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Text and Arrows – MoGraph’s Formula Effector

Here’s a little something something I came up with just adding a bunch of effectors together in MoGraph.

The main effector in charge here is the formula effector. That is controlling the motion of the text flowing around and the floating of the arrows. The random effector and target effector are also involved. I also like the candy or bubble-gum color scheme got going on here.

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Drum Kit made with MoGraph

Here’s an animation I made in CInema 4D using Mograph. It’s a drum kit, made of words, that reacts to the beat.

OK so, I don’t think I’ll be getting a job in the music industry coming up with catchy beats. I made this crappy beat in Garageband, and hooked up each drum to a separate Sound Effector to drive the animation. I could make a better beat, but I wanted to make something simple with all the drums involved. I think it’s a cool way to visualize a drum set. The font is called Chunk Five and it’s my new favorite.

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Subway Train Animation/Composite

Here’s a Cinema 4D train moving through a subway station.

The subway platform comes from istockphoto. I modeled the train in Cinema 4D and brought it into After Effects to fit it into the scene. By moving the train so quickly with a heavy motion blur, you can get a way with a relatively basic model of a subway car with not a whole lot of detail. I added some HDRI lighting to simulate the fluorescent lights above and color corrected the train to make it blend in with the color and feel of the environment.

I mean, the clip isn’t anything earth-shattering; you could easily just get a clip of an actual subway train passing by. But sometimes the best part about being a designer is making something out of nothing. A still photo becomes alive with hopes of convincing the audience that there is no animation at all and it goes unnoticed.

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A Cold Case Without a Trace of Law & Order CSINCISNYPD Blue: Miami

I don’t watch TV like normal people. Every time I see something on TV, I start breaking things down in terms of how they are produced in post-production. I think about the effects and techniques involve and wonder how I would go about creating something similar.

There’s like 10,000 Police/Crime/Detective dramas shows that have come and gone that I never watched much. I think the major networks have this idea that the good guys need to catch the bad guys in a half an hour or else people won’t watch and they can’t sell any ads. I urge you to forget these broadcast network crime shows and go get your hands on The Wire. Trust me. There are two types of people in this world, people who think The Wire is the best show in TV history, and people who have never seen The Wire. You will regret wasting your time watching people take their sunglasses on and off instead of watching The Wire. It has no discernible line between good guys and bad guys, the stories have a series of causes and effects that span several seasons beautifully, intertwining conflicts get resolved and lead to new ones, and it’s HBO so it doesn’t have to hold back like regular TV.

Oh yea, motion graphics. I made this intro in CInema 4D and After Effects for a shitty crime show that will surely get cancelled.
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Magnetic Animation

I just started messing around with the idea and came up with this. In Cinema 4D of course.

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Flipping a Deck of Cards in MoGraph

I was in Las Vegas recently and couldn’t stop thinking about linear cloners and step effectors. I’ve got cards and gambling on my mind. I devised a little project that arranges all 52 playing cards in a linear cloner, thus allowing you to animate a entire deck of cards with different parameters and effectors. This animation here is what it looks like when you fan the whole deck of cards out flat on the table and then start at one end and flip all the cards over sequentially all in one motion.

Not a complex animation but once you’ve got it set up it could unlock some better tricks. I think I’m going to make a tutorial for this.

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Aetuts+ Logo Reveal Contest Entry: Puzzle Pieces Animation

I had this idea in my head for awhile. I wanted to create a 3D model of a jigsaw puzzle that can have the pieces animated into solve it with just a few keyframes. It can be textures with whatever, it’s a puzzle so it can be a replaceable image of anything. Well I finally got around to doing it for the Aetuts+ Logo Reveal Contest.

It’s based on my old animation in Mograph, the Current Cubes animation. I thought that if you cloned puzzle pieces into a grid cloner that you could control the assembly of a whole jigsaw puzzle. You could do some could random effectors to make the pieces scatter and have it pop back into place. This logo reveal contest came up with Aetuts+ and I couldn’t come up with anything special in After Effects off the top of my head, so I grabbed the puzzle idea off my idea whiteboard and got to work. I have no graphic moral compass apparently, since I’m primarily using a 3D application to do a logo reveal for a site devoted to tutorials in a 2D application. I’m a monster.
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5 Second Project – Old Video Games Graveyard

So this is my entry for this week’s 5 Second Project theme “Old Video Games.” I started modeling an old NES Cartridge in Cinema 4D but couldn’t figure out what exactly to do with it. I figured the theme would provoke everyone else to try and emulate old, crappy video game graphics so I wanted to do something else to differentiate myself a bit. I thought about all the old terrible games I used to play (technically I still have them) and how lame they seem nowadays, or how they were poorly designed and thus nearly impossible to actually beat, or the myth that blowing on the contact part of the cartridge would actually make the game work. Since you can play all these old games online with various emulators, the cartridges seem dead and worthless, and visually sort of resemble a tombstone.

I had a few other game name ideas, but I threw out the scratch paper I jotted them down on. Using your own NES game experiences, feel free to come up with one and post it in the comments.

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5 Second Project: Kick the Bucket

So I finally jumped in Greyscale Gorilla’s 5 Second Projects competition. Here is my entry/interpretation for the category of “Kick the Bucket.”

I guess I can call myself a character animator now.

New Tutorial: Crumpling Paper in Cinema 4D

So I finally posted a new tutorial. This one shows you how to make a crumpling paper animation in Cinema 4D, like this video.

 I discovered the basis for this tutorial while doing a lot of experimenting with the Cloth Tag in Cinema 4D. It definitely saves a ton of time rather than the alternative of keyframing the entire animation. I would recommend playing around with the settings rather than just using what I gave you; you can get different results for you animation and experiment a little bit.

I’m going to make an effort to post tutorials more frequently. If you become a registered user I will send out a notice when a new tutorial is posted, or you can subscribe to my feed.

 Feel free to email me any questions you may have about this tutorial.