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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I recently did some freelancing in NYC and I worked on some ads for a few Broadway plays. These are technically unfinished I guess, since they weren’t finalized by the clients before I left, but they got to the point where I wanted to include them on my site.

First is La Cage with Kelsey Grammer. The key for this came out really good, I just wish the subjects were chicks instead of dudes.

La Cage from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I also did some rough work on an idea promoting a play with Denzel Washington, it’s called Fences:

Fences – Example from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I’m not sure if I’ll put either of these on my reel, since I don;t know if they are approved and finalized. So I’ll just leave them in Vimeo/Blog purgatory for now.

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A Cinema 4D conspiracy theory:

Short & Gray: UFO Abduction from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I’m going to New York for like 2 weeks, trying to make something happen. Peace.

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Because bar graphs shouldn’t get all the love.

Short & Gray: Pie Chart from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

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So I’ve got all of these unfinished projects that are just rotting on my hard drive. I come up with an idea and don’t know what to do with it. They are usually pretty simple, and I rack my brain trying to come up with a ground-breaking way to present my simple idea. It usually results in a dead end. So instead I’m just going to start posting them under the umbrella of “Short & Gray.” Since they will have just a plain old gray texture and be 5 seconds or less, the title fits. Maybe I will be able to use them down the road as part of a bigger project; it’s always good to have a library of random designs built and ready to go.

Here’s the first one, Jiggle Text:

Short & Gray: Jiggle Text from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

It’s just some simple MoGraph using a Step Effector and a Delay Effector. The text is bouncy in a Jello type of way.

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I produced a new tutorial for CGTuts that can be seen here. This tutorial demonstrates how to use Mograph and Xpresso in Cinema 4D to create a sort of mini-application that can be used to design and animate your own bar graphs. The Xpresso is the key, because it gives us the ability to enter and keyframe data from a control panel, and it updates automatically in our scene.

I felt deflated when I found that Andrew Kramer produced something very similar about 2 weeks ago on his site using After Effects. It’s a totally different way to make bar graphs, but it looks like I jacked the idea from him. I had developed this over a month ago, it just took awhile to produce and get it posted. I didn’t even check his site for it until someone mentioned the relation to mine. They are very different tutorials for different programs that happen to produce something similar. The timing just makes me look sketchy, oh well.

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I just posted my newest tutorial, where I demonstrate how to create a set of curtains that spread apart to reveal footage. It’s like a theater stage or a movie theater style set of curtains that parts in the middle, and you can place your footage behind it and have it be revealed. I’m thinking of a new welcome video for my site based on this, but I’m not sure yet. So check it out on the tutorials page.

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Last month I made a subway train scene using Cinema 4D and after Effects, and the folks over at Envato liked the idea so I got to produce and distribute a tutorial for them showing how to do it. So I didn’t upload this to Vimeo or embed it on my site since it is on CGTuts+, that’s the rules. So follow the link and check it out.

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

Text and Arrows – Formula Effectors in MoGraph from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

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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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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