do that,
| | 04:05 | our fish immediately flops upward.
| | 04:08 | So now we've got our fish facing
the right direction on the spline.
| | 04:12 | Now we can get it moving.
| | 04:13 | The parameter we want to animate to get
the fish to move is the Offset Parameter.
| | 04:18 | Let's scroll back to 0 and then Offset Parameter
I'm going to hold down the Ctrl key and click
| | 04:23 | on the gray circle.
| | 04:24 | That turns it into a red dot.
| | 04:27 | Now I've set a keyframe
for the offset at time 0.
| | 04:30 | Let's animate forward to frame 90 and then let's
change the offset to 100%, and watch as I move that.
| | 04:37 | You'll see our fish travel through there.
| | 04:40 | Now I hold down the Ctrl
key and set a keyframe.
| | 04:43 | Let's Rewind back to 0 and hit
Play and watch our fish swim.
| | 04:51 | Now the great thing about this, let's orbit
around and take a look at that up close.
| | 04:55 | You can see that we've got
great movement on our fish.
| | 05:01 | One other thing that's happening is the
frequency of the fish movement doesn't quite match up
| | 05:06 | with the speed that he's going.
| | 05:07 | So we could go to the Fish Wind
Object and adjust the Frequency up.
| | 05:12 | Let's crank the Frequency up to say 9.
| | 05:14 | So he's got a little bit more energy
as he's swimming through the scene.
| | 05:17 | That's still not quite enough.
| | 05:19 | Let's make it about 20.
| | 05:20 | Let's crank it way up. There we go.
| | 05:24 | We've got great movement.
| | 05:28 | Let's pause that.
| | 05:29 | One of the things you may have noticed is
as it travels through here, there are some
| | 05:33 | spots where the fish distorts a little bit.
| | 05:35 | You want to be really careful
when you're using Spline Wrap.
| | 05:37 | You never want to make the curve that the
object is passing through smaller than the
| | 05:41 | diameter of the object
that's passing through it.
| | 05:43 | What'll end up happening is that you
get a weird crossing of the motion.
| | 05:47 | So for example, if I were to go to the fish
Spline and take these two points and move
| | 05:53 | them, I'm going to grab the
Green Axis Band and Drag it closer.
| | 05:58 | Watch what happens in the location where
the fish passed through that small point.
| | 06:03 | You'll see that as it goes through there, it
really distorts it and you want to avoid that.
| | 06:07 | So I'm going to undo that.
| | 06:09 | The other thing is that when you have a Rail
spline you have move both splines at the same time.
| | 06:14 | So I can select both the spline in the Fish
rail and I can use my Rectangular Selection
| | 06:18 | tool and I can grab all
the points on both splines.
| | 06:22 | So if I want to drag just those points around,
let's switch back to the Top view and I can
| | 06:26 | rotate those guys around a bit so that he's
not starting off with such a severe angle.
| | 06:32 | I can then hit the Spacebar to get back to the
Selection tool and then move those guys around a bit.
| | 06:36 | So you can see I'm moving both the
rail and the main spline all at once.
| | 06:41 | One last thing, a good idea for your hierarchy
is to keep the Fish Wrap and the splines all
| | 06:45 | together under the same Null so that when
you go to move them from project to project,
| | 06:49 | they'll all be together.
| | 06:51 | So I'll add a new Null Object here and let's
call this one Fish wrap Uber. There we go.
| | 06:59 | And I'll take the splines and the
Fish Wrap and put them all under there.
| | 07:04 | Now when I move that around, the fish and the
splines all travel together in the same way.
| | 07:09 | So the great thing about the Spline Wrap is
you can put just about anything underneath
| | 07:12 | there, type, fish, any
sort of geometric object.
| | 07:16 | Anything made out of polygons
basically can be put under there.
| | 07:18 | You can have all kinds of fun.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating bendable type| 00:00 | Type is a common theme on motion graphics
and one of the things that animators and/or
| | 00:05 | designers often get asked
to do is to distort type.
| | 00:08 | CINEMA 4D has some great tools for distorting
objects, but when you go to Distort Type there
| | 00:13 | are some very special
considerations to keep in mind.
| | 00:15 | I've got this very simple word here Bendy.
| | 00:18 | It's just an Extrude NURB there with the Text
spline underneath it and I've got some caps
| | 00:21 | on the Extrude NURB set to be
Fillet Cap with the radius of 2 by 1.
| | 00:27 | Now what I want to do is to bend this type.
| | 00:30 | So let's go to Deformer
Objects and add a Bend Deformer.
| | 00:33 | A great rule of thumb when using the
Deformer Object is to have the box that represents
| | 00:38 | the deformer object be the same size or as
close to the same size as the object you're
| | 00:43 | going deform as possible.
| | 00:45 | That's going to give you a lot more control
and predictability over the deformation.
| | 00:49 | So what I want to do is to switch to a four-way view
and I'm going to raise up this box on the Y axis.
| | 00:57 | So it's about on the middle of the word and
then in the Object Properties for the bend
| | 01:03 | deformer I'm going to scroll down on Y.
| | 01:05 | It's pretty good.
| | 01:09 | Then I'm going to scroll out on X to get it just
inside and then on Z, let's make it quite a bit thinner.
| | 01:17 | There we go.
| | 01:19 | Next thing I'm going to do is to take the Z axis and
move it down so it's in the center of the word.
| | 01:24 | I think that's pretty close.
| | 01:26 | The idea that you want to have
everything in your word inside that purple box.
| | 01:29 | If you remember from earlier, Deformers work
on either their parent or their peers, so
| | 01:33 | let's go ahead and add a new
Null Object to the scene.
| | 01:36 | So let's draw a rectangle around both these
objects and make them children of the Null.
| | 01:39 | There are now pairs of each
other underneath the same Null.
| | 01:43 | Now when I take the Bend Object and adjust its
strength you'll see that it's bending the Deformer.
| | 01:48 | Let's adjust the angle to be 90 degrees.
| | 01:51 | That's going to allow me to
bend the type front to back.
| | 01:54 | So now when I adjust the Strength,
you'll see that it bends this way.
| | 01:58 | So I can get a cool wiggly movement.
| | 02:00 | Now let's make the Perspective view fullscreen
and if we scroll the type all the way over,
| | 02:07 | one of the things you'll notice
is that it's not really bending.
| | 02:10 | The reason for that is a very important rule.
| | 02:13 | A single polygon edge cannot be bent.
| | 02:16 | So because of that rule, all the lengths of
my objects are being treated as one long edge
| | 02:22 | and you can see they're not bending.
| | 02:24 | So what I need to do is to tell the Spline
Object not to treat this one long length of
| | 02:30 | the end as a single segment.
| | 02:32 | So the way I do that is by twirling open the
Extrude NURB, selecting the Text Object, and
| | 02:36 | then under the Object Properties we're
going to go to the Intermediate Point.
| | 02:40 | Now what I want to do is to change the
Intermediate Point from Adaptive to something like Uniform
| | 02:45 | and when I do that, you see that my
type immediately starts to bend.
| | 02:49 | Now if I'm not getting enough deformation or
enough resolution in my word, for example,
| | 02:54 | if you see the corners on the Es are now
starting to go round out a bit, I need to crank up
| | 02:59 | my number in the Intermediate Points counts.
| | 03:01 | So let's take that up to 16.
| | 03:05 | You can see as I take it up,
those edges got smoother.
| | 03:08 | Let's make this 24.
| | 03:09 | Let's take it all the way
up to 64. T hat's better.
| | 03:15 | So now you can see that I've
got a great bend in my type.
| | 03:19 | I still got some issues though.
| | 03:20 | If you'll notice along the N itself, hit Command+R or
Ctrl+R in the keyboard to render the active view.
| | 03:26 | You could see that it's deforming roundly,
but it's kind of breaking in weird ways and
| | 03:30 | that's because of the way that the
Extrude NURB probably draws the caps.
| | 03:34 | By default, it draws something called N-NURBS
and if you remember from the modeling module
| | 03:38 | N-gons are evil and they
should be avoided in all cost.
| | 03:43 | So what we need to do is to tell the
Extrude NURB Object not to draw N-gons.
| | 03:46 | So let's go to the Extrude NURB Object.
| | 03:49 | Underneath the Caps Option
are some checkboxes here.
| | 03:51 | We're going to leave those along, but
right below those is the N-gons pulldown.
| | 03:57 | Now we want to change that from N-gons to
be Quadrangles and when we do that, we're
| | 04:02 | going to turn on Regular Grid and that's going
to eliminate virtually all of our problems.
| | 04:08 | If you still see issues in your type, you may
need to adjust the width of the regular grid.
| | 04:13 | What happened is that instead of triangulating
all these, it created a regular grid pattern
| | 04:19 | overlaid it on the type, and used that to
determine the shape of the type as it bends.
| | 04:24 | We can see this grid pattern by going to the
Display menu and changing our Display from
| | 04:28 | Gouraud Shading to Gouraud Shading with Lines.
| | 04:31 | When we do that and now see that grid pattern.
| | 04:34 | If I undo, Command+Z or Ctrl+Z on the keyboard
you can see that's what the polygon distribution
| | 04:38 | looked like before.
| | 04:39 | Command+Y or Ctrl+Y,
that's what it looks like now.
| | 04:42 | You can see it's much, much cleaner.
| | 04:44 | The great thing about using live type for
this exercise is that I come back in and change
| | 04:49 | that type at any moment.
| | 04:51 | If I go to the Text spline, I can go to the
word Bendy and say Hello, click outside there
| | 04:58 | and my word changes to Hello.
| | 05:00 | Now as long as my words are still inside that
purple box, I don't need to adjust the Bend Deformer.
| | 05:05 | So this is a great way to
set up a nice type template.
| | 05:09 | You can animate the bend.
| | 05:11 | If you animate the Strength property, you
can have your type sprung back and forth and
| | 05:14 | you have a lot of control to
create some really interesting effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making splats with the Melt deformer| 00:00 | One of the often overlooked Deformers in
CINEMA 4D is something called the Melt, and we're
| | 00:05 | going to use the Melt Deformer in a
sphere to create a really cool splat.
| | 00:09 | Let's add a sphere to the scene.
| | 00:11 | Now let's add the Melt Deformer underneath
the Bend Object or the Deformers and let's
| | 00:14 | add Melt to the scene.
| | 00:16 | Melt is a deformer and I
prefer to use them in Peer mode.
| | 00:19 | So let's add a new Null Object and take both
objects to make them children to the same Null.
| | 00:24 | Now as soon as I do that, the
melt has an impact on the sphere.
| | 00:28 | If we click on the melt, we can
see that there are some properties.
| | 00:30 | We've got strength and radius.
| | 00:32 | The strength is how much it's melting and
when I bring it to 0, you can see that the
| | 00:37 | sphere is really only a hemisphere.
| | 00:39 | That's because the place that the object melts from
is the axis, the center of the world in this case.
| | 00:45 | So what I need to do is take my sphere and
raise it up and I can do this numerically.
| | 00:49 | If I go to Coordinate Properties and go to
the Position and make that 100 units on Y,
| | 00:58 | now my sphere is touching the floor perfectly.
| | 01:01 | So now when the melt is at 0%, my sphere will be
intact and I can adjust the strength to 100.
| | 01:08 | You can see that it melts nicely.
| | 01:09 | So we're going to animate this backwards.
| | 01:12 | So let's go to about 10
frames and set a keyframes.
| | 01:15 | This is where we want our
sphere to hit the ground.
| | 01:17 | We want to hit the ground at 10 frames.
| | 01:19 | So select the sphere and go to Coordinate
Properties and on the Position Ctrl+Click
| | 01:23 | on the grey circle to set a keyframes.
| | 01:26 | Now we can back up in time and at time 0,
we can raise this up at the camera.
| | 01:30 | Let's raise it up pretty high, and
I'll Ctrl+Click again to set keyframes.
| | 01:36 | Now when I hit Play, you'll notice that my
sphere slows down right before it hits the ground.
| | 01:39 | Let's fix that in the F-Curve Manager.
| | 01:41 | I'm going to go to the Window and bring up
the Timeline and in the Timeline I'm going
| | 01:46 | to switch to the F-Curve
Manager by hitting the Spacebar.
| | 01:49 | Select the sphere, hit H on the
keyboard to see all the curves.
| | 01:52 | Hit Command+A to grab all of them
and then right-click and do Linear.
| | 01:57 | Now you can see we have a nice
linear move on along our Y axis.
| | 02:01 | Let's close that window up.
| | 02:03 | Now when we rewind and hit Play, we don't get
slow down when our sphere hits the ground.
| | 02:07 | Now we can animate the Melt Deformer.
| | 02:10 | If we go to the Melt option, at the point where it
hits the ground we want it to start spreading out.
| | 02:16 | So under the Melt, we're going to
Object Properties and adjust this Strength.
| | 02:20 | So we'll hold down the Ctrl key and add a
keyframe for strength 0 at frame 11 roughly.
| | 02:25 | We're probably going to have to adjust this.
| | 02:27 | Then as we get out in time, we
want it to spread out and melt.
| | 02:32 | Let's bring the Strength up to 100 and now
I'll Ctrl+Click to set a keyframe for that.
| | 02:38 | I didn't really give a fill for
how long that was going to takes.
| | 02:41 | So let's rewind and see what that looks like.
| | 02:46 | You'll notice that when it hits the ground,
it hits the ground and then starts to splat.
| | 02:49 | So there's a little bit of a pause there.
| | 02:51 | So what I want to do is to
change these keyframes.
| | 02:54 | Let's bring up to timeline, under the window
Do Timeline, and let's switch back over the
| | 02:59 | keyframe mode by hitting the Spacebar and then hit
the letter H to frame up all of our keyframes.
| | 03:04 | What I want to do is take the Melt
key frames and back them up in time.
| | 03:08 | So let's select them by
Clicking on the Melt object here.
| | 03:12 | Now I've got all its key frames
highlighted, I can backup in time right there.
| | 03:17 | Now as I scrub through, you can see that, it
starts to melt just before it hits the ground.
| | 03:22 | Maybe little soon, let's
move it one frame up. Boom!
| | 03:27 | Let's play that back and
see how it looks. N ot bad.
| | 03:32 | Let's actually have it
anticipate just a little bit more.
| | 03:35 | I'll back that up one frame, close up the
Timeline, let's rewind to 0 and hit Play again,
| | 03:40 | and there you go, a great animated splat.
| | 03:42 | Now one of the cool things about this splat is
that I can take the null object and rotate it.
| | 03:47 | Let's say this were going to be a
snowball getting thrown against the wall.
| | 03:50 | If I orbit this around, I hold the Shift key
down as I rotate and rotate it 90 degrees,
| | 03:55 | the sphere is animating
relative to its parent.
| | 03:58 | So if I Scroll backwards in time, you can see
that it's going to hit the wall and spread out.
| | 04:02 | So there's a lot of
versatility with this setup.
| | 04:05 | The great thing about the Melt Deformer is that it
will melt just about anything you put under it.
| | 04:09 | The more polygons the object that you're trying to
melt has, the better your Melt Deformation will be.
| | 04:13 | But be careful don't put too many polygons
under there; you'll choke your computer off.
| | 04:17 | Now let's see what other kind of uses
you can find for the Melt Deformer.
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ConclusionWhat's coming next| 00:00 | I hope you've enjoyed CINEMA 4D
Essentials Cameras, Animation, and Deformers.
| | 00:04 | In the next course C4D Essentials Materials,
Textures, and Lights we will explore how to
| | 00:08 | give your objects color and texture using
the Material Manager and then how to light
| | 00:12 | the objects dynamically
using the Light Objects.
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