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.

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.

I have wanted to update my site but I’ve been locked in on a rather interesting and time-consuming side project. I’m halfway through the first draft of a book about how to use Cinema 4D. Yes, the same guy who cranks out a ho-hum blog post every month or so is writing an entire book. Makes perfect sense.

I’m still not 100% sure why I was the one asked to write this book, they could have picked a million other designers to do it. It must be because I am an industry leader in 3D animation using Cinema 4D and sarcasm they drew my name out of a hat or something. Whatever the reason, I didn’t ask any questions and I got to work ASAP before they changed their mind. I’m taking the project quite serious because it’s obviously a great opportunity at my age to become a published author. It’s also a much better side project, and I don’t have to waste time racking my brain trying to come up with a new tutorial or creative design file I can sell for a $1.25 at the Envato Marketplace.

The book will be a thorough overview of the essentials features of Cinema 4D. It will have roughly 80 short lessons that go over just about everything you need to know to become well-versed in the program. A general concept I try to infuse into the lessons is to compare how certain techniques can be achieved in Cinema 4D versus how they are accomplished in real life, and I draw from personal experience to make recommendations and encourage further exploration of the program. You could write whole books on individual components, menus, and tools within the program, so I did my best to cover the most useful and straightforward topics to turn the reader from a novice to advanced user if the book gets read from cover to cover.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to channeling my unfiltered creativity and seek the proper inspiration as I forge ahead with my pièce de résistance.

Sent from my iPad 3 via WiFi at Starbucks while adjusting my dark rimmed glasses.

Good fire footage is a must for every animator’s library. Fire is something so natural and organic that you can’t effectively simulate it with cheap plugins. It tends to feel fake; you have to use real fire footage in your designs if you want it to look best.

I got the opportunity to use this Rampant Design Tools 3K Fire and Flame footage on some of my performance loops for Premio Lo Nuestro. It’s a great set of high res fire footage shot on RED One cameras and it blended in perfect with my comp.

So I did a tutorial highlighting the clips and present this example of what you can use this fire footage to create. It uses Cinema 4D and MoGraph to create our title animation and camera movements, and then After Effects to blend our 3D with out fire footage as well as turn up the heat on our animation. Wow that pun was terrible. I’m so sorry.

The footage is available at 25% off using the Coupon Code: BIGMIKEDESIGN

Here is part 1 of my Baseball Wall Title Sequence tutorial in Cinema 4D, also with compositing and post effects in After Effects. This tutorial shows you how to recreate the titles seen on ESPN this year promoting their baseball broadcasts. All of the elements in the scene are generated in Cinema 4D to create a portion of a stadium in 3D, and then you import this into After Effects and add your own titles onto the wall.

Here is part 1 of my Baseball Wall Title Sequence tutorial in Cinema 4D, also with compositing and post effects in After Effects. This tutorial shows you how to recreate the titles seen on ESPN this year promoting their baseball broadcasts. All of the elements in the scene are generated in Cinema 4D to create a portion of a stadium in 3D, and then you import this into After Effects and add your own titles onto the wall.

Here is a Univision Promo I did featuring the lovely Greydis Gil. I want to apologize first for the music. It was not up to me to use a track that was written by Mario and Luigi in the Mushroom Kingdom.

This one took a long time to create. I started by making a butterfly in Cinema 4D that was comprised of the pieces of the Univsion logo. I imported the logo as splines and textured each piece to match the corresponding colors. Then I animated the movement of the wings by linking them together with xpresso and driving them with some user data I keyframed. I flirted with the idea of making a sine wave control the movement of the wings, but it looked better to add a little more randomness to the speed and movement of the wings flapping, so I took the manual animation route. I can tell you are on the edge of your seat.

When out of nowhere I defined the path that the butterfly was to fly and attached the butterfly’s position by aligning it to the spline and animating the start and end position. I added a vibrate tag to offset the position and rotation of the spline slightly in order to give the butterfly a little more realistic flight path; it moves more sporadic this way like a real butterfly would. Once I did this for one butterfly, I duplicated many instances of it and tweaked all the animated parameters to make each butterfly different than the next in terms of the way it looks and moves. I refrained from naming them all.

I positioned each butterfly carefully in the scene to get the right distribution through the duration of the animation, making sure of things like they wouldn’t overlapping each other. I tried to make it look as random and natural as possible by neurotically adjusting and constantly tweaking my creatures for hours to have them fit perfectly in my world. I bet that is what God feels like on a day to day basis.

I divided the butterflies into drones and heroes. The drones are the butterflies that fly aimlessly through the scene and carry on their way. They are n00bs. The heroes are the ones that interact with the talent and need to be in a specific spot at a specific time during the animation to make it appear as if they are being swiped at by the net. I ramped up some of their movements as the net is going by in order to make it seem like they are trying to escape urgently.

For the final logo, I had to come up with something that went with the way the scene is shot. She looks up as if something is coming from high up so you have to do something along those lines to make it convincing. They originally suggest I make the butterfly turn into the logo, but that is pretty predictable since it already is the logo. I decided to make the logo big and in 3D and have butterflies nesting on it and flying towards it. Besides looking like a “U” and a butterfly, the logo also looks like a flower, which is naturally what a butterfly would be attracted to. Much like I am attracted to Greydis Gil.

Greidys is the lovely lady in this promo, and I have not seen her at work since I’ve been here at Univision. I really, really wish I would have. If I saw her in the hallway I would approach her and tell her that I am the clever and rather striking young man that was fully capable of surrounding her in imaginary butterflies, so I could obviously make her wildest dreams come true. Then she would say something to me in Spanish and I would have no idea what it meant. Google translate wouldn’t help because I would have trouble spelling and remember what she said. It was probably something quite romantic and how she longs for an hombre like me. But alas I will never know for sure…

What.

Here is a new Univision Promo I did with Cinema 4D and After Effects. They needed it done fast earlier this month because they wanted to air this network promo right after the coverage of the World Cup ended, and they were hoping Spain would win and they could air this promo that has an obvious Spanish theme to it. I got it done with a quick turnaround thanks to MoGraph as always. I made the Univision logo the object cloner, then I offset the smaller particle clones along a spline using a spline effector. I added some chaos to the particles with a random effector and animated the parameters so they moved and rotated along a spline path to make it appear they were coming from the woman’s fan and merging into the network logo. I did the post effects in After Effects, it needed some rotoscoping mostly, along with a few other tricks to make it look polished.

I’m going to start doing a breakdown of my projects when I can. It may help people understand what it is exactly that I do, besides pushing buttons on a computer to make pretty pictures appear on da tee vee.

Oh yea and there’s a BMD new logo in there…change is coming…

I recreated the baseball promos I’ve seen this season on ESPN. I modeled the whole scene in Cinema 4D and did the compositing in After Effects. This scene relies on the camera position being parallel to the wall to recreate the simple and smooth pan along the warning track. I used Mograph to create the wall by cloning the padded panel, and once I modeled one seat I simply used cloners to create the rows. The grass is made with Hair; it really slows the render down but it creates the best looking 3D grass in Cinema 4D. I added the titles that I created in Photoshop to look like they were painted on the wall, and did some color correcting and added some grunge to enhance the scene.

They look very similar to the commercials you see on ESPN, and the best part is that once you create in in Cinema 4D, you can simply swap out the titles to change the teams and games to say whatever you want.

The Red Jays beat the Blue Sox that night 6-4.

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.