bulletproof

New Tutorial with Motionworks: Collision Deformer

Hey head over to John Dickinson’s site Motionworks and check out this tutorial I made using the new Collision Deformer in Cinema 4D. In my book I go over this new tool in release 13,m and this is a new example I developed where we create a figure object who is completely bulletproof; we animate bullets the bounce off of our hero and fall to the ground. All we need is the Collision Deformer and some dynamics.

map_image4

3D USA Election Map with XPresso

It’s been forever since I made something new for sale on 3DOcean or Videohive. If I wasn’t working on that pesky book all year I would have come out with a few items for some good old residual income. Once I finished writing I got creative again and made this file that should prove useful during the upcoming election year.

I tried to avoid watching political shows because I can’t stand watching people complain about public officials and act like they have all the right answers. But I’ve often seen graphics where they are highlighting what’s happening around the country, sometimes in a particular state, with a 3D map of the USA. This file I created in Cinema 4D can help create a similar look used on network TV. Check out the video to see what it can do and how it works.

I made an XPresso control panel with User Data that can offset individual states from the map, in case you want to highlight what’s going on in a certain state. You have control over all the properties you’d want, like the extrusion depth, how far the state is offset, the speed in which it slides out, etc. Each state has a super-easy slider programmed to do all the work for you with just a couple keyframes.

I also created a section in the control panel that creates as sort of random pattern in which the states offset back and forth. You have control over the speed too so it can go faster or slower. I’ve seen political themed backgrounds with this kind of design, so with a simple check box activation you can create it too.

The file is for sale here if you care to donate to my campaign. $12 for about a week’s worth of XPresso design and coding? Now that is a smart allocation of funding right there.

2012_reel_frame2

2012 Reel Intro Design

I figured out awhile back that making something cool that introduces your reel is a free and easy way to create something completely unique on your own, without any clients being involved. You have the first and the final say in however it looks. It’s important to have something cool at the start of the reel to set the tone for the rest of your work; you want anybody checking out your stuff to have a positive first impression of what you are capable of designing.

So clearly the only correct answer in this situation is to create some sort of cylindrical, rejected, mechanical prop from Tron 2 and place a flat screen TV inside it with some glitchy video.

I started out just trying to create some sort of video revealer, and I watched and loved a lot of graphics on NFL Network this year so I think this sort of procedural-building-mechanical animation style was on my mind. If only all my work could look like Big Machine’s instead…

I made the basic a shape and cranked up the details, making some sort of sliding space tube. I imagined the TV inside presenting my reel, so I attached it to the inside with these robot claws and pieced the whole thing together. I experimented with different materials, and toyed with a sort of all white, clean room kind of look, but I love the super reflective black look, it probably makes people think I’m super-dangerous and slick. Maybe.

It was a heavy render out of Cinema 4D, I applied Ambient Occlusion to get some shadow detail inside the crevices. I used an External Compositing tag to replace the edit I did to introduce my reel with the footage inside the screen. It’s a more interesting way to introduce myself and tease the contents of my reel.

Finally, I updated my reel with some new stuff and final;ly scrubbed it of all those nasty car commercials. BIg day for me. I also added some new music from the Vimeo Music store, it’s a track by Human Factor called “Step on Back.” Well worth a $1.99, I love this track.

Univision_logo_chiqui (00190)2

Univision Holiday Campaign Animation

This animation I made aired throughout the holiday season on Univision. My producers wanted it to be similar to the animation I did for their summer campaign.

The actual logo animation is a very simple spin inside Cinema 4D, it’s not going to rock anyone’s socks off. I created a very reflective red material for the logo because I wanted to try and make it look like it was a Christmas ornament.

The part I ended up liking the best were the gold ribbons, which were a technique I developed after to avoid dealing with the frustrations of working with Cloth in Cinema 4D. I hate using Cloth in Cinema 4D, I will avoid it at all costs. The ribbons are a Plane object modified with a Spline Wrap deformer to get their overall shape and control their path on a Helix spline. But if you stop there you have just a flat and dull looking line circling the screen. The key to making them float and fly in an organic manner was to apply a Displacer deformer to them as well. If you bump up the Height of the Displacement and the Global Scale of the Noise pattern you pick in your Shading options, you can get a wide level of displacement that makes the ribbon look more natural as it flows through the scene. Then you can just change the Seed value on the Noise shader and you’ll get different looking patterns for the ribbons, and you can find one that you like the best. Much easier than using cloth for ribbons.

dynamics_comp (00427)

Some Dynamics Examples From My Book

Here’s the end results of the lessons in chapter 10 of my book on Dynamics in Cinema 4D. I cover most of the dynamic features of the program like the Dynamics Body tag, springs, connectors, Soft Body dynamics, how to make MoGraph cloners dynamic, dynamic cloth, dynamic splines, and hair.

The key advantage of using dynamics is you can create realistic looking reactions and collisions without using keyframes. You set up a world and how your objects interact, and let Cinema 4D handle the rest. In my opinion it’s one of the the more fun areas to explore in the program, you can do some very creative and interesting stuff (like making cereal for example!) with dynamics.

You can find my book avilable for purchase here.

Rube Goldberg Machine

Rube Goldberg Machine Made with Dynamics

This animation is the result from the final lesson in my book. The last chapter deals with configuring dynamics in Cinema 4D, which is the process of making objects interact with each other with collisions, as well as forces, gravity, and more.

From the moment I started using dynamics in Cinema 4D I always thought of making a Rube Goldberg Machine, an elaborate contraption that yields a very simple result through chain reactions of many objects. It’s basically like creating a big game of Mouse Trap, except you have to make the whole thing yourself and kids will get really bored watching you tweak settings like Rotational Mass, Collision Noise, Linear Damping, and Angular Velocity Threshold.

I designed as many pieces as I could and tried dozens of combinations to get a complete sequence that results in the big finale. The lesson in the book takes you through the process of taking a bunch of static 3D objects and making them behave as this complex machine. The entire process requires no keyframes at all, which is all thanks to the power of dynamics.

new_cover_at_web

Finally Finished Writing

I finally finished writing my book about Cinema 4D. I started in March and wrote 10 chapters over the course of the rest of the year. I would have been done sooner but I had to revise a decent portion of it when Maxon came out with Cinema 4D release 13 in August. Look here it’s a real thing I swear not just something I made up to sound cool.

The final word count:

*faints

Yikes. Kind of makes me want to go back in time and smack myself whenever I felt stumped by a stupid 5 paragraph essay in school. Teenagers are so dumb. The page count is inflated because of the formatting and the pictures. It will be 500 or so I think.

Writing was a draining process; I’d come home from work and end up just doing more work almost everyday. It’s especially tough when you aren’t really making any money until you finish and hopefully sell the damn thing. And it wasn’t just writing, I had to design dozens of projects and examples to teach the software and take screenshots of all the lessons. I can’t wait until it’s finally published and tangible instead of a Word document.

I still need to prepare some sample videos and stills to help promote it on here, but the heavy lifting is done. I’m glad I finished before the holidays and I’m looking forward to setting some these new goals, in order of increasing difficulty:

  • Relax for the holidays
  • Complete online traffic school for going way too fast
  • Fix my Xbox
  • Find and consume at least one bottle of Brooklyn Black Ops
  • Learn Spanish
  • Find a girl who can stomach me for more than one date
  • Learn some new software. Maybe Nuke, Realflow, or Syntheyes… yea that’s right ladies ;)

Should be fun.

Protagonistas_Final

Protagonistas Show Opening

Me and a couple other animators were given less than a week to prepare an entire graphics package for this new show called “Protagonistas.” The producers left the graphics on the backburner in the hands of some animators that weren’t cutting it for about 3 months. I would have loved to collect checks and produce subpar graphics for 3 months, but instead I was asked to make something nice in about 5 days.

Protagonistas follows the cookie cutter reality show format of: Auditioning contestants in front of 3 judges -> move selected contestants into house -> sit back and watch them fight/argue/have sex/argue about sex fights -> vote contests off until a star is born.

This show searches for the next big telenovela star. I was denied an opportunity to be on the show to which I am still outraged. Just because I’m white and don’t speak Spanish shouldn’t preclude me from becoming a telenovela star. I could totally be on Que Hora Es? and they know this. I will have to catch my big break at another time.

I highlighted the main part pf the show’s opening that I did in this clip, they added some sound effects and music for the broadcast addition. I had to make a tunnel full of screens showcasing clips of the contestants on the show. They wanted all this to feel like we are going into the camera lens, which is the main element of the show’s logo. The tunnel is a heavy render in Cinema 4D with the help of MoGraph. I modeled one flat screen TV and placed it in a radial cloner, then made a linear cloner of each radial cloner. The camera is set to have a very wide lens to make the tunnel appear a lot deeper than it actual is. I had to apply different clips to each TV so there was some variety among the monitors, so there were a lot of materials. I didn’t have Cinema 4D 13 at my disposal so I couldn’t use the new multishader setting where you can add entire folders to just one material.

The shutter is a transition I made with another radial cloner to the contestants on the show. They wanted a sort of “beam me up Scotty” effect to introduce the characters. Each contestant enters through a combination of effects like linear wipe, turbulent displace, and emitting some particles using Trapcode Particular. I used a lot of tech overlays from the Motion Designer’s Toolkit because having pre-rendered footage like that is the only way I could pull that off in a few days.

This intro marks the first time in Univison history that the female contestants are wearing more clothes than the males. Despite concerns from me and multiple other people with common sense that framing the male characters waist up without a shirt will make people think they are naked, this is exactly what the shows producers wanted to infer. There was plenty of room for me to include the tops of their pants, but I was told to scale them up so that viewers will obviously be so captivated by a bunch of naked hombres on the screen. This will clearly lead to incredible ratings, increased advertising revenue, and ensure that the visionaries that insist on shooting guys waist up without shirt get promoted.

Summer_Promo_Final

Fix it in Post: Summer Campaign

If by any chance you’ve seen a commercial break on Univision in the past few months you’ve probably seen my promos for the network, suggesting you to enjoy the summer on Univision. Since it’s August already, I strongly recommend you tune in ASAP and absorb one of the many different promos I did for summer before it’s too late for you to disfruta el verano. They feature various on air personalities doing cheesy-fun summer stuff outside. Strangely I myself was not cast to be in any of the fun vignettes with beach balls, picnics, and tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. Weird. Maybe next time.

But you know you’ve hit it big when your work is featured across the web among articles wondering how Paulina Rubio looks in a bathing suit after having a baby.

Each promo ends with a shot of a nice summer scene where I placed an animation of the Univision logo splashing out of the water. The one shot that was deemed the most important of all the endings was a tilting shot from the hotel balcony overlooking beautiful Miami Beach. It was to make you want to jump through your TV on the spot and hopefully land in the Atlantic, except that it looked like this:
green beach

/sad trombone

Awwwww. Why is it all…green? Did we have to shoot directly into the sun? There’s no detail in the water and sky, you know, the stuff that will make it look kinda nice. Really, this is the shot I’m supposed to work with? OK BRING IT:

Basically I created a scene that wasn’t technically real at all, I replaced, enhanced, and added just about everything you see. This is what I feel like a beach is supposed to look like, whether you can actually find a beach that looks like a postcard is not TV’s problem. I could direct you to way better effects breakdowns from bigger studios to show you that the best composites actually go unnoticed, and you have toruble figuring out what parts of the the image are real and what’s been fixed in post production, or you probably don’t think about it at all.

I started by tracking the camera move so that I could position all my new layers properly in the animation. The originally clip needed a massive color correction, the white balance of the camera wasn’t even close, so I had to remove a lot of green to make the beach look somewhat normal. The sun had blown out the exposure and made the water and sky look awful, so I basically took the water detail from the right hand side of the screen and finessed it into the left side of the screen so there would actually be something there. I replaced the sky with a clear image, and color corrected both new pieces to look very saturated and rich, something to original image lacked entirely. From here it was adding the 3D logo I animated in Cinema 4D, as well as compositing the water into the composition. I wish I knew how to use Real Flow, but the water is from the Compositor’s Tool Kit from Digital Juice. I matched up some pieces and had to time remap the clips just so the splashes and condensation looked right with the logo. Then I added a fake sun to make the image a little hazier, I simply placed it in the same spot as the original sun.

The result is a scene that would be nearly impossible to capture in nature, but since you are accustomed to seeing picturesque beach scenes like this, you hardly give it a second thought as to if it’s real or not. And then you rewind your DVR to watch Chiquinquirá Delgado float by on the raft again.

Yea I really wish I could have gone on location for this shoot.

music_orb (0.00.01.12)

Mograph Dancing Music Orb

I was trying to come up with a new way to show what the Sound Effector in Mograph can do for a lesson in my upcoming book. I wanted to make something that was beyond the simple “Hey look at the clones scaling up to the sound of beat” animations we’ve all seen. So I created this shiny, squirmy, dancing turd rock. GENIUS. There will be a short and sweet lesson on how to create it in my book, in case your future clients demand you make one.