Personal project using particles to define a word.
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Tag: cinema 4d
I have had my eye on these set of character models over on 3Docean for a while now. So in my list project ideas I had the idea to create a simple story around these characters. Something similar to what would be on a mobile phone game cut scene, “think angry birds cut scene”. It would be playful and light hearted and convey some simple premise. I came up with a little battle versus idea between the two types of characters. I made a quick written outline/story board, then I started a quick 3D animatic of the story.
I soon realized (after procrastinating to do it) that this was going to take more time then I wanted it to so I amended my idea to do a quick smart phone video game intro animation. As an animator I all ways like these sort of scenes before the game I play even if there only 5 seconds or so long. So with my new idea I went into production of designing my game’s logo.
I first sketched a hand full of ideas before trying to create them illustrator creating various version of the my favorite ideas. After I was able to pick out which one I like the most I posted it on hunie.co, the newly revamped design critique site for some feed back. After receiving some good response and ideas, three versions later I had a design that I liked enough to bring it into C4D.
Building it when straight forward as building any standard 3D logo. I keep the subdivisions low on the text shape to fit in with the low-poly style I was going for. After building it and texture it I started buying the models I would need and animating them in my scene. I had a rough idea of the overall animation sequence written down so I as I got each model I started animating it to the end of the sequence before getting the next one. Some of the models came with animation on them but for most of them except one I re-did the animation since most of their movements are just a repeated loops of a simple action. After animating them I did a quick lighting setup using Maxwell render to give it a sunlight feel with a strong shadow overhead.
My last step was to do some composting in after effects and some sounds effects. Originally was going to find a music track for the background, but thinking back on some of the games I play not many of them have music for this part. Usually the music doesn’t hit till the main interface so I went the route of using only sound effects which I got from freesound.org. In the end I like this better especially since I had fun mixing the stereo sound the various creatures and vehicles. I really want to try a 5.1 mix just to see how it works and hear sound all around me.
Categories
Monsters Vs. Animals
More info about my process why I made this and my process in a later post.
For the past couple of months I’ve gotten into a new webcomic called JL8 which features various members of the justice league as little kids in school. The go to school like normal kids except that they have super powers and the comic explores this in many ways often with a side of humor.
The creator of the comic Yale Stewart posted a some desktop wallpaper images on his deviantArt page and I got the ideas to try and do some camera projection using those images. I chose to use C4D because it has projection man which makes this very easy to setup.
After brain storming what kind of camera move I wanted to do I found a character model that was similar to Hal in the picture and started adding parts that would match the image and give it some slight depth. Using projection man to manage the images allowed me to easily jump back and forth between C4D and Photoshop and extract various parts. Above is a hardware video where you can see the geometry I used.
My final goal was to create a simple 5 second camera move animation that featured Hal focusing on sky and his glowing ring.
One of the areas I feel that I’m not as strong at in 3D sometimes are my rendering skills and the specific skills that help with it like understanding scene scale and lighting. I’ve also have tried out various tools to help me speed up this process. I have used Vray for 3DS max at work for a bit now and it greatly enhance the renders without much effort (at least for the type of work I do). At home however I don’t have max or vray and getting just a trial for vray for c4d is not a seemingly easy thing to do. So looking around I came across Maxwell render (now owned by Nextlimit, Realflow) again and this time I decided to give it a serious try.
Just going through the tutorials I was impressed with the real looking renders you get without much effort so I decided to get the learning edition which is only $99 with a few limit like render size but no watermarks. The above render is a character I modeled and rigged from a logo I found on brands of the world.
moskarachos
I’m still not sure what the word means that the image was titled with even after trying to look up the word, hopefully nothing bad. I had two ideas for how I wanted to render the scene either glossyish plastic like a toy or flat shaded to seem like the logo vector. I decided just to go with the flat shade for now but it still has very nice lighting overall. I think I may work on a static image of a plastic version for a still shot.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and learning how to use Maxwell Render. I did forget to turn one effect on in my scene for the final render which I’m kind of mad at myself for not doing but I’m not going to render it again now.
Cineversity just releasde this new plugin called CV-Artsmart. It’s a great plugin that takes you illustrator vector artwork directly into c4d with out breaking the connection. So no more re-building your paths doing, extrudes one by one or any other prep work. It will even take in your colors from Illustrator and make materials for you. Which you seem to have to if you turn on mograph.
Oh yea mograph is easily used with one click to effect either the whole logo or each layer. It makes quick work of making simple extruded 3d logos. Keep in mind how you group elements your layers in AI since it seems effectors will effect them as group or individual based on it.
This is a great plugin and I wish there was something like this for when I have to use other 3D packages… I see this a great tool to get your logo built quickly( this logo took me 5-10 mins maybe less to setup ) with textures. For more complex stuff you will have to break it eventually but it does keep a clean hierarchy. My only issues is I wish you could used editable AI text (you still have to outline it) and, I wish I could control each layer with position,scale, rotation in addition to effectors.
You can get the plugin from cineversity.com
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Robotic Notes
On envato they had there free items of the month release from their various sites and as an asset junkie I was compled to download all of the free items that I even thought I might need. One of these was a robitic creation kit from graphic river by
RZDESIGN.
As a fan of robots and character designs I was drawn to the simple yet complex in customizeable optionsfrom these character parts. I decided as a simple exercise and quick project ( or so I thought) I would build a few of these characters.I picked one from his original dark set and light set.
The white bot I built first which was fairly straight forward since it mainly consisted of rounded long cubes. The only “real” modeling was the done on the head since I had cut into the head to make sure the mouth and eyes where all one part of the head. I did a bit of redesign with the arms so that they could move without just seeming like there coming out of the sides of the body magically.
The green bot was a bit harder to make which at fist seem like it would be pretty simple. The main issue I encountered was how to build the head/main body. A pentagon is a simple object to make in any 3D program and there usually is a one or two click solution. My issue was with cuts into the front face to make the eye and mouth with out there being a bunch of triangles and would allow it to smooth correctly.
There is seemingly no way to lay a grid out on a front face of a 5 sided object without some triangles though I did my best to hide or put them in places that won’t matter. I was able to layout some structure that let me cut into the face and allow for the edges to be smooth correctly with a hypernurb. Of course since I wasn’t really planning on doing any deformations in the face I might not of needed to take as much effort laying out the face, but using just booles ( which I’am sometimes guilty of using) would not have cut it.
I did a bit of redesign for the lower part where the treads are since in the original design they seem to connect directly to the main body, which in a static 2D design works but in 3D may be a bit of a stretch in how it would actually move. So I created a new base of the tread design of a model of a Hunting Russ Mk. II tank.
The next step I took was lighting the two bots which I started of well and posted some preview images of on my twitter, but as I continued to work on it I got hung up some details and reflection that I couldn’t get to emulate the original design correctly. Eventually I just said the heck with it and pushed through it and created a new save file that said final and after a few incremental saves, I had the final images. I also have a rotating camera up which I may render a full turntable of later.
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White Robotic
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Green Robotic