Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love to make fun character animation, particularly when the movements are really satisfying. I think animation is this perfect intersection between being creative and being technical. When things all work together really smoothly, it's really satisfying. Particularly working in 3D tickles both those parts of your brain. Hello, I'm Russ Etheridge. I'm a freelance director, animator, and designer working out of Brighton in the UK. I've been a professional animator for a number of years. I work on client projects, big and small. I'm excited to share some of the stuff I've learned along the way with [inaudible]. Welcome to my first Skillshare. Thank you for joining me. In this class we're going to be looking at making a simple 3D animation. I think it's going to be good for all skill levels. Whether you're a 2D animator who needs to do a quick 3D element for their thing, which is too hard and time-consuming to do by hand, that's going to be good. Or if you're completely new to animation and you're keen to launch yourself into the world of 3D, then this is for you as well. 3D is an incredibly powerful tool. You can create a huge variety of content from realistic visual effects that you might see in a feature film to cartoony character animation, or even the stuff that we're going to be covering in this class where you can make 3D look like 2D animation. Plus, it's really fun to think of all the crazy, technical toys inside it. Here's a quick peek at the completed animation. It's all 2D, apart from when the skateboard does its flip. That bit was done in 3D and that's what we're going to be focusing on. I'll be taking you through everything you need to know to create a simple rotating 3D object, and how to make that fit seamlessly into your 2D animation. We're going to be using CINEMA 4D to create a flip in skateboard. Here are some other examples of projects I've worked on in the past where I've used a little bit of 3D to fit into the 2D style of that project. It's just a little bit of inspiration for what you'd be able to do with these skills once you've completed this class. It doesn't have to be all that complicated. It's best to start with something super-simple, let's skate.
2. Class Overview: Today, we're going to be making a simple 3D animation. I figured the best way to learn 3D is to do a really small 3D part of a bigger 2D animation. This is a really common problem in 2D, making something that has this slow 3D rotation is really hard and also very time-consuming in 2D. This skater animation I made does a really slow motion trick with the skateboard. It's a perfect example of when you might need to make a 3D element for your 2D animation. Is something that would be really hard to animate using most traditional 2D methods, but very easy with a bit of 3D [inaudible]. I made the character using After Effects, but when it came to making the spinning skateboard, I switched over to Cinema 4D. It was rendered using a built-in tool called Sketch and Toon, which automatically gives you the outlines around the objects and then it's ready to seamlessly plunk on top of your 2D animation. There's a million different ways to do everything in animation and it basically boils down to what style are you working in and how long is it going to take you because animation takes a really long time. Anything time-saving is going to be super useful. But there might be an argument for doing slow 3D rotations by hand if you want a certain handmade aesthetic. Like back in the day in old-style cartoons, we didn't have 3D so everyone had to do those things by hand. You get this certain look to it, it's imperfect, but that might be what you want. 3D is definitely a time-saving thing, but whether it's considered authentic or cheating, I'll let you guys decide. One thing is for sure, is knowing these skills is going to save you in a tight spot one day; it's a super useful thing. You don't want to spend all day animating something really simple that no one's going to notice. You want to spend a long time doing the really good stuff. If it's not really a showpiece in your animation, you might as well just do it in 3D and save yourself all day. You don't have to have done your 2D animation in After Effects like me, you could have done it by hand in something like TV pane, or maybe another vector animation software like Adobe Animate, it doesn't matter. You could actually combine the skateboard that we're going to make directly in your 2D program if that's what you want to do, if that's your style. But I'm going to combine it using After Effects because I've already animated it in After Effects, plus it's really useful just to combine things in After Effects anyway, even if you are working in hand-drawn software, just because it gives you a lot more flexibility and it's a good way to do it. You could also just use this class to learn a bit of 3D. We're going to be starting from scratch, I'm going to be showing you the interface right from the beginning, so you could just get the 2D bits. But however you get your end result, you will need a copy of Cinema 4D to follow along. If you are a 2D animator, you may want to be making your own scene to add your own 3D object to by following the instructions on this class, that's fine, or if you're a massive lazybones like I'm very often, I've provided my skater animation without the skateboard so that you can just make the 3D object and then apply it to my animation. That's available in the class materials to download. Either way, it's up to you. Just to give you a quick outline of what we'll be covering in this class. We'll be going through some 3D theory, basically, what is 3D? What are the different processes you need to do to create a 3D animation? I'll be giving you an introduction to Cinema 4D, the buttons and the general layout of the software. I'll take you through working with reference images and videos inside Cinema 4D. We'll be using those reference images to do some simple modeling of the skateboard and then we'll be setting up that skateboard for animation. We'll be going through animation basics; looking at the timeline, making sure you guys know where different types of key-frames and how the curves work to make the skateboard do its flip, a varial kickflip to be precise. I'm not a skater so, apologies. Finally, we'll be making your 3D animation look like 2D animation. I'll talk about the different ways you can go about doing that and specifically, I'll be showing you how to use Sketch and Toon in Cinema 4D and then how to combine that with your 2D animation. Let's get to it. In the next video, I'm going to be going through 3D. I'm going to give you a bit of a 3D orientation class just because 3D is quite complicated and there are lots of different parts to it. I'll be going through which bits we're going to be covering and which bits we're not going to be covering and generally, how those different areas when you're working in 3D combine to make a finished 3D animation. See you there.
3. What is 3D Animation Anyway?: I just wanted to do this one extra 3D orientation video called the 3D theory class. Because I think from the outside, 3D can seem a bit mysterious and quite complicated. I just wanted to cover what all the different stages are when you're working on a 3D animation. That way, it will make sure everybody's on the same page and hopefully make the rest of the class a bit clearer. Like I said, it might seem very complicated from the outside and actually to be honest, it is quite complicated. But like with everything, if you break it down into smaller chunks and you learn step-by-step, gradually things begins fall into place and everything becomes a lot clearer. Making 3D animation or even just stills in any 3D program, I think can be broken down roughly into six different areas. I'll just take you through those. I'm just going to show you on the screen, how the different processes work as you work on them. I'm not going to really explain what I'm doing, but I'll just take you through different areas in the order that you would probably be working on them. But in reality, you can go backwards and forwards like texturing can go off to animation, that kind of thing. Number 1 is modeling. Modeling is literally what it sounds like. You create a model, it's an object. This is how you create anything that you actually see in 3D. All 3D models are made up of points, lines, and faces. You might have heard the term polygon quite often when referring to 3D. As you can see here, I've made a cylinder, then I can also adjust the points as you can see here. I'm literally taking these points and moving them around these edges. You can move the edges and you can also move faces. When people are talking about polygons, they're talking about the faces. It's a multi-sided shape. You can also do things like extruding the face. I'm going to extrude a face here and pull it out, and then you can see. By a process of this and lots of other tools similar to this, you can build up very complicated objects. You can build pretty much anything you want; humans, cars, it's all done like this. You might have heard of software such as ZBrush, where you can actually sculpt as if you were using clay. But it's all the same principle. Everything is just moving these points around in one way or another. Number 2 is texturing. This is when you want to apply some color or some texture, or maybe an image and wrap it around your model. This is how you make your gray static model that's not colored, but in any way you add some material to it. Texturing is often referred to as texturing or adding materials. They're two separate things. Textures are literally adding an image to the object, materials is when you build up the substance of that material inside the 3D program, you can add things like reflections or you can add transparency or if you want something to look like glass or water or make it look like a tree, you might want to add random noises and you can do all of that inside Cinema 4D or inside your 3D program. It doesn't have to be all done with taking 2D images like Photoshop textures and applying them to a model. You can do a lot of work directly inside the 3D program using the tools in there. Now, not into the flames. Number 3 is rigging. Once you've modeled your object and potentially textured it, rigging is when you prepare your model for animation. In the case of this skateboard, if you can see this blue circle that surrounds the skateboard, this is a control that I've set up so that when I want to animate the rotation of the object, it happens around the point which I've selected. It's not just a random point, this is a point that I've specifically selected. In terms of animating skateboard, that's what you really need to do and we'll go through that later. Here's an example of a slightly more complicated rig. It's a hand I did on another project. You can see here that I've got similar control boxes for the skateboard, but it controls the wrist in this case. I've got one down here for the elbow and I've got another one down here for the second elbow which you can see here. It doesn't connect exactly how you want it because of the way I was animating it. This is rigged in a bit of a weird way because there's a weird animation going on. Then here's another quick example from the same project of a much more complicated rig where it's a full character. We've got body, legs, and arms, and head and everything all in the same thing. You can do things such as having the knees bend when the torso moves around and that way you don't have to worry about animating the knees and the feet stay in the correct place when you just animate the top of the body. That neatly brings us on to number 4, which is animation. Once you've got your character rigs, it's pretty self-explanatory. You can go in and then actually move the character around or whatever we're doing, skateboard in this case. The way the animation works is very similar to a lot of other animation programs. If you've ever worked in After Effects or you've done any sort animation work, quite often you're working in this view called curves. So you can see the curves here. These are stepped curves that I'm using for the character. That's just the start of animation I was doing in this particular project. But you can see that it moves. This is the way the body moves. If I show you just the y-position, you can see that he's down and then he goes up a bit, up even more. Then there's a smooth movement here, which you can see is represented by this curve slowly moving up and then slowing down to a stop as we get to frame 49. To quickly show you the same thing on the skateboard, you can see it's animating here and if I go over to the animation timeline, which is down at the bottom here. You can see the curves are moving here to make the skateboard do it's flip through the air. But we'll be going through this more detail later on. Number 5 is lighting. If you look on the left side of my screen, you can see the skateboard in the middle of the scene and you can see that I've set up two lights. These are represented by these squares that are pointing towards the skateboard in the middle. On the right side, you can see the rendered view of what the lighting is actually looking like when in the final image. If I select one of these lights, I can move it around. The size of the light is literally representing the light source. It's like having a giant square light pointing at the skateboard and if I move it down, you can see on the right-hand side the light changing and getting closer and brighter because I'm moving it towards the skateboard. That neatly brings us on to number 6, which is rendering. On the right-hand side you can see a rendered view. In this particular case, I'm using a renderer that is very fast, so I can see a preview of the final image very quickly in real-time, pretty much. Then when I want to render my final sequence or just a still image, if I'm rendering a sequence, I can do that. There's a separate part of the program which lets me export a final image or that will be your completed 3D work. We could carry on and talk about compositing here, as there's quite often, especially on a complicated 3D project, you will have to combine 3D elements with 2D elements in a program such as After Effects. We will be doing basic compositing here where we take our finished skateboard and combine it with a 2D animation. Technically that is compositing. But you can get much more complicated and things get really interesting when you start combining live action footage, such like we would get in a feature film with 3D realistic special effects, for instance. But for this explanation, I just wanted to make it clear all these different stages for how to work in 3D in particular. Great, so let's quickly recap those six stages that we've just went through. Number one is modeling, which is building your actual object. Number 2 is texturing, which is adding color and material to your object. Number 3 is rigging, where you take your object and prepare it to be animated by doing various things. Number 4 is animating your object, obviously you're moving it around. Number 5 was lighting, and finally, number 6 was rendering where you take all your previous steps and the computer processes it all to make a final image. Like I was saying, we're not going to be covering all these areas in this class. It's not necessary. We're mainly going to be focusing on just modeling and animation, and we'll be doing some rendering, but it's very simple. The materials that we're doing are just colors and then I'll show you how to get the lines around the board. That's basically it. This should be enough to at least get you started in 3D. I am planning on doing a more intermediate class, maybe some 3D character rigs and character animation, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Now you know what 3D is, let's make some. In the next class, I'm going to be taking you through the interface, showing you where the buttons are and give you a general orientation of when you open the program. I'll see you there.
4. Welcome to Cinema 4D!: Right. Let's jump into the computer and boot up Cinema 4D. I'm going to take you through the layout and the buttons, and generally what you see when you start it for the first time. I won't go into loads of detail but just enough to get your bearings. Let's do it. Welcome to the Cinema 4D interface. There might be a splash screen that welcomes you. It's got information like links to people's work, working in Cinema 4D. Just check it out, it's useful. But for now, just close it and get to this screen and you should have something like this. I should say that I'm using Cinema 4D, Version 21, R21. It's actually a couple of versions old. It's just because this is the one that I've bought and I haven't switched over to the new subscription model. But if you've got a newer version, most of the options and buttons should be in the same place, but if they're not, and I'm talking about anything that you can't see, then you should probably go online and have a lookup exactly where that button is that I'm talking about. Apologies if you're on a different version, it's just the nature of doing these things. Let's start right in the middle here. This is your Viewport, so this is where everything you make, you'll see. There's a few different ways to look at this. I think it should be this singular default camera view which you can see up here when you open a program. But if you click on the top right button up here, right in the corner, it will split the view into perspective, top, right, and front. This is the same view in four different perspectives. For example, if I go up here, which I'll describe this panel a little bit in more detail in a sec. But if I make a sphere, you can see the sphere has appeared in the middle of the perspective window, and it's the same sphere in all the other window. Let me go back to the singular view here. If you look to the top left of the view window, you'll see view cameras display those buttons. I'm not going to go through all this stuff because there's just loads of it, but they're just options for the display, for the Viewport specifically. If we go to the top panel, these ones with the big icons, these are your selection tools, your navigation tool, render options, and your creation, your most common object creation buttons. Starting on the far left, you've got undo and redo, that's pretty simple. This is the domain selection tool. It works like a brush if you middle click. I actually don't know what the other shortcut is. If you middle click, have a look at it up here if you're not sure, but if you're using middle click like me, then you can middle click and drag, and it will make the brush bigger and smaller and so you can paint selections. I'm clicking and dragging at the moment. If you paint across the sphere, it will select the sphere. After that, we've got the transform tools for the objects, so we've got move, scale. It's only like transform, moving position. Scale and rotation. PSR reset is a little bit more of an advanced tool, but it's very, very useful and I use it pretty much all the time. It just resets. Whatever you've got selected, it resets it back to the middle or resets its coordinates to 0, 0, 0. Then you've got last tool use here, which is quite handy. These XYZ things are maybe not super useful. I don't really use them that much. The one that I mainly use is this button here which toggles between world and object coordinate systems. Again, it's another more advanced tool that you'll use once you actually get into the software. Following along from that, we've got the render options. The far-left renders the current view in the window. This is your main render button, so when you need to do a final render, you'll be pressing this middle one. The one on the right is render settings. In here you'll be changing frame rate, your render size, where you're going to save the file, and all the other render settings. Following on from that, we've got all the object creation. If you hold down any one of these buttons, it will bring up more options. This creates primitive objects. After that, we've got the spline tools which we'll also be touching on later. If you've ever used Illustrator, they're the same things as paths. They're just lines essentially. You can create a rectangle and you can see that it's just a rectangular line. These next ones are a bit more complicated. There's just a few more options. There's different kinds of things you can do with models. Here we've got some more things you can do with splines, cloners, volume modeling. This is more advanced stuff. Again, these are modifiers which we will touch on later with modeling. This is when you want to do something to an existing model, such as bend it, bulge it, taper it, that kind of thing, without actually affecting the model. They're like model effects if you will. After that, there's environmental things which I don't use all that much, but they're pretty handy sometimes. Then these are self-explanatory. Make a camera, make a light. Running down the left of this screen is the object mode and selection tools. Starting at the top, we've got modeling object mode. I wouldn't worry too much about these at the moment. The most important ones are the point selection, edge selection, and face selection. We'll be doing that for modeling. This is when you need to actually go into the nitty-gritty of modeling and change the shape of an object manually. Below that, we've got access tool and also these are for soloing objects. If you're working on a really complicated scene and you just want to work on one small part, you can solo the view and make everything else disappears. Below that, the snapping tools, similar to any other snapping in, for example, Illustrator or Photoshop that you might have used. These ones are just a bit more complicated because you've got three axes to work with, going down in an anticlockwise direction, which I seem to be doing. Here we have the main timeline, so if you're working on an animation, you can drag this backwards and forwards to see what's happening over time. It got an in and out preview points like you do in After Effects. These are pretty self-explanatory, play, pause, next frame. These buttons over here are for setting keyframe. Below that, here in this empty panel, it's empty because we currently have no materials. This is the material view. If we create a material here, there's a lot of options in here, but the main thing we are going to be looking at is just the standard material. So create new standard material. There you go. There's a material there if you had multiple materials that will come up alongside it. This neatly brings me on to the attributes panel. This is now getting into where you'll be looking most of the time when you're apart from the main view, which you will look at a lot, that you'll be looking over here quite a lot. This is where you change all the options for anything you have selected. I currently have my material selected that I just created over here. Looking at the attributes panel, you get to change everything to do with the material. I'm in the color tab at the top. I can change the color, so let's make it a nice blue. That's a lovely blue. When I click somewhere neutral, like a blank part of the panel, it'll disappear because it's not selected. Continuing around our anti-clockwise direction. This panel here is probably the most important panel when you're working in Cinema 4D. It will show you absolutely everything in your scene. I know it doesn't really look that complicated at the moment, it's only because we have a sphere. But once you really get into Cinema 4D, you will be creating all kinds of stuff. All these things that we're talking about before, all these different objects, splines, modifiers, subdivision surfaces, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, it will all appear in the object view. Then once again, when you click on things in the object view, all the attributes for that will appear in the attributes panel. For example, my sphere, I can adjust the coordinates, which is where things are. If I move this around, you can see that the position is moving. Scale is in the middle one and rotation is the last one. Then if you go to the object tab, because this sphere is what is called parametric, if I switch over to my display here, so if I go to display options and courant shading lines, these are all the different types of displays you can see inside the Viewport. You can see on my sphere, all the subdivisions. If I increase the segments in the attributes panel, you can see the segment's going up there, so it makes it nice and smooth. I'm just going to quickly add my material to my sphere to show you the tag system very quickly, because that's one of the main ways you interact and you adjust objects in Cinema 4D. If I drag my material onto my sphere, you can see it's created what's called a material tag, and the material tag has its own attribute. When I click on the material tag down in the attributes panel, you can see some different options for how the material is being applied to the sphere. Navigating around inside the Viewport is done in a couple of different ways which I'm going to show you now on my keyboard view. You can either use a combination of 1, 2, and 3. If you press 1, it will pan inside the view. If you press 2, it will zoom in and out, and if you press 3, it will orbit around. That's 1, 2, and 3 in combination with left-click. I'm actually using a Wacom tablet, but if you're using a mouse is just left-click and 1, 2, and 3. The other way of doing it is the way that I personally use and I prefer it, is to hold down alt, then you use left-click, right-click, and middle click. I've got my right and middle click mapped to the buttons on my Wacom pen. But it works the same on a mouse. If you're using a mouse, you can use left-click, right-click, and middle click. I would actually recommend 1, 2, and 3 for the moment. Not very many people have middle click and if you're on a laptop or something like that, then 1, 2, and 3 is maybe your main go-to for navigating. I'd recommend having a really good practice with that, because the more easily you can navigate around your scene, the more easily you're going to be able to interact and make stuff. The last thing I wanted to show you is the different layout load-outs that you can have. If you go to the top right of the screen, you can see layout. It's currently on startup because that's what you're going to see when you first open Cinema 4D. I actually have my own custom layout which is this. It looks exactly the same. The only difference is I've added a few buttons up here. One of the other ones I do use quite a lot is the animate load out. This is if you're working on a single screen. I usually work on two screens so I have the startup load out on one screen and then timeline on the other screen. I will quickly show you the timeline. Nothing really shows up there until you've actually got animation on an object. If I click on my sphere and click set keyframe, you can see that it's now added the sphere to the timeline. I'll be talking about animation in a bit more later, so I won't go into any more detail than that for the moment. Hopefully, all of these gubbins makes a little bit more sense now. Don't worry, I know there's loads of buttons and trust me, I've been working in this program for 10 years and I press most of the ones I went through quite often, but there's plenty of buttons in there that I'm sure I've never pressed. It's all a learning process. There's actually a panel which I didn't show you where you can bring out. It has a whole list of all the buttons that are available in Cinema 4D and you can bring out custom ones. Those custom ones that I showed you in my start-up, load out, those are like custom buttons. They are also like third party plugins, that kind of thing. But don't worry, so if you get stuck, there's plenty of resources online, like there is with everything, so go and check out there. In the next video, we're going to be getting south for modeling. We are going to be bringing in a 2D illustration to build our skateboard from. I'll see you there.
5. Bringing in Your Reference: Let's take a moment to get set up. You could go straight ahead and start modeling right now, but you might come into a few issues for being too eager. If you want your 2D animation to really smoothly transition into 3D animation, your 3D and 2D objects are going to have to match really precisely, if they don't there will be a bit of a jump when we switch from one to the other. In the example of the skateboard which I've made we could actually just have a 3D skateboard static on the ground, and then it does its flip and then goes back to being the 3D thing. We could do that 2D one completely, but quite often in 2D animation you will be doing some kind of animation with that first and then you want to transition to your 3D thing and then back again. That's how we're going to do it in this. To build our skateboard very accurately we're going to need a reference. Now is the time to go and create a reference if you're making your own 2D animation or if you're following along with my skater class materials. You can download an MP4 of the skater in the class projects and resources tab down below the video. We'll be using the video for both modeling reference and animation timing references. Let's get to it. Great. Let's start with the low down layout of Cinema 4D again. You should have this view in front of you. The first thing we're going to do go to this top right button of the viewport and switch two multiple view here. The first thing we've got to do is decide which perspective we're looking at. The standard thing in 3D, which no one ever told me for a long time, was that y and x, this is in Cinema 4D because the axis are different in different programs. But in Cinema 4D y is up, x is right, and z is back. If you go to your front view here we'll have y and x as our visible axis, and then z is going off into the distance in front of us. If you imagine a character standing facing you if you're modeling a character, the character should be set up so it's facing you from the z axis as in the nose is pointing away from the z axis if that makes sense still. But don't worry too much if it's different, it doesn't matter too much because as long as you set up your render to face the right direction that's fine. Let's select our front view and make that full screen by pressing the little button in the top right corner of front view. To bring in a reference you go to "Options" in the top of the viewport, go down to "Configure", then in the attributes menu you'll see the viewport attributes for the front view. Looking at the tabs at the top of this attributes menu click on "Back" and there's an image box here. If you click the little box next to the image box, now you can navigate to where your skater animation is. So mine is here go, to wherever you've saved it if you're working with my skater animation or you're bringing in your own one bring it in now. You should see the skater appear behind the grid. Don't worry this is an old version of the skater because obviously I made this before I'd made the 3D one and finished off the whole animation so apologies if it looks completely different. I mean it doesn't look completely different it's just got different hair. When I scrub the timeline down in the bottom left here we should see it animate. The animation that we've brought in is actually longer than the default time of the Cinema 4D project. To lengthen the Cinema 4D project click on the place where it says "90", yours may differ, and change this to something higher. We could change it to something like 300, and then you grab your preview bar here and you can stretch it all the way out to the maximum so it's showing you 0-300. Before that I only showed you the original and so you need to stretch out so that you can see the entire length. Now we scrub along, the character does this jump, yeah disappears. Maybe we can just go to the point where it disappears. It should disappear around 260, and there's also another issue with the frame rate. We need to click on "Mode" which is at the top of the attributes menu and click on "Project", and that will bring up your project view. These are the options for the actual project, and we need to change the frame rate of the project. This is the number one most confusing thing about Cinema 4D when you're starting out is where to set the frame rates. There's always a frame rate mismatch and I'll explain a little bit more why that's the case in a second. But just know that this is the main global frame rate for your entire project. Where it says FPS we change that from 30-24, and that's the frame rate that I animated the skater in. When you set your frame rate here you also have to set your output framework. So I'm going to click on the "Render Settings" button which is at the top here, and it's the one on the right it looks like a little clapper board with a cog. Click on that Render Settings window should come up, make the frame rate change it from 30 or whatever it is to make sure it's in 24. This is the export frame rate, it's very confusing to have two frame rates. The frame rate in the project tells Cinema 4D what the actual timeline is running at. So the timeline is running at 24 frames a second, the render settings this can be anything you want. What will happen when you render if these two frame rates don't match, it will reinterpret your 3D animation to match the export frame rates. If your project frame rate is at 24, and your export frame rate is at 12 then it will be running at the same speed but you'll only render half the frames if that makes sense. It will only be rendering every other frame. I know its confusing, I know it maybe doesn't make that much sense at first but if you just make sure that those two frame rates are the same then you can't go wrong really. We also have to change the resolution. I'm actually working in four by three HD which is 1920 the lock aspect ratio button was clicked so make sure that's not clicked. Do 1920 by 1440 and that will be the same resolution as my skater render. Let's close that. While we're talking about frame rates I just wanted to talk about what the difference between 1s and 2s are if you're not clear about it. You may have heard of people in animation talking about working on 1s or 2s or 3s or 4s or 6s something like that whatever it is. It comes down to whether the animation is changing every frame or is changing every other frame in the case of 2s, or changing every four or five frames in the case of 4s, 5s, 6s and 7s, 8s and so on. This particularly happens in hand-drawn animation as a time saving device. For example traditional Disney animation or the hand-drawn films they had loads of money, they are a feature film. They would work on 1s because they just had that resource to be able to do that. But a lot of people don't have that so cheaper animation is done on 2s or 3s and quite often it's actually done as an aesthetic choice. You might see it in digital animation quite a lot. For example my skater which is on 2s, I've chosen to do it like that because it makes it feel a little bit more hand-drawn. The most common frame rates when you're working in film and TV are 24, 25 and 29.97. There's lot's of other ones like 60 frames people working in now it doesn't really matter. 1s and 2s means the same thing no matter what frame rate you're working in. In the past I've been asked a couple of times whether we should be setting our project frame rate to 12 frame rate a second for example. If you're working on 24 frames a second for your full frame rate why not just set the projects to 12 frames a second? I would definitely say to not do that, the main reason being it makes it so you have no flexibility. If you suddenly want to change to working on 1s you won't be able to do that you'll be stuck working on 2s. There might be situations where the camera is moving on 1s and the characters moving on 2s, and if you've got your project running at 12 frames a second you can't do that. I would definitely recommend working at the full frame rate whatever that may be, and then dropping it down later either using effects like Posterize Time which I'm going to be showing you later or you can just set the frame rate to be a different rate in your compositing software. There's a couple of different ways to do it basically. There's my 1s and 2s lecture done. Now I'm going to find the end of the 2D animation, sorry it's not quite long enough let's change this to 300. There we go. The end is at frame 261. Let's change the end frame number in our project timeline here to 261, and now we know that the 3D project is the same length as the 2D animation. I'm just going to go back to configure. There's a couple of more things I want to do in here. First off I want to change the transparency that way it's just not blocking your whole screen, and I'm also going to move the position. You can actually move the position of this in relation to your scene. I'm going to just move the y which is moving it up and down, and I'm just going to try and put the wheels around the x axis line. That way when we actually make a skateboard model it just makes more sense to build the skateboard at ground level as it were. We are done. So far so good, we're south for modeling. I just wanted to mention one more thing. That's if you're modeling something with a bit more detail than the skateboard, because we can actually infer what the skateboard is going to look like from this one view, one perspective. If you're making for example this coal character in 3D you might want a side view and front view, you may even want a top view as well. If you click on the top right button to change from the front view back to the multi-view you can now create multiple references in each one of these panels, and that way you'll have all the different angles to be referencing your 3D modeling from. For this one we only need the side view so let's just stick with that. Great. Let's quickly recap what we just went through. We switch to our front view, we went to the configure box for where you can bring in background reference images. We positioned it and set the opacity correctly, we set the timeline length to match the same length as the 2D animation video reference. I gave you a lecture about what 1s and 2s are, and also went through showing how to make sure that your project frame rates and your render frame rates match otherwise it can cause problems. Also setting the correct resolution so that 3D renders are going to match our 2D renders. I also quickly talked a little bit about how you can set up multiple references for multiple perspectives if you're making a more complicated model. You could do like the front side and top view for example. Now you're all set, you know where all the buttons are. You've got your reference in, let's actually build something. In the next video I'll be taking you through modeling a skateboard.
6. Modelling Your Board - Part 1: Okay. Enough chat, enough prep, this is the moment you've been waiting for, let's actually do something practical. It's time to model our skateboard. We're back at our default view. Let's just double-check. If you click the top right corner of the viewpoint screen, you should have your reference loaded in into your front view, which should be in the bottom right of your screen. If you don't have your reference there, please go back to the last video and make sure that your references are loaded into your scene. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is model the wheels. I'm going to go up to the top bar at the top of the screen, hold down on the cube, and go and select a cylinder because it's the closest object that's close to the shape of the wheels, so we might as well start with a cylinder. I'm going to change the display above the viewpoint here to keep rotating the lines so we can see the lines. This is the most useful view for when you're modeling. You can see a cylinder has popped up in the object view on the top right. The next thing I'm going to do is position the cylinder so that it's as close to the wheels as possible so that way we can make sure everything's going to line up with our 2D animation. I'm going to select the cylinder by clicking on it, or you can click on it up here in the object view. I'm going to make sure rotation is selected. That's all, if you're keeping note of keyboard shortcuts. Then I'm going to rotate it forwards like this on the red axis and I'm going to hold Shift while I do it. What that will do is it will lock, basically you need to start dragging it and then hold Shift. If you hold Shift first, nothing will happen. We're going to rotate it down to 90 degrees, so now it's exactly at 90 degrees. If you didn't hold Shift and you're having trouble getting it to 90 degrees, it's better to be as precise as possible in 3D because things can go wrong very quickly. But you can click on the cylinder in the object view and the attributes panel below will bring up lots of different options. You go to the coordinates tab, you can actually type in 90 degrees here. If yours is not 90 degrees, you can go here, select that, type in 90 and you're good to go. Now I'm going to switch over to the front view where our reference is and I'm going to zoom in. Now's a good time to make sure you're familiar with the navigation tools. Again, it's one, two, and three to navigate around. The same is true for the flat views, so one and left-click will be Pan 2 and left-click will be zoom. Then I wouldn't use three because that will rotate the screen, and if you get into a funny angle, again, you can use shift. If there is anything you need to lock into place, Shift is sort of sort snapping tool quite often, so if you're having trouble getting things to go back to alignment, then you can try holding Shift and see what happens. Now we can see our cylinder in front of our skateboard. Now's a good time to explain the difference between parametric objects and just simple models. Cinema 4D will tell you if it's a parametric object because you've created it here, all of these are parametric, and also it knows it's a cylinder. so you've created an actual cylinder. It's got a little icon of a cylinder up in the object for you. If I press C, which converts it to a flattened polygon object, you can see that Cinema 4D now thinks this is polygonal object. I'm going to undo that for the moment. A parametric object is one where you can't change the actual points. For instance, polygonal objects, Cinema 4D just interprets as points and line information, and that's it. That object can be opened in any 3D program, they all see polygonal objects in the same way. A parametric object is specific to Cinema 4D. The other programs do have their own versions of parametric objects, but it's not like you can copy and paste from one program to another because they all work differently. In Cinema 4D, you get these handles to change the properties of the parameter objects. In the instance of a cylinder, you can change the radius and you can change the height really easily. This is super handy for getting started quickly with modeling. If you have your cylinder selected and you go to the attributes panel, you can click on object and the radius height and various segment information is all here for you to change. I'm going to change the radius to match the radius in our reference image. We can do that here by shrinking this down. Then if you press E or click on the move position transform icon in the top left, you can move the object over and we'll line it up as closely as possible with the skateboard. Well, this is really handy to zoom in nice and close and get it as accurate as possible because obviously when we switch over from 2D to 3D, we want it to line up perfectly. I'm also going to change the height. Now that we've got the radius correct, obviously that does not look like a wheel, so if we go back to our perspective view, it's worth saying that switching between these two views is going to happen a lot. I'm not going to talk about how to do that. It's the top right button, that's why I'm minimizing these views. My perspective view, I'm going to shrink this down to something that looks more like a skateboard wheel that unhappy with. I know that's not exactly like a skateboard wheel, but this is kind of star light. I'm going to stick with something like that. I'm also going to increase the rotational segments. When you're rendering in 3D, if you have a very low polygon object, that will appear in the render, so you'll be able to see these harsh edges, and because we want a nice round circle, I'm going to increase that so we have a nice smooth circular object. I'm also going to reduce the height segments down to nothing because we don't need to do anything with height segments. It's really good practice to keep the object as simple as possible in 3D because things can get out of control quite quickly. We're going to be doing some moving around of the points, and if we've got way too many points than we need, then it's going to be very difficult to interact with them and change them. I'm also going to go into the caps tab and I'm going to increase the segment from one to two. This is going to be for making the hub of the wheel. As you can see in my reference, we've got an extra circle in the middle, and we need to reflect that in our 3D objects. Right now, I'm also going to go into this front view and change the display. Down here it's got this option called ISO palms. This, I think, is a way of making it so that it's a simplified view. It doesn't show you the true wireframe, it just shows you a simple shape outline of the object. I want it to be able to see the actual polygons, so I'm going to switch it to wireframe. Now we need to make it not parametric. If we rendered this cylinder right now, that line would not appear, so we need to tell Cinema 4D that there is a line here, so we need to actually build it into the wheel structure. To do that, I'm going to press C. The other way of doing that is to press this button up here is make editable. Now that we've done that, we need to select this circle in the middle, and I want to push it in using extrude. If we go to our faces view on the left here, these are the two views. If you press points, you can see the points. Edges will let you select edges. What I want to do is select the faces, so I'm going to select all of these faces per part here. Oops, I did that because I had my move tool selected, you can just directly move things like that. What I want to do is just select them, so we go to our live selection tool, which is this arrow with a circle around it. Select all the ones in the middle here. One thing to make sure, if you press on any tool here, you get options for the tools in the attributes menu. Select the selection tool and make sure only select visible elements is ticked on. If that's off and I select this, you can see it's actually selected all the way through and selected things straight through the object. So if I, for instance, did that again from this angle, it now selected exactly the same on the back. Only select visible elements, and then select the middleware. Now you can see it's only selected those. Before I edit these, I want to go into reference image again. I'm going to make sure that this circle now matches the radius of the inner circle on the wheels. To do that, I'm just going to scale them. I'm going to press T, we'll go up here and select the scale tool. These little handles here, if I go to my perspective, will a bit clearer. You can scale in different axis. This will scale z and x, and this will scale y and x, and go back to my reference and drag it down until it matches the inner circle. I know that the inner circle is a bit wobbly here, that's fine, but just to make it closely match as possible. Now I want to extrude that in to tell Cinema 4D that this is actually part of the structure of this object. To do that, I'm going to go up to the mesh options here. This is where a lot of the modeling tools are. You can explore this in your own time. There's a lot of stuff here. It's very powerful. What I need right now is extrude. I'm going to click "Extrude". In here, there's a few different options. The main one you need to look at is offset. That's how much it's going to change the extrusion of your selected faces. If I click "Apply now", that's done exactly what I want to do. You might have done something like this, might have come out positive. Don't worry. After you click "Apply", you can still make updates, but as soon as you click "Away", then that extrusion is permanent. If you want to change your extrusion, make sure you do it before you click away and you're using these numbers in the panel, that's the safest way. If yours is sticking out like this, which probably is, it might even be sticking out a really long way, make sure we go down. You can interact with these numbers by adjusting these arrows going up and down. If you press "Shift", it will go faster. I want something like that. It's just where the nut goes, and it's just to tell Cinema 4D, look, this is part of the object. This will become much clearer later when we actually add sketch and tune, which does the lines, which does the art lines around the object. I'm just clicked back to object mode, this is now objects selection. We're no longer selecting faces or the inner parts of the object, we're going to go back to just selecting the object. Great. That's your first object model. We've modeled a skateboard wheel, and we're half the way there because there's only two objects in this scene, it's the board and the wheels. The wheel we can just duplicate now, so I'll show you how to do that. Rather than just copying and pasting it, I'm going to show you how to make a clone of it, or an instance. That way, if we decide to change this wheel, it will automatically update the other wheels. It's a really handy thing, and I think it would be more useful to show you than just simply copying and pasting. If you go to the top of the screen and you hold down the button on this green, circly cube and select "Symmetry", these are helper objects. They have a whole bunch of different functions. Have a look at that in your own time, but the one we're going to use is called Symmetry. It's really good for modeling all different things. It's a very powerful tool actually. For instance, if you were going to model a human head, you might want to put it in a symmetry object. Then you only have to model half the head and the other half will be mirrored instant links. Let's just start using it and you'll see what I mean. Symmetry objects has popped up. You can't actually see anything at the moment. The way we use this is you drop whatever object you want to be mirrored into the symmetry object. If you grab our cylinder in the object view and just literally drop it on top of the symmetry, you drag and drop, and now you can see that the cylinder has become what is called a child of the symmetry object. We'll be talking more about parenting and parents and children relationship in the rigging video, which is going to come next. As you can see, it's made a mirror image of wheel, so now we have two wheels. If we go back into our reference view, you can see that it's slightly off because the illustration is not a 100 percent symmetrical. The way we fix this is we just need to move the actual symmetry object. You can see it's right in the middle of the scene at the moment, we need to bring the center of the symmetry object in line with the middle of these two wheels, and we can do that by eye. If I just adjust the exposition, it will make it so that it's in the middle, and you can see that these two wheels are now equally misaligned. Then if we go and click on our cylinder object up in the object view and drag it back, this will move it closer to the middle of the symmetry object. Just to show you what's happening more clearly when you drag it closer to the symmetry object, it will do the exact opposite of what you are doing, the lines. Now we have two aligned wheels. Great stuff. Going back to our perspective view, I just want to make sure we're looking good from this angle. If you're looking down the skateboard, currently we have a wheel right in the middle of the scene. I don't know if you guys know what skateboards look like, but basically, they have four wheels and two wheels are on one side and two wheels on the other side. We need to move these wheel so that they're off-center, so if we drag these and move them roughly where we want our wheels to be. Now we need to make a mirror image of these. The way we're going to do this is we're going to make another symmetry object. We go back up to our green, circly square, click on symmetry again, and now we've got a second symmetry object. This time we don't need to move it. If we drag the symmetry object that we made before and drag that into our new symmetry object, but there's an issue. Because the symmetry object mirrors things across one axis, we need to tell it which axis to use as the mirror. It's using z, y, the mirror plane. There we go, it's the first one. You need to set your mirror plane to x, y, then now we have a perfectly symmetrical set of skateboard wheels. So I'm actually thinking that these skateboard wheels are a little bit too far and I want to change them. If we'd copied and paste one wheel four times or three times to make three copies of whatever, you'd have to then individually changed them all to match, or you'd have to delete them all and change the wheel and then copy and paste them again. But the power of doing it this way is I can just select one cylinder object. I'm going to go to our scale tool and I'm going to scale it just on the green axis here, and I'm just going to make it a tiny bit smaller, maybe something like that. You can see it's automatically update to the other wheels. Great. Now we've got all our wheels done, let's make the actual skateboard. To do that, I'm going show you a slightly different way of modeling. This was what is commonly referred to as box modeling or it's a version of box modeling. It refers to the fact that you quite often start with just a cube and you build up using lots of extrudes. That's why it's called box modeling. I think we'll just pause it there for a moment, there's a lot to cover in the modeling and I was hoping to do it all in one video, but I don't think we're going to make it. We're already at sort of 16 minutes. Let that digest and I'll see you in the next video for the second half where we'll be modeling the top of the skateboard.
7. Modelling Your Board - Part 2: Okay. I hope you're all feeling nice and refreshed. Had a cup of tea or something like that. In the last video, we went through modeling the wheels of the skateboard, so let's finish off by modeling the top of the skateboard and I'll show you how to do that now. Let's do it. I'm now going to show you how to make a simple object using splines. As I mentioned in a previous video, splines are like paths. If you've ever used Illustrator, they're like a vector path but in 3D. If I go to the Pen tool options up here, click on Rectangle. Now you can see I've got a rectangular line. If I rendered this, nothing would appear. As with most objects that you create in Cinema 4D, it comes out as a parametric objects. This is actually a parametric spline, which means I can change it down in the attributes using width and height scales here. I know this is probably not the best time, we should have done this at the start, but I'm now actually going to change the units because as you can see here, I'm working in millimeters, and the default in Cinema 4D I think is centimeters. It might differ depending on your region. But I'm going to switch it back to centimeters because working in millimeters, the units are just too high. Again, Edit, Preferences. This window pops up and I'm going to go two units down here, and Unit Display, I'm going to switch from millimeters to centimeters. If this is going to be our skateboard surface, it's currently facing the wrong way. Skateboards aren't sideways like this. It's not a bus. It's a skateboard, so we need to change the plane. It's similar to changing the plane on the symmetry. I don't want it to be x, y, I want it to be x, z. I'm going to change the width down to be roughly what I think the width of the skateboard will be, probably around the same width as the wheels, and the length needs to be a little bit longer. We're not going to be making this an editable spine. It can stay as a parametric object. That's the power of the parametric object. Even after we've finished modeling, we'll still be able to edit the length and width and various other object properties. Skateboards are rounded at each end, so I'm going to switch on rounding in the rectangle attributes. Make sure you've got your rectangle selected and you click on Rounding checkbox. Just going to go over this again. If you hold Shift and drag these arrows up and down, it will happen really quickly, and if you hold down Alt, it will happen very slowly. So we'll just do it by point values. I think I'm happy with that rounding. Your values may differ, so don't follow these. Just do it by eye and everything will be fine. You know what, I didn't actually check the reference. Let's check the reference. I know that we need to be somewhere left. We'll get this more accurate in a sec, but just to make sure it's more or less in the middle. Okay, great. That's roughly what the skateboard board is going to look like. The next thing we need to do is actually make this a surface. To do that, we're going to go up to this button here, which is as a hollow cube. I'm going to hold that down and I'm going to make an extrude. This is going to do the same thing as we did with the inside of our wheels. But this extrude uses splines. It's the same type of thing as the symmetry objects. To use them, you need to drop something inside them. We're going to drop rectangle inside the extrude. You might have something very similar to this. This is an issue going on here. It's extruding in the wrong direction. If you click on the ''Extrude Object'', you can see that the movement on the inside object properties is moving 20 centimeters in z. This is x, y, z. Make sure z is 0. We don't want any movement in that direction. Now, with all 3,0 we have a surface but it's completely flat, and skateboards have a little bit thickness to them, especially in our reference. Let's go to movement and we want it to move in the y direction. I'm holding down Alt to move it very slowly, and I'm going to drag up on the arrows and I'm going to make it roughly the height of my skateboard reference. I have my extrude selected. We can just move this down. What I'm aiming for, just to be clear, is the middle of the black line. When we add sketch in tune, it's going to add a black line around, and the middle of the line will be the edge of the object if that makes sense. That's looking pretty good. What I want to do is actually make this a bit rounded. Click on the extrude object in your object view. Go to the Caps tab, and here we have a bunch of options for what happens to the top and bottom and increase the size of the bevel. As you can see, as I'm increasing the value of this, it's adding a rounded edge onto the skateboard. It's also adding height to it, and to accommodate for the extra height that the bevel has added to the extrude, I'm going to go back in here and just reduce the height of it. We need to go back into our reference and make sure that we're now matching it. We're going to have to move this up to accommodate for that. The next thing we need to do is add the curves to the skateboard. These bits where you, oh, I don't know what you call them. I don't really know skateboard anatomy. To do that, we're going to use just some bends. We're going to use two bends just to bend the edges up. To get the bends to work, this is a really important step because you need to think about 3D in terms of subdivisions. Essentially, what will happen when we add the bends in is it will only be able to bend the points and these surfaces because we can see the points in this view, making sure you're in Display, Gouraud Shading Lines. You can see that there's actually no lines on the caps, so on these endpoints, there's nothing there. If we added a bend in at the moment, it would bend these edges nicely because they've got subdivisions. But there's currently no subdivisions on this top, so it will be like trying to bend a ruler. It will just be a straight line. To do that, we click on our Extrude. We go to Caps, and at the bottom here we've got Cap Types, and at the moment it's N gun like this, so you need to switch cap types to, let's go with quadrangles on a regular grid. So Cap Type, Regular Grid, and now you can see we're getting some subdivisions here. If you press this tiny little invisible triangle next to Cap Types, you need to unroll that and we'll change the size just so that it's a bit smaller to something that we know is going to work. Okay, great. We have another issue. There's no subdivisions along the side here, and to do that, you need to go into your rectangle and change where it says intermediate points, at the moment it's adaptive. So we need to change that to, let's go with subdivided. Now we've got all nice subdivisions all the way along our spline. I know this seems like a lot and you may feel like, oh my God, how am I going to remember all this stuff? But what will happen is you'll be trying to model something and you'll come up against these problems, and you might have to either refer back to this or just keep pressing the buttons until you remember something or you realize what's going wrong, and I promised these things will fall into place because as soon as you start thinking about 3D in terms of all these points and you've done things before in the past and you know there's a way to solve them. These things will pop back into your head and you'll be able to figure it out. To add our bend, we go up here and actually the bend is the first object in this purple icon view, and these things are called modifiers. We hold that down, there's a whole bunch of other modifiers in here that we don't need to worry about, just click on Bend for now. It's quite big, if you go into the bend properties and change this strength, that's the strength of the bends, you can see it bending over there. If you click Keep y-axis length, it will bend in a slightly different way, it keeps its y-axis length. I prefer like that just because it makes a little bit more sense when you're bending. We need to make this bend, just bend the edge of the skateboard. Let's scale it down, if you go to the scale tool or press T, you can scale it down to be a bit smaller. Let's make it down to something like the width of the skateboard and click on the bend again to bring up the bend properties, and I'm going to change the size of it. There we go, now that looks like it's going to actually bend our skateboard. To apply the bend, we need to do something a bit extra, you can either drop a bend and make it become a child of an object, but because we haven't extrude here, is a bit confusing to drop it inside the extrude. The way I like to do is just to group it together using a null. Nulls are really important, we'll be covering them a bit more in rigging, but basically it's a way of grouping your objects together in a certain way. If you click on the cube here, where all the other primitives are, click on null, and now we have a null appear in our view. Nulls are essentially a nothing object, is just position rotation and scale information, there's no actual object attached to it. Click on your bend and hold down Control or Command on Mac, and click the extrude, and then drag both of them into the null. We now have our bend and extrude grouped together inside that null. Now we can adjust the bend position to where it will actually bend just the end. At the moment you can see it's bending the whole skateboard, we need to press R or press rotate, and I'm going to rotate this holding shift so that it becomes exactly 90 degrees. Again, if you've messed up holding shift, you can click on the bend and go to coordinates and make sure it's 90 degrees on the B access for bank rotation. Rotation is not XYZ, its HPB which is for heading pitch and bank, which is like airplane terminology for some reason. Then I'm going to move it to the end of the skateboard, I'm going to press E or press my Transform tool here. Position can be moved just by these two axis, I'm going to move it over to the end here. There we go, it's looking better. Obviously it's bending the wrong way, let's go into the bend object properties and the attributes and strength needs to be minus. Now we need to make sure it's matching our reference, then we can position the bend a bit better. That's looking all right, I would say you can adjust the size of your bend a bit too big obviously you can make the bend really huge, but we just want it to be fairly small. Looking good. You know what? Our skateboard maybe it's a bit long because you can see it going up. If you click on rectangle you can change the width, I think yours might be high, and I'm just going to reduce it down just by a tiny bit. Now we need another bend for the front of the skateboard. An easy way of copying in cinema 4D is just to hold down control if you're on a PC or command if you're on a Mac, and you click on the objects you want to copy and you hold down Control or Command, and then you can just drag and it will make another one. As you can see, doing that has done something a bit confusing, it's doing a double bend. I know the temptation right now would be to rotate the whole skateboard down, back down, but that's not a good way of doing it. We actually just want to rotate the bend around. It's a little bit more tricky to get that around your heads, like why wouldn't I just rotate the skateboard down? It's because it's more messy. I don't want to be completely changing the position of something with a bend, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the new bend that we made. I'm going to press R or go to rotation, and I am going to rotate around holding Shift. It still looks weird, but it will look better. You can rotate 180 degrees and now it's fine. Before you start changing things around to counteract something weird that's happened, try and figure out why that's happening, and if you can make it less weird, then you're much better off. There we go, now we can just position the other bend to make it match our reference. There we go. Congratulations, you've made the skateboard, you've finished modeling, and you have a beautiful, perfectly formed skateboard to match the illustration. I just want to do one little bit of housekeeping. It's a little bit distracting having these bends there because we can't see our skateboard,all we can see are these big purple boxes. You can hide them using these traffic lights next to the objects, this will hide anything in your scene. If you click on it once it goes green and again it will go red, the same with the bend, clicking it once and again it will go red. There's two here, I know they're tiny and fiddly, but the top one is hiding things in the viewport, and the bottom one is hiding things in the render. One final thing I want us to do is rename some of these things. If we click on the null up here where it says null, if you double-click, you'll be able to rename that object. I'm going to rename it to board. I'm also going to rename the extrude to board extrude. I'm going to rename the top symmetry here, I'm just going to add wheel symmetry here and rename the cylinder to wheel. I know this is a very simple scene, there's only a few objects here, but when you create a really complicated scene and there's millions and millions of objects all in this view, and you have no idea what anything is because you haven't labeled anything, then you'll be cursing the day that you didn't sit there and rename things as you made them. It's just really good practice to label things properly so that you know what they are when you come back to it. There you go. Give yourself a pat on the back, you just modeled 3D skateboard. Well done. Okay. It's missing a few bits and bobs, but it's just the design done. I know that was a lot to go through, lots of new tools, lots of learning how the bits and bobs work in cinema 4D and things to look out for, but I'm pretty sure that's the hardest task out of the way, so well done. Just to give a bit of a recap of what we went through, we made cylinder, which was a primitive, and we created an editable polygon object out of that cylinder. We then used the extrude tools to make the hub inside the cylinder. We then went on to make some symmetry objects to duplicate the wheel and making it so that we only have to edit one wheel if we want to change all of them, which is really handy. We then made spline object parametric spline, which was a rectangle, and we extruded that with the spline extrude object. We then adjusted that extrude objects so that it's ready for bending and rounding the edges and making sure it all looks really nice. We then looked at the bend modifier and how you can adjust that to fit the skateboard, and make sure that the bend is happening correctly to match the reference image, and then we got that working by grouping it into a null. We then went through and labeled everything correctly because that's just really good practice going forwards. If you fancy a bit of a challenge, why don't you try using the modeling skills you just learned to build the trucks of the skateboard, those are the bits that hold the wheels on, give that a go if you fancy it. In the next video we're going be looking at getting the board ready for some animation. That will include looking at some more nulls and making sure everything set up correctly so that when the skateboard animates, it flips correctly. I'll see you there.
8. Rigging the Skateboard: Great. We have our skateboard modeled and our scene set up. Next, we're going to be going through setting up the skateboard for animation, which is called rigging. Before you animate anything in 3D, you have to rig it. This one won't be that complicated just because there's only one moving part, the board. We don't have to make the wheels spin or anything like that. You won't see it it's just because of the style of the animation. So let's jump in and I'll explain what our null is really for. Okay, so here's our skateboard from last time our completed skateboard model. The first thing I'm going to do is create a new null. Go back up to this cube where the other parametric objects are, create a null and it should appear in the object view at the top here. This null is going to be called skateboard master. I'm a really terrible speller, so apologies if anything else in here is spelled wrong, that's just the way it is. Then I'm going to close these two. If you've got these open, you can click the little minus here and it will close the group. We're going to drop these into the skateboard master. So when we move this null around, everything moves with it. We could animate like that, but there'd be an issue. If you animate from this master null, the skateboard will rotate around wherever you made the null. So if you're rotating the skateboard, it will spin like this. I mean, that's pretty close. But for me, that's not really where things will rotate around. Something like a skateboard that's spinning freely in the air, will rotate around its center of mass. Although the center of mass is probably correct on this axis, it's still rotating around a point which is too low. I would say the center of mass for this whole skateboard would be somewhere between the floor, like halfway up the wheels or something like that. So this skateboard master null is just a container for everything else. Next, I'm going to make another null. To create another null, go to the top. I'm going to drag this null inside the skateboard master. So this null is going to be the one we're actually going to animate. So press on your transform tool, the move tool, or press E, and I'm going to move it up to the point, this is going to be the axis around which the skateboard will rotate. Let's rename that null, spin main. If you now rotate this null nothing happens so we need to actually put these two things inside that null. So now we have a bit of a hierarchy going on. This is the parent-child relationship I'm talking about before. So we have the skateboard master. That's the thing that moves absolutely everything and then inside that, we have spin main and then rotating spin main will rotate everything inside that. Just to give you a final example, if you clicked on the board null that we made in the last one, that we'll rotate just the board. At this point, I'm going to switch back to my finished skate board because I want to show you something. This is the first version of my animation. You can see here that when the board pops up, it rotates around, drifts over, and then kind of lands and it's a really awkward movement. I know it might actually be not that noticeable, but to me, that has a really awkward rotation and it was happening because of gimbal lock. So here's my finished animation for the skateboard. Keep your eye on the blue circle here as the board animates. You'll notice that it doesn't actually spin with the skateboard. At first, I wanted to animate everything with that one null. Basically what I've done is I've animated part of the rotation with the blue null board main, which we've just set up on our model. But I've added in another null here called P spinner, and that null does an extra rotation. In 3D, if you're animating all three axes of rotation, you can come across a problem called gimbal lock. I was hoping not to have to explain gimbal lock in this. There's plenty of 3D animators out there working professionally who have never even heard of gimbal lock. Essentially, the computer has trouble knowing what your intention is when you're rotating objects. It's still quite difficult to get your head around. But as a visual example, if you turn on gimbling rotations, you can see that when I rotate this way, everything seems to be okay. Then when I rotate this way, the blue axis and the green axis start to align. The computer doesn't know whether you are rotating the green axis or whether you're rotating the blue axis, it just becomes an issue. It is a mathematical thing and I'm not a 100% sure why it does it. Basically, all you need to know is that it does happen. The way I've solved it here is by having the H rotation and the B rotation on the first null and then I'm spinning the P rotation on a second null. That's so the computer says, okay, this board is spinning in these two directions then I'm going to look at this third rotation rather than trying to do it all at one time. Going back to our setup, we need to add in that extra null to avoid gimbal lock so let's create another null. Drop that inside spin main. Because spin main is in a different position and when you create a new null, it makes it in the center of the world, which is at 000. When you drop the null into spin main, you can see that it's now at minus 9.534. So this is a really important concept to get your head around. Whenever an object is inside another object or parented to another object, it's in that space. So skateboard master is in the center of the world, so it's position is 000. Spin main is 9.5 centimeters higher on the y-axis than skateboard master. If I now click on the new null that I've put inside spin main, you can see that it's down at 000, but the coordinates in here are not 000, it's minus 9.5. So we can see that these numbers in here are actually in relation to whatever it's inside of or whatever its parent. So if we make that 0, now our new null is at 000 in comparison to spin main. I'm going to rename this null P spin because we're going to be spinning the P axis in that null. So again, click your board and the wheels and put that inside your P spin. Now the rig is basically finished, but let's do a quick couple of tweaks to make it a bit easier to see. All the nulls are default black dots and there are teeny tiny black dots in there. So there's quite a handy way to make them a little bit more visible. If you click on "Skateboard master" and go to "Object", there's a display mode. If you click on where it currently says dot and change it to rectangle, you can see a rectangle has appeared in the viewport. We change that orientation away from camera because currently it will just face the camera. I actually want it to be a rectangle on the floor so we know the orientation because we're going to be spinning things. So you change it to XZ. I want it to be a bit bigger, so I make the radius a bit bigger. Now, we have a nice big square so I can click on that square and it will select the entire rig. I also don't want it to be black anymore so let's go to "Basic" and "Display color". Click "On" and change the color to whatever you like. I'm going to change it to blue. You can see now it's changed into a blue sky in the viewport, but it's not blue in the object manager. Click on the "Skateboard master" again, go to "Basic" under icon settings, turn down this little triangle. You can go to Icon color, at the moment it's set to none. If you set it to display color, and you can see up here in the object manager it's now turned into a little blue icon. So you can set this up however you want. I'm just going to set spin main to be different one as well because we're going to be animating that separately to board master. I want to be able to see the difference between the two. So I'm going to go again, we're going to go to spin main object display is currently a dot. I want to make that a circle and I don't want it to be facing the camera. I want it to have its own orientation. I'm going to make it bigger so I'm going to make it a circle like that. I'm going to go to display color again on the basic and turn that to nice bright fuchsia. I'm going to set the icon color as well. Now when I rotate this I can really see it nice and clearly. Because I'm going to be clicking on these things a lot, it's quite handy to be able to just click on them. Just for good measure, let's make P spin something different as well, but make the display color the same. Okay, great. That's basically it. When I was prepping for this video, I had that gimbal lock issue, so I thought it would be very good to point out to you guys that there was a problem. I thought this was going to be the simplest animation ever. It was the simplest thing I could think of with spinning an object, but actually turned out to be a little bit more tricky. Gimbal lock doesn't become that much of an issue quite [inaudible] it's not actually that often you're rotating things in three full dimensions. It's fairly common, but it's not all that common. So it's good to be aware of these things. Brilliant, so we've got a really nice clean rig now to start animating the skateboard. Let's just go over the steps we did to achieve this rig. We had a good look at nulls and how to set up colors and shapes of them so that they're easy to see. We talked a lot about the hierarchy of objects inside the object manager and why that's really important for animation. We went over the coordinate system inside cinema 4D. So when you put one object inside another object or you parent it to that object, that objects coordinates are in relation to the parent object. We went through my gimbal lock issue and why it was happening. Again, you could have animated it without adding this extra null in to solve the gimbal lock issue. But it's going to have unpredictable results when you animate in three-axis rotating, it's going to look a bit weird or potentially look very weird. So this is a safer way to get around that. If you want a bonus task at this stage, you could try rigging the wheels so that they move independently from the board. So let's say our skateboarder leans on at one side or another, you could try setting up a rig so that the wheels will stick to the ground while the board moves around. We've already got the board and we'll separate in there. It shouldn't be too much of a leap to add another null in that controls the board independently from the wheels. So give it a go if you fancy it. With that out of the way, we're ready to animate. In the next video, we're going to get this board flipping, I'll see you there.
9. Animating the Flip: Right is it, this is where the magic happens, where we take something that is once lifeless and static and breathe into it a tiny bit of character. It's always good when you're going to start animating to check out some references or even act it out yourself. We've got a character who's about to do some skateboard flip. Let's check out some skateboard flips online and see exactly what's happening. Like with everything, there's just loaded references on YouTube. I did a quick search for a varial kickflip. I just chose this one. I knew I wanted to do a kick flip, but kick flip doesn't actually have a full rotation in it, so I thought I'd go for a varial kickflip, which is a bit more complicated. Luckily, skating is really popular so there's just tons of references. I found this one which is a varial kickflip at 1,000 frames per second. The video is by Adam Shomsky, clearly a very talented skateboarder. Go and check him out. He very kindly let me use this clip for the class. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't let you skip frame by frame through videos, but I'm sure you can figure out a way of doing that yourself. Great, so we know what we're going to do. We've set up our nulls correctly. Let's see if our rig is going to work. First thing we're going to do is try and find our frame range because we need to know how long the skateboard is going to be animating in the air for. Let's go to our reference image. Don't worry, this might be quite slow for you. It's very slow for me because I'm doing screen recording at the same time. Also I'm using an old version of the animation, but the body movements are the same it's just that the guy's hair is slightly different. For me, frame 144 is the first frame of the flip. This is going to be the frame that we're going to switch over to 3D. We can add a bit of padding so if it doesn't quite work out like that, we can fix it. I'm going to click on my SpinMain, null. SpinMain is going to be doing everything. We are going to be animating the position and the main part of the rotation with this null. Then P spin is just going to be rotating the P axis of the rotation to avoid the gimbal lock issue. If you look down to the right-hand side of the screen, you can see a few buttons. You've got a red circle with a key and then a red circle with a couple of hours. Next to that, we've got these toggles. These buttons toggle what the keyframe button will be recording when you press the keyframe button, the red one with the key, that sets the keyframe. If you've got position and rotation toggled on, it will only set keyframes for the position and orientation. We're on frame 144, which is the first frame of the skateboard flip. I'm going to hit keyframe. You can see it's made a little pale blue rectangle on frame 144. You can also see that it's made all the properties on the coordinate system go red. This means that there's a keyframe on that frame. Now we're going to find the end of the animation. The guy jumps to the air and he lands on frame 192. I'm going to set another keyframe on frame 192. I'm going to make sure that my P SpinMain is selected and set a keyframe. These two key frames will stay the same. Actually, let's go back. Frame 144 is the first frame of the flip. But actually we should set another keyframe on frame 142 because this will be the last frame where the skateboard is in this position. Because the next frame, this is going to be the frame where he pushes down and kicks onto the ground. On frame 192, that'll be the frame where he lands back into this position. Great. Now that we've set that up, we can actually get a bit creative. We know that the skateboard is going to start flipping at that point and it's going to end flipping at the last point. Everything in between is up for grabs. I've chosen to do a varial kickflip. You can choose something else, you can do something crazy. You can do something unrealistic or whatever. It's totally up to you. I'm not going to explain exactly my whole thought process on how I'm making the skateboard flip, because animation is really a creative task. I'm just going to take you through technically how to do it. Hopefully we'll get somewhere similar by the end of it. You don't have to have this perfect flipping skateboard. The next thing we need to do is actually see our curves a bit better because we can see the keyframes here but all this does is tell us that there's a keyframe here. It doesn't tell us the value of the keyframe. It doesn't tell us anything about the actual animation. What we should do is switch our view to the animate view, which I showed you back in the interface video, press the dropdown, and choose "Animate". That's brought up our timeline. You can see that SpinMain is there. If you drop it down on the left, you can see position and rotation keyframes have been set. In the top left of the timeline view, the left one is the dope sheet view. This view is probably comparable to the view in After Effects, as it shows you a layered view. If you click on the F zigzaggy one next to it, this is the F curves view. This is going to be the view where you can actually edit your curves and fine tune your animation. The last thing I'm going to do before we turn our reference off, we're going to need to work without the reference on because it's slowing us down. The last thing we need the reference for is the height that the skateboard will go. If we go to somewhere in the middle, that's going to be where the peak, the highest point of the skateboard will be. I'm just going to turn on the button next to the keyframe button, it's auto key. What this does is sets the keyframe every time you move something that's already animating. If I move this skateboard up, it automatically set a new key frame. It's just if you had it on all the time like you do in After Effects, you're constantly moving objects around in similar 4D, you'll be setting unintended keyframes all over the place. Be careful with that. I should just say here as well that on my old reference, I don't have the object that he's jumping over. On yours you'll have a little triangle or something. Just make sure the skateboard is going to go high enough to clear it. I'm actually going to turn it off again, just in case because I don't want it to be making a mess. I would recommend you moving it up like that and then switching Auto key off again. Now I'm actually going to go and turn off the reference because it's slowing everything down and go to Options in the viewport and configure. Then if you go to the Back tab, and then if you click "Show Picture", if you switch that off, now we should be able to smoothly view our animation. If we quickly preview it now, if we press Play, it looks really robotic. This is because these are the auto curves. I got to tell you, it doesn't look good. Really it's not a good animation. Let's get the overall movement in first and then we can go in and refine the actual animation. I'm just going to talk through what I'm doing. Feel free to follow along. This is going to be a bit more of a figure it out yourself episode. But I'm going to try and explain everything that I'm doing to get this skateboard finished. If I went through every single little detail, it's going to take forever. Obviously, what I'm working to is this preview range. You can drag this backward and forwards too, so that you're not having to preview the entire timeline. The next thing I'm going to do is go to one frame, to the frame 144 where we set our original keyframe. That's going to be the first frame of the flip that I was talking about. I'm just going to turn auto key on again for this. I'm going to tip the skateboard backwards. If you're pushing down on your back foot, you'll be pushing the front of the skateboard up and the skateboard will pivot around the back wheel. We could have made a null in the middle of the back wheel and that would have made a perfect pivot going backwards. But because it's just going to happen on one frame, we don't really need to worry about it. I'm not being super precise with this. Also, you can see how it goes from 142 and on 143, it will dip down. In a previous video, I was talking about ones and twos. Because this is going to be on twos, we only have to worry about the even frame numbers. 143, you're actually not going to see this frame in the final animation. It will go straight to 144 because we're going to be dropping animation down onto twos. If you go into the F-Curve view, you can see the actual movement of these, one tip for selecting your key frame looks like a straight line. That's because we have really zoomed out. If your view looks different to mine, you can go to Edit, Timeline Preferences. I have Show Vector Track checked. I think the default is for that not to be there. I quite like that because it means you can just click on position and it will select all of them for you. I've got that checked on. If you're having trouble seeing what I'm seeing, then just make sure that Show Vector Track is turned on here. If you click on a set of key frames, you can only focus on position at the moment. If you select none by just drag selecting somewhere random in the viewport where there's no key frames, and then you press "control A" or "command A", select all in most programs and then you press "S", it will send all those key frames to your view. Then, you can use your navigation tools one, two, and three. You can navigate around this view just as you do in the viewport. To fix this dipping down, I'm not going to make it so that it does a smooth movement because we're not going to see that frame. But because it is a little bit distracting, I'm going to make this key frame a stepped key frame. Up here, you've got a lot of key frame option. At the moment it has auto key or auto spline. That creates these little curves everywhere. It's busier handles just like in Illustrator. I'm going select the first ones, and I'm going to click this one here. I'm going to click that. I need to do that on rotation as well. I need to click position and rotation, and then do control A and S. That's centered everything. I'm going to select my front key frames, the first frame, and I'm going to press the zigzag so that no animation happens on 43. A stepped key frame, it will keep the value of whatever key frame that is until it reaches a new key frame. Let's get the spin going. I'm not going to go to the end because that's a end key frame and we want it to be like that. I'm going to go two frames before it to frame 190. I'm going to press "R" for the rotation tool. Let's have a think about this. I want the skateboard to rotate 180 degrees around this axis. My auto key turned on. I'm going to start rotating. I'm going to hold shift so it snaps, There we go. It set a key frame for that. Now when we scrab backwards, we can see that it's done, flicks up, and then it does this 180 degree rotation, and then goes back down. Another thing I'm going to do is I'm going to raise this up so the board doesn't land on the ground itself, it's still in the air when its feet push it down. You can see that it spins backwards really quickly. I'm just going to do another stepped frame here because we don't have to worry about frame at 191. On frame 190, I've made these frames stepped key frames by selecting them all. I've made sure I've got position and rotation selected. Now, I'm going to click on my P spin and do that other extra rotation that we need to do on here. To set a key frame in a different way, I'm going to make sure I've got auto key turned off. I'm going to go to the frame where I want the P spin to start spinning, which is frame 144. I'm going to go to the Coordinates tab in the Attributes panel, find where the P rotation coordinate is. I'm going to press the circle next to it. When you press that, it switches the key frame on for that frame. Frame 144 is the start of the spin. Yeah, 190, that's when we want it to have completed the spin. I'm going to drag this down, which way do I want it to spin? Maybe this way. Minus 360. You can type it in. You need to press it again to set another key frame. If we don't say a key frame and we move the play head, it will just pop back. This is looking pretty good. Let's just press play and see how it's looking. It looks good. I would say that's good to go for most people. We don't have to do anything particularly crazy. But it does look a bit sluggish and unnatural, so I'm just going to make a few tweaks to make it look a bit better. To do that, we can actually start changing the curves. I'm going to select all my position ones, press "S". This arch should be a bit steeper on the size. We don't actually need a key frame in the middle of these [inaudible] ones, so I'm just going to remove this. You can follow along with this bear or you can just watch. I'd really like it if you guys did this yourself and got to grips and really experiment with this stuff. This part of the process in particular, you're going to have to fiddle around with it to get it to look quite,. We've finished it technically, so you could stop animating right now, but it doesn't look great. I'm just going to carry on and try and make it look a bit nicer. I'm going to set these. If you press "shift" and "control", you can pull out these handles, and they'll lock in position. If you just drag on them, then they'll do something weird like that. But holding shift and control locks it into a straight line. You can always reset it by pressing this button here, which is easy ease. There we go. It's looking good. The rotation is looking a bit sluggish to me. I think things rotate. Once things start rotating, they go in more or less a straight line. We can select all these key frames and press "Linear". Just select these left ones. These ones are set to stepped. I select these left ones and press "Linear". The rotation on P spin, we've set a key frame on P spin, that's now appeared in the timeline. I think this should be linear as well. Let's see how it looks linear. I preview that. Great, that's looking pretty good. Finally, I'm going to do a little bit more on the B rotation on my SpinMain null, just giving it a bit more of a dramatic twist. I'm doing this quite quickly. I'm going to show you my finished animation in a sec. That's looking good. I'm just going to compare it back to the reference video. I want to check the landing because I think there's one thing we could do to make the learning a bit nicer. Have we stepped through this frame by frame? Yes. This is the thing. This is where the feet make contact with the skateboards. Then, on frame 190 now, I'm going to move the skateboard to match his feet position. I'm going to rotate it back like this and he's coming down really hard on it. Make this a stepped key frame again. There we go. Pretty good. I'm just going to quickly show you my finished one from the actual animation. If you look at my curves here, what I've done is I've actually spaced it out a bit more or so. You can see it does a spin and the spin happens really quickly at the start. You can see the curves go up really quickly and then they go into this linear movement. Then, at the end, they speed up again. That gives it a really nice slow motion feels and look. Give it a go if you fancy, but you don't have to do that. A couple of extra things I wanted to point out, the curves view, if you select a key frame, you can actually see the attributes for that particular key frame. In the case of a P spin, you might want to check that you're giving it exactly a 360 rotation. You can drag select the key frame there. Then, you can change the key value here, and you can give it a really precise value. You can do minus 360 and then it will be perfect. There you go with a bit of patience and hopefully a bit of exploration on your part, you should have a skateboard that's spinning, something similar to this. Maybe even closer to my one with the actual slowdown and nice movement to it. If not, don't worry too much. I know it's pretty complicated. That will come with a bit more practice. But for now, let's move on. Well, that's basically all the hard part over. Give yourself a massive clap. You've just completed your first 3D animation. If you fancy a bonus task this time, then you could try making the wheel spin, or you could try a different flip, a different trick or maybe something completely crazy and made up. Just go for it. Just to quickly recap what we went through for animation, it's a very simple task on the outside, set some key frames and move it around, but there are a lot of buttons to let you do that. We went through setting key frames, the different ways you can do that with set key frame, auto key frame, or just pressing on the animation buttons inside the coordinate system. We had a good look at the main timeline panel. We switched our load out to the animate preview. We also had a look at the dope sheet compared to the F-Curves view again. We also talked about the difference between ones and twos, which is really important if you're going from drawn animation, 2D animation to 3D animation. We also looked at the different types of key frames that you can set such as stepped frames, and curved, and linear. Those are the main three that you can have. In fact, they're the only three. I don't know why I'm saying the main three. They're the only three. I really encourage you to explore these tools yourself. Try and match my original skateboard I think is a really good tasks to do because if you can get those key frames to do pretty much that, then you can do pretty much any animation in Cinema 4D. But don't worry too much. As long as you've got a skateboard spinning at this stage, I think that's what we need to be concentrating on. In your own time, go and refine that as much as you want. That's what happens a lot in animation. You'll do a first pass of animation and it might look a little bit ropy and you've done it quite quickly. Then, you do all the renders, put it all together, have a look at what it's looking like when it's all put together. It will probably look pretty rubbish, so you need to go back and do it again and make it look better. Next bit is the easy bit. It's just a matter of making it look nice, taking your lovely bit of animation and combining it with the 2D animation and making it look as good as possible. In the next video, we'll talk about how we can go about doing that.
10. Toon Rendering: Here we go. The hard part is over. Now it's all about making it look great. In this video, we're going to be looking at how to render the skateboard so that it looks like the 2D animation that we've already got. At this point, if you're doing cell or hand-drawn animation, you could just take the render of the skateboard, put it directly into your 2D program, and trace over it. That would work perfectly fine. But seeing I animated my character in After Effects, everything in there is all vectors, so the lines are super clean. Doing that by hand would be quite tricky and time consuming, and there's an automatic way of doing it in Cinema 4D. I'm going to show you how to do that using an effect that's built in Cinema 4D called Sketch and Toon. So let's do it. You should be seeing something very similar to what I'm seeing now, hopefully, if everything has being going smoothly up until this point. You should have a skateboard that's doing a flip and it's completely gray. To do that, we're going to do two things. We're going to look at the standard material because we're going to add colors using the standard material, and we're going to look at Sketch and Toon, which is going to give us our line effect. The first thing I'm going to do is come down to the bottom left of the screen. Let me remove this. Click on "Create", go up to Materials, and go to New Standard Material. You should have a gray material called Mat. So if you click on "Mat", and have a look over our attributes panel, it should automatically come up with the color tab. I'm going to click away from that. So we're going to go to Basic and we're going to turn off color and turn off reflectance. All these checkboxes are different effects that you can add to the material. They're kind of different layers. For example, color is pretty self-explanatory. If when an object has any kind of color, whether that's a solid color or whether you've got an external texture, such as an image, then that would go in the Color channel. These other channels do a variety of other things. Reflectance is a way to add reflection to a material. Anything that's shiny or reflective, and so on. So there's a whole bunch of different ones here. Looking at our reference, if we go to our reference view. We can see here that the colors we want are just solid. There's no shading on them. To make a solid color, I'm going to go to our material again, and I'm going to actually click on "Luminance". The reason I'm using luminance rather than color is because if I click on "Color", it will give us a shaded color. This is the 3D lit object, and we actually don't want that we want to a really just solid color, and you can achieve that by using the luminance channel. So you click "Luminance", and you can see at the top here the luminance tab has appeared. If we go back to my reference image, you can actually use this color picker and we can just directly sample the color of the wheels. Now we need to do is apply that yellow material to the wheels. To do that, you just drag and drop. So I'm going to drag Mat and drop him on wheels symmetry. We've also created a material tag next to the objects. We don't need to do anything with the material tag. So now we need to do is make the same thing again, but for the board. To do that, I'm just going to duplicate that Mat that we've already made by holding Control or Command on Mat, and just drag hold Command or Control, and drop. Once again, I'm going to go back to the reference. I'm going to zoom right in so that I can see the board nice and clearly, I'm going to click on the. "Color Dropper" and select the blue. I drag that onto our board now. There we go. We've made two materials. Our board is now looking a lot more like the board from the illustration. Now we need to make the Sketch and Toon material to make the line around the skateboard. To do that, I'm going to first go to create, again, go to materials and click "New Sketch Material". Come up as a separate material here, it does work in a slightly different way to these other materials. So I'll take you through that now. Now I'm going to drop my sketch material straight onto these objects and we can start working with it. Drop it onto the board because that's where we're going to need some lines. We're also going to need lines on the wheels so let's drop it onto wheels as well. The lines are going to be the same so we can use the same material on both objects. You can see instead of making a material tag, it's made a sketch style tag, which looks like this transparent orange cube. This tag basically tells Sketch and Toon how to apply your sketch material options to whatever object you're applying them to. In the sketch material you have how the sketch material actually looks. In the sketch style tag, you can say how that sketch style is being applied to those objects. I'm going to bring up a new option here is called Interactive render region. To bring that up, you can go to render at the top and press "Interactive render region", which is somewhere in the middle here, IRR. You can also press "Alt R" and that will toggle it on and off that those are very tiny and invisible little triangle on the far right of it. This changes the quality of the render. So you should be able to see a black screen, and now our skateboard has actually got some lines around it. If your render doesn't look like this, you might have to fiddle around with the options until it does. One of the areas you can have a look at is in the render setting. If you go up to the top and look at the right render button with the cock on it, press that. Your render settings will come up and will have this Sketch and Toon option down here. This appears when you've made a sketch material in your scene. If you go through the options here, there's some more global options, I believe these are for Sketch and Toon. I would go through and make sure all of these things are off. Make sure that your settings look like my settings. I have a feeling that maybe older versions of Sketch and Toon would automatically turn some of these on. But we want most of them to be off. So make sure your lines are all switched off. Render looks like this. These things checked off. No, we're not using multi-pass. Shading should be off, so background should be off, objects should be off and edit to display is all off. That's just for the preview anyway. Hopefully, you've got something that looks like this. There's a lot of options here for sketch material. I'm going to try and keep it simple, but just to go through a few things if you click on the "Sketch Style" tag. I've got my one for the wheels selected. So if we keep an eye on the wheels and unchecking border creases and folds. You can see all these options here under the line's tag will apply lines to different parts of the 3D model. They're named in a bit of an arbitrary way, but they kind of roughly describe what kind of thing you're seeing are. Maybe let's not work with a black background for the moment because we can't actually see the edge of the line. I'm going to go back to the Render Settings, go back to Sketch and Toon. I'm going to go to shading and turn background to color. I'm going to leave it on the default, which is probably white. That's much better. So now we can actually see what we're doing. I just want to mention one thing about the interactive render region. Sketch and Toon, I think works resolution dependent. So the line thickness is related to the resolution that you're rendering out. Even though these lines look quite thin. If you render a lower resolution, I think the lines get thicker. As I lower this, the lines start looking a bit thicker and thicker. I wouldn't use the interactive render region as a guide for how thick your lines are going to be. I would always do a test render. Just rendering a still using your final render resolution. For you go ahead and do your final render. I think you can adjust both of these at the same time if you hold down shift and select the tag on the board and the tag on the wheels. You want as few of these lines on as possible so that they're not just overlapping loads and loads of lines. I think we can do with maybe border increases. Maybe we should have not border but outline. See this is why I am saying, the little bit arbitrary named border, you would assume is the outline. But outline is border, they're a bit randomly named. There we go. I think outline increases as what we want. Just to give you a quick idea, we don't need this because we've made flat materials. But if you go to shading, that will give you stepped shading for any object that you've got materials on. So if we did have shading on our material objects by using the color tag and setting up lines, you can use the sketch style to reduce those colors down into steps. So they look like a hard edge shadow that you might get in cell shaded cartoon animations. Great. We're getting there. I'm just going to go over to this sketch material again. So we haven't really changed anything in the material itself yet because the default is just a black line and that's what we need. But we do probably need to change the thickness. You can do that in the sketch material and you go over to the thickness tab currently set to two. Just for example, if I set it to 10, you can see it makes the lines a lot thicker. Set it back to two. To set the lines correctly, we obviously need to see the skateboard in relation to the reference. To do that, first I'm going to go back up to the Render Settings and turn the background off. Go to the shading tab and set, turn background to off. I'm also going to turn off the interactive render region for the moment, so I'm going to press "Alt A". To compare it to the reference, we're also going to have to set up the render because we need the skateboard in the correct position. We haven't told turn them to 40 where we want the skateboard when we hit render. At the moment it will just render this view. So whatever view that you're using to interact with, if you hit render, it will just render that view. The first thing we're going to do is click on the "Camera" icon up here. It defaults to making a camera in exactly the same position as the view that you're currently looking at, but it doesn't put you inside that camera. So we're actually not looking through the camera. It's just put a camera in the same position. So if I carry on rotating, you can see that now the camera is there. That camera view is still not correct. The way I normally work is I have this top left one I have as the view through the camera. Top-right panel I change to a second perspective view. You can do that by going to cameras perspective. So it's currently on top. I'm going to change it to perspective. Now we've got two perspective views, and what I want the left panel to be is a view through the camera. So I'm going to switch to camera. On the left panel, I'm going to go to Use Camera and click "Camera". You can change the name of the camera just so that it's a bit clearer. Dot this one. I'm going to Cameras, Use Camera, camera this one. Great. We need to move this camera into the position so that we're looking through the same shot as this. I do realize that you can render through the front view. If you go to View and say use as render view, then Cinema 4D, will use this view to render. But I would say it's a little bit fiddly to set this up because it will render based on your positioning here, won't render based on a camera here. I've completely ruined my shot, and then you have to go through and you got to set this up again, line this up with the viewport. It's just not a good way of doing render basically. But the better way of doing it is to have a camera. First thing you're going to do is you're going to click on the camera and we're going to move the left viewport to match the view first of all. We're going get it like this. We know that that's roughly going to be our view, something like that, but we need it to be completely flat. We don't want any perspective view. To do that, I'm going to click on the "Camera." I'm going to go to Object tab in the camera attributes, and I'm going to do projection and change that to parallel. Here we go. We're getting there. You can still rotate around and I want it to be 100 percent locked off. You can do that in the Coordinates tab. You see here how we've still got a bit of rotation on the camera. If you set that to zero and zero. Now, we know that the camera is 100 percent perfectly looking in a straight line. That's pretty much it. Then all we have to do is pan, so make sure you're panning and not rotating so it's going to be roughly there. Now, we want to bring in the background. I'm going make a new object. Using the reference in the background on this panel is really handy, but it's not really useful doing a final render. To get the background in perspective view, we need to make another object which I use. There's probably a few ways of doing this, I'm not 100 percent sure. But the way I do it is to go to Create at the top left here, environment and click on Background. This made an object that we can't see. But it's created a background object in the Object panel. Now, I'm going to make another material. A really quick way of making just a standard material. Instead of going to create materials, you can just double-click in the Materials panel and I'm going to leave it exactly how it is and then the background object will just see the Color channel, color, texture, put three dots. I'm going to navigate to where my skater video reference is. Now, we've got the skater inside a material, and I'm going to drag that material onto my background object. Now, you can see that the skater has appeared inside the Perspective View. If I scrub my timeline back and forth to watch the animation, you can see that the character is not moving. To make him move, you have to click on the material, go to the Editor tab and click "Animate Preview". Now, we can see the character animating. Amazing. Now, all we have to do is line up the skateboard. Use your Pan and Zoom buttons to navigate. Be careful if you've really carefully lined up your camera with the shot and it's all perfect. You can mess up your camera position by using the navigation tools in this view. We're going to move the camera, zoom in. We can fine tune this view by clicking on the Camera and then holding down Alt X, Y, and Z position in the Coordinates tab. You can change the zoom if you go to Object tab doom parameter, so you can just zoom in and out with that. We got it right. This is the most important step to get right, because this is going to be where 2D and 3D animation lineup. Now I'm going to do my test render to make sure that our line thicknesses are looking like the reference. I'm just going to scrub ahead a little bit so that we can clearly see the skateboard. I should mention again that I'm using an old reference for the skateboarder. U1 will have different hair, and I don't think you'll have the skateboard during the jump section. Great. Let's check our line thickness by going to Render settings. Let's just spend a moment to make sure all our Render settings are correct. I'm going to go to where it says output. We want output to match the render that we've done for the 2D character, which is 1,920 by 1,440 If you're following along with my skater materials. We want a frame rate of 24 frames a second. We want frame range to be set to current frame. This is just going to be the test fame that we're going to render and we don't want to save it, so we're going to uncheck save so that we can just do a render without saving anything. You can just hit your main render button, which is this render with the play arrow, this is your main render button. If you want to do a final render, you click this. If we hit "Render," let's see what happens. Great. So it's doing something. The couple of things going wrong. We've got the lines are too thin. Also there seems to be some weird white halo around the skateboards. This is the picture viewer. This is where you actually see your images rendering. I worked out what the halo is. It's because I had straight Alpha turned on. If you go to the Save options and make sure you have straight Alpha checked off, then when we hit "Render" everything should look fine. Currently the lines are too thin. Click on "Sketch material" and go to the Thickness tab. Let's try making it thickness of four. Let's hit that. That's looking better. I'm just going to scrub to a slightly different frame because I'm finding it a bit difficult to match up. I'm going to bring skateboard back down to roughly where the skateboard is. Let's just see now, hit "Render" again. Actually the line thickness is looking good, but we're having another issue. This is the thing we sketch in toon, it's a little bit fiddly sometimes depending on what you're seeing is what's seem self is. Whatever way we're applying the line at the moment, it's losing it when the skateboard goes totally sideway. To fix that, we can go into our Sketch style tags on the Object, so I click on these orange boxes and then we go to Lines tab. Make sure you've got outlined folds and creases switched on, and that's how we fix that problem. Let's check a few more frames and make sure it's looking good. Excellent. I'm going to go back into thickness, reduce that down to maybe 3.5. That's where our sweet spot is. Amazing. This is basically done. We're done with everything we need to do. Let's set up our Render. We go to output, make sure 1,920 by 1,440 is still there, 24 frames per second. Let's set our frame range. Your frame range may differ slightly from to 142. The frame where it lands is scoping along 192. Seem the 4D will render every frame in between those two values. Now, we're going to go to Save. I'm going to make sure that my format is PNG. When you're working in 3D, is really good practice to render straight to an image sequence. If you're an animator, you might be completely used to this. So just ignore me for a moment, but working in image sequences is just much more powerful. Also, image sequences have more flexibility with Alpha channels. If you don't know what an Alpha channel is, it's basically just transparency. For example, when we render our skateboard, if we want to render it without the skater in the background, and we want to combine them later, skateboard will be by itself on a transparent background. The skateboard would be visible on top and you'll see the skater through the background. If you don't have After Effects, you can at this point, go to Format. You can render an MP4. So you can click MP4 down here and you can just hit "Render," and it will render the skateboard with the skater in the background, and you can be done at that point, that's fine. So make sure you're rendering the full range, and then you can just press "Render" and your skateboard will render on top of the skater. That's not a good way of adding the skateboard to the skater. The better way of doing it is to render the skateboard separately with the transparent background and then add it together again in After Effects. But if you don't have access to After Effects and you're not using any other animation software, you're just learning Cinema 4D. At this moment, you can just hit "Render". If you're going follow me for the next video in the compositing section, which I would highly recommend if you've got a copy of After Effects and fantastic, so let's do our final render. Change format from whatever it is to PNG. Hit that straight Alpha again, click on the three buttons next to the file output and go and find a nice folder to put your rendering. One last thing we need to do before we hit that Render button is hide the background because we don't want the background to be visible in the render unless you're going to just combine it without doing any compositing. To do that, these two little dots, this bottom one which controls whether things are visible in the Render and click it twice and it should go red. Now, that background won't be visible in our final render. Here we go. Let's just go for it. Output settings are correct, let's just going for it. Hit "Render". Great. My render is now finished. Lovely. Now, we can preview the render, and it's in the whole timeline in here so you can scrub through backward and forward through your render. Amazing. In reality, you will never have render anything just once. As you can see, there was already a few issues when I was rendering this and I've already done this. This was the second time I'm doing it, just to show you guys how it works and I still had issue. After you've hit "Render," just go to Finder or File Explorer or whatever, and just check the folder and make sure that you've got your files rendered in there so you can see your image sequence. Let's just recap all the steps that we went through to make our toon rendered skateboard. We went through the material system and we made a luminance material which gives us a solid color. If we used a color material then we would have shading on it, which has not been a match 2D illustration. We then made a sketch material and we looked at all the different places you can change the sketch material options. We applied the materials to the objects and looked at the tags in there, the tag options. Then we went into the Render Settings and had a look at the sketching toon style render setting options. We then adjusted our line width to match the illustration. We brought the illustration onto a background object to do that. We looked at our Render Output settings to make sure the Render settings were correct for rendering to match the 2D illustration. We rendered a still just to make sure that everything was looking right and that the line thickness was correct. Then we checked our Alpha channel settings, Save settings, and made sure that the image sequence was the correct length. Then finally we hit the "Render" button and made sure that the final render was looking correct. It should have a black background. Then we went to check that the Alpha channel had rendered correctly as well. We know that the black was going to be transparent and the skateboard was going to be not transparent. All that's left to do now is to put all our bits together. If you rendered your skateboard straight onto the skater using Cinema 4D, then congratulations, that's fine. Well done for completing this 3D portion of this class. I hope you enjoyed it. But I do really encourage you if you have access to After Effects to follow along in the next video because we'll be looking at how to composite the skateboard properly. Let's bring our skateboard that we rented an image sequence of width transparency into After Effects, and I'll show you how to do that. I'll see you in the next video.
11. Compositing in After Effects: We made it. This is the final leg. Basically, taking your 3D render, sticking it on top of the 2D render, or what we call in the industry compositing. Compositing is basically just the layering up of different elements to create a final image. I'm going to use after effects for this, not just because I animated the character in after effects. If I'd done things in hand-drawn, I probably would be still combining things in after effects just because it's such a powerful tool. I'd recommend anyone working in any video to at least get to grips with the basics of after effects because it is such a useful thing to know. If you don't have after effects, like I was saying before, you could just do your final render in cinema 4D. Check the last video to render that if you don't want to do the compositing section, that's fine. If you just want to learn 3D, no worries. But like I was saying, it's not a great way of doing it. But at least you'll have a final animation. I would highly recommend using after effects. If you're going to follow along with me, boot up after-effects and let's jump in. When you open after effects, you should have something similar to this. I've got an extra couple of panels on the right-hand side. These are just plug-ins that I like to use. I'm not going to go through after effects in that much detail, I'm just going to show you the bits that we need to go through to combine skateboard with our skater and then to do the final render. If you go over to your project window on the left here and right-click, go to Import File, and now we need to find skateboard lines here. So click on the first frame and then down the bottom, there's a few more options here on import. You need to make sure that PNG sequence is checked on and then go to import, just click that, and you should have your board 3D whatever you named a PNG, and it will show you the frame range in the filename here. Right-click again and go to import file, just find the skateboard reference, once again, the MP4 that's in the class material. You're going to drag the skater menu than before down onto this box down here, which is create new composition. It looks like a little film frame with three colored shapes inside, so just drag and drop it onto there and after effects will automatically make a new composition named the same as your MP4 and all the settings resolution, and frame rate will be identical to the mp4. One thing we need to double-check, I think after-effects defaults to importing image sequences at 30 frames a second. The frame rate here is going to be vitally important. You need to click on the board, the skateboard PNG sequence in your project window, right click on it, go to interpret footage, then go to main and make sure this is at 24 frames a second, 24, and click "Okay". Now let's look down here at composition timeline. This is where you layer up all your stuff in after affects. We're going to drag down skateboard PNG sequence and we're going to drop it into the same composition. We need to make sure that the skateboard layer is above the skater MP4 layer. Now we should have two things layered on top of each other. If you don't have this, you need to go back and check your Render Settings or try and figure out the problem that's happened. This is quite a common thing that happens all the time. If you getting into animation, you need to get used to this, going back and checking and do some troubleshooting and figure out what the problem is. But if everything's gone to plan, you should now have your skateboard on top of your skater. But one issue is the timing is off, so the skater animation starts here at frame zero, but the skateboard is happening way too early. We need to find the frame where the skateboard disappears in the skater animation. Drag the play head forwards and just find the point where the skater does it's flip. Just move the skateboard animation to the same start point, so the start point of the skateboard animations should now be at the play head. Amazing, so we do have a slight issue here. I don't need to go back to the 3D render to fix this, but basically, I think it's a frame light. I'm not sure why it's a frame light. Maybe there's an issue because I was using the old reference. But if your frame ranges differ slightly, then go with your frame ranges. Don't just follow the numbers that I'm reading out. Actually, frame 142 is the first frame of the animation for the skateboard. That's the frame that I want to be kicking up in the air. So I'm going to move this frame back to here. This skateboard that I'm using here is the one from the final render. That's what this is also included in the class materials if you want to play around with my render. But it's possible that when I did this originally, I just used a slightly different frame for starting. Hopefully, everything is fixable in after effects at this stage for you. In after effects, you can drag the start and end points of when an actual animation is visible. So that's not changing the timings of the animation. It's just showing this is just changing when this clip is visible, I want it to appear just when the skateboard starts its flip side. I'm going to start at frame 142 and then the same again with landing. The skateboard reappears for me at frame 190. My 3D render now switches off from the frame before. Great, so I'm just going to press space bar and render a preview. That's looking really good. Anybody who has been following my lectures on ones and twos will maybe notice at this point that the skater is running on twos, so the skater is only animating on every other frame, but the skateboard is running on ones. It looks unnaturally smooth at the moment and we need to fix that. The way we do that is with something called posterize time. If you right-click on a blank portion of the composition view and go to new adjustment layer, this is a blank player to add effects to. Any effect that you add to the adjustment layer will affect all the layers below it. You're going to click on the adjustment layer and you're going to go to the effects controls, which should normally be up here, but if it's not there, go to window effects controls, and that should bring up this window. Right-click on the blank part of this window and go to posterize time. The default frame that appears for me in posterize time is 24 frames a second. That would make absolutely no difference to this because it's already on 24 frames a second. We're going to change that to 12, which is half,12 frames a second, i.e twos. Now, if I press space-bar again, the skateboard is now changing every other frame. I think we're basically there. The last thing I'm going to do is just a little bit of style to make this field a little bit more handmade. I'm just going to add another effects to the adjustment layer. So I'm going to click the adjustment layer, right-click, and I'm going to go to distort and turbulent displace. Now it's going to wiggly, wobbly. I'm going to reduce the amount to slightly just to make the lines a little bit less perfect, so it's not so vector rigid, it fills a tiny little bit more handmade. To do that, we need the turbulent displace to be changing on every frame. Feel free to skip this step. We're done, but I just wanted to add this extra thing and just to make it feel a little bit nicer and just to add that final level of polish, also to give you an idea of the things that are possible with compositing. First, we're going to click on evolution option, we need to make it randomize every single frame so that it's like you've redrawn the frame and you haven't drawn the lines perfectly. To do that, I'm just going to click on the stopwatch on random seed and it's going to start at zero. I want it to be a different random seed on every frame. I'm just going to scroll all the way to the end and see that it's at frame 240. I'm just going to put this on 240. Now, it should give me a new random seed for every frame. Let's just preview that and make sure that it's looking good. I think what's happening is the turbulence displace is not being affected by the posterize time. Though actually what we need to do is make a new adjustment layer, put that below the top one. Maybe a good idea is to actually name these layer. I'm going to press Enter on the top adjustment layer and write posterize in it. We know that that's our posterize time. I'm going to select our turbulence displace and just do command or Control X just to cut it, and then I'm going to click on the next adjustment layer down and do Control V or Command V to paste it. Now let's preview this again. Much better. I'm actually going to reduce the amount down to one because I think it's still a bit 1010 1.5, yeah 1.5 looks good. There's loads of little effects you can do like this to make it feel even more handmade such as rough and edges and things like that, but I like it quite clean. In the final version, I've actually added a very subtle paper texture just to add that little bit more grain or like handmade feel. But the possibilities are endless. I would say that. It maybe it's just a taste thing, but you can go a bit too far with these effects like adding in vignettes and really heavy textures. Go careful with it because it can just slide in muddy water and you'll end up making it look worse rather than better. It's a bit of a balancing act with effects generally. Now I'm just going to render the final animation. To do that, I'm just going to have my composition selected down here. I'm going go to composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder. There we go. Make sure you've got H.264 selected, which will render an mp4 for you. If you've got the presets here, Match Source, high bit rate is quite a good one. Choose your output file. Click render, which is this green play button on the top right and you should see your little animation rendering. Then navigate to your render and let's have a look at the final thing. That's it, we're done, congratulations. Bask in your glory, or do what I do and just watch it over and over again because it's so satisfying watching something really nice that you've made or post it up on Instagram, get a million likes, and enjoy that dopamine hit that you get from social media. Well done guys. Seriously, thank you so much for joining me on this journey all the way to the end of making this skateboard. I hope you've learned a thing or two along the way. I know it's quite daunting doing 3D and there's quite a lot to cover just to make something relatively simple. But now hopefully, you've got the power of 3D at your fingertips. Then so go forth and make some beautiful things. Join me on the next video. We're going to have a quick recap of everything we went through to make this and debrief. Thank you very much and I'll see you there.
12. Debrief & Conclusion: You made it. Well done for completing your first 3D animation. Let's just do a quick rundown on everything we went through. We did some 3D theory, we looked at how 3D animation is generally put together and the stages that you need to do that, we got to grips with the Cinema 4D interface, finding your way around in Cinema 4D program like where the main buttons are. We brought in a reference video for doing a modeling and then using it for animation timings. We did some basic modeling based off that reference, we set that model up for animation, so we did a very basic rate using nulls. We animated that really looking at the timeline, looking at the different keyframes that you can do. We looked at setting up a simple tune render using sketch and tune in Cinema 4D. We looked at the simple materials that are involved to create some flat colors on our 3D objects and then we applied this sketch in to the material to the object to get our line to go around it. We also looked at making your render settings correct, so that it's ready to composite when you hit renderings Cinema 4D, and then you're ready to bring it into after effects. We then went into after-effects and combined that 3D render with the 2D animation, making sure the frame rates are correct and also adding a tiny little bit of turbulence displays to give that slightly extra handmade field to it. I really hope this has given you a solid foundation in Cinema 4D so that you can go on and create your own beautiful 3D animations or if you're a 2D animator, I hope learning some of this stuff has sped up your working process. I hope this is demystified 3D a little bit for you. I know that feeling of opening a 3D program for the first time, seeing zillions of buttons, you have no idea what any of them do. Also you know you need to make something, but you have no idea how to do it. I hope this is at least got over that first hurdle for you and you have bit of a clear idea of how things work. If you have successfully completed a skateboard flip and added it to my skater animation, well done top marks. If you've successfully completed your own skateboard flip and added it to your own original skater, then well done double top marks. If you've used the knowledge from this class to add a bit of 3D animation to your own 2D animation creation, then congratulations, tippity-top beyond top marks, this is exactly what I'm making this class for, so well done. Whatever you've made, I'd really love to see it, so please post it below for me and others to see. If you have any questions, if I've missed anything, then please let me know in the comments. Thank you so much for listening to me waffle on about 3D for all this time, is definitely one of my favorite things to do. Once again, I'm Russ Etheridge you can see more of my work or follow me on social media in the links, I'm sure they're around somewhere. I'll see you in the next one.
