Xpresso links the different shapes together and a 1 set of rotation keyframe drives the entire animation. Simple but kind of cool.

You better believe that Sweep NURBS can make text look cool.

I made a tube in Cinema 4D.

I will now answer your questions about the tube:

Q: I’ve watched the tube and I’m confused. What exactly does this tube do?

A: The tube doesn’t really do anything per se, it is what it is. It moves, and then the pieces inside it move.

Q. I see. How did you go about creating this tube?

A: Well I was trying to come up with a different way of presenting/containing/revealing some text in Cinema 4D. Instead of having the letters just sit there, I put them in a tube that kind of looks like those things at the bank or the basis for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I used MoDynamics to get the right feel for the letters to behave in their new vacuum sealed world. Then I altered the position and rotation of the tube to shake things up and have the contents bounce around. I added some marbles inside there because I felt like it. Then I added reflections and materials in order to make it look cooler and we arrived at the tube which stands before us today.

Q: Are there more of them like this?

A: I assure you this tube is the only tube of it’s kind.

Q: Precisely how long did it take to make this tube?

A: I spent a good 6-8 hours designing it to look and function correctly, and it took about 17 hours for my computer to render out the video that is less than 10 seconds. I can tell you are very impressed or possibly concerned.

Q: Wouldn’t it be better if it was like…a snow globe or something?

A: It definitely would be, it certainly lends itself to a design like that. But it’s not as simple as adding mittens, snowmen, cuteness, etc. The snow would have to be a particle system rather than dynamic clones, plus you’d need fluid dynamics to simulate the movement and turbulence of someone shaking the globe and dispersing the snow. If you would like to pay me lots of money to make you a snow globe I will consider it.

Thanks for your time.

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.

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.

A Cinema 4D conspiracy theory.

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

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.

This is the first one, called Jiggle Text. It’s just some simple MoGraph using a Step Effector and a Delay Effector. The text is bouncy in a Jello type of way.

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.

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.

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.

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