So I finally posted a new tutorial. This one shows you how to make a crumpling paper animation in Cinema 4D, like this:

Paper Crumple Tutorial Intro from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

 I discovered the basis for this tutorial while doing a lot of experimenting with the Cloth Tag in Cinema 4D. It definitely saves a ton of time rather than the alternative of keyframing the entire animation. I would recommend playing around with the settings rather than just using what I gave you; you can get different results for you animation and experiment a little bit.

I’m going to make an effort to post tutorials more frequently. If you become a registered user I will send out a notice when a new tutorial is posted, or you can subscribe to my feed.

 Feel free to email me any questions you may have about this tutorial.

So here is a clip form a commercial I did that had to do with UCF Athletics. Instead of just using regular-old text, I constantly try to think of different methods to present title work. In this sports themed commercial I added the title work onto a material in Cinema 4D and created a waving pennant using the cloth tag.

I would recommend using the cloth tag to create any sort of waving flag like this rather than the wind deformer. The Cloth tag is very easy to set up and with some trial and error you can create a much more natural looking movement than with the simple wind deformer. Don’t forget to make it a child of a hyperNURBS object to make it even smoother.

There are several tutorials on this subject already out there, including this one.

I’d really like to get more in depth with the cloth tag to better understand how the settings can alter the movement and reaction of your object. I haven;t been able to find an in depth review of what certain things like flexion, global intersection analysis, global drag, etc. actually “do” when changed. If anyone has a breakdown of this to link to or would perhaps put it in writing please let me know.

So I had to come up with a design relatively quickly (That’s like 6 hours or so) that conveyed how owning a Ford vehicle already can save you a lot of money if you really want to buy a gas-guzzling F-150 that Ford is practically giving away.

Money Mailbox from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I modeled the mailbox in Cinema 4D and made it fully functional with a door and a flag. The money particle was easy to make, with a wind deformer modifying a plane object with both sides of a $100 bill as the materials. The emitter works well, but it lacks collision detection so the particles tend to intersect and overlap in ways a giant stream of money flying out of a mailbox wouldn’t here in the real world. Without using Xpresso and Thinking Particles I couldn’t get it to react properly, but the bills are moving fast with a motion blur and rotating so you really can’t tell. And thats what it’s all about, getting it done ASAP by finding corners to cut.

Thinking Particles is something I want to get good at, but there are no great books or resources I have been able to find to teach me. 

I felt my home page was in need of a bit of a makeover, so I created a new welcome video. I consulted my Xbox for inspiration and decided to create a Guitar Hero style video for my site. After doing tons of interactive research while observing the details and nuances of the game, I did my best to recreate the look and feel of the game with Cinema 4D, Photoshop, Motion, and After Effects. If you’ve never seen or played Guitar Hero (or even more awesomer, Rockband) then I suggest you head down to somewhere like Best Buy and take the floor sample for a spin.

Motion Graphics Hero: Guitar Hero Style Intro from Michael Szabo on Vimeo. 

I’m pleased with the way this came out. It’s good to know that all of my research and hard work payed off.

I’m planning on doing more welcome videos to the site every so often. I’ll either have them play randomly if I can figure out how or I will have a way to cycle between them. 

I recently stumbled upon a useful tool in Cinema 4D on how to keep cameras (or any object for that matter) locked in the same position.Quite often I mistakenly moved my camera in the viewer window, and Cinema 4D doesn’t allow you to revert back to the view you just had, so essentially your perhaps perfect camera angle is gone. The only solution  was to add only one set of keyframes to the position values at a specific frame. But their has to be another way…. 

And there is. I stumbled upon the “Protection” tag in the Cinema 4D tags menu.

So in the Object Manager ->Tags -> Cinema 4D Tags -> Protection.It works for anything else too, its the equivalent to locking something in Photoshop and After Effects.

I posted a new tutorial for you Cinema 4D users out there. I was working on a project where I wanted the camera to shake, and I developed a camera shake method that is easy to set up. It incorporates User Data (very similar to expression controls in After Effects) to let you create a custom camera shake parameter to control on your own with Xpresso. Go ahead and check it out.

I made a new page where I will start uploading animations that I create in MoGraph. I find myself constantly messing around with MoGraph’s cloners and effectors, and I just wanted a spot where I can put anything cool I design.