Learn Cinema 4D - Looping Abstract Shapes

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm just personnel and I'm a three D designer in this course will animate and create seamless loops with abstract geometry and cinema. Four D will create two very different looking shapes, but the set up for them is very similar. Will be using procedural techniques that are very flexible and easy to work with. We'll start with a dark shape and we'll go over how toe build it with splints and something called a sweep object. And then we'll shape it and create its characteristics with the former's and will then move onto animating it with a seamless loop will frame the shot, apply three point lining and texture it. We'll also look at how to quickly preview our renders with the hardware renderers so we can work efficiently. Last step is to bring it into after effects for some further enhancements, and then we'll take on the same shape again. And with just a few adjustments, will end up with a completely different result. Okay, let's start 2. 01 Using the Sweep Object: Let's look at the sweep object and we can find this weep object under the generators menu. So that's added to the scene. The sweep object creates geometry from spines, and as you can see, it doesn't do anything on its own. It needs at least two spines, one path spine and then a profile spline that you sweep along the path. You can also add 1/3 optional rail spline for some additional control over scaling and banking. So let's go ahead and add the first spline and I'm gonna use a helix and the helix I'm going to use as my paths plein. Somebody call this path and in the helix, I am going to change the plane from X y to X Z. So it is going in a different direction. So the Helix spine has lots of options, and I like to use this one for a lot of different things. We have a start angle and an end angle, which controls how spiral e it gets, and I'm gonna reduce this number to 400. So it's not too crazy. We have a start radius and an end radius. Let me reduce the end radius a little bit. And then there radial biases controlling how thick or thin that curve is. Now let me increase the height a little bit and zoom out the height buys is kind of control . Where the Curtis if it's close to the top or the bottom, So I'm gonna leave it at this subdivision at 100 is good in general. You wanna have a lot of subdivisions when you're working with Curd s planes? So let's add the profile and I'm gonna use an inside, so I'm gonna call the inside the profile. And when you add the profile split into a sweep object, you want to make sure that you created on the X Y plane so the inside we can control the A number off sides six. I'm gonna leave it at six. But we can see that if we're going to sweep this inside along this splitting this inside is way too big. I'm going to reduce the radius to 20 and then I'm gonna take the profile spine and I'm gonna make it a child of the sweep object. And the order here is important. You want to make sure that the profile spine is the first child in the sweep object, and the path is this second. So now we have geometry. You can also see that we have this weird issue here with the shading and whenever you see it this way, it's almost always the result off the phone tag. So if I go to the phone tag here, we have a falling angle set to 60. So it's trying to smooth certain areas and that leaves other areas sharp and it looks like a mess. But it's easy to fix, so I'm going to reduce the Fung angle to 40 and that fixes it. So let's look at some of the settings of the sweep we have in the object tab we have and scale so we can have it grow over the length of the spine. We can also have it rotate, and then we have a start growth and an end growth. So say that I wanted to have it grow from 0 to 100. We could do it like this, and we also have under the details tab. We have two spines, one for scale and one full rotation, so you can have very precise control over the scaling and the rotation over the spine here . So if I wanted to add some points, I could add my control or command key at some extra points on this plein. So you have a lot of control over this, but that looks pretty cool. The ends here, those are the caps, and they're all flat. So let's look at this one. Under the caps Tab, we have start cap and an end cap. This is the end cap. Now, the settings we can take away the cap so we don't have to have a cap. Um, but the best option here ah, lot of times is the filler cap. The filler cap is gonna allow you to have a cat, but also to enable some rounding on the edges, which tend to look much better. So right now that radios here, which is to size of the edges too large. So if I reduces 2.5, we get a more reasonable edge. Now the steps is gonna control how many subdivisions you have and the higher you go here, the smoother the edge is gonna become. So if I set this up to say six, it's starting to look really good. Now, if I set this back to a standard camp, you can see how flat it looks in comparison. And then when you enable filler cap, it can capture highlights from lights and other sources, so it tends to look a lot better with a filler cap. So whenever you have that option, I think you should use it in most cases, No, and compares. And now this looks really flat because this one has this nice rounding. But now this looks kind of flat. So in the inside, we actually have an option for rounding there, too. Now, when I enable this is gonna be too big, this 17 here of centimeters is way too large. But if I match the 170.5 that we had on the edges were starting to get a much better look in shape, so we might as well put a filler cap at the end here, so that which is actually the start cap. So if I go back to my sweep, I'm gonna match up those settings. So step six and then the radius 60.5. So now we have a pretty nice looking shape, so that is an open sline. Let me put this under annul. Gonna call this one open sweep. Let's put this sweep in that. No. And then hide it. It also works with close spines. So let me add a flower to this, and this flower split is gonna work as my path. So I'm gonna call this one path and then along this path, I'm going to sweep a rectangle, and the rectangle is huge. So let's producer size to 20 by 20. And then we need a sweep object ADOT and the rectangle here that is the profile. And the profile needs to be the first child of the sweep. And then the path the second. And now we have this and we can still manipulate the paths. So if I wanted to add a d former to the flower path, by all means, go back and add are twisted former, make it that a child off the flower path and then fit that to the parent, and then we can start modifying the shape. So you have a lot of creative control. I'm also gonna add the same rounding that I added in the last example here. So under the rectangle. We have a rounding for this one too. So if I enable this and reduce the size to the same size we had before 10.5 and you can see how much better that looks, how much light it catches. It's gonna catch reflections as well. So that is the introduction to the sweep object. Let me put this in. No, if I could hit it. There you go. Call this closed sweep. So that is the introduction to the sweep object. Now that we know a little bit more about it, let's go ahead and use it in our next project. 3. 02 Creating the Geometry with Splines and the Sweep Object: in the next two lessons were going to create this. So in the first lesson, we're gonna create the actual shape. And in the second lesson, we're gonna make this animation, so this animates and it is a perfect loop, so it's gonna continuously loop. So let's see how we can do that. Let's go back to the starting file and I'm gonna use the sweep objects. I'm gonna bring that in first. So sweep object and the sweep object needs to spines. So let's me use to flower Splain. That's going to be my profiles among us. Rename this one profile and I'm gonna make a few changes to the profile. I am gonna reduce the inner radius to 50 and the outer radius 220 and then I'm gonna add my path spine, which is gonna be an inside when they call this one path, and I'm going to make it a little bigger. 280 and I'm not going to use six sides. So instead of a hexagon, I'm gonna make that a triangle, and I wanted to stand up. Then I can make it stand up. If I go to the coordinates tab and under rotation banking by Tu minus 90. There. Now we have it standing up. So let's take the profile and drag it into the sweep as the first child and then the path as the second. And then we have this, which in itself looks kind of cool. Um, but I'm going to change a few things. I don't wanna have eight pedals. I'm just gonna use three. So it's a simplified shape. Then in the inside path, I'm gonna enable this option the rounding and I'm gonna increase this to the maximum. The maximum here is gonna be 140. You can only go half of the radius value. So if this radius value is 300 we can increase the radius here, 250. But you can't go above half that value. So 280 it's gonna take it down 240. Now, both these blinds need to have the intermediate points set to uniform. We're gonna add displacement to this, so we need a lot of points on the spine. So that's that. The 1st 1 to uniform 50 and let's set this one to uniform 50 as well. Now Let's go to the sweep. I'm gonna leave everything at its default for now. In this week, except one thing, I'm going to change the end rotation now it looks bad. It looks really bad. And it's gonna keep on looking bad until I hit exactly 3 60 Once you go to 3 60 you don't see the seam anymore. If you go above 3 60 you can see the scene. If you go below, you can see the scene. But as long as you keep it at 3 60 you have this perfect transition and that is the shape. Now, you could play around with this a lot to create some completely different looks or increase the number of petals. So I encourage you to play around with this. But I'm gonna stick with the original values. So that's the shape in the next lesson. Let's animate this 4. 03 Animating and Creating a Seamless Loop: Okay, so let's animate this. And the way we're going to do that is let's go into the sweep. And under the object tab and a detailed section, we have the rotations blind. If I move this plane up and down, you can see that the object rotates. And at the bottom of this Splain, we have, ah value off minus 1 80 in the from field and at the top, we have a value of 1 80 So over the duration of the timeline, which is currently 90 frames, I'm gonna key frame this going from the bottom to the top. And whenever we keep frame in cinema 40 we need to work with the timeline. So I said that the duration of the timeline is 90 frames. We can see that the last frame here is 90 which is controlled with this field here. And the start frame is controlled with this field on the left side here and the frames per second, or the speed of this animation is 30 frames per second. So the entire loop is gonna take three seconds to complete. And if you need to change the frames per seconds, you can go up to the edit menu and in the project settings, we have the FPs the frames per second right here. So I'm happy with 30 frames per second. But if you need to change that for whatever reason, you have it right there. Now if you wanted to have a slower, um, speed on this or if you want a deputation to take a little longer What you could simply do is you could extend the timeline a little bit. So instead of 90 frames, we could double this to say 1 80 and then drag out this bar to match up. So now the animation would take six seconds instead, cause we have twice the amount of frames. I'm quite happy with 90 frames. I'm gonna reset that back to 90 but you can. So when we keep frame this, we want to look at time, you want to set a specific value at a specific time, and then Cinema 40 is gonna interplay between those key frames. So as frame zero, I'm gonna go back to my sweep. I'm gonna take my rotation spine, drag it to the bottom and set a key frame. And to set a key frame. I'm going to click on this button here. This is the key frame button, and whenever you see these Rhone buttons in cinema 40 that means that this property is animated ble. So click on it. It turns red to indicate that we have a key frame, and we can also see that we have this little rectangle under the play head in the timeline as well. Now, if you made a mistake and key, frame the wrong frame and you can simply take this key from and move it. But we wanted a frame zero and then let's go to the end. I can drag the time slider. I can also type it in into this field 90 and then go back to the sweep and take the rotation spine, drag it all the way to the top and then click on this button again, make another key frame, and now we have a new animation. So let's play it. We have the timeline controls here, and if you hover over them, a tool tip is gonna pop up. So this is go to start. This is go to the previous key, and this is go to the previous frame, and this is to play and so on. So let's play this and we have an animation and you can see that this blind goes all the way to the top, goes to the bottom top and then back to the bottom again. Not one thing you may notice is that the speed of animation isn't constant. It's slower at the beginning and the little faster in the middle, and then it slows down at the end. And that has to do with the key frame interpretation. So let's take a look at that. If I go to the rotation property and I right click on it and under in the menu here we have animation so we can add key frames. Here we can go to the next or previous key frame. Um, if you need to delete all key frames on a property, you can delete the track here that would remove all the key frames. But what I'm after is the show F curb. So here we have a visual representation off the animation. It's a little busy here, but there are only two properties that were interested in there. Only two properties are being animated, and that is rotation one. Why and rotation to why they're one and two are referring to the points on the rotation spine. So if I select this one and this one, so both the rotation wounds. So we have them both selected at the same time. We can see the curve here. So let's play this so you can see that this curve is corresponding to the speed of the animation. Now, if I want to make this a little bit more extreme, that's drag out these handles so we can see this a little clearer. Fast, slow, slow, fast, slow. So this is normally a good behavior in an animation. You don't want it to come to a full stop. You wanted to kind of ease in, gives a smoother animation, but not when you have a loop like this. So we're gonna change the key from interpolation off the key frames to instead of this one , which is a Sline, we're gonna change it to this one, which is a linear. So now that I click on it, we just have this spine here, and we have a constant speed. So that's close his window we're done with it. Okay, so we're almost done. There's just one thing we need to do if you pay close attention when the play had reaches frame 90. It kind of freezes and it's because a frame 90 and frame zero, they have the same value because we've come to one full rotation. So we have two frames with the same value, and that costs us this little freeze frame. But it's an easy fix to that. What we can do is tell Cinema 40 don't go all the way to frame 90 go to frame 89 skipped the last frame and then go back to zero. So if I reduce this to 89 then Cinema 40 is gonna ignore that last frame. We still have the same value for the key framing on frame 90 but now the time line goes from 0 to 89 back to zero. So now we have a perfect loop. We have a constant speed and we have no freeze frame. It's gonna loop forever if we let it. So in the next lesson, let's add some word details to our shape 5. 04 Adding Details with the Displacer: Okay, so we're gonna add some more details to our shape now, The kind of details that we see here and the way we're going to do that, is yes, we're going to use to displace to former again. So let's start. Let's go back to the starting file here. And, uh, I want to add this entire sweep to a subdivision surface. So let's add a subdivision surface to this. If I hold down the option key is going to make a parent off the subdivision surface, and I need to add a null too. So I'm gonna add a null. And let's call this one G e o for geometry. And that's drag the subdivision surface into the full to the folder G e o folder. We can twirl it up. And let's add the display, sir. So the former's display, sir, and make that the second child here and in the display, sir, What I'm gonna do is I am gonna set this to minus 10 and intensity so it only pushes in one direction, is gonna push inwards in this case and then shading That's ad a noise and ah, let's go into the noise and I'm gonna leave it at standard noise. But to get these lines that follow the flow of the polygons, we are gonna choose UV and the scale here. I'm gonna reduce this down to 25 and then this one, it's gonna be zero. So now we have the lines running along the polygons. But I'm gonna take this one down as well to 50% and I'm also gonna increase the contrast to 100. So now we have these kind of sharp lines here. Now that me twirl down the subdivision here and then go to the sweep in the Fong tag. Let's increase the funk tag to the maximum 180. And that's smooth it out a little bit. Go back to the displays her and into the noise. Now, occasionally you're going to start seeing some artifacts with this. Um, not sure if I can see anything here. Um, but if you start getting some artifacts and it just looks bad and there are a few things you can do, you can always increase the amount off geometry to start with. That almost always helps a little bit. So if we have the flower profile For example, we can increase the number off intermediate points in the flower profile and the inside as well. You can also increase the geometry in the in the subdivision surface, and the view port can really start slowing down if you add too much geometry. So what you can do is you can work with a lower setting in this subdivision editor and then have ah higher value for the renderers. So it's not so slow. While you're working now in the display, sir, you may also have to increase the scale. Sometimes you just have to do tests with this, but sometimes you have to increase the scale a little bit or you can reduce the contrast that helps a lot of times as well. Okay, so now this is too detailed, too many details. So let's add another noise on top of this and hide some. So let's drop this noise inside a lay shader. Let's go into the layer Shader And let's add another noise and this noise we're gonna use to cut off some off the bottom noise here, I'm gonna hide some of that noise, so I'm gonna set this blending mode to be multiply and let's go into the noise and changed a space from texture to UV. And let's take this down to zero. And I'm gonna reduce this one down to 40. Around 42 40 maybe 42 is better. And I'm gonna increase the contrast of this one as well to 100. So now we are hiding a lot of that original detail. Now, let me change the seed value that better fits. Um, I the tests. And I liked seed 6 88 So that looks pretty good. Next up, let's add a camera and frame are shot. 6. 05 Framing the Shot: we're gonna add a camera and frame the shot. But I did notice something, and it's that these details are just way too sharp. I wanna have more variation in this, So I'm gonna go back to my display, sir, and into the layer Shader and to the bottom noise. And instead of having a contrast of 100% I'm going to reduce it down to 60. Is this gonna give us a little bit more variation? And it looks a little better that way, I think. Okay, so now we have that. I also want to organize this a little bit better. So let's add a null and command control drag on this melt to make a duplicate, and then do that one more time, and this is gonna be you know, this is gonna be the scene. This is the camera, and then this is gonna be for the lights. So let's take the scene elements dragged them into the scene, and we're ready to add a camera. We should also set the output dimensions before reframe this. So let's go to the render settings. And under the output, I'm gonna choose 10 80 by 10. 80 this time, so it's a little smaller, but by having it a little smaller is going to reduce the render times quite dramatically. So let's close this and let's add a camera and let's go into the camera by clicking on this little icon, and when you add a camera, it is added at the exact same location as the editor Cam. Now what I want to do with this camera, I wanna zero it out. I want to put it at World zero. I'm gonna frame this a little differently this time. I'm gonna use the camera more as a stationary camera and then rotate the shape around instead. So I want to reset the positions for the camera to it's default, Which is that World zero Now? I could do that by entering 000000 Or I could use the right click, which is gonna reset the value to its default. But I want to show you a really useful command in Cinema 40 And that's called Reset PSR, which means reset position scale rotation to it's default in cinema 40 released 20. That's under tools. This command right here reset PSR. Now I'm gonna undo command or control Z because I want to show you where it was in previous releases. It was under the character menu character commands, and it was in this menu right here. And if you can't find it, for whatever reason, there's a really useful search function in Cinema 40 and you get to it by using a short cut . So shift see, it's going to bring up a search bar and then we can search for anything in the application . But I'm going to search for reset PS are. And there it is so we can run this command by simply double clicking on this one. And now we've reset the camera to World Zero or its default. Now let's move the camera on the Z axis here, let's move it back a little bit and I want his camera to have ah, flat view. I want to flatten the view out, and the way we do that is by changing the focal length. So we have a focal length of 36 millimeters, but I wanna I wanna have a long lens. I'm gonna choose to telephoto lens 235 millimeter lands and now I need to move the camera further back because it's a long lens. I'm gonna go further and let me type in a value here 25 55. So that framing is done. We have the distance. Correct. Now for the camera. Let me move it into the camera folder. So now I'm gonna take my scene. Actually, not my scene. I'm gonna take my g e o the null that contains all the scene elements and let me rotate this one around. And while we do this while I get the framing, I want to see it play. So if I play now is going to be a little sluggish because I have this subdivision surface enabled. But if I disabled the subdivision surface, it's gonna play a little faster. So I know a framing that looks pretty good is gonna be three. And then minus 48 and 45 I like this. So I think that looks pretty good. That is the framing. So we have the geometry set up. The framing is right. It's time to light the scene that's coming up next 7. 06 Lighting the Scene: Let's light the scene and we need reflections in the scene. So let's add a sky object sky and then drop that into the lights folder. And I'm going to reuse the same HDR I that we've been using in the previous lessons. So let's go to the content browser presets and then prime presets, light set ups, HDR I and then Sunny Park and let's go back to the Objects manager. I'm gonna take the sunny park, drag it on top of our sky, and we don't want to see it. So right click on the sky and say Cinema 40 tags compositing tag, and we don't want it to be seen by cameras. So let's uncheck this. I also don't want to have any colored reflections, so let's go in to the material. Drag that over. We don't need the reflecting, so let's turn that off in the luminescence. We need to take out the saturation so that's added into the filter, go into the filter and then take the saturation down. So now we have black and white only so we can close this. Now I'm using the same a she or I for all essence here And that's just to make it easier to demonstrate the HDR I that you choose can have a really huge impact on the look. So you should try a lot of different ones until you get to look like you want. And they're also some third party. Really great resource is you can go to and one that I would really recommend is HDR. I haven dot com They have excellent three hdr eyes that just look gorgeous. So hdr I haven dot com All right, so let's light this. Now let's add our first light and I'm gonna go here and I'm gonna add a target late and let's enable the four of use here. So let's click on this one here, and I want to make sure that this window is active and then I go up and start the interactive render region. Make it a little larger and up to quality just a little bit. And let's dragged a light on the light target into the lights folder. And I don't want this to be a spotlight I want is to be an area light and I want shadows. I'm gonna set it to area shadows and let me zoom out here a little bit in the top few, and I wanna have this light sitting over here somewhere. So let me pull it this direction, something like that. And let me pull it up because I was coming a little bit from above. Maybe a live it more tourist asides. I think that's good. Now I'm gonna make this slightly warm light. Let me add a little bit of orange to this, and, ah, let's increase the size. So the outer radius in the details tab increases to 200 and let's go back to the generals, Tap the general tab, and I think its strong I want to create really soft lighting for this eso. I'm going to reduce this right down to 50% and then see what that looks like. Um, I think that's good. I'm gonna start with that. Let me call this one key light he light. And then let's duplicate that which will be the fill light. Let me turn off the key light rename this one the Phil, and I'm gonna move the fill to this side a little closer to the object, and I'm gonna pull it down a little bit, and I don't want shadows on this one. So let me select none for the shadows. That's gonna brighten it up considerably. We pulled it up just a little bit. Um, let me move it a little bit this way. Now, I'm gonna make this light really big. So in the details tab, I'm gonna increase this to six. Hundreds is gonna be a fairly large light. And if I go back to the general tab again, I don't want this light to be yellow or orange. I wanted to be a bluish color, something like that. And I think that's good. Now I'm going to reduce the intensity to 30%. It is very, very dim. Maybe move it up. Just a sliver. Okay, so now let's look at the key light and the fill light together, So that looks good. So let me disable the key light. I'm gonna duplicate the fill light command control, Drag that up and this is gonna be the rim. Now, the rim light. I'm gonna put exactly on top of the shape and let me turn off the field, and I need to bring it up, and I'm gonna change this light. So instead, off blue light, I'm gonna make this a white light. Pull this a little bit to the site is coming pretty much from straight above. Now. I don't want this light. Have this characteristics. I'm going to go to the details tab, and I'm going to set it to be a much smaller light. So 100 for the outer Radius is going to change the character of that like quite a bit. So I think that is quite good. I might want to pull it down ever so slightly. Yeah, I think that's good. Let me go full frame on this and then let's enable to fill and the key light. And that's good. That's the lighting that I want. So now that the lighting is done, let's texture this and it's coming up next 8. 07 Texturing the Shape: Okay, so let's texture the shape. Now with the interactive render region active, I want to switch the renderers. So let's go up to the render settings and instead of the standard render When I said it said to be the physical, it's just a little quicker toe work that way. And in the physical settings, the Samper I'm gonna choose fixed. And then the sampling quality of low is good. It's going to give us a reasonably fast update. Let me close this and let's greater material double click in the materials manager and bring the new material on top of the sweep. Let's open up the material by double clicking it. I may bring this over so we can see it. And I'm gonna disable the reflect ins for now and focus on the color channel first. So I'm gonna make this a dark grey with a slight bluish tint. The hue of 2 19 is good, but I'm gonna have a saturation of 11 and then spring down this to around 25 and I'm also going to switch the model from lumber shin to or Neyer, which just gives a more dull surface less plasticky and Let's enable the reflectors now and we get our default speculator. We don't want that. So let's delete it. And instead, let's add a g X. So in the GX, we have an attenuation of average is gonna average to color off the color channel with a reflecting its color. Um, but I want to bring down this one in, make it darker. So I'm gonna have a similar color to the color channel. Just a little bit more light blue. So 1 92 for the hue and bring up to saturation to around 10 9 is good and make it darker and let's see what that looks like. Okay, Yeah, that's good. I want to add a friend l to this right away. So let's twirl down the for Nell so we can get some reflection, fall off and let's do die electric And then the preset I'm gonna choose is emerald. Now the friend l is too overpowering. So let me bring back the reflections a little bit by reducing the strength to around 75. So I think that's good. Um, I know that I don't want any speculate strength at all, so I'm gonna take that down to zero. But now we need some roughness on this. Let's bring this up just a little more. Okay? That's good. Let me take down the reflection. Strength ever so slightly to the Rhone. 75 perhaps. Yeah, that's good. So the base material is done. Now we're gonna add the Golden Stripes. I already prepared them for you. So let me show you how you can copy and paste a shader. We have Grady and color texture here and in the reflected since under the texture here I have a layer set up. So let's copy this. I can click on this to get to drop down and then say Copy Shader and let's go back into our material and then go to the Texas lot and then get the drop down and say Paste, Shader! And now we have that later Shader in our material. Now I want to change the mix mode instead of normal, which is now just using the layer here. Let's set this one to be add. So we get this color back and let me show you how you're built. This I mean, take down all these to the first ingredient it takes a little while to build this and this . I used the exact same technique that we did in the first project. So in the first Grady int, which looks like this may go into it, we have a two D you Grady int and I just have three little golden lines here and with no interpretation or step and then if I go back up, we have a layer mask going in the other direction, which is just cutting off parts of it. And the effect is gonna be that the colors are gonna be appeared to be traveling a long assist rotates and animates. And then I added another one on top. It just adds some more and then a few more, and it takes a little while to build this up. So I spare you this timeto having toe watch me build it. But here we have it, and this is the material. Now I also want to add a little bit of surface imperfections, so we're gonna add a bump. So let's enable the bump channel, and that's going to the texture and add a noise and let's go into the noise and it's of course, it's a lot too big. Here s so I'm going to reduce the global scale to to and because we're using a noise in the Bump Channel, we should also reduce the Delta to match the global scale. That's going to give us a much better looking noise or much better looking bump. So that's reduces to two as well to match up, and it's close. But I want to tame this. So let's jump up and instead of the strength of 20 set this to just 5%. And that's the material that's close this window and enable the subdivision surface. And this bring up the quality here to see what we've got. May take a while to update. Okay, so here we go. All right. The material is done in the next lesson. I just want to show you how you can get a quick overview off the animation with colors on. That's coming up next 9. 08 Previewing the Animation with Hardware OpenGL: I want to see what this is gonna look like animated with these added colors. But to render out a full resolution render is going to take quite a while, so we need to find a different way to do this. Let me disable the interactive render region. It's always a good idea to output a low quality render. Bring that into after effects or whatever compositing program you use at the effects that you want to get an approximation off the final output we can also inside of cinema 40 usedto hardware open G l render. So let's go to the render settings. And instead of physical, I am gonna select hardware open G L. Now your mileage may vary because this depends on your system and your graphics card. But if I go into the settings for the hardware open, G L, we can enable something called enhanced Open G l. And that enables us to see shadows and reflections so we don't need to save this. So let me uncheck this save. But under the output, we right now have a frame range of current frame and I am on the frame 77. So let's just render that one out and see what we get so rendered to picture Viewer this one and we're done. So by no means is this perfect. But it only took three seconds to render out, which is considerably faster than is gonna take for the final render. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set this one to render out the whole animation. So limit closest window, go back into the render settings and under the output instead of current frame the frame range, I'm gonna say all frames. So from 0 to 89 and then I'm gonna click Render to picture Viewer There is no final name specified for the render image. Do you want to continue without saving? And yes, I do. So this is gonna take a few minutes to render out and I'll be back. Once it's done, the hardware render is done. And it didn't take more than 34 minutes to render out. So it's really quick and that now I can go ahead and play this So we have the plate controls here. Some let me play this and it plays pretty well. It's not perfect, but it plays pretty well here. And I can get a very good sense of what the animation is gonna look like. And if I weren't happy with the colors, I could go in and change them or change anything that I wanted to change. Now, I'm happy with this. I'm gonna leave it at this. But it's good to know that we can get a preview so quickly. Okay, so I'm going to stop this, and I am now ready to output the final render, and that's coming up next. 10. 09 Rendering the Animation: Okay, so let's render the animation. Let's go to the render settings and let's start with output. We have 10 80 by 10 80. That is correct. Now we also have to look at this the frame rate of 30 frames per second. That is correct. We are rendering all frames from 0 to 89. Also correct. Let's go to the save that enable the save box and save it wherever you want on your hard drive. The format is gonna be as before, P and G and instead of eight bit, let's do 16 bits. And I'm just gonna enable a standard Alfa Channel, a pre multiplied Alfa channel. And in the Renderers, I am gonna choose the physical, and I want to go to the anti alias ing and in the filter here we have CUBIC, which is really good for a still image gives really crisp results. But for one animation, we could get some flickering with that. So let's choose this gosh in the animation instead. And then let's go to the physical settings and the settings that I came up with after some testing is we are medium I'm gonna do fixed and then medium, but I'm gonna increase the sampling subdivisions to five. So with a still image, you can crank up the settings quite high. You're still not gonna have to wait that long, but with animations, it could defer hours and render time. So you want to take your time optimizing the settings before you render. I mean, it's always gonna be a push and pull between quality and render time. And I think testing is the key. And remember that some noise is acceptable in your animations, much more than with still images. Okay, so with that said, Let's close this window and let's click on the Render to Picture Viewer and we're off and this is gonna take a while so I'll be back once it's done. Okay, so the render is done. It took three hours to do, and here we are. Let's play this and it looks good. I think we're done here, So let's bring this into aftereffects and add some post treatment to this, and that's coming up next 11. 10 Color Grading in After Effects: Okay, so here we are in after effects, and we're going to create something similar to this and let me play this. You can see that as well. Okay, so let's see how we can build our own. Let me go to the project window here. I'm gonna bring in the footage. You can right click and say import file. You can also just simply DoubleClick in this window that's gonna bring it into. I'm gonna do that. Select one of the images here and make sure you enable the P and G sequin. So they come in as footage rather than a still images and then click open. And then I'm working with 32 bits per channel again. And if you want a toggle between the modes, you can use the altar option. So 8 16 and then 32. And I want to work in the 32. And let's first fix one thing. Now, when we bring it in, I can see in the info box on the top here that it says trillions of colors and straight. This is preferring to the Alfa Channel, and we didn't enable a straight Alfa channel in cinema 40 So let's fix that first going on right click on shape for and select Interpret footage main. And then I am gonna select the pre multiplied option. Leave black here, that's fine. And then just click. OK, so let's take this now and drag it to the create new comp button. And that's going to create a calm with the correct dimensions. Is also going to create a calm with the right frame frames per 2nd 30 frames per seconds, and it's also let me pull this one up. It also creates the correct duration. If I take my time slider and go all the way to the end, you can see that it matches up with 89 frames. Now, you may have seconds here if you hold down the control or command Klay. You can click and switch between seeing this in time or frames, and I prefer to see it in frames. So we also have ah transparent background here so we can verify that this is indeed a movie with an Alpha channel. If you want a toggle, the transparency grid on or off, you can use this button. It's gonna turn it on and off we can leave it off now because this is an animation we can now play. We have a play head, just like in cinema four D. If you want to play now, you can use the space bar, or you can use to zero key on the extended keyboard out of habit. I tend to use the the zero key S O when you hit the zero key is gonna load it into RAM plate as fast as it can, and then it's gonna play it back. And in the panel, the info panel here, we can always verify whether it's playing real time or not. So we can see FPs 30 and then riel time. Now you're after effects set up may not loop the way mine does. So let me show you how to fix that. Then all these panels, if you don't see them for whatever reason, you can go up to the window and you can find all the panels here. But I'm gonna go into the preview and you can see that we have right now. It says space bar. And this is referring to, um, the settings. Here I am changing the settings for my space bar and this button here, this is the one that says either play ones or loop. This is play once, and this is loop. Now, if you also used a zero on your extended keyboard, you wanna have to change that by going to numb pad zero and switch this one as well. So that's a little got you that you have to change it in in both places if you want to use both the space bar and the zero key, so now it's gonna loop. Okay, so that's start adding effects. I'm gonna go to frame zero, and I'm going to start by adding a background so layer new solid. And I'm gonna call this BG for background. And I'm gonna make that to calm size. And I'm gonna change the color to be black and then click, OK, and then okay. And then let's drag the background to the to the bottom here. I'm gonna temporarily hide the footage because I want to add an effect to the background. I want to add a ramp to it. So let's go up to effect. And then under the generate menu, we have greedy int ramp means my scroll wheel to zoom out. So this is a linear ramp. But I wanted to be a radial ram. So in the ramp shape that switch that to a radial ramp And I want the beginning of the ramp to be right at the center. So I'm going to click on the start of ramp, use this little gizmo and click right in the center and the end of the ramp I wanna have around here. So I'm gonna click end of ramp and then click down here Now the colors are not right. I want black on the outside and that's the end color. So what I can do is I can take the color picker and just sample this start color and the start color. I wanna have like, a dark brown. So let's go into the colors. Um, not bring at hew to around 30. It's got good. And then fairly dark, something like that, and then click. Ok, now I want to make this more subtle, so I'm gonna blend this with the original to say 75 5%. So it's so subtle now we can barely see it, but we're going to see this when we start adding glows to this. Okay, so let me zoom in here with a scroll wheel and then let's add some effect her. I want to increase the contrast first, so go to effect and then color correction curbs. And in the curse, I'm gonna increase the contrast. But I want to pull this not up here and show you was This is the controls to black value, and I don't want to crush that blacks too much. I'm gonna pull this one up just a little bit, so it's not gonna crush to black so much. And then I'm gonna pull this one down to increase the contrast and then increased the rights here a little bit more aggressively. I think something like that is good. That's compared to before and after. Now, when you increase contract, it also increases saturation. So let's pull some of that out. Let's go up to effect color correction, And then this ad hue, saturation and the master saturation I'm just going to reduce that to minus 20 and then let me twirl this up. I'm also gonna add a blur to this just to soften it up. Eso go to effect, blur and sharpen and then add a gauzy blur. And I'm just gonna add one pixel blur. And I am going to enable the repeat edge pixels check box. So those are the effects that I'm gonna make to the footage, and now I'm gonna use adjustment layers. So let me go up to layer New, and I'm gonna use a solid we're gonna use to solid as an adjustment layer and keep reusing it. I'm gonna call this one adjust ment layer, and this one is also gonna be comp size. But I like to keep my adjustment layers white. It doesn't make a difference, but I like to keep them white just to a second. Distinguish between them and other layers in the timeline and then click. OK, so to make this an adjustment layer now, we need to enable this check box. This turns it into an adjustment layer, and now everything underneath it is gonna be affected by whatever effects we add to it. And the first effect I'm gonna add is the stylized glow and this is what's going to define the look of this. So let's go into style. Eyes glow and I'm gonna increase the radius a little bit. And then the threshold which controls what parts of the image are gonna be glowing. If I take this all the way down to zero, everything is going to receive the glow and it looks very, very strange. Let's pull this up a little bit. That's first adjuster radius to be around 140 or so I'm a little less and then the threshold. I want a little bit more affected. Take it down to around there. Let me let me put this down to say 0.9. So this is before and this is after. So it's really changing the look of this. But I want to kind of clamped the glows in a little bit. So I'm gonna add one more curves to this. It's a color correction and then curves and let me just increase the contrast to something like that. Now the curves adjustment. They're very sensitive. So just a little bit of a change there is going to dramatically. I changed the look of it, so it's a little finicky. I may put it around here. I think that's good. We can always come back and justice later. So without the curves here, you can see that glows a little bit more on this kind of brings it together. Let me, in fact, increased a contrast even more. Okay, Okay, I think that's good. Before after. Okay, so now what I want to do is I'm gonna add another adjustment layer. So let me go into the solace when you create a solid aftereffects creates, ah, solid folder for you. And in here we have the adjustment layers. I can reuse this. Now pull this down and then let's enable the switch for adjustment layer And let's rename these, um, hitting the return key. And I'm gonna call the first adjustment layer a t j and then glow curves. And then the 2nd 1 I'm gonna call a d g o j. It is. I'm gonna call this one gamma bright ness because what we're gonna do is that we're going to increase something called a gamma, which is really the mid tones which is gonna make these colors a little bit more intense. So let's add color correction curves again to this and in this curves, I'm gonna clamp the bottom here, gonna put a point here and a point there just to clamped EMS. I don't want to affect the whites and the blacks so much. Um, let me put this down a little bit, but I will increase the Gamma or the mid tones. You can see that this has a quite a dramatic effect and go overboard with this for sure. If you go the other way. Looks really strange. But when we pulled it up something like this, it really starts bringing this toe life compare before and after just intensifies everything. So I think that's good now. I also want to increase the blue just a little bit and let me pick a different frame. That's a pretty good frame. Maybe here. So in cinema 40 we added a little bit of a blue 10 to the great, a dark grey material we had. But I want to accentuate that a little bit more. So let's add one more adjustment layer and then enable the adjustment layer switch. I call this one a D. J. How has a k a. D. J boost there blues And in here I'm gonna add effect color correction and then hue saturation. Now, in this hue saturation. I'm not gonna work on the master. I'm gonna select a specific color to work with. So in the drop down here, we have reds, yellows, green science, blues and agendas. Now, let me illustrate that if, for example, choose to yellows, then we get a range of colors here. And this is the range going to read and then this on this side, we have greens to see what the color range or the colors that are affected by this. You can take the yellow saturation and drag it all the way down to the bottom to see what is this range actually affecting? And we can see that it's affecting a lot of this. And if I pull these here, we can see that we have effectively taken out almost all the saturation. Now, if I bring this back to zero again, that we can increase the saturation or we could increase the lightness if we wanted to. Um but I'm not gonna work on the yellows. I'm gonna work on the blues. And in fact, in this case, I'm actually gonna work on this science, not the blues. Um, but I'm going to reset this effect. This is really nice and after effects that all the effects have a reset button. So when I click on Reset, it's going to take it back to its default. And instead of the master, I'm gonna work on the science, and I'm gonna leave the range as is. But I'm gonna increase the contrast now if I go too far, it looks horrible. But if I take it up to say around 23 22 it's gonna be subtle me before after, I'm not sure if you can see that. Just ask a little bit of blue to it. And I think that's good. So I'm gonna leave it at that Now, on top of this, I'm gonna add another effect. I'm gonna add a tri tone to bring all the colors together and let me add another adjustment layer. I prefer to add the effects to several different adjustment lays. That way I can turn them on or off, but it can also tone them down by adjusting their, um, capacity of the layer. So let me enable that the switch, and then I'm gonna call this one a D. J. And then try tone. I'm going to use the tri tone effect. So effect, color correction and then try tone. And this is pretty far away from what we want. Um, but let's see how we can fix this. So the highlights I want to leave alone now, the mid tones, I'm gonna create this kind of orange that Hugh of 32 is good. I'm gonna create, like, a little brighter around there. Let's click, OK? And then the way I'm gonna bring this together with the other colors in the composite is by using the blend with original. But before that, I want to ask some blues to the shadows. So let me pick up blue around here and then just a little bit around there. That's pretty good. And then click. OK, so now let's blend this with the original and I'm gonna go all the way to 80. So this is before and this is after and in fact, I want to say that make this a little bit more subtle, so I'm gonna reduce your capacity off this adjustment layer. So I'm gonna twirl this down and under transform. We have capacity a quicker way to get this, cause this swirling gets a little cumbersome is to use the shortcut t. But since we're here, I'm going to use this one here. And instead of 100% I'm gonna lower the capacity of this to 75. That's and that's let's ah, turn off the layer before and after. So it just brings things together a little bit better. I said, look at some different frames since this is an animation, um, so we're almost done. But I'm gonna add one more thing and I'm gonna add some green to this. Let's go back to the project. Add one more adjustment layer and then enabled the adjustment layer switch. Call this one a D j grain, and then effect noise and green add grain. So we have This is a preview here in the viewing mode. I'm going to change that to the final output. And it is way too grainy here. Of course. Um, so I'm going to reduce the intensity to 1/10 of this. So 0.1 and then the size, I'm gonna make a lot smaller as well. 0.15 I was probably subtle. I don't know if you can see it on the recording, you're gonna be able to see it on in your own aftereffects Project file. If I turn it on and off, you can see that it looks better with grain. Now, let me also find a frame so you can see why we added a back room. See there. Okay, so if I go to my background and just turn it off, then we would get black in the background. You see that in the center, here and on the glows Let me turn it back on so you can see he just clams it and just brings it together. It just looks a little bit better. This is without, and this is with. So that's why we added the background to kind of bring all elements together. Let's go to the first frame and here we go. We are finished. Let's play this. I'm gonna hit the zero on the extended keyboard. It's gonna load this interim Now. It's a little slower to play now because we've added a lot of effects. Yeah, up. I wanted to keep loading and when I go full screen after this almost done, almost done. Here we go. Let me go full screen on this and that's it. We have finished our project. Stop this. So to recap, we started in Cinema 40 and we used spines and the sweep object to create the geometry. And then we animated it and created a perfect loop. We added some details with a display, sir, and then we added a camera and lights. The final steps in cinema 40 were text oring and rendering the animation, and we also looked at the open GL hardware renderers to see how it can help with animation previews and then here in after effects. We've added some post effects to create this glowing shape that we have here as the final result. As always, thank you for watching. 12. 11 Exporting the Animation from After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder: we finished color grading the project, but we didn't look at how we can export this out of after effects. So let's look at that. Go to the composition menu and select add to render queue. And that's going to open up the render queue window at the bottom. And this workflow is very similar to exporting a still image, which we looked at before. But if I go down to the render settings and click on the word best settings, I want to make sure that the quality is set to best and that the resolution is set to full . And they are. And I also want to verify that the duration is 90 frames, so it all checks out and click OK, and then let's go to the output module and click on the word lossless and under the format dropped on, I'm going click on the drop down here and the options you see they're going to depend on the system you have and the version of after effects that you have. But as an example, I'm gonna choose quick time, and I want to look at the former options for the quick time movie, so I'm going to click on this button and under video. Kodak. Right now we have animation. I'm gonna click on the drop down. Now again, the options to see here depends on your system. But I would typically go for something like Apple Pro rez for two to h Q click on that and then select. Okay, And then we have channels and depth. I'm gonna leave. Old is, as is, we have an audio output set to auto which checks for audio in your video. And if he doesn't find anything, it won't export any audio, which is perfect. So let's click. OK, And then we specify where we want to save this file to and the file name, and then we click the render button. Now, I just wanted to use this as an example. I'm not gonna actually going to render this out, but I want to go back to the output module. It's on the word custom. Quick time under the formats, if you have an older version of after effects, you're gonna have a lot more options here. Adobe has moved a lot of the export options in more recent releases of after effects to its dedicated and coding application called Adobe Media Encoder and including those formats, the Web format such as H 26 to 4. So we can still access them, though. But we have to do it through adobe media encoder, And as long as you have a creative cloud membership, you can download it. So I'm gonna cancel out of this. So if you don't have it installed, installed Adobe media encoder from your creative cloud application and then let's move on someone. I click on the shape for here to bring back the composition. And then I'm gonna go up to composition, and then you can see that we have an option. Add to Adobe Media encoder que, and that's gonna open up Adobe Media encoder the application and added to its cues. It's really easy to work this way. So let me click on it. And if you didn't have it open in the background, it's gonna take a little longer. I cheated. I opened it up already, but you can see in the queue here that we have our composition shaped for and we have a format set and a preset applied. Now, if I click on the format. On the drop down, we can see that we have a lot more options here. We have hte to 64 for example, which is enabled because I use that the last time. But we also have em. Pick two. We have P and G's P two movies, even animated GIFs. But I'm gonna choose H 2 64 because it's a good format for quality and very reasonable file sizes and then under presets. If you want to export to, say YouTube, you have presets for YouTube or Vimeo or even Facebook. And if you click on the word age to 64 you can see a little mini version off our composition here. And we have all the export settings on the right side so we could choose to format and the presets from here. And we could change the output name if we want. And the location. If I click on that I'm not gonna do that is going to be exported as an MP four export video and audio. We don't have any audio, so let's disable that. And then we have even more settings down here. So, under video, for example, we have with and height. If I wanted to change that, I could just disable this check box and put in my own values here. I'm gonna keep it as is. I'm not gonna change any of these other settings either, but I will enable this one. Use maximum render quality. Just scales it a little bit better. Takes a little bit longer to render. But this is gonna be very snappy to render anyway, so click. OK, And now we're ready to just send us out for render. And to do that, I'm gonna click on this green arrow and at the bottom, you see, it's so quick, it's encoding is done. So let me open up. The video is gonna calm on my def money. Other monitor and unopened in quick time. And bring this over and in quick time under the view menu, I can tell it to loop and then this blade and there it is. Here is our exported looping movie. Stop that. So we finished our project and we exported our movie. Thank you for watching 13. 12 adapting the new shape: I originally planned on ending with this shape and this project, but I think it's good to add an extra example just to highlight the versatility of this technique. So we are gonna build one more thing. Let me show you what that is. So we're gonna build this, which is homeless, like a polar opposite. The 1st 1 was dark. In contrast, E, this one is quite light. So if I play this back so a bit of a hiccup, um, that it's it's looping seamlessly. It's just that the V l c player doesn't want a loop seamlessly, but this is a perfect loop. So we're gonna created this. So it's almost a complete opposite off that dark shape. So let's see how we can build this high this. So the beautiful thing about this is that we can reuse most of these elements. We just have to change a few settings. So first of all, let's clean this up a little bit, so we're starting with a bit of a clean slate. I'm gonna hide the visibility of the lights by alter option clicking on this and then let's delete this material. We're gonna create a new material. And let's also delete it from the materials manager so we don't get confused. And, um, let's get out of this camera. So on this G e o, we do have, um, some rotation changes here. We can set this back to its default by going up to mesh or tools rather and say, Reset piece are this is going to reset it to it's default and let's hide or to turn off the subdivision surface And the display, sir, For now and then let's just focus on the shape. So I'm gonna turn up to sweep now, too, so we can see. So right now we have two shapes. We have the inside path, which almost looks like a circle. And then we have the flower profile, and I'm not even gonna touch the inside path. I'm gonna leave that as is, But I will make some changes to the flower profile. So in the object tab, I'm going to reduce this inner radius to 13 and I'm gonna keep this at 120. But I'm gonna increase the pedals to seven, and then let's see what we get. If I re enable the sweep now we have very different looking result. This kind of swirly shape. Much thinner, much lighter. Now. You could go even thinner or smaller with a radius here. So if I do, they set this down too. To then we have almost like thes sheets. And this looks like a flower or something like that. Now bear in mind that we also have a display, sir. Eso if I turn on the subdivision surface and the display, sir, then this type of thin flour is not gonna work. And very well with that displacement eso. I'm gonna set this back to 13 but I will lighten the displacement here a little bit. So let's go to the display, sir. And under the height, right now we have minus 10. Let's reduce that to minus three. So this is what we have now let me turn off the subdivision surface justice a little quicker, so that looks quite good. So the next thing is to set up a camera angle for this. If we play this back has turned up the display. Sir, Let's play this back. So if I go to the old camera that we had and look, it's quite flat. And the reason for that. If we go into the object, tap off that camera, we have a focal length of 135 millimeters, and and that's a fairly long lens. And their characteristics of a long lens is that it's gonna flatten the things that use zoom in on out. So this is a much flatter look. So what I want is the opposite of that. I want to emphasize extreme angles. I want to create some distortions in this, and a very good way to do that is to change the focal length. I'm gonna go right down to super wide, and it jumps off to the horizon. But let's zoom in and let's just rotate the camera around little bit. Now you can see what a difference. See how you get all these distorted angles now that you just rotate the camera even the slightest, and this is perfect for the loop, it's gonna have the appearance of these kind off these parts of that flower rotating around . It's just increases the distortions, and it looks quite nice that way, so I don't wanna have it at a slight angle, perhaps something like this. Let's play this and see what we get. We can a justice. So depending on how much you want to emphasize the distortions, you can angle the camera more or less. Think I'm gonna have it. I think something like that looks quite good. So let's pause this and let's go into options kind of figure. And under the view tab, let's increase the capacity of the tinted border to 95 just so we can frame this a little bit better. And I think actually, that framing is gonna work quite well. So I'm happy with that cameras. I'm gonna lock it. So right, click on the camera cinema four D tags. And then let's do a protection tag. And that's enable the subdivision surface. And then the display, sir, to see. So this is what we have. So in the next movie, actually, you know what? Let me change this up a little bit. Let me go. My sharp, Maybe something more like this. Once you turn on displacement, sometimes you have to make adjustments. So I think maybe I like this a little bit better. Um, let me turn off the displacement and the subdivision surface. to play this back. Yeah, I think this is a little bit better. Okay, so now, um, after I changed my mind, let's lock that one again. Protection and ah, turn on the subdivision surface and the display, sir. And this is the end of the lesson. In the next lesson, let's go ahead and ah, lightness, eso that's coming up next. 14. 13 lighting the scene: Okay, so let's go ahead and like this. And, um, I want to add a bright backdrop to this eso Let's temporarily hide our shape option or all clicking on the stoplight. And then I'm gonna add a background object. I'm gonna pull that into the scene and, um, in the background object. I also want to create a material. So I'm gonna double click in the materials manager and I'm gonna call this B G. And then let's put that on the background and ah, to see this, we need to enable the interactive Orender region. There are few things I want to do to make this quicker. The first thing is, I want to turn off the display, sir, and I want to turn off the subdivision surface. And then I also want to go into the render settings. And the physical render is what I want to use. So under the physical tag, the options, that sampling quality, let's set this right down too low. And in fact, I'm gonna go even lower. Just so it's quick while we preview are lining. So let's set all these 21 and close this now let's enable the interactive render region interactive render region, and I'm gonna pull it out so it matches our render size something like that. That's good. So now let's go into the background material. I'm gonna double click it and then pull it over here and we don't need reflect INTs in the color we're gonna add a Grady int. So let's click on this drop down and say Caridi int And then let's go into the Grady int and what I wanna have is instead of a two d. U. I want to the circular and I want the darker areas to be on the outside. So I want the reverse of this. So if I right click under this bar, I can say invert radiant. And, um, I don't want it to be white. Let's twirl this down. I don't want it to be white. I wanted to be very bright, but not quite white, so that's probably pretty good. And now this one. I want to make a lot brighter. So something let that I don't have a specific number in mind. I just want to create, um, a light Grady int or a light background. I think that's gonna do it. So let's close this and let's re enable our shape and ah, let's see how we can light this. So we have to go. We already have the lights set up. So if I twirl this down and right now they're all disabled, so I can enable them, and I want to work on one light at a time. It's a much better way toe work. You get a good idea what each light is doing. So I think that's good. Now let's click away from the background so we don't have anything selected. Let's ah, look at this in all four view. So you can either hit F five or click on this button and ah, okay. So the key light is what I want to start with first. And my thought process here is that I want this to be light and airy, and that means I want to also create low contrast. So this first key, like the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna increase the size. So if I go to the details tab right now, we have an outer radius of 200 centimeters. But I'm gonna increase this to 600 centimeters. Bigger lights are generally softer, creates less shadows, less harsh shadows. And that's exactly what I'm going for and also what I want to do. You can see how close to camera is to the actual shape because it's a wide angle. I'm gonna put this light almost directly behind the camera so we can see in all four views here. What's going on? So on the top, we also see here when I pull this one up in the right and of you, my pulled is up. Maybe pull this back a little bit, so it's not as close and just put a hint of an angle on there. So I think that's a good start. Now, I also want to make sure that this light isn't too yellow. I go back to the key light on the general tab and we have ah ah, yellow saturation on this. So let's just take this down a little bit. So we have a little bit of yellow in there, which is nice, but not too much, So that was pretty good. We don't have a lot of shadows inside of the shape and which is exactly what I want. So now let's set up the feel light. Let's enable the fill light and ah, the fill light have actually somewhere around here, that's pretty good. Now this is to blue. So let's reduce the saturation of that to say, seven. And then this is already a big light. This is a 600 centimeter light, which is good, which is what I want. Ah, but let's see, I just wanna fill in a little bit of the information and create a little bit of contrast. And I think if I pull this down a little bit, so let's see what that looks like with the key light. Okay, s So let me let me do one more changes to the key light. I think perhaps, um, let's increase the intensity of the key lights. It's a little brighter. And then what about the fill light? Let's increase that this to say 60. And then let's look at these both at the same time. So I like that. That's good. Let's move on to the rim light enable that. So the rim light I wanna have behind now because this is a hollow shape. Um, we're going to get some light coming through the crevices, which is good. Um, I just want to create some additional highlights here, so let's take the rim light. Um, let's see. How big is this? This is 100 centimeters. I don't want to. So contrast he So let's bring this up to say, 400 and ah, and this Pulis back, I want this on the other side of the camera. Let's zoom out in the right view here. So actually not bad. See that we're getting some interesting highlights here. See if I pulled it to the side a little bit. See what we get on the other side. Uh, and I can't like this one better. Let's see. What is thean? Tense city. We can perhaps bring up the intensity a little bit. Se 60. Yeah, I think that's good. Let's see all lights at the same time. So I think I like this lighting. Let's leave it at this. If I bring this perspective full screen back, you can see what we have now to appreciate delighting. If I turn off all these lights, we're gonna get to default light. So this is what we have at default. This kind of harsh lighting eso by lighting it, we get more tonal changes. It's a softer paint of this subject or this object, which is exactly what we want. So I think this is This is pretty good. Let's leave the lighting like this and, ah, let's move on to texture in this and that's coming up next. 15. 14 creating material and render: Okay, so let's go ahead and texture this. First. Let's create a new material double click in the Materials Manager, and I'm gonna call this ah, shape Matt for material. And let's drag that on the sweep and then let's go into the material double click it and then here we go and, ah, let's focus on the reflections. We're gonna come back to the color later, but in the reflect INTs, let's that change some things here. First of all, it comes with a default speculator. We don't want that. So let's delete that. And instead, let's add a Beckman and it's becomes this really shiny shape. Now, the intent you ation is how the other channels are are combined with this. So right now it's that average. But if I change this to additive, that means the color channel is gonna be brought in as well. So now we have a much brighter kind of shape. Now I'm gonna increase the roughness just a little bit 16% just a little rougher. And then I'm gonna bring down the reflection strength to around 75. So now it's less reflective, but I also want to bring in some fall off on the edges for the reflection and nasty for Nell. So if I look at the layer for Nell and twirled that down and then what type of friend l do we want You either want a conductor which is a metallic type off for Nell or Die electric, which is everything else. And I know that I want to use the pet preset. So So that's good, but it I want to bring back some more reflections. I'm not going for a realistic look Here s so we can play around with this as much as we want. So say 57. So we just bring back some of those reflections and I I like that better now, one more thing that we can do before we add the color is that we can add just a little bit more off shadowing. Um, and one way we can do that. We can always play with the lights, but we can bring in something called ambient occlusion, and that's under the render settings. So if I go to the render settings and it's under effect effect and then ambient occlusion and that just adds darkening in the cracks in the crevices off objects and you can see that it got a lot darker and this is too dark. I don't want to emphasize those too much. I just wanna have a subtle effect. So I'm going to do two things. First of all, I'm not gonna have black take this black, not and just bring it up into around here in the Grays. And then I'm also gonna change how this greedy int is mapped. I'm gonna take the bright areas, and I'm puller right in so that we get more bright areas back, and I think that's gonna be pretty good. So if I turn the Amy into collusion off can see, especially here in these crevices and then it turned back on, it looks better now. We have very low Orender setting, so it's very noisy. But once we increase the render settings, this is gonna look a lot better. So that's good. Let's leave it at that. So now let's add the colors. I already prepared the colors because this is a fairly slow process to do, but I'm going to show you how I set them up. So let me go to this material colors and, uh, it's copy and go into the color. And then we can copy the shader. So if I say copy Shader and then I'm gonna double click our material, I can go into the same drop down and say Pay Shader! And now we have the colors in there and this is placed inside of a layer. Shader is let me go into the layer shader and then into the Grady int. So I have this Grady and set up its ah, the direction ist two d u. And ah, what I've done is I've created lots of little knots with colors and ah, I have gone painstakingly gone through and try to make it look as good as I possibly could . Um, I wanted to make sure that a lot of these colors are on the edges of this. So the process is really to move these little knots around until you get something that you like. So I see that we lost this color here now so I can move that back so they will have it back . So you could use this Grady in. But it's a much better idea to create your own radiant s a much better way to learn and just place the Grady INTs where you see fit Where? What looks good. What I like about this is that we have lots of the colors on the edges, which is going to make it look good when this one travels around. I also like the fact that we do have some soft transitions and then also some harsher transitions. So it just builds to the complexity of the object. So that's what I liked. And that's why I set up the great in the way it did. Um, and if I right click here in a release 20 you can select the interpretation of all knots at once. And ah, this one is set to cubic and cubic gives you a very kind of smooth interpretation. So they're all cubic. So that's the set up. Let's go and see how we can render this. So let's close this material and then let's go to the render settings. And, um, let's look at the physical, the settings for the render first. So I did some testing, and ah, fixed was the fastest to render, and I used medium. In fact, I used five, I increased the subdivisions here to five. But I'm gonna keep it for for now because justice settle faster to render. But I think in the other example I showed you I used five, but I want to bring these back to, to to To which is there default? So this is going to give you a good render quality. There will be a little bit of noise in there. Um, but since this is a moving object, we're not gonna really see that too much. Ah, and let me enable the subdivision surface in the back. And then the display, sir, that's gonna make it a lot slower to render. So as we set up the render settings, it's gonna think about it. So in the output, I have a with in the height of 10 80 by 10 80 and then the frame rate is still 30. I haven't changed any of these things from the other shape. And then we go to 89 which is what creates the perfect loop. It goes from 0 to 89 instead of 90 which creates the perfect loop. And then, um and then in the save options pick a file name. I think I did. This one can just save it here. Actually, it may create a folder for it. Older. This is, uh, Loop. Swirl. Okay, so let me save it In their loops World swirl, click Save and the foreman I'm gonna do a P and G, and I'm gonna do 16 bits per channel. But we do have a backdrop so we don't need on Alfa Channel. So let's disable that. And, um yeah, I think those settings are good. So now what I'm gonna do is disable the interactive render region. And, ah, I'm gonna shoot this off for render. So I'm gonna click this button here and now it's gonna start taking and ah, I will pause this and I'll be back once it's rendered. Okay, So the render is finished. And on my machine, it took close to two hours round Ah, one minute in 18 19 seconds per frame. So your mileage may very depends on your machine here, but let's dress this up just a little bit in after effects and that's up next 16. 15 color correction in After Effects: Okay, so we are in after effects, and I have imported the footage. Let's make a composition out of this. So I'm gonna take this, drag it to the create new comp button, which is going to create a comp with the correct dimensions and the correct frame rate. And then I'm gonna pull this into the comp folder that I created. Let me zoom out so we can see the entire thing. So if we play this back, we get this and it loops perfectly, which is what we wanted. Now, let's just add a little bit of color correction to this. I wanna overall make it a little bit brighter, little lighter. And I also want to add a little just a little bit of blur to this. So go to actually, we have to be in this window First layer new gonna do solid. And I'm gonna call this solid a d J for adjustment whites good make comp size, and then okay. And ah, well, it's a solid now to turn this into an adjustment layer, we click on this switch here. Okay, so let's start by adding effect, color correction, and then curves. And in this curves. I'm just gonna brighten this up. Um, the meat start up here. Well, this up something like that. Maybe pull this down for a little bit of additional contrast. Something like that before, After before, after. So this is really all to taste. But I think this type of animation could benefit from being a little bit lighter. Brighter. I'm also gonna add a blur effect color correction hand that's not right. Blur and sharpen. And then just a Gaussian blur. Repeat the edge, pixels and maybe just a one pixel. Okay, so without the's effects, we had this. And now we have this. So on top of this, I want to add some mawr blur. So I'm gonna duplicate this adjustment layer so controlled the or command d and then the top one. I'm gonna call a d. J Um, um, brightness. And the bottom one, I'm gonna call a d j Motion Blur. And for now, let's turn on the top. Turn off the top one. And that's delete. The Goshen were in the curves, so I want to add a little bit off motion blur to this and there a few different ways. You can do this. If you have 1/3 party plug in the really smart motion blur, this is a good option. If you don't have that one, we can always use time and then pixel motion blur, which is a pretty good effect. And you can see that it got blurry here, Um, let me increase the shutter samples to say I don't know, 12. And then let's just play this back. He's gonna have to chug along just a little bit. So the shutter angle here basically controls how much blow you get if you have. If you set this to a higher value, get more blur. And the shutter samples is the quality of the blur. So here we have it. And then if I turn it off, see, that just looks a little bit less fluid. So I prefer it on. Now let's enable those other effects as well used to chug along a little bit. But so wait for this to load into Ram. They go, Okay. And ah, Pacific in zoom in here. Probably not. Yeah, I need to re load that into Ram. But so this is the final result. You can always tweak this any way you want Eso This project is actually finished. I do want to show you one more thing, though, um, to go back to the projects folder. Um, I haven't won more. So this is just on additional thing that you can do with this Lupin technique in cinema 40 . The exact same set up, Except I just tweaked a few parameters on. Then we I made this. So we're not gonna work on this project, But I'll add it as, ah, as an extra project that you can tinker in and play around with. Um so the same set up. Now, this has a fairly complex layer shader set up inside of cinema 40. Um, this is really the fourth course on abstract shapes. So in the first course, I go into depth on how to create these kind of intricate, complex layers. Shader is set up. So if you're interested to see how to set that up, check out the first course. But that concludes this project. I hope that you found techniques that you can use in your own projects. 17. Thank you for watching: thank you for watching the course. This was the final in a Siri's off four on making abstract shapes in cinema 40. So if you didn't see the other ones, I recommend checking them out. Play with these techniques and have fun. There are so many different ways you can go with this and remember to post your projects. The habit of publishing your work does wonders for your improvement. Even if you didn't reach the level of perfection you were hoping for. Perfection is an illusion. The work is what counts. Let me know if you have any questions, or perhaps ideas for what you'd like to learn. You can reach me on velocity peak dot com where I post projects and tutorials animals on Twitter at Jesper Sandal. I hope you found the course helpful. And if you did, don't forget to leave a review. If you follow me here on skill share, you'll be notified. Whenever I publish a new course, keep learning and I'll see you next time