From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects
Understanding coordinates
From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects
Understanding coordinates
There are some differences in the way that Cinema 4D and After Effects measure 3D coordinates. Fortunately, when use Cineware, you don't need to worry about these differences, as calculations are made behind the scenes to compensate for them. However, it's really important to understand the differences. To avoid confusion, when you start animating in Cinema 4D. Now, I'm already in Cinema 4D Lite. Have opened it from within After Effects. I'm going to go to File > New and create completely new document or new scene. Now position and scale in Cinema 4D are measured in a similar way to After Effects, using x y and said coordinates. And if I create a cube, by clicking on the cube button. You can see those coordinates here, in the manager. Okay? You can also see the cubes coordinates here in the attributes manager in the coordinates section. Now, in terms of scale, Cinema 4D works pretty much how you would expect it to work. You'll notice that if I scale something up. So, if I chose the scale tool and just scale something up. It scales up in a positive direction, and then down to zero, okay. Slightly different from after effects. It won't scale to negative values. You'll see that the most I can scale down to is 0.02. So slightly different there. So I'm going to undo that, but it works as you would expect it. Positive values make it get bigger Now its different when it comes to moving things. If you select the move tool and you'll see we have our three way axis determining the x value, the y value, and the z value. Or x direction, y direction, and z direction. Distances on the x-axis are measured as the arrows indicates. Positive distances are measured from the origin Going to the right as we're looking at the scene, so to be more precise, I would say from east to west. Now, you'll notice that if I hold down the three key and click on the origin point and just rotate around that, that the axis actually moves around with the ground plane. So let me just undo that. So I'm going to hold down command+shift+z or ctrl+shift+z to undo my view change. And just explain that a little bit more. If I click and drag on the x-axis, you'll notice the x-axis changes in a positive direction, so it's going to positive values. If I click and drag it this way It goes to negative values when it goes past the zero origin. Let's just undo that, okay? So we go back here. I'm going to hold down the 3 key and click as close to the origin as I can just to rotate view rimmed and you'll see that when I've rotated the view rimmed, it's still going in a positive direction when I drag it in the direction of that axis. And negative when it goes the other way. So it's irrespective of the direction of the view, if you like. So it's more like east and west, than right and left. So I'm going to hold down command+shift+z or ctrl+shift+z on Windows, again. And then I'm going to hold down ctrl+z to undo the move that I made with the cube. So x-axis is measured pretty much the same way as After Effects. The only difference is, it's measured from the origin in a positive and negative direction. In After Effects, it's actually measured from the top left corner of the composition. So, what about the y-axis? Well. The y-axis behaves differently. You'll notice first of all it's measured from the origin, similarly to the x-axis instead of from the top left corner of the comp. But also if I click and drag the y-axis, notice as I move it upwards, it goes into positive values. And if I'm, drag it down below the origin point it goes to negative values. Now that's the opposite of After Effects, which measures positive values going down and negative values going up. I'm going to undo those moves. So that's an important point to note. Y-axis behaves differently. The z-axis also behaves differently. If I drag it away from the origin in this direction, it measures positive values. If I drag it this way, it measures negative values. So in After Effects, as you can guess, it's the opposite way around. It's positive as it moves towards the viewer. Negative as it moves away from the viewer. So as I said, there are differences in the way that After Effects and Cinema 4D measure coordinates. You don't really need to worry about them in terms of getting your project from Cinema 4D to After Effects cause cinema would take care of it for you. But it's important to be aware of those because if you're coming into Cinema 4D and adjusting things using values, you may get a little confused without that knowledge.
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Contents
-
-
-
-
-
-
Understanding coordinates5m
-
Understanding rotation2m 39s
-
Timeline shortcuts3m 1s
-
Basic keyframing of properties4m 31s
-
Copying keyframes2m 3s
-
Keyframe interpolation5m 20s
-
Adjusting F-Curves5m 45s
-
Holding values5m 8s
-
Using XPresso to link properties: Part one4m 17s
-
Using XPresso to link properties: Part two2m 27s
-
Importing existing animations into CINEMA 4D Lite7m 34s
-
Animating cameras in CINEMA 4D Lite4m 37s
-
Animating using presets4m 32s
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-