Behold this greatness. I started using After Effects in summer of 2005. Prior to that I was mostly just a Final Cut Pro guy, editing short videos and home movies. I knew Photoshop to an extent, and eventually I got to the point where there were things I wanted to do with video that I could do with photos in Photoshop.

That led me to After Effects. The date on these files is marked as 6/8/2005, so they are almost 7 years old. I guess this could be considered my entire demo reel in 2005. I worked at an ad agency that made car commercials by the bushel, and they were fast and cheap designs. Well, maybe not designs as much as they were car salesman screaming this sketchy and misleading deal RIGHT NOW before it’s too late.

The footage of the Mustang is from Ford. They rotate the camera and car around and give you the clip and a matte to work with in case you want to composite. And composite I did!

In the first clip, I placed the car behind a stylish premade background from Digital Juice. Then I designed a speedometer in Photoshop and angled it in a 3D layer. I shrewdly separated the needle from the rest of the speedometer so I could do that sweet rotation move as the car’s speed revved up, despite it not driving anywhere. And somehow the whole speedometer starts getting all shaky and crazy but the needle stays perfectly still. You were supposed to feel the raw power of the car with all that shaking but now it just looks weird to me. I give myself an A for effort!

In the second clip, I merely took a dark sky stock footage and placed the car in front of it. I must have had the car filled with a black layer or used the matte to cut out the shape of the car from a solid, then I faded it out and brought the car to light.

MY work has gotten better since then (I hope), through nothing but absorbing tutorials and building project after project. You force yourself to get better by learning how to do things correctly or by creating projects that are based on an effect that people consider quality work. I think it’s important to remember what’s not on your reel and why, and it’s worthwhile to go back and look at work that really isn’t THAT old and see how far you’ve come.

Hey head over to John Dickinson’s site Motionworks and check out this tutorial I made using the new Collision Deformer in Cinema 4D. In my book I go over this new tool in release 13,m and this is a new example I developed where we create a figure object who is completely bulletproof; we animate bullets the bounce off of our hero and fall to the ground. All we need is the Collision Deformer and some dynamics.

It’s been forever since I made something new for sale on 3DOcean or Videohive. If I wasn’t working on that pesky book all year I would have come out with a few items for some good old residual income. Once I finished writing I got creative again and made this file that should prove useful during the upcoming election year.

I tried to avoid watching political shows because I can’t stand watching people complain about public officials and act like they have all the right answers. But I’ve often seen graphics where they are highlighting what’s happening around the country, sometimes in a particular state, with a 3D map of the USA. This file I created in Cinema 4D can help create a similar look used on network TV. Check out the video to see what it can do and how it works.

I made an XPresso control panel with User Data that can offset individual states from the map, in case you want to highlight what’s going on in a certain state. You have control over all the properties you’d want, like the extrusion depth, how far the state is offset, the speed in which it slides out, etc. Each state has a super-easy slider programmed to do all the work for you with just a couple keyframes.

I also created a section in the control panel that creates as sort of random pattern in which the states offset back and forth. You have control over the speed too so it can go faster or slower. I’ve seen political themed backgrounds with this kind of design, so with a simple check box activation you can create it too.

The file is for sale here if you care to donate to my campaign. $12 for about a week’s worth of XPresso design and coding? Now that is a smart allocation of funding right there.

I signed up for FXPHD to learn Nuke. It’s been a while since I learned a new piece of software, and I’ve heard great things about Nuke and what it’s capable of. I feel like I almost had to because so many of the applications in my arsenal are becoming obsolete because somebody is more concerned about selling games and timewasters for phones instead of catering to the needs of creative individuals who used their stuff before it everyone else thought it was super cool and trendy.

I figured out awhile back that making something cool that introduces your reel is a free and easy way to create something completely unique on your own, without any clients being involved. You have the first and the final say in however it looks. It’s important to have something cool at the start of the reel to set the tone for the rest of your work; you want anybody checking out your stuff to have a positive first impression of what you are capable of designing.

So clearly the only correct answer in this situation is to create some sort of cylindrical, rejected, mechanical prop from Tron 2 and place a flat screen TV inside it with some glitchy video.

I started out just trying to create some sort of video revealer, and I watched and loved a lot of graphics on NFL Network this year so I think this sort of procedural-building-mechanical animation style was on my mind. If only all my work could look like Big Machine’s instead…

I made the basic a shape and cranked up the details, making some sort of sliding space tube. I imagined the TV inside presenting my reel, so I attached it to the inside with these robot claws and pieced the whole thing together. I experimented with different materials, and toyed with a sort of all white, clean room kind of look, but I love the super reflective black look, it probably makes people think I’m super-dangerous and slick. Maybe.

It was a heavy render out of Cinema 4D, I applied Ambient Occlusion to get some shadow detail inside the crevices. I used an External Compositing tag to replace the edit I did to introduce my reel with the footage inside the screen. It’s a more interesting way to introduce myself and tease the contents of my reel.

Finally, I updated my reel with some new stuff and final;ly scrubbed it of all those nasty car commercials. BIg day for me. I also added some new music from the Vimeo Music store, it’s a track by Human Factor called “Step on Back.” Well worth a $1.99, I love this track.

This animation I made aired throughout the holiday season on Univision. My producers wanted it to be similar to the animation I did for their summer campaign.

The actual logo animation is a very simple spin inside Cinema 4D, it’s not going to rock anyone’s socks off. I created a very reflective red material for the logo because I wanted to try and make it look like it was a Christmas ornament.

The part I ended up liking the best were the gold ribbons, which were a technique I developed after to avoid dealing with the frustrations of working with Cloth in Cinema 4D. I hate using Cloth in Cinema 4D, I will avoid it at all costs. The ribbons are a Plane object modified with a Spline Wrap deformer to get their overall shape and control their path on a Helix spline. But if you stop there you have just a flat and dull looking line circling the screen. The key to making them float and fly in an organic manner was to apply a Displacer deformer to them as well. If you bump up the Height of the Displacement and the Global Scale of the Noise pattern you pick in your Shading options, you can get a wide level of displacement that makes the ribbon look more natural as it flows through the scene. Then you can just change the Seed value on the Noise shader and you’ll get different looking patterns for the ribbons, and you can find one that you like the best. Much easier than using cloth for ribbons.

Here’s the end results of the lessons in chapter 10 of my book on Dynamics in Cinema 4D. I cover most of the dynamic features of the program like the Dynamics Body tag, springs, connectors, Soft Body dynamics, how to make MoGraph cloners dynamic, dynamic cloth, dynamic splines, and hair.

The key advantage of using dynamics is you can create realistic looking reactions and collisions without using keyframes. You set up a world and how your objects interact, and let Cinema 4D handle the rest. In my opinion it’s one of the the more fun areas to explore in the program, you can do some very creative and interesting stuff (like making cereal for example!) with dynamics.

You can find my book avilable for purchase here.

This animation is the result from the final lesson in my book. The last chapter deals with configuring dynamics in Cinema 4D, which is the process of making objects interact with each other with collisions, as well as forces, gravity, and more.

From the moment I started using dynamics in Cinema 4D I always thought of making a Rube Goldberg Machine, an elaborate contraption that yields a very simple result through chain reactions of many objects. It’s basically like creating a big game of Mouse Trap, except you have to make the whole thing yourself and kids will get really bored watching you tweak settings like Rotational Mass, Collision Noise, Linear Damping, and Angular Velocity Threshold.

I designed as many pieces as I could and tried dozens of combinations to get a complete sequence that results in the big finale. The lesson in the book takes you through the process of taking a bunch of static 3D objects and making them behave as this complex machine. The entire process requires no keyframes at all, which is all thanks to the power of dynamics.

I finally finished writing my book about Cinema 4D. I started in March and wrote 10 chapters over the course of the rest of the year. I would have been done sooner but I had to revise a decent portion of it when Maxon came out with Cinema 4D release 13 in August. Look here it’s a real thing I swear not just something I made up to sound cool.

The final word count:

*faints

Yikes. Kind of makes me want to go back in time and smack myself whenever I felt stumped by a stupid 5 paragraph essay in school. Teenagers are so dumb. The page count is inflated because of the formatting and the pictures. It will be 500 or so I think.

Writing was a draining process; I’d come home from work and end up just doing more work almost everyday. It’s especially tough when you aren’t really making any money until you finish and hopefully sell the damn thing. And it wasn’t just writing, I had to design dozens of projects and examples to teach the software and take screenshots of all the lessons. I can’t wait until it’s finally published and tangible instead of a Word document.

I still need to prepare some sample videos and stills to help promote it on here, but the heavy lifting is done. I’m glad I finished before the holidays and I’m looking forward to setting some these new goals, in order of increasing difficulty:

• Relax for the holidays
• Complete online traffic school for going way too fast
• Fix my Xbox
• Find and consume at least one bottle of Brooklyn Black Ops
• Learn Spanish
• Find a girl who can stomach me for more than one date
• Learn some new software. Maybe Nuke, Realflow, or Syntheyes… yea that’s right ladies

Should be fun.