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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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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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I produced a new tutorial for CGTuts that can be seen here. This tutorial demonstrates how to use Mograph and Xpresso in Cinema 4D to create a sort of mini-application that can be used to design and animate your own bar graphs. The Xpresso is the key, because it gives us the ability to enter and keyframe data from a control panel, and it updates automatically in our scene.
I felt deflated when I found that Andrew Kramer produced something very similar about 2 weeks ago on his site using After Effects. It’s a totally different way to make bar graphs, but it looks like I jacked the idea from him. I had developed this over a month ago, it just took awhile to produce and get it posted. I didn’t even check his site for it until someone mentioned the relation to mine. They are very different tutorials for different programs that happen to produce something similar. The timing just makes me look sketchy, oh well.
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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’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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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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I’m not going to do a tutorial on making that MoGraph deck of cards. I started recording it and for the sake of brevity I excluded the tedious set up of adding materials and clones to make a full deck. And without that the tutorial just basically is setting up a linear cloner and an animated step effector. It was going to be kinda weak. So here’s mostly how you do it: Add your clones (All 52 of them) to a linear cloner and offset them in the X position. Then add a slight step rotation to make them in an arc. Add a step effector that flips the cards 180º. The only trick there is to make sure the spline graph under the Effector Tab is a straight line across the top of the graph. Then just add some falloff and animate the position to flip them however you want.
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I was in Las Vegas recently and couldn’t stop thinking about linear cloners and step effectors. I’ve got cards and gambling on my mind. I devised a little project that arranges all 52 playing cards in a linear cloner, thus allowing you to animate a entire deck of cards with different parameters and effectors. This animation here is what it looks like when you fan the whole deck of cards out flat on the table and then start at one end and flip all the cards over sequentially all in one motion. Behold:
MoGraph: Deck of Cards Flip from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
Not a complex animation but once you’ve got it set up it could unlock some better tricks. I think I’m going to make a tutorial for this.
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Head to the tutorial Page to check out my latest tutorial, where I use Cinema 4D and the MoGraph module to create a 3D speaker that is powered by a sound file. You end up creating something like this:
MoGraph Speakers from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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