Efficiency and flexibility are not just marketing terms, they’re what make motion graphics achievable. Creating moving images is incredibly labor intensive, and once all that labor is done, you still have to hit the render button and wait to preview the result. Being efficient is crucial to meeting deadlines.

Creating a workflow that allows you to swap and modify key elements at any point in the production process is what XRefs are all about. An XRef is a special object that points to a scene file much in the same way a print program, like Illustrator, points back to a master image and uses the original file from the hard drive for printing. Visually, the XRef appears to you as a single object, but it actually represents all the objects in the scene that it’s pointing back to. This means that you can make changes to that scene file, and any XRef that points back to it will automatically update. This also means, since R13 XRef objects allow you to reference a CINEMA 4D file as a single object, that you can manipulate an XRef from an entirely different scene, thus allowing for distributed workflows where one person is modeling while another person animates. This makes for a very flexible way to work.

In this week’s Design in Motion video, I’ll show you how to add an XRef into your animation, and I’ll show you a real-life scenario where having XRefs set up allows me to easily swap two cars in a chase scene, with two completely different cars—all without having to update my animation. If you’re new to XRefs, this tutorial quickly breaks the process down to help you get started. XRefs have made last-minute director swaps quick and easy for me many times, and they can save you, too!

The overall XRef experience has been significantly improved in CINEMA 4D R13. To learn more about those improvements, check out my full CINEMA 4D R13 New Features course on lynda.com. If you are a lynda.com member, make sure to check out chapter five, where I discuss R13 workflow additions, including a specific video on the Xrefs format rewrite.

Interested in more?
• The full Design in Motion weekly series on lynda.com
• All CINEMA 4D courses on lynda.com
• Courses by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D R13 New Features
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects

Tags: Cinema 4D, Design in Motion, Rob Garrott

Animation has a way of connecting with a viewer that is very different than a still image. The power of a still image or illustration lies in its composition and content. Animation on the other hand, adds timing and movement into the mix, and these elements are an important tool you can use to communicate with your audience.

The speed and direction that your graphic elements move in tell your viewer information that adds to the overall content and composition of your piece. If your object moves quickly and comes to a sudden stop, then, that could be combined with a dark, intense composition to communicate a sense of drama and action. Smooth, fluid movements could work well for romance, or even a somber mood. Sharp, punchy moves are great for comedy.

This kind of subtle animation is all about control. Both After Effects and CINEMA 4D have excellent graph editors that will allow you to really express emotion through your animation. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, check out this week’s Design in Motion tutorial titled Styling animation to communicate emotion (embedded up top), then check out my CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training course, or After Effects Apprentice 03 by Chris and Trish Meyer. Both courses have chapters that go into detail about controlling your animation with curves.

Interested in more?
• The complete Design in Motion weekly series on lynda.com
• All video courses on lynda.com
• All courses on After Effects and CINEMA 4D on lynda.com
• Courses by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• After Effects Apprentice 12: Tracking and Keying
• After Effects CS5.5 New Features
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects

Tags: After Effects, animation, Cinema 4D

This month has shown the release of several lynda.com Revit Architecture related courses, further expanding our ever growing list.

Paul Aubin, our ever-reliable and popular Revit author, has just released Advanced Modeling in Revit Architecture. In Revit, simple objects, such as walls and floors, are reasonably easy to construct. Modeling more complex objects, however, can be a bit of a challenge. Paul Aubin helps you think both inside and outside the box to use Revit’s modeling tools to create sophisticated and detailed models. He also digs into some more specialized Revit features such as in-place Families, topography, and the Massing Environment. The Advanced Modeling in Revit Architecture course is great for anyone wanting to add more detail to their Revit projects.

In this video from chapter one of the Advanced Modeling in Revit Architecture course, Paul shows you how to build an in-place mass:

In our second new Revit course, Designing a House in Revit Architecture, new author Brian Myers takes you step by step through the process of designing a house from scratch in Revit Architecture. The course covers the design of a multi-level home, and the documentation process required to create multiple plans, sections, details, and schedules. This course is terrific for anyone wanting to understand the full design process within Revit Architecture.

This clip, from chapter two of Designing a House in Revit Architecture, walks you through the process of creating exterior walls for an American bungalow-style home, which is usually the first modeling step taken after you’ve reviewed all your project requirements, and entered your project information into Revit:

If you’re interested in architecture, stay tuned as we have more courses focused on architecture-related software in the works.

Do you have any Revit modeling tips or tricks worth sharing? Let us know in the comments section what you’ve been working on, or what you’ve discovered through trial and error.

Interested in more?
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All Revit Architecture courses on lynda.com
• Courses by Paul Aubin and Brian Myers on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Revit Architecture 2011 Essential Training
• Revit Architecture: Rendering
• Revit Architecture: The Family Editor
• Google SketchUp 8 Essential Training

Tags: Revit Architecture

Used for a wide variety of applications, including product design and manufacturing, SolidWorks is currently one of the most popular CAD packages on the market, and we’re very proud to have finished our first SolidWorks course this month.

In SolidWorks 2012 Essential Training, author Gabriel Corbett shows how to create manufacturing-ready parts and assemblies in SolidWorks 2012. Beginning with simple 2D sketching and the software’s sketch-editing tools, the course provides step-by-step instruction on building 3D geometry from 2D sketches. In addition, the course also covers creating complex 3D objects with the Extrude, Revolve, Sweep, and Loft tools, and shows the process of building complex assemblies by mating individual parts together into robust assemblies and structures.

Diving deeper into the course you’ll find tutorials that discuss generating manufacturing-ready drawings complete with an itemized Bill of Materials, cutting and revolving holes, and using the Hole Wizard tool to generate industry standard holes like counter bores, counter sinks, and taps. The course concludes with Gabriel showing you how to photo render a final design.

If you have any interest in SolidWorks, this course is a great way to start learning more about this popular CAD tool.

In this movie from chapter seven of the SolidWorks 2012 Essential Training course, Gabriel describes how to extrude your sketches and turn them into 3D solid objects using Solidworks 2012:

Interested in more?
• The complete SolidWorks 2012 Essential Training course on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• Courses by Gabriel Corbett on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• AutoCAD 2011 Essential Training
• Rhino 4.0 Essential Training
• Google SketchUp 8 Essential Training
• modo 501 Essential Training

Tags: CAD, SolidWorks 2012

Animating characters in Maya can be a lot of fun. Fighting with a difficult character rig, however, can sap the joy out of animating. Character Rigging in Maya is a course designed to help you create character rigs that are both robust and easy to animate.

A deeper, more technical update to the Maya 8.5 Character Rigging course, Character Rigging in Maya covers the basics of Maya’s rigging tools, then goes deep into how these tools are used to create a complete character rig, including skeletons, forward and inverse kinematics switches, and the skinning of characters to skeletons.

Some of the more technical topics covered include expressions and scripts that help automate the rig and make it easier to animate, and the process of creating an advanced facial rig that shows a variety of ways to create sophisticated controls to manage complex facial expressions (which I find particularly useful.)

If you’ve seen the Character Animation Fundamentals with Maya course on lynda.com, you may notice Character Rigging in Maya creates its rig with the same character used in the animation course. It’s not the same old character, though—we’ve have thrown in a few updates to the rig to make the character rigging techniques even more interesting.

We’re very committed to character animation here at lynda.com, so if you’re into animation, stay tuned for more character courses in the coming months.

Interested in more?
• All Maya courses on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All by George-Maestri on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Maya 2011 Essential Training
• Maya 2011: Modeling a Character
• Character Animation Fundamentals with Maya
• Game Character Creation in Maya

Tags: 3D + animation, Maya

Often times creating type is the bread and butter for motion graphics artists. But like plain old bread and butter, it can get a bit stale. When that happens, gradients are a great way to freshen up your stale type.

A gradient is simply a transition from one value to another. This can be from one color to another, or from light to dark. When used properly, gradients can be used to pump up the legibility of your type, and to make the text really leap off the screen.

Using gradients on text in CINEMA 4D boils down to understanding how textures are applied to objects. This can be a difficult concept to understand, but it’s crucial to getting control of the look and feel of your objects in 3-D. There are three main tools that help you manage the projection of textures on to the surfaces of 3-D objects: The Texture Tag, the Texture Tool, and an often overlooked command in the object manager called Fit To Object. These three elements will give you tremendous control over how your objects appear to the viewer.

For more on this, check out CINEMA 4D R12 Essential training. Chapter six has some great movies on creating and manipulating textures.

Interested in more?
• The full Design in Motion series on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D and After Effects Integration

Tags: 3D + animation, Cinema 4D, Design in Motion

The idea of dynamic simulations has gotten a lot of attention lately. Dynamics allow an animator to create very realistic motion and collisions with objects without using key frames. Nearly every 3-D software package has some kind of module dedicated to this. That being said, dynamics can be somewhat unpredictable by nature, so they’re not entirely flawless. Similar to setting up a stack of dominoes or a Rube Goldberg machine, dynamic simulations just don’t always give you what you expected. This can make them very challenging to use in production, and it often has designers and animators asking themselves what exactly it is they can do with dynamics. With so much unpredictability, what problems can they solve?

The answer is, really, quite a lot! Dynamics can be great addition to your tool kit if you’re willing to accept a bit of unpredictability in your animations. In this short project I’ll show you how to use dynamics to animate some text being knocked over. Using key frames, this kind of animation would be very time consuming, and it would be even harder to make it look convincing. Luckily, CINEMA 4D’s dynamics engine is really easy to use, and allows you to apply these techniques to a variety of different projects.

For more on the important basics of using the CINEMA 4D dynamics engine, check out chapter 14 of my CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training course.

Interested in more?
• The full Design in Motion series on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D and After Effects Integration

Tags: 3D + animation, Cinema 4D, Design in Motion

A lot of folks get started in motion graphics creating 3D logos and logo animations. It’s how I got started all those years ago. When I look back on that animation now, I cringe. The clients loved it, but the lighting was terrible. Luckily, I’ve learned a lot since then, and in this week’s Design in Motion, I’ll share some key logo-lighting tips with you.

First and foremost is the idea of lighting through the camera. The 3D world is based entirely on the idea of perspective, and the only valid perspective is the angle that your artwork will be viewed from. That view is your render camera. Positioning your lights from the angle of the render camera ensures that you are only adding information that your viewers will actually see. This will take all the guesswork out of the process, and make it faster and more efficient.

The second step is to create an environment for your reflective logos to help give them a textured, dynamic look that can make them feel like they’re moving even when they’re not. Remember, the standard 3D space that surrounds your logo is just black, so even if you turn the reflection up past 100 percent, if there isn’t anything there to reflect, your logos will look dull and lifeless. Use the Material Manager and the Luminance channel to start creating an environment sphere for your logo, then you can apply and edit gradients to tweak your environment to your liking. Once you have your environment surrounding your object and texturing your logo just how you want it, it’s important to remember to apply a Compositing tag, which allows you to show only the transparency, reflection, and refraction of your environment sphere to the render camera—not the environment sphere itself.

Lastly, the color of your reflections has a big impact on the look and feel of your surfaces. The default color values for reflections in CINEMA 4D are white, and that’s just fine if you’re creating something like white enamel or tiles. But, if you’re making a gold surface, then a white reflection will make your logo feel washed out. By coloring your reflections to match your surface color, your logos will have a richness and saturation that really makes them pop off the screen.

For more on how CINEMA 4D works with lights and textures, I recommend checking out chapters six and seven of my CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training course next.

Interested in more?
• The full Design in Motion series on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D and After Effects Integration

Tags: 3D + animation

It’s easy for motion graphics artists to neglect their modeling skills. Websites like Turbosquid, and the wide availability of amazing model libraries mean that a lot of artists can go for a long time without ever modeling anything from scratch. But what happens when a job or client comes along that requires a specific model that you can’t find? Don’t panic! The polygon modeling tools in CINEMA 4D are helpful and easy to use.

Points, Edges, and Polygons are the basic building blocks of all objects in the 3D world. Everything from a simple sphere to a photo-realistic model of a T-Rex are made of these elemental parts. This week on Design in Motion, I’ll show you how to build and animate a simple model of a paper airplane to use as a prop in a logo animation.

For those more advanced modelers who have mastered the CINEMA 4D Essential Training course, I recommend taking your animation skills to the next level with CINEMA 4D: Designing a Promo to learn how to take a 15-second promotional video from concept to on-screen animation, and into final rendering and compositing.

Interested in more?
• The full Design in Motion series on lynda.com
• The full CINEMA 4D: Designing a Promo course on lynda.com
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All by Rob Garrott on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• CINEMA 4D R12 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D and After Effects Integration

Tags: 3D + animation, Design in Motion

Adobe Premiere Pro has a robust titler built in, including the ability to create title rolls and crawls. However, Adobe After Effects has even more advanced tools, including hundreds of Animation Presets for type, Shape Layers (to build additional graphic elements such as lower third bars), and a combination of Layer Styles and Effects to further enhance the final look. If you have either the Production Premium or Master Collection suites, Premiere Pro and After Effects can talk to each other using Adobe Dynamic Link, which makes this process more fluid. In this course instructor Chris Meyer explains the general process of using After Effects to create refined lower thirds for Premiere Pro, including sharing some After Effects design ideas. Although this course is aimed at intermediate Premiere Pro users who have some After Effects experience, beginning After Effects users will also find this course to be full of useful tips, exposing them to numerous areas of the program.

Interested in more?
• The full Premiere Pro and After Effects: Creating Title Graphics course
• All 3D + animation courses on lynda.com
• All courses on After Effects
• Courses by Chris Meyer on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• After Effects CS5.5 New Features
• After Effects Apprentice 04: Layer Control
• After Effects CS5 Essential Training
• CINEMA 4D: Rendering Motion Graphics for After Effects

Tags: After Effects, Chris Meyer