More info about my process why I made this and my process in a later post.
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Category: 3D Animation
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
If you don’t know about Bearmageddon you should because its an awesome webcomic by Ethan Nicolle. If the title doesn’t give it away it’s about Bears taking over and ripping people apart. I found out about this comic through Ratfist, which is another awesome webcomic.
I deiced to do this for couple of reason, the first is I really like webcomics or comics in general and the ones that I find are the best visually are really dynamic and have a lot of motion on each page. I’ve had on my list to animate a webcomic for a while now but still have not really done it yet to where I really like it. (I did a commercial spot for I Kill Giants)
When I saw that Ethan was taking a break I though I should do something to show how great the comic. I also saw that other people where posing other cool images about the comic and thought I could make something too.
Originally I was going to animate the last few pages from where the bears start chasing the van, but realized this would take a lot more work then I had the time for. So after some quick brainstorming I came up with the idea to animate the sites banner image which is also in desktop format.
I planned to do a 3D camera project of the image on to some rough geometry to give it a more believable feel then some of my other animations. I still had to cut our the whole image into parts and map them onto geometry and make sure it looked ok. My first tests where good with my original camera moves but I change the move a bit at the end and you can see some repetition where I didn’t think anyone would see.
I did some final composting in After Effects to try and give it a more movie feel. I also added a whole host of sounds effects that I mixed together to try and help enhance the already amazing visuals. I paid a bit more attention to it this time trying to create a good mix of sound with in the piece that didn’t just become mush when you listened to it. Tried to give it a real stereo sounding feel to it so if you listen with only one headphone you wont get the full sound.
I think this is one of my better 2D image to animation pieces but still has bunch of things that could be worked on. This was supposed to be just a weekend project but it wound up taking a few days more but the result is better because of it. So here you go my a 3D camera project animation of the Bearmageddon banner/desktop image.
3D Type animation personal project. I will be posting some notes on this project in a few days.
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Nutcracker Happy Holiday
Holiday Animation using a model I built a few months a go. Happy Holidays
