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Short & Gray: Falling Boxes

MoDynamics is awesome, I am using it all the time. You could create some really cool stuff with just Mograph before this addition to the module, but adding the ability to make your clones collide and interact with other bodies make it so much more powerful.

Here is a simple animation I made, it’s a quick revealer that can be used to bring some type, footage, objet, etc. on screen. You basically keyframe the hero box, have it blend in with some dummy clones, and animate the surfaces of the plane to unravel to showcase the contents of the box.

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Short & Gray: Roller Coaster in Cinema 4D

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.

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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Short & Gray: Pie Chart

Because bar graphs shouldn’t get all the love.

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Short & Gray – Jiggle Text

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.

This is the first one, called Jiggle Text. 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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New Tutorial: Automated Bar Graphs with Xpresso

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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Cinema 4D Tutorial: Animated Bar Graphs with Xpresso Part 2

Check out my tutorial on CG Tuts to learn a way to create bar graphs using Mograph and Xpresso. These 2 Cinema 4D components make it so we can create our on data and input to drive the look and style of the graph. Once you create the base file, you can use it as a template to create bar graphs whenever you need to. You can export a video with graphs from Cinema 4D instead of creating a static, boring one in Powerpoint for your next presentation.

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Cinema 4D Tutorial: Animated Bar Graphs With Xpresso Part 1

Check out my tutorial on CG Tuts to learn a way to create bar graphs using Mograph and Xpresso. These 2 Cinema 4D components make it so we can create our on data and input to drive the look and style of the graph. Once you create the base file, you can use it as a template to create bar graphs whenever you need to. You can export a video with graphs from Cinema 4D instead of creating a static, boring one in Powerpoint for your next presentation.

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Text and Arrows – MoGraph’s Formula Effector

Here’s a little something something I came up with just adding a bunch of effectors together in MoGraph.

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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Drum Kit made with MoGraph

Here’s an animation I made in CInema 4D using Mograph. It’s a drum kit, made of words, that reacts to the beat.

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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Subway Train Animation/Composite

Here’s a Cinema 4D train moving through a subway station.

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.