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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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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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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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Here is the most thorough Global Illumination tutorial I have ever seen for Cinema 4D. It’s for release 11 and higher, which has a revamped interface and set up. One day soon I’m going to strap myself into my chair, lock the doors and not come out until I know every single part of this tutorial.
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Here’s an animation I made in CInema 4D using Mograph. It’s a drum kit, made of words, that reacts to the beat:
Cinema 4D Drum Kit from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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.
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I’ve been doing a lot of Cinema 4D design lately, so I keep using shortcuts to getting faster renders. I thought I’d share some tips as to how to get your computer to crank out your projects a little faster and save some of that precious, precious time.
1. Reduce the resolution of your render.
Duh. I tend to always want to see my renders at full resolution, but whenever you don’t need to see the fine details, chop your resolution by 1/2 and save some time.
2. Turn off elements that aren’t in the scene.
It’s a good idea to toggle the on and off the visibility of your scene elements depending on when they are in the frame. If an object doesn’t appear for the first 3 seconds, there isn’t really a point to having this item rendered in the beginning of your timeline. Same goes for things that exit the frame, if it no longer appears, you might as well tell Cinema 4D not to render it.
3. Don’t use reflections, transparency, shadows, and global illumination unless you have to
These are all render hogs. Make sure you absolutely love the reflection and transparency effects on your material, because if you don’t, they are going to waste your time in the rendering. Make sure that if you use global illumination, you are actually getting your money’s worth. Take 2 screen shots, one with global illumination ann one without. Sometimes the difference is negligible and not worth the extra render time. You can also turn down some of the quality settings in the global illumination panel, test it out with screen shots and see if you notice any difference in quality versus how long it takes to render.
4. Leave Anti-aliasing on Geometry unless you have more advanced looking effects like reflections in your scene
Once again, do a screen shot test to see if having it set to best or geometry is actually doing you any good. If it doesn’t make a difference, don’t bother with it.
5. If you are working on animations, timings, and camera moves, keep your scene simple
If you are trying to get a exact camera movement or an animation to fill the frame just right, then turn off anything that will slow the render down. You don’t need materials and lights or anything else slowing down the render if you are simply positioning elements or keyframes.
6. Try adding motion blur and depth of field in After Effects instead of in Cinema 4D
I hate these effects in Cinema 4D. Object motion blur is weak and scene motion blur makes your renders take forever with all those samples. Think ahead if you can just add the blur in After Effects to one particular item. Render it separately or with an object buffer. Same goes with depth of field.
7. Render your scene in pieces
If you need something render-intensive like that scene motion blur, perhaps for a camera shake effect, then only render that piece with the scene motion blur. Select the frame range in the render settings that only require the blur, and turn it off to render the other parts. If you save multiple copies of your project, but set the render settings to render it in different pieces with different effects, you can use batch render to load and render these project consecutively. So you load the multiple projects with the different frame ranges as a batch, hit render, walk away and eat a sandwich.
Sometimes rendering can be delicious.
So those are just some tips I’m throwing out there. If you have any others, leave them in a comment below so we can all learn some more.
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Here’s a Cinema 4D train moving through a subway station:
Cinema 4D/After Effects Subway Train from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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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