Another year another 99frames - The Social Animation Project
Be prepared to participate in this years 99frames. We got a lot of exciting things going on. Super cool professional judges and tons of prizes to win.Tell your friends, workmates and family to participate and spread the word that 99frames 2012 will soon begin !Follow us on Twitter to stay informed:
https://twitter.com/99framesDesign, Animation and Production by:
Neekoe : http://www.neekoe.com/Music:
Broke One - Lightheart
CellOut - Cell Shading Experiment/Exercise using C4D
Quick Cell Shading animation test, inspired by this great AE tut by Mattias Peresini and another awesome animation by Helmut Breineder. Wanted to see if I can pull off the effect and pick up some new stuff that I didn’t know before - and sure I did… :) …
All geometry was generated by Thinking Particles using Xpresso and SweepNurbs Objects (apart from my ident in the middle of all that chaos). For compositing and color correction I used After Effects.
Here some screen shots of the project file inside of Cinema 4D. Also my first chance to apply some of my own tips properly to my own projects LOL - like “Color-coding Xpresso nodes to keep track of things for example” … Have to admit it helped a lot but I think I went a tad too far here… ;)
In case you have any questions, please let me know. Cheers …
Collection Of Some Of My Basic Cinema4D Quick Tips
This is a collection of some handy C4D Quick Tips I stumbled across whilst working on projects in the past months. Usually I just tweet-share them as soon as I use them, but then tend to forget them myself again. So I figured, it might be helpful to collect them all together in one blog post and keep as a reference to come back to every now and then. Please feel free to add some of yours in the comments as well. Pretty sure lots of people (including me) could/will def benefit from it. I will update them as well as soon as I come across another one and add them on top of the list… … o.O
Interview with ThinkParticle.Com - Sam Welker
Alright guys, time to get yourselves a good cup of coffee. In this podcast, Sam and me spend roughly 2 hours talking about motion graphics, freelancing, and getting better at what you are doing. It was awesome chatting to Sam (twice) and I am looking forward to coming on the show again. I think it’s a really cool idea and gives artists the chance to see who is behind those “crazy” avatars. :)
The first part of this show we sit down and learn about who NEEKOE is, after that we talk about my workflow and reel. I am trying to give a couple of tips regarding freelancing and improving your creativity. Later on Sam gets down to business and rocks an awesome C4D tutorial using Xpresso and the “mysterious” C.O.F.F.E.E. node ( oh well… at least “mysterious” to me… :P …)
Sam is an insanely talented artists (especially technically) and a super friendly dude. He is also one of the makers of the great C4D tool “Text-Edge-Fx”. Make sure to check him out on those links below and feel free to ask him/us both questions whenever you would like, we both love helping!
BOOOM
twitter.com/samwelkertv
vimeo.com/samwelkertv
blog.thinkparticle.com/
c4dtools.net/text-edge-fx
The first part of this show we sit down and learn about who NEEKOE is, after that we talk about my workflow and reel. I am trying to give a couple of tips regarding freelancing and improving your creativity. Later on Sam gets down to business and rocks an awesome C4D tutorial using Xpresso and the “mysterious” C.O.F.F.E.E. node ( oh well… at least “mysterious” to me… :P …)
Sam is an insanely talented artists (especially technically) and a super friendly dude. He is also one of the makers of the great C4D tool “Text-Edge-Fx”. Make sure to check him out on those links below and feel free to ask him/us both questions whenever you would like, we both love helping!
BOOOM
twitter.com/samwelkertv
vimeo.com/samwelkertv
blog.thinkparticle.com/
c4dtools.net/text-edge-fx
Read > Think > Adjust > Smile … ;)
MY CINEMA4D LAYOUT
David Drayton from Maxon, made C4D users show off their C4D layout via Twitter. After seeing a lot of great arrangements of palettes and windows, I thought it might be useful to post mine on here and explain why and what.
My setup is for 2x24” Cinema Displays and includes a couple of plugins and shortcut buttons.
First screen layout: The Main editor window is pretty standard with fairly small icons on playhead timeline and tools. I always use an extra view panel for “real time” render purposes on the top right. I usually always got that one setup with the final camera activated and Interactive Render Regions turned on with approx HalfRes (depending on scene weight) - just to see what my final output will “sorta” look like.
Underneath is the Attributes Manager and Coordinates.
The second screen has the Object Manager on the top left, followed by the Main Timeline on its right and the Xpresso Editor. Bottom left is Material Manager, Layer Browser (don’t under estimate the power of that thing for optimal workflow and scene optimization) and Material Editor. Bottom right is my Main Render Settings, Interface of the plugin Render Elements (essential as F**k), Render Queue and Content Browser.This layout works great for me on pretty much every project.
As for my plugins on the first screen: Most left side palette bottom is: controls for a plugin called “Cineview” - a bit older but very good preview render solution. Under neath in red: Render Elements by Adam Swaab, one of my most used plugins and essential to my workflow. Next is the Kerning Effector for working with the MoText Object, Blee for Kuler Themes Viewer and awesome script HangOver.
Top row has the standard tools, then a button to activate Vray as main Render Engine, found here. Followed by another set of standard tools, then Solo Button plugin (very useful with complicated scenes to solo out elements and hide others etc), Vray Studio Tools and TurbulenceFD.
On the top right of the Main View Panel is some extra shortcuts that help me during my workflow such as “Select all children”, “Connect and delete”, etc…
If you wanna know more about layouts, make sure to check out fresh new ‘Motioneers’ page with videos on Robert’s and Rob’s C4D layouts. Great tips and tricks.
If you have any questions please let me know. :)
Over and Out.
David Drayton from Maxon, made C4D users show off their C4D layout via Twitter. After seeing a lot of great arrangements of palettes and windows, I thought it might be useful to post mine on here and explain why and what.
My setup is for 2x24” Cinema Displays and includes a couple of plugins and shortcut buttons.
First screen layout: The Main editor window is pretty standard with fairly small icons on playhead timeline and tools. I always use an extra view panel for “real time” render purposes on the top right. I usually always got that one setup with the final camera activated and Interactive Render Regions turned on with approx HalfRes (depending on scene weight) - just to see what my final output will “sorta” look like.
Underneath is the Attributes Manager and Coordinates.
The second screen has the Object Manager on the top left, followed by the Main Timeline on its right and the Xpresso Editor. Bottom left is Material Manager, Layer Browser (don’t under estimate the power of that thing for optimal workflow and scene optimization) and Material Editor. Bottom right is my Main Render Settings, Interface of the plugin Render Elements (essential as F**k), Render Queue and Content Browser.This layout works great for me on pretty much every project.
As for my plugins on the first screen: Most left side palette bottom is: controls for a plugin called “Cineview” - a bit older but very good preview render solution. Under neath in red: Render Elements by Adam Swaab, one of my most used plugins and essential to my workflow. Next is the Kerning Effector for working with the MoText Object, Blee for Kuler Themes Viewer and awesome script HangOver.
Top row has the standard tools, then a button to activate Vray as main Render Engine, found here. Followed by another set of standard tools, then Solo Button plugin (very useful with complicated scenes to solo out elements and hide others etc), Vray Studio Tools and TurbulenceFD.
On the top right of the Main View Panel is some extra shortcuts that help me during my workflow such as “Select all children”, “Connect and delete”, etc…
If you wanna know more about layouts, make sure to check out fresh new ‘Motioneers’ page with videos on Robert’s and Rob’s C4D layouts. Great tips and tricks.
If you have any questions please let me know. :)
Over and Out.
TUTORIAL: Inheritance Effector & Particle Morph
In this first tutorial I am covering Cinema4D’s Inheritance Effector. I never really used this effector mainly because I didn’t understand what it does and never really felt the need to find out either stupidly. After seeing David Lewandowski’s Siggraph presentation for Maxon, I was blown away by all the crazy stuff he uses the Inheritance Effector for and challenged myself to recreate some of his project files. Whilst doing that I learned so many new things and felt the need to share all that with the rest of you guys. So yeah … this is fairly quick but hopefully useful to some of you guys.
Additionally: You might also wanna check this awesome tutorial on the Inheritance Effector by @eyedesyn found here: http://eyedesyn.com/2012/02/09/using-the-cinema-4d-inheritance-effector-pt-1-trigger-or-offset-keyframed-cloned-objects/
Good luck.
Audio by http://soundcloud.com/proflogik
Additionally: You might also wanna check this awesome tutorial on the Inheritance Effector by @eyedesyn found here: http://eyedesyn.com/2012/02/09/using-the-cinema-4d-inheritance-effector-pt-1-trigger-or-offset-keyframed-cloned-objects/
Good luck.
Audio by http://soundcloud.com/proflogik
Like me some EchoSpace …
Quick Motion Test using Trapcode EchoSpace.
This project never made it to the finish line, so I figured I might as well just put it up on the blog. The whole composition consists of one single PreComp that holds a couple of shape layers with animation. The visible effect comes from EchoSpace doing it’s magic and offsetting the Pre-comp in duplicates, with the option to time-offset, scale, rotate or/and reposition. I definitely recommend you guys to check out this plugin. Really interesting stuff for anyone in doing motion design.
If you have questions, drop me a line and I will explain further. :)
This project never made it to the finish line, so I figured I might as well just put it up on the blog. The whole composition consists of one single PreComp that holds a couple of shape layers with animation. The visible effect comes from EchoSpace doing it’s magic and offsetting the Pre-comp in duplicates, with the option to time-offset, scale, rotate or/and reposition. I definitely recommend you guys to check out this plugin. Really interesting stuff for anyone in doing motion design.
If you have questions, drop me a line and I will explain further. :)
This is a test render of a pitch i was working on in January. All CG and created in Cinema4D. Project didn’t come off but it was a good exercise and learned a couple of things here and there about lighting and texturing. Post work (DepthOfField, ColorCorrection, Vignetting, etc…) all done in AfterEffects.
VRay Exterior Lighting Tests
I participated in an animation contest called “99FRAMES - The Social Animation Project” (www.99frames.net) and put together a quick Cinema4D animation transition of the number “99” turning into the word “Frames”. Video FOUND HERE. My entry won 2nd place, so stoked.
To make the project even more “social”, I am giving away my project file for this video.
DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILE HERE …
Tear it apart and hopefully some of this is helpful to you guys. If you have any question just let me know (as always) - I am more than happy to help :)
PageFlap - Proof Of Concept
Proof of Concept
1. Page Rigging, Weighting, Animation, Symmetry…
2. Tracked Shot with Scene Geometry… Used XREFs for the flapping instances. Emitter with single pages for background.
Character Creation Process
Done in November 2010
This is the initial concept/idea of a character creation process. Combining different render passes and some motion graphics to illustrate/visualize each step along the way… ISH!!! (hehe…) The Final Animation can be seen here: http://vimeo.com/22184392 (Studio: Clockwork VFX)
PS: Character has got a funky bounce in his step… ;)
#FullCircle - BreakDown (Written)
Breakdown to a previous personal project FOUND HERE …
Concept:
Whilst playing around with Trapcode’s “Soundkeys” I realized how powerful this plugin is and wanted to take it a step further and possibly into 3D (Cinem4d). Parallel to this i was also trying out Cinema’s “hair” module and loved the look of the module’s dynamics. so i took both experiments and mixed it up with the concept of “how things (in life) go out of shape, become something abstract (light/dark, static/moving, cold/warm, hard/soft, artificial/organic, death/life, etc…) but at some point come back to where they came from” - going “FullCircle”
Music, Soundkeys and C4D:
After finding this awesome track of “edIT - Dex” I created a short 1min edit of it and a generic soundmap in AE with Soundkeys - to isolate the “driving” accents from the music that I needed for the object to be moved/changed by. For example: isolating the “clicks” to drive the opacity of polygons with it (in my case layers… see below). The same for the main Hair part: I extracted the bass and the snare for the color and deformation of the object… Mike “The Monkey” Senften has a great breakdown on his AICP 2008 project on mograph.net where I got a lot of information out of - LINK HERE
Essentially I used that Soundkeys data to create a movie file with the length of the entire song, that is generally just blank white but turns red on the bass and yellow on the snare - imported that into cinema4d’s hair material as texture (u can assign separate materials to tips, roots, etc…).
To get the deformation of the object happening on the bass, I extracted that bass data separately (again using soundkeys) and copied the keyframes into a txt file and imported it into Cinema 4D via “ASCII Animation Import option” in your timeline and assigned it to a noise texture that is driving a “displacer” deformer.
Additionally i manually animated the hair length and some of the hair attributes and gravity.
The setup for the beginning bit is a bit complicated but this is how I did it. I setup the whole part in terms of atom array for the objects and data for deformation. I then created 4-5 different camera angles with each angle having to render 7 different object “states” with certain polygons visible and some not. For example: on Cam1 setup1 the object’s polygons A, B and C visible only…. on Cam1 setup2 the object’s polygons D, E and F visible only, … and so on… so i ended up with over 30 different renders.
Lighting is pretty simple and straight forward: A softbox, area light and backgroundobject + a low intensity light underneath the object to fake GI a bit (aixsponza “no keyframes” trick) i quick reference to something similar you can find here at Nick Campbell’s “soft body glass mesh” tutorial: LINK HERE
After Effects, Control and Color Correction: In AE I arranged the normal main atom array renders in the timeline and edited the different angles to the music. I then put a copy of that edited Precomp on top of it and exchanged the atom array renders in there with the different polygon renders but all the same angle and camera according to the original atom array layer. Now I was able to drive the opacity of that top Precomp with Soundkeys and was able to decide what layer to show at what time so it makes sense with the music. That was the only possible way for me to get around some DOF issues I had in Cinema, even though it was very complicated and time consuming. But by doing so i had more control over the on/off states in AE, then having to do it all in C4D, so tried so be safe and consistent + my Xpresso knowledge is not THAAAT crazy yet… ;)
To color correct i used Magic Bullet and some standard AE plugins. There is also some Optical flares in there but only in form of camera lens smudge/dirt. The glitch/rewind effects i did with AE’s time remap function and overlaying effects.
RENDER TIME and INFO: Production time: about 3-4 weeks. Render time is really hard to say since it was built in different parts and not all in one: but here some approximates: - The 30 renders took about a week to get through… because of the amount. - Main Hair part was 25 sec per frame (surprisingly…) Although I think my 12core 2.66, 2xATI 5770 and 20GB of RAM (a.k.a. MONSTA) , might do some magic too… ;)
Hope that was useful to some extend and others are able to benefit from this like i have. Let me know if you have any more questions.
Concept:
Whilst playing around with Trapcode’s “Soundkeys” I realized how powerful this plugin is and wanted to take it a step further and possibly into 3D (Cinem4d). Parallel to this i was also trying out Cinema’s “hair” module and loved the look of the module’s dynamics. so i took both experiments and mixed it up with the concept of “how things (in life) go out of shape, become something abstract (light/dark, static/moving, cold/warm, hard/soft, artificial/organic, death/life, etc…) but at some point come back to where they came from” - going “FullCircle”
Music, Soundkeys and C4D:
After finding this awesome track of “edIT - Dex” I created a short 1min edit of it and a generic soundmap in AE with Soundkeys - to isolate the “driving” accents from the music that I needed for the object to be moved/changed by. For example: isolating the “clicks” to drive the opacity of polygons with it (in my case layers… see below). The same for the main Hair part: I extracted the bass and the snare for the color and deformation of the object… Mike “The Monkey” Senften has a great breakdown on his AICP 2008 project on mograph.net where I got a lot of information out of - LINK HERE
Essentially I used that Soundkeys data to create a movie file with the length of the entire song, that is generally just blank white but turns red on the bass and yellow on the snare - imported that into cinema4d’s hair material as texture (u can assign separate materials to tips, roots, etc…).
To get the deformation of the object happening on the bass, I extracted that bass data separately (again using soundkeys) and copied the keyframes into a txt file and imported it into Cinema 4D via “ASCII Animation Import option” in your timeline and assigned it to a noise texture that is driving a “displacer” deformer.
Additionally i manually animated the hair length and some of the hair attributes and gravity.
The setup for the beginning bit is a bit complicated but this is how I did it. I setup the whole part in terms of atom array for the objects and data for deformation. I then created 4-5 different camera angles with each angle having to render 7 different object “states” with certain polygons visible and some not. For example: on Cam1 setup1 the object’s polygons A, B and C visible only…. on Cam1 setup2 the object’s polygons D, E and F visible only, … and so on… so i ended up with over 30 different renders.
Lighting is pretty simple and straight forward: A softbox, area light and backgroundobject + a low intensity light underneath the object to fake GI a bit (aixsponza “no keyframes” trick) i quick reference to something similar you can find here at Nick Campbell’s “soft body glass mesh” tutorial: LINK HERE
After Effects, Control and Color Correction: In AE I arranged the normal main atom array renders in the timeline and edited the different angles to the music. I then put a copy of that edited Precomp on top of it and exchanged the atom array renders in there with the different polygon renders but all the same angle and camera according to the original atom array layer. Now I was able to drive the opacity of that top Precomp with Soundkeys and was able to decide what layer to show at what time so it makes sense with the music. That was the only possible way for me to get around some DOF issues I had in Cinema, even though it was very complicated and time consuming. But by doing so i had more control over the on/off states in AE, then having to do it all in C4D, so tried so be safe and consistent + my Xpresso knowledge is not THAAAT crazy yet… ;)
To color correct i used Magic Bullet and some standard AE plugins. There is also some Optical flares in there but only in form of camera lens smudge/dirt. The glitch/rewind effects i did with AE’s time remap function and overlaying effects.
RENDER TIME and INFO: Production time: about 3-4 weeks. Render time is really hard to say since it was built in different parts and not all in one: but here some approximates: - The 30 renders took about a week to get through… because of the amount. - Main Hair part was 25 sec per frame (surprisingly…) Although I think my 12core 2.66, 2xATI 5770 and 20GB of RAM (a.k.a. MONSTA) , might do some magic too… ;)
Hope that was useful to some extend and others are able to benefit from this like i have. Let me know if you have any more questions.
