Categories
3D Animation 3D Modeling Motion Graphics

Moskarachos 3D Logo Animation

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

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.

Categories
Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Lesson 10

My submission for Robert Legers Xpresso lesson
better quality on youtube due to using my one hd video a month on vimeo already
Categories
Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Task 9 + Pogs

Well it seems I haven’t posted in quite a while. This has been partly due to my working full time at a post-studio in NYC and some freelance work that took up most of my free time. All excuses a side I think I have simply not been focused with my own personal work which I’m getting back into now.

Last week I finally made time to do Robert Legers XPresso Lesson #9 – Task – Custom Effector. This one was was a little bit tough at first to figure it out but I was able to complete it. My example isn’t that spectacular but I put together a little example that reveals some text. Still waiting to see the official results from Balázs and Robert.

Another project I’m working on is a personal project that I’m going to finish in some capacity by next monday. The idea is to a simple id spot using pogs to show a company logo. The idea for pogs just sort of came to me after looking at the recent vector designs from http://blog.signalnoise.com/, especially the circular ones. I plan to make a few designs using them as inspiration and some other cool pogs designs.

Not sure if scene wise this is what I will go with but it’s in the area right now.

Categories
Daily 365 Downloadable Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Task 7 + Lego Swirl Cinema 4D File

 

I though I should share my result for roberleger.net Xpress0 Task 7. The first file below has my setup for the product table. My setup is pretty straight forward with only one extra flair for a custom shape. I would suggest looking at the results page to this lesson and checking out the other solutions.

The second file is part of my lego swirls file that I used to make the animation for this lesson. It’s not the whole file since I did buy the model but it has the rising tunnel and the lego parts as they swirl around. I though it might be cool to post up how I solved this task. There are a couple of ways to go about it and I choose my method because it gave me the look I was going for but an alternative could have work just as well.

Base Product Table File Zip | Lego Swirls File Zip

 

Categories
Daily 365 Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Task 7

 

This is my submission for Robert Leger’s Xpresso Task 7. The task was to create you standard product table. After the last hair puller the straight forwardness of this one was welcomed. This one was hosted by Ryan Hamilton, a xpresso task regular who is always producing some great work. To add even more awesomeness to it this one is a contest of for an Iphone App…although I don’t have an Iphone.

As far as the xpresso setup I didn’t hit any major snags while building it. I did however run into an issue where instead of using the radius of the shape to control the size I used the scale so I wouldn’t have to link up each different shape. My main reason for this, besides not wanting to make a bunch of connections over and over, was so I could use any custom shape. So I used scale with a small increment to make it seem like the radius is getting bigger.

I didn’t add any other features to this one like I normally do. Instead I focused more time into creating this animation.

 

Lego Mario Build Up

I wanted to do something then just have a random product on a table with it rising. My original idea was to have mickey mouse’s head and shoulders one the table and have it rise up as the ears rotate around and land on his head. I couldn’t find a good model of his head and I didn’t want to take the time to build it, so I did some brainstorming and thought a lego would be cool to build up.

I found this model of lego mario on 3d ocean and figure it would be cool to use. After that I just built the scene up and made a little Xpresso setup for the body parts. Then I created the swirling blocks to wrap around Mario while the product table(tunnel) goes up.

It’s a standard effect of sorts but it does look cool I think. I think I was inspired by the stop-motion like work of a recent lego spot that was on tv (web since I don’t have cable),

 

 

Categories
Daily 365

Xpresso Task Test Droid

This is a quick render I put together to test my Animator for Robert legers Xpresso task. This one took me quite a while to get working, I had a complicated setup like most it seems before he gave the hint about just using a range mapper. Which helped  but I still had some trouble getting it to work even though I’ve used the range mapper even before I started these tasks.

So I watch some of his older tuts and it clicked that I was just using the wrong values to map every thing. My setup is fairly simple I think just takes a lot of repetition of connections to get it to work for the different values. I say in the Vimeo Xpresso group that other people where having some trouble as well. Some of the solutions seem somewhat complicated for my taste.

This scene was inspired by the android commercials with their mascot.

I will post my final file after I tweak it bit and maybe add some more controls.

 

 

Categories
Daily 365 Downloadable Series

Xpresso Task 5

This is my result for the expresso task 5 from robertleger.net. I was able to have all of the required functionality plus I added a spline warp that gives it path follow capabilities.  I have also included the file below if anyone want to check it out and use it. I made a screen cast of it in action which is taking a while to upload so when it’s done I will add it to this post.

G2BProductions Xpresso task 5 Final