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New Tutorial: Make a Subway Train Scene in Cinema 4D and After Effects

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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Cinema 4D Tutorial: Create a Realistic Subway Station Scene using Cinema 4D and After Effects Part 2

Follow the link to view my CG Tuts+ tutorial about how to create a fast-moving, 3D subway train in Cinema 4D and then composite it into a subway station photo to make a realistic scene. The modeling in done in Cinema 4D, and the compositing is done in After Effects

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Cinema 4D Tutorial: Create a Realistic Subway Station Scene using Cinema 4D and After Effects Part 1

Follow the link to view my CG Tuts+ tutorial about how to create a fast-moving, 3D subway train in Cinema 4D and then composite it into a subway station photo to make a realistic scene. The modeling in done in Cinema 4D, and the compositing is done in After Effects

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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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Spider Web Text Animation Tutorial Posted

I just posted a new tutorial for After Effects. I show you how to create an animated spider web that catches some text flying into it. It starts by showing you how to create the web in Illustrator and then how to make it elastic and bouncy in After Effects. Enjoy and hit me up with any questions you may have.

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After Effects-Spider Web Animation

Tutorial: Spider Web Animation in After Effects

So here’s a tutorial that may mimic a certain theme you’ve seen before. I show you how to create a spider web in Illustrator and then animate it to catch text in After Effects. It’s not limited to just text, you could make it catch anything, even footage. Here’s a link to the font I used. I’ve also included the web I created in Illustrator, in case you don’t have that application you can still follow along. I know it’s a big file, but After Effect’s continuous rasterization was messing up the effects added to the web, so I made it big enough to not require scaling it up. Lastly, I forgot to mention one little part that makes the web a little more realistic, but I didn’t want to go back and redo part of the tutorial since it was already compressed by the time I thought of it. A spider web has slight variations in the thickness of the web, or it at least appears to. It probably has to do with how the light hits it. So there’s a way to achieve this: Just ad a solid with fractal noise as a track matte above your web. Set the track matte to luma with some setting seen here on this screenshot. It just adds a little variance to the web.

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Marvelous Spider Text, Man

Something I worked on in After Effects that really doesn’t try to mimic any style or theme you’ve seen before, nope not at all.

I submitted this to get picked up as a tutorial that I would get paid for, and it probably won’t in the end. So if not then I will record the tutorial for this technique and post it here.

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After Effects vs Motion

After Effects is king of 2D animation and compositing. It’s been around since the early to mid 1990s when I was working on coloring books instead of color corrections. I first used it probably around version 5.5 and I barely new what I was doing. But as my knowledge of general computer and video principles increased, I became quite adept at it. I’m probably in the top million After Effects users on the planet, elite company.

But then there’s Motion, Apple’s relatively new, competing program. Motion 3 came out a couple years ago and added some advanced features that closed the gap some. I used Motion everyday at my last job, so I got to learn it rather thoroughly and decided to write a little compare and contrast based on my experience. Here we go:
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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.