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For the longest time I tried to build this complex roller coaster scene and it never went anywhere. I wanted to build a theme park around it or do some cool materials on it, but I could just never get it to become anything that wowed me. Basically I built the track around the text, and unfortunately I had to keyframe the cars to death, this doesn’t run on some sort of physics system.
Short & Gray: Roller Coaster from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I thought I could use an Align to Spline tag, but the animation wasn’t smooth enough because the car had to slow down and speed up fluidly on certain parts of the track. And it took me back to high school physics when we discussed roller coasters, and from that I learned that each car in the coaster makes up the speed in terms of the system, which is the combination of all the cars combined. So each car had to be angled and positioned individually, instead of just cloning a couple cars and being done with it. It was a huge hassle, so that’s why there are only 4 cars, because it took forever to put them in the right position.
All in all it’s OK, I purposefully kept the camera far back so you wouldn’t notice a few sketchy details.
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The tutorials page was getting very sloppy. The page was scrolling down forever, and I hope to keep adding to it, so I had to do something eventually. I now made it as just a kind of menu page, and each tutorial opens in it’s own page. It might help SEO wise too, I don’t know.
I added and subtracted from my reel, some stuff needed to be off there for sure.
I should have a new tutorial ready for next week, keep your eyes peeled.
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I’ve been doing a lot of Cinema 4D design lately, so I keep using shortcuts to getting faster renders. I thought I’d share some tips as to how to get your computer to crank out your projects a little faster and save some of that precious, precious time.
1. Reduce the resolution of your render.
Duh. I tend to always want to see my renders at full resolution, but whenever you don’t need to see the fine details, chop your resolution by 1/2 and save some time.
2. Turn off elements that aren’t in the scene.
It’s a good idea to toggle the on and off the visibility of your scene elements depending on when they are in the frame. If an object doesn’t appear for the first 3 seconds, there isn’t really a point to having this item rendered in the beginning of your timeline. Same goes for things that exit the frame, if it no longer appears, you might as well tell Cinema 4D not to render it.
3. Don’t use reflections, transparency, shadows, and global illumination unless you have to
These are all render hogs. Make sure you absolutely love the reflection and transparency effects on your material, because if you don’t, they are going to waste your time in the rendering. Make sure that if you use global illumination, you are actually getting your money’s worth. Take 2 screen shots, one with global illumination ann one without. Sometimes the difference is negligible and not worth the extra render time. You can also turn down some of the quality settings in the global illumination panel, test it out with screen shots and see if you notice any difference in quality versus how long it takes to render.
4. Leave Anti-aliasing on Geometry unless you have more advanced looking effects like reflections in your scene
Once again, do a screen shot test to see if having it set to best or geometry is actually doing you any good. If it doesn’t make a difference, don’t bother with it.
5. If you are working on animations, timings, and camera moves, keep your scene simple
If you are trying to get a exact camera movement or an animation to fill the frame just right, then turn off anything that will slow the render down. You don’t need materials and lights or anything else slowing down the render if you are simply positioning elements or keyframes.
6. Try adding motion blur and depth of field in After Effects instead of in Cinema 4D
I hate these effects in Cinema 4D. Object motion blur is weak and scene motion blur makes your renders take forever with all those samples. Think ahead if you can just add the blur in After Effects to one particular item. Render it separately or with an object buffer. Same goes with depth of field.
7. Render your scene in pieces
If you need something render-intensive like that scene motion blur, perhaps for a camera shake effect, then only render that piece with the scene motion blur. Select the frame range in the render settings that only require the blur, and turn it off to render the other parts. If you save multiple copies of your project, but set the render settings to render it in different pieces with different effects, you can use batch render to load and render these project consecutively. So you load the multiple projects with the different frame ranges as a batch, hit render, walk away and eat a sandwich.
Sometimes rendering can be delicious.
So those are just some tips I’m throwing out there. If you have any others, leave them in a comment below so we can all learn some more.
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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:
Crime Show Style Promo from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
The opening scenes are all Cinema 4D with an assist from Photoshop. The fingerprint transitions into After Effects. I got the background image from here and I purchased the main character from iStockphoto. I realized after I bought it that he was wearing a tuxedo, whoops. I was fixated on his sunglasses and totally ignored the tux. Nothing Photoshop can’t fix. Main character wearing sunglasses at night? Perfect. The caution tape and titles were Cinema 4D, positioned and animated to fit in the scene. The siren colors are a simple After Effects expression. I think it’s a good composition considering I have no actual video elements in a 15 second clip. All from stills and scratch.
It needed a voice over track, but if you’ve listened to my tutorials you know my voice is so terrible for this. I had a some great corny lines like “If you aren’t watching the best show on TV… GET A CLUE.” Forensics humor. Nice. Anybody with a good network promo voice who wants to record some cheesy copy I have in my head, I welcome it.
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I once had to read Catch 22 by Joseph Heller for English class in high school. It was a good book, and the term “Catch 22″ has become a bit of cultural literacy. If you don’t know what it is already, a Catch 22 is when your stuck in a situation because “A” needs to happen for “B” to happen, but conversely “B” cannot happen without “A” happening. It’s basically a paradox in logic, check Wikipedia for a better explanation.
Earlier this year I decided to leave the motion graphics job I had in search for something else. The position I held somehow was both aggravating and comfortable to me. It was aggravating because I had no opportunity for a promotion or to climb any ladders. I stuck was creating the same crap over and over again, so my reel had no diversity and nothing that I was making was good enough to be put on it. And also my salary wasn’t very high to begin with, and that got cut and started heading backwards. So there were plenty of reasons to be unsatisfied. But it also had its comforts, since I had established myself there, it was close to home, and I was never in over my head work wise, I simply felt adequate on a daily basis. It was “meh.” I don’t like feeling meh.
I got greedy/ambitious and wanted more, for various reasons beyond just my design work. I was having a quarter-life crisis, basically wondering why being smart, educated, funny, dependable, and talented was not worth more (wow modesty would help I guess). I had to make a move at this point in my life, before I let an opportunity (ok fine, there was this girl too who had me wrapped around her finger…) slip away. I felt my job had served its purpose and I wasn’t going to get any better doing the same thing I have already done so many times. I’d learn no new styles, techniques, and my reel would remain stagnant. If I wasn’t going to change it up now, when would be a better time to do so?
So I set out towards New York, which has a thousand times more job opportunities than the golf courses and nursing homes of my home state of Florida. I figured I could work my way in the door somewhere, take my lumps and start a career instead of just simply having a job. I will admit I underestimated the weakness of the economy, since I really didn’t personally feel it on a daily basis. I can use that as an excuse, but I’m not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs while my youth rots away while the government tries to fix this fiscal mess we are all in.
So far I’ve had a couple interviews at some legit places. I was particularly high on a position that I was plenty qualified for and would be an ideal place to start building my career. I really wanted the position, especially when it hit me after the interview of what a perfect place that would be to start. It took forever for them to get back to me with the bad news, I didn’t get the position. They said my interview was good, my work was too, but they hired someone who had more experience than I did.
So herein lies the problem: How exactly do I get not only more, but also better experience if I need that very experience to obtain it? Good question. I obviously took a gamble leaving my position when I didn’t have anything to immediately fill that void. So that was dumb in hindsight. My freelance work is picking up, but it’s been sporadic and I banked on it to hold me over until I got a full-time position. I can do quality work if I just get the chance, but if I never get the chance I’ll never be able to prove it. Catch 22.
So how do you get experience without experience? Basically I would think you need to draw attention to work you created yourself, for no other purpose than to showcase your skills. Basically that’s what I try to do with this site. This is harder than it sounds; it’s the equivalent of asking a painter to sit down and just paint something. Anything. More often we need inspiration or guidelines to jump-start our brains and create something great. Design work is often problem solving, it’s how to start at point A and get to point B with as much style and effectiveness as possible along the way.
Another way is to freelance and build connections. You’re at least making money and you meet a guy who knows a guy who needs a guy to jump on a big project that leads to bigger things. This hasn’t happened to me yet, so I’m basically trying to get any work I can in hopes of opening a door that leads to somewhere more promising.
So ultimately I did something brash and less-calculated, which usually isn’t my style. I’ve kind of dug myself into a hole with my back against the wall in the corner. Exactly. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I’ve got to get some more experience, so that I’ll ultimately be able to get… more experience.
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So AETUTS+ announced their winner for the logo reveal contest I entered. Mine was ok, the winner’s was way better, quite slick. I got listed under honorable mention, I think that’s like one step better than getting one of these:
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WOOOOOOOOOO! I’m awesome!
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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. Behold:
AE Tuts+ Logo Reveal Contest Entry: Puzzle Pieces from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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.
I’m pleased with how it came out, but this project was a headache. The problems start with the splines that outline the puzzle pieces. I got the splines from an Illustrator file with each piece outlined. When you bring them into Cinema 4D, the object axis for each of these remained in the center of my X,Y, and Z axis. This creates a less desirable rotation effect when you go to scatter the pieces. It’s a bit tricky to try and offset each piece, because they vary in size, therefore have a different “true center” and won’t interlock when placed consecutively in a grid cloner. If you get the right splines and have the patience it can be done properly, but I’m working on other things and frankly I’m not paying myself enough money to sit there and tear my hair out over off-centered puzzle piece splines.
Obviously it’s going to be a RAM hogging project when you get that many piece involved. And the lights cast a ton of shadows. When you add some global illumination and some motion blur, you’ve got a beast of a render. But the good thing is I’ve built this project once, and if I need a different style puzzle I can just swap out the materials and I’m good to go.
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I added a few clips to my reel. I also picked a less obnoxious music track. Watch it and get your funk on.
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Well actually it wasn’t slight, I kind of re-coded the whole thing. A few cosmetic changes too. Please alert me of any glitches.
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I need to network better. Everybody is on Twitter, and it’s no longer just for letting you know what I’m eating for lunch or that I just got the mail. I want to get connect to more people because I want to make new contacts and get some new work opportunities to come my way. If connecting to Twitter helps me with that just 1 time, it pays for itself. Yea I know it’s free.
So please follow me on Twitter. I don’t want to be a desperate nobody, trapped in Twitter purgatory. I will post links to my stuff as well as cool tutorials, design resources, articles, etc. that I find on the net. So please add me, otherwise I’m going to have to make like 100 pretend Twitter accounts, and I really don’t want to do that.
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