I’ll be presenting for Maxon at Full Sail University on Friday, May 24th. I’ll be discussing some projects of mine as a Broadcast Designer, I’ll talk about how useful a tool Cinema 4D is in my field. I’ll try to hit on some topics like:

• What exactly is broadcast design
• Cineware integration with After Effects
• Advantages for students
• How Cinema 4D helps me in my various projects

I’m excited to be demoing some of my projects recent for live performances and I’ll try to shed a little light on what exactly a career as a broadcast designer entails. Here’s a still from a recent project I did, I’ll show the 3D behind it:

So Maxon posted videos of all the presentations from NAB 2013. Mine was about how XPresso can help optimize your workflow in Cinema 4D. I demonstrate how you can create control panels with User Data to streamline all your relevant project settings into one spot. Here’s the project files that went along with it.

I had a blast at NAB and a great time with the Maxon crew. It was inspiring and an honor to be in the company of so many creative C4D users from around the world.

Check out the video and if you have any questions please contact me.

I’m presenting for Maxon at NAB today in Las Vegas. I’ll be demonstrating how to use XPresso to enhance you Cinema 4D Projects. This post contains everything you need to follow along with my presentation on C4D Live:

I’m on Twitter @bigmikedesign

Here are the sample projects to follow along during my presentation.

Here is my reel.

Here is a link to the C4D Games Projects if you wish to check them out and download them all.

Here is link to my donationwareCinema 4D Twitter project with a sample video showing you all the controls in action.

Thanks, if you wish to contact me after the presentation with comments/questions you can email me at mike@bigmikedesign.com

I keep seeing all sorts of TV shows post tweets during broadcasts, you can’t escape it. I keep seeing people post the same generic Twitter layout for displaying tweets, it’s probably just a basically template in Photoshop that is updated daily by interns. There is usually no movement or anything animated, just a boring, static graphic.

I started to build a 3D Tweet as a way to display a tweet inside Cinema 4D, and before long I built an entire Twitter feed and web browser.I looked at a Twitter feed and translated it into a MoGraph object, it’s basically just a linear cloner that iterates tweets. So I rigged a ton of XPresso to give the user compete control over everything you’d want to customize in the feed. You can customize the browser window, trending topics, your summarized Twitter profile, and obviously the individual tweets. You can enter in the text you want and all the secondary information to make the tweet appear exactly how you’d see it on Twitter (well, like 99% accurate, this is 3D animation not web design).

Here’s a video I posted showing how you control it, the file is available here for free. I decided against making it a pay file and just as donationware, so enjoy.

Maxon asked me to be a presenter for their software demonstration at NAB in Las Vegas this year. Naturally I accepted; it’s a pretty cool honor to have them notice your work. And of all the people in the world using and creating great stuff with Cinema 4D, I won’t ask too many questions why they chose me and instead just enjoy them bringing me out to Vegas.

Three to four years ago I was down on my luck after walking away from the glamorous lifestyle of mass producing local car commercials. I couldn’t get a design job anywhere. In September 2009 I didn’t make it past the first round of interviews for a part time job designing animated advertisements for a flat screen TV inside and Indian grocery store in Iselin, NJ. Yes apparently there were a second set of interviews for this position. That all sounds funny now that I see it typed out. Since then I got my foot in the door somewhere, I eventually got hired, I wrote a book, and enough people think I am smart and qualified enough to give me these opportunities. Honestly it’s a cool position to be in; I’m only 27 and I keep improving my knowledge and creative capabilities every year. Hopefully my presentation will share something cool and insightful about Cinema 4D. It will lean heavy on XPresso.

Check out C4D Live on Wednesday and Thursday for my presentation.

So this has been done for awhile, but I completely forgot to post it. Like 5 months. Oops. I obviously run a tight ship here on my site.

This installment of C4D Games is recreating a carnival style game of Duck Shoot. You take aim at moving duck targets, some are big and some are small. You can specify point values for the different sized ducks, and the game automatically tallies the score for you. You can shoot one bullet before having to reload (musket style weapons) just so it’s more challenging. Check out the sample video to see how this is coded with XPresso, and how all the MoGraph an Dyanmics settings are configured to get this game working.

Click here to download the game and check it out.

Mini golf is a nice alternative to real golf, which I happen to be pretty bad at yet still keep playing after all these years. In this edition of C4D Games we tackle perhaps the most treacherous test of concentration in all of sports: the windmill hole in mini golf. The objective here is to putt your golf ball through those dangerous windmill blades and get you ball to come out the other side and into the hole.

We’ve got a variety of elements in the works here. MoGraph is used to create and power the windmill as well as for the unique setup of getting our putter to swing back and through our golf ball. Lots of dynamics are in play here too, as the hole course needs to be one big obstacle for our ball. The ball’s dynamic properties are activated on collision with the putter, and it rolls along the hills and dips of the terrain.

XPresso links up our properties so that we have control over our aim and power of our putt and the configuration of the windmill. This was a fun little project to make and it lends itself to being rework and configured to other holes.

Download the file here and try and sink this putt.

In this quick game we have a maze toy, where you have have to tilt the game around and get the marble to roll through the maze and into the center to win. With a little XPresso we are able to configure an accurate stopwatch that tracks our time and shuts off instantly when we reach the center with our marble. You can tilt the game a lot or a just little bit to get the marble rolling, then set your keyframes to record the movement. The marble moves with Dynamics, the keyframes only trigger the movement of the maze, thus causing the ball to move acordingly. The objective here is to get the marble into the center as fast as possible. Watch the demonstration video, download the file, and give it a try.

Download C4D Games: Marble Maze

Welcome to the inaugural voyage of C4D Games. The idea behind C4D Games is to design projects in Cinema 4D using the components of the program to create small little interactive games animators can play, while demonstrating some fun uses of Dynamics, XPresso, and MoGraph. My goal is to build a little library of projects that you can download and examine how they work inside Cinema 4D. Learning is way more fun if there are games involved, so I’m going to do my best to come up with new games as often as I can.

Up first, we have a classic game of ring toss. These games can be very hard or even totally rigged in carnivals, (you could also do this in Cinema 4D with one setting on you Dynamics tag) but I won at it last year at a beer festival. I won an ugly T-Shirt that is too small for me from a company that makes a rather bad tasting beer in Asia. There’s no prize in this game I made, but the key to good competition is keeping score. This ring toss game is configured in XPresso so it can count your score based on you being able to toss the rings on to specific bottles. You can alter and arrange different colored bottles to result in different scoring in the game. The XPresso looks complicated but it’s just the same steps repeated several times for multiple rings and bottles.

Check out the video and download the file to play some ring toss.

Download C4D Games Ring Toss

While working on a project I stumbled into a cool design with Meta Balls in Cinema 4D that creates this 3D version of the Rorschach Test. It’s the famous test where you are given 10 different ink blots to stare at by a psychologist and you are asked what you interpret the image to be. They are just smudges but sometimes you can make out the silhouettes of certain objects or themes, thus determining if you are 100% completely insane or not.

Using a Cloner with a sphere, a Random Effector, a Formula Effector, and Meta Balls, I was able to create a free-flowing version of a test. The great thing about Using MoGraph with this is you can alter the random seed, the number of clones, or any number of different options and get a completely different looking animation. Pause the video at any point and look at the pattern. See anything interesting?

Clearly this is the Dog from Dunk Hunt laughing at you when you fired and missed shooting at the duck.