Animate a Music Video in Cinema 4D

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course, animate a music video and cinema 4D. Pete Merrick from Cleveland, ohio and will be your instructor. I've taught thousands of 3D artists over the years through Cuyahoga Community College, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and various online platforms. After completing this course, students will gain the skills necessary to animate their own music video, complete with sound visuals and effects. The topics that will be covered include sound design using GarageBand and other music options. Scene setup, an animation using the sound effector demonstrated with five unique examples. Animation bonus lessons using hair and espresso, camera composition, lighting, rendering, and post-production techniques in Adobe After Effects. I designed this course for the beginner to intermediate 3D artist who wants to easily animate music videos and seamlessly sync sound to visuals. Basic understanding of Cinema 4D user interface as recommended. Reading to learn how to animate a music video and cinema 4D and roll today on Skillshare. 2. Project Overview: Let's get started on animating a music video in cinema 4D. The first thing I wanted to show you is a completed animation. In this course, we're going to primarily cover the sound effector and how to use it within Cinema 4D. Before we get started, I just wanted to talk about planning your project. One of the things that I like to do is come up with a rough storyboard. Something that gives me an idea of what kind of shapes I want to use, what kind of compositions I want to use, what kind of animation that I want in my final video. This is subject to change. Once you start getting into Cinema 4D, your final animation might not end up exactly like your storyboard. You might want to take a few minutes to sketch out some ideas of what you want your concepts to look like in your final animation. The next thing that I wanted to do is establish a color scheme. The way that we can do that is we can go into Adobe color. And right here where it says Explorer, this will give you a lot of different options as far as color schemes. You could type in keywords and search for whatever keywords that you want. Once you find a color scheme that you're happy with, what you could do is just click on the scheme and take a screenshot of this. And this will give you all these numbers down here that you could type in to Cinema 4D ease material to give you these exact colors. So here's the final scheme that I chose for my animation. Yours could be completely different than this. And that's okay, but let's just establish a color scheme right up front before we get started. 3. Audio Files: Let's discuss the sound file. So I wanted to give you a few options as far as where do you get the sounds? So number. The first thing that you could do if you feel like it and you could create your own music within GarageBand or any other program that you're comfortable with, you can use the sound files that I'll supply for this project. You can purchase royalty-free files through like premium lead or any other online resource. Or you can find free resources online. Right now I'm going to jump into GarageBand. Just show you how I organize my file. If I solo this first intro, just play that for you. Once that intro completes that I have this sort of electronic band kicking in, and I have some basic arpeggios that I made over here. And if you don't understand any of this, it's fine. Like I said, you can use the sound file that I supply. I have a real simple melodic line, some drums and then some base. So once that kicks in, here's what happens. All right, I won't play the whole thing, but you get the idea. If you wanted to create your own custom music track within GarageBand, few simple ways that you could do it is if I go found new empty project, I'm going to start with a drummer. Let's create this. Garageband will allow you to choose different types of drivers. So if I click electronic, Let's go ahead and play this and see what this guy sounds like. You can also select different presets down here. So if I rewind this to the beginning, that'll give me a totally different groove. Here's another one. You can choose whatever one that you want to hear. Once you have a basic drum pattern. You can also go up here where you have these loops, where the loop browser is on the top right. You can search by genre. So if you go into electronic, this is going to give you a whole bunch of different loops that you can use within your composition. You can go through, click on some of these and see what they sound like. If you find ones that you like, what you could do is you go file new track. Let's just use this microphone. Then what I can do is I can go back into this loop browser and I can just simply drag and drop some of these loops into here. And then I can start building my track. That way. You're going to want to have about 30 to 60 seconds worth of music. For right here. We can click on here and just show time, and that'll show us the duration of our music track. So if you feel inclined and you want to write your own music, that's a quick and easy way to do it. If not, again, you can use my sound files. So I'll go back and open up my file again. Once you have your music created, what you can do is you can solo and export all these individual elements. You can have different parts of the animation be affected by different sound. The way that I can do that is I'll just mute all of these tracks down here. Then we can go share exports on to disk. And since this is the only one that's on this intro, it'll just export that sounds. Let's go export song. And we can just call this intro to the desktop. A WAV format is usually the best. So I'll just export that. They can go through. And let's say we turn that off, we can export this next one, share export saga disk. Then what you want to do at the end is export the entire track. Turn all these back on, Share. Export song to this, that'll be the full track. The sun files that also apply for this is I'll give you the full track. I'll give you the introduction, main arpeggio, a melodic line, precaution, and the baseline. Your field. Feel free to use those. 4. Scene Set-Up: Let's go ahead and set up our scene. First thing I'm gonna do is create some new materials by clicking this material editor. What we'll want to do for this is just reference these numbers down here within our color scheme. If I double-click, create a new material, what I'm gonna do is go into this color. Right here, I'm going to click this little number sign. And here I can input those values. Tab and there's my color. One of the things that I wanted to suggest for this animation is to keep your materials super simple. If you start adding a lot of reflection your materials, it's going to bump up your render times. And since 3D simulation in dynamics sometimes take a while to render, I would recommend your materials to be as simple as you can. You can even turn off this reflectance if you wanted to, or you can just leave this specular layer on whatever you wanted to do. I'm going to keep these materials super simple. Once we have the first material created, we can just duplicate it by hitting Command C, command V, double-click list. And I'll go into my color, and I'll just input that number for the next color here. Go through, duplicate these materials to create the rest of your colors. So after you have all your materials created, let's go ahead and close this material manager, then we'll start building our scene. For my particular scene, I kept it super simple and I encourage you to make your own. I started this off with just creating a whole bunch of landscape objects. And I resize these, these over a little. So let's say our camera view is going to start from here. I can duplicate this over here. Maybe change the seed of the second one. Go to the seed. That'll change the shape of this landscape. There we go. Maybe I could change the height right here. And then I'll go into my top view. Just duplicate this again. Rotate this one. Just go into here. That over slightly can make that a little bit less tall. I could change the seed again of this one. That'll change the shape of that. Duplicate that over one more time, and change the height. Now what I can do is I can create some sort of floor down here. Command C, command V. Rotate this guy over here. And I'll just rotate this 180 degrees and just push this down a little bit. I can't even turn off this grid. If I wanted to filter workspace, turn that off. Here's the basic scene. Even make this a little bit longer. And there we go. I can just group these landscapes together, called this Landscapes. I'll put some materials on here. Let's say these are dark. Let's say this one on the bottom. A little bit lighter. Again, you're seeing might change. It might not be exactly like mine. That's okay. The last thing I'm gonna do for the scene is just create a basic plane. This is going to be my water. Push this up just a little bit. There we go. I'm just going to find a liquid material within the asset browser is going to mind materials. Search for water. You can use any one of these materials. Just go ahead and download this one. And I'll just place this my water plane. That's the basic Seine. One other thing that you can do here is where we have this water. If you wanted to get some waves in this water, an easy way that you can do that is go into the deformers over here. You can use a displacer deformer. You can drop that as a child and this water than in this displacer deformer and the shading, you could choose a noise. And what that's gonna do is it's going to start displacing this. Actually, if I take off this material, you can start seeing that a little bit better. What that does is it starts displacing this up and down. Per that noise. It makes it look like it's a little bit wavy. If you're not getting enough subdivisions, you can always go back into your plane and add a little bit more subdivisions to this. That'll give you some more waves. If it's looking at a little bit too jagged, you could put it this water plane inside of a subdivision surface. That's gonna increase render time as well. So I might just keep this super simple like this and call it a 5. Sound Effector Overview: In this video, I wanted to give you a basic overview of how the sound effect or works in Cinema 4D. Let's go ahead and create a real simple cube. I'll scale this down. And then I'm gonna go ahead and drop this inside of a MoGraph Cloner. Create a cloner, make this cube a child of the cloner. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go into this cloner object. And I can move this stuff over so you can see this a little bit better. Right here where it says mode. We're just going to change this to linear, is 0 out this y position and just kind of offset these in the x. And I'll increase the counts of this corner. We have some cubes and we have the cube inside of a cloner. And that's duplicating those cubes. With this cloner selected. What we're going to want to do is go to MoGraph Effector and choose the sound effector. When we select this cloner and go to the effectors tab, we'll see that the sound effector is located within that tab. Let's go to the sound effector. And right here it says soundtrack. Can move this over again so you can see this a little bit easier soundtrack. Let's go ahead and load sound. For this. I'm just going to use the full track just to demonstrate. The way that this works is within the sound effector, if you go to parameter, you could specify how that sound is going to affect these clones. So right now by default we have the Position enabled for this demo. Let's just go ahead and enable scale. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say this Y scale. I just want this to increase PER that sound. Right now I'm just typing in an arbitrary value. We can go back to this effector tab. And now when I rewind, hit Play, you'll notice that nothing's happening with my cubes. We go into the sound effector, effector tab right here where it says amplitude. You can go ahead and you could specify a portion of your sound wave that you want to affect your clones. Now when I drag this over here, you'll notice something is starting to happen with these clones. I hit play again. You'll notice the sound effects parameters. We enabled scale and we typed in this arbitrary value of 2830, whatever it is. Now these cubes are growing when the sound affects them. If I rewind play that again. You can also set a parameter within this sound effector to affect all of these cubes a little bit differently. So if you go down to sampling right here where it says PQ, Let's go ahead and change that to step immediately. Immediately you notice that it affects it differently. So now if I hit Play, if we get a different look, I'm just going to go ahead and add some more frames to this 500 frames so we can play this through and see what happens. As you could see, now these clones are being affected. If we go up to this amplitude again, if we play with this slider, again, you're going to notice that affects our clones a little bit differently. So you're just gonna have to get in here into this amplitude and start playing around with some of this, some of these values until you get the look that you want. What are the thing that I wanted to point out? I'll play this real quick. You'll notice we're getting some jaggedy kind of animation. And one way to smooth that out is by using this decay slider right here. So if I take this to k and I bumped that up, let's say 50% or so. What it's gonna do is once these gets to the peak, it's going to kind of ease out of that movement and make it a little bit smoother. So let me see, let me show you how that changed the animation. Now, those are coming back to the original size a little bit slower. Demonstrate again, here's what it was before. Kennedy jittery. Now if I bump up that decay, lot smoother. If you go too far with this decay, these will start to stick. You don't want to go too far. You want to have these come back to somewhere in their original position. The other thing that you could do is you can go into the sound effect or in this parameter, you can enable position, you can enable rotation. If we enable rotation, Let's just play around with some of these and see how that affects this animation. Feel free to take some time, play around with some of these parameters and see how they affect the overall animation in the colognes. 6. Cubes: Let's start animating some geometry. The first thing I'm gonna do is bump up my frame count. My music is about one minute and ten seconds long, so 2100 frames should work. Yours might be different than that. You have to figure that out 30 frames per second times however many seconds that you have for your music track. The first thing we're gonna do here is I'll create a cube. And I'm going to re-size this cube, something like this. And then I'm going to put this inside of a cloner. I'm holding down option on the keyboard. I'm on a Mac. And that makes the cube a child of this corner. So what I'm gonna do is go into my object linear. And this is very similar to the previous video. Will 0 out this y position. And I'm just going to increase this counts. I'm going to increase the size on the x. I could just increase the counts here. Could take my cloner. And I can just move this over. I want these to happen right underneath this water. I can go into this view. Shading, just take this down. It's underneath my water. Yours could be different than this. The thing I'm going to increase this number, x, kind of offset these a little bit more. I don't think I need as many spheres, cubes. And then I can make these cubes a little bit smaller. Something like this. And it'll drop. Let's say this green texture on this cube. Now, with this cloner selected, go ahead and create a MoGraph sound effector. Let's take the sound effector, go into the effector tab right here where it says sound track. Go ahead and load a sound. For this. I use the intro sound for the parameter I want to use to scale. This time, I'll scale it in the Z. Let's go ahead and play this and see how that's being affected. It's not being affected at barely at all. So I have to take this amplitude slider. There we go, slide it over. So these waveforms certain affecting our clones. Alright? So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go ahead and into this parameter. And I'm going to increase this, the Z size. Maybe something like this. Go. Then I'll go to the sound of factor. Instead of using the sampling as a peak, I'm going to do a step. And now when I play this, I get this animation happening. I'm going to go into this decay slider and just bump this up to about 50%. Maybe I want this a little bit less. I think that's looking pretty good. Now what I can do is just take the sound in this cloner, and I'll group these together and I hit Option G on the keyboard, and I'll just call this O1 cubes under water. Here's a little tip That's going to help you speed up your playback, speed up some of your renderings. Once you have your sound effector in cloner, all set up and you're happy with the results. What you're gonna wanna do is cache this MoGraph animation. All right, So with this cloner selected, let's go up to create tags, MoGraph tags and selected MoGraph cache. Now with this selected, go ahead and break this out. I'm going to save this. What I'm gonna do within my project folder. Within my 3D folder, I'll just create a new folder called The cash. Now over here I'm going to specify that folder to save my cash into. All right, It's projects, 3D cash. And I'll just call this a one. Now with this MoGraph cache tag selected, you want to hit bake to file. What that allows us to do is to scrub through our animation timeline without any discrepancies in the actual animation. So when Cinema 4D has to calculate every frame, when you don't have this paragraph tag, it could take a long time. You could get unexpected visual results. It's always nice to break this out that way. You'll always get the correct preview when you're scrubbing through your animation. 7. Spheres: Let's continue creating some additional animation. All right, so for this one, I'm going to start off with a sphere. Now go ahead and I'll resize this, just make this a little bit smaller. And then I'm just going to duplicate this two times by hitting Command C Command V. Command C Command V. Now I'm going to place these three inside of a cloner. Let's go ahead and apply some texture to these. I'll take one. I'll do a light color. This next color. I'll do this. Now this cloner. And go ahead and bump up some of these parameters in here. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and create a sound effector with this cloner selected MoGraph effector. Effector. And again, I'm going to load this file, the effectors, and I'm gonna do the same intro file. Here. I'm going to specify, instead of position, I'm going to do a scale. And I'll do a uniform scale. And I don't know. I'm just going to start with an arbitrary number and see how this plays out. Alright, so let's go to this effector and this amplitude. And I'm just going to push this over and see what happens. The first thing that I want to change, because I wanted to go into this sound effector and the sampling, I'm going to change to step. If not all of these are slightly different. The next thing I'm gonna do is go to this cloner simulation and add a rigid body tag to this. Now when I hit play, you'll notice what's going to happen. I think this is probably way too big as far as this effectors scale. So let's just go ahead and take that down a little bit. Something like this. So getting back to this rigid body tags, so now when I hit play, these spheres are probably just going to drop. Yep, they just drop all over the place. But what we want these things to do is attract to the center of this cloner. Going to go into this corner. And right where it says size for these, I'm gonna start with a 000 size. Now when I play these little explode out and fall to the ground, eventually faulted drowned. The way that we can make these stick to the center of this cloner. It's pretty simple. If we go into this region body tag right here in this force tab, Let's go ahead and type in. Let's start with ten for follow-up position. And let's see how that affects it. There we go. That's looking pretty good. Go back to the cell defector. I could play with this amplitude a little bit. Let's see if this changes anything over here. We can also go back into this decay and see what happens now. That's pretty good. Once we get this looking like we want it again, we could take these two, we can group them together. I'll just call this a one spheres, since this is still the intro. And we can starts composing our shot. So let's say our camera will maybe be somewhere around here. So far, if I create a camera in here, look through this camera. I can go to the composition and enabled grid. Let's just start composing this shot. Maybe these are right in the center of this. And this is going to be completely up to you how you compose this. I can take these spheres and I can push these back in space. Will have to be on frame 0. To do that. Push those back in space. I can push them up a little bit. So maybe they started right around here. And let's hit Play. If we wanted more spheres, we can go into this cloner. Add more spheres here. That's going to be completely up to you once you get this animation and you're happy with the way it looks, you're going to want to go into this corner again, go to create tags, MoGraph tags, MoGraph cache. And then you're going to want to save this to your cache folder that is right here. And just save this as o12, O1. Be better. Now with this MoGraph cache tag selected that you want to hit bake to file. 8. Glowing Spheres: Let's go ahead and create some more animation. I'm gonna go ahead and create a plane. It'll take this plane, just move this down. I'm gonna do here is turn on display garage shading lines so I can see how many lines and subdivisions are in this plane. Then I'll just scale this up. Something like this. And I can move this down. Let's kind of align with the water. Doesn't have to be exact. Back spread over. I could just turn off my environment. Now I'm going to create an additional sphere, resize this, and make it a little bit smaller. I'll drop that sphere inside of a cloner. This cloner where it says mode. I'll change this to object mode. Now, we'll get an object field down here. I'll drop this plane inside the object field. Right away. You'll notice that the spheres start cloning right along the surface of this plane. That's because this distribution method is on surface, but I'm going to change this to a vertex. Then these spheres are going to snap to each vertices. Maybe we can make these spheres a little bit smaller. I'll just scale that down a little bit more. We could turn our environment back on. What I can do here is turn this plane off. We don't want to see this plane and the view. And then I'm going to go ahead and create a new material here. And all this is, has the luminance channel turned on and nothing else turned on. And then I chose a color for this luminance because I want these kind of glow. I'll just drop that on the sphere. I can just turn off this environment so I can see what we're doing. Turn everything else off. Go to displays, go back to garage shading. Excellent. So now with this cloner selected, let's go up to MoGraph Effector and choose a sound effector. Enough for this one. I'm going to go ahead and choose this load sound. And I'm going to choose this 03 main arpeggio. Alright. Let's go ahead and play with this amplitude. And this is not going to play for several frames. Actually, we can hear this intro animation still. Go here. Jump through the timeline, and we'll select some of these waveforms. Now the sound effector, I'm going to offset this z. Let's see what happens now. If I hit play, That's pretty good. It's going to hit Play. I can probably turn this environment back out to see how far these are coming up. Maybe this needs to be a little bit more. You'll have to play with your scene. That's pretty good right about there. Also, what I'm gonna do in the sound effector is I'm going to do scale here. I also want the scale to grow as these are coming up. Or I'm gonna grow a little bit. Now the sound effector, I'm going to go to my fields. I will select spherical field. Now what this is going to do is it's going to only affect the spheres that are within the radius of this field. See that? Now these are coming up where they're affected by this field. And I'm just moving this. What I can do here is on the spherical field, I'll right-click and I'll choose animation tags and vibrate. Within this vibrate tag, I'll go ahead and enable position. Let's hit Play. You'll notice this just vibrates back and forth. I'll do x and maybe z. So let's hit play again. Maybe we need a little bit more. You'll have to play with these parameters. You what were some of your scene? There we go. Maybe that's a little bit too much. Bring some of these parameters down. Again, play with it, see what works for you. All right, looking pretty good, I'll go back to the sound effector. What I'm gonna do here is just increase this delay little bit. It's pretty good. Let's see what happens if we churn, change this to step because anything happened, but that looks pretty good. I'm going to take all of these. I'm just going to Option G on the keyboard. I'll call this 02 spheres water. And save my scene. 9. Grid: Let's go ahead and reuse this plane to create a grid. Now with this plane selected, what I'm gonna do on, let's turn off our environment again so we can see this. Let's turn this plane. And now I'm going to drop this inside of an array object. So if I go Atom Array, take this plane, drop it inside here. What that does, turn these off just so we can see that it just creates this little grid. And we can go to this atom array and just, I don't know, let's type in 0.75.75. I think that's going to work. About 0.5. I think that's better, a little bit less. All right, Good. Then I'm going to texture this so I'll just grab a green. You could do the luminance material if you wanted. I'm just going to keep it at this. Now what I want to do is as these spheres come up, I want this grid to kind of grow and follow those spheres. Are group this together, put this in a null or call this o12 grid. Now, I'm going to take, go up to MoGraph and create a poly effects. I'll drop this inside of that null. What this poly effects selected. I'm gonna go ahead and go MoGraph Effector, plain effector. Now what that does is it kind of breaks this up a little bit. I'm going to go to the parameter. We can change his position, return off the position. We could do a rotation if we wanted. We go and we can do a scale. Let's do a uniform scale and we'll do minus one. Now that grid disappears. I'll take this, drop it inside of here. Now. I'm going to go ahead and take this plaintiff factor. I will create another spherical field. Now let's make sure this spherical field is in line with this other spherical field. Take the spherical field and go to coordinates. Copy my position x, y, and z. Just hit Copy and then go to the spherical field and I'll hit paste. Now I can just make this a little bit bigger. I'm going to take this vibration and I'm going to Command click and drag to put that vibration tag on this spherical field. Now that spherical field will move in the exact same fashion as this other spherical field. If I hit play. You'll notice this grid is kind of disappearing over here. So I want to change this spherical field on this plane. So I'll go to remapping and just do Invert. Now I can just take this row this out if I wanted. There we go. Now as those spheres come up, that grid will grow with it. 10. Background Elements: Let's animate some background elements. So we'll start this lesson off with a helix. Alright, now what we're gonna do with this helix is we're gonna make the heights 0. We're going to take this. I'm gonna push it back in space, somewhere behind these landscapes. We can look through this camera just so we can get a sense of how big this thing, how big this thing is, relatively to everything else. We can take this helix. Let's go ahead and start tweaking some of these parameters. I can go ahead and turn off fields in this view just so I can see what I'm doing. And radius to bring that up. Let's see what that looks like in the perspective view. Pretty good. Maybe I can just increase this end angle. A few more of these, increase this radius. That's looking pretty good. At this point, what I'm gonna do is creates the cylinder and I'll orient this plus z. Maybe I can make this a little bit bigger. There we go. And I will create a sphere. I can scale this down a little bit. And we're going to take a cloner, throw the cylinder and the sphere inside of there. In this cloner, I'm going to change this mode object, this object field. I will drop this helix in there. Now these pieces of geometry are cloning to this helix. If I go into this cloner, I can go to transform. And I can rotate some of these elements so they're facing the camera. Let's rotate that 90 degrees. In this Cloner. Instead of distribution counts, I can do an even. Then I can just bump up that number until it fills these like that. Maybe the cylinder needs to be a little bit bigger. I'll just hit T on the keyboard scale that up. Maybe this counts and needs to be a little bit more. All right, It's looking pretty good. Now with this cloner selected, I'll go to MoGraph Effector sound effects. Now in the soundtrack, I wouldn't loan a sound. You can use whatever one, wherever sound that you want for this. I'll take this amplitude. Just having this facts, this for the time being, we might need to adjust that later. For this position. I'll turn that off and I'll affect the scale. Do a uniform scale. Just bump these up a little bit. There we go. Let's see what that looks like. If we go into the sound effector. Let's go down to this sampling. Let's try step. Let's see what that looks like. I'll take this decay, I'll turn that up. Let's see what that looks like. It's looking pretty good. I'm going to use something else called a delay, a factor. And what that's gonna do, it's going to ensure that these clones don't start animating abruptly with the sound effects. But with this cloner selected, I'm gonna go to MoGraph Effector and just use delay. Then I'm going to go into this parameter, uncheck rotation. There we go. Now we have a little bit of a smoother animation and go to the sound effects are again, play with some of these parameters until I'm happy with it. We can even do a negative value if I wanted. Let's see what happens there. That looks kind of cool. Let's play that. I think that's looking pretty good. Now often we wanted, we can duplicate some more of these cylinders, so we have more cylinders and spheres. And then we would go ahead and add some color to these. We have some dark ones in here as well. Maybe this sphere is this blue color. Then we have another animation. So I'll just group those together. Now call this background. You probably want to go through this cloner and bake that animation as well. 11. Bonus Lesson 01: Hair: These next couple of videos, I want to show you some additional techniques that don't use the sound effector, but you might find useful for your scene. You don't have to use every single technique that I've demonstrated in these videos. Use your discretion, use what works for your scene in your animation. One of the things I wanted to show you is animating hair. If you create a sphere, just resize this. I can make this editable by depressing this key. And I can go to endomysium polygon mode. In select all my polygons, then I can come up to stimulates hair objects. Add hair. Right now if I take a render of this, here's what we get. Just a big ball of hair. Alright, so if I take the sphere, what I can do is I can add an animation tag, vibrate, vibrate tag, all enabled position, and just start playing around with some of these parameters. Let's hit Play. Right away. You see that this hair is very dynamic. Right now. You can see that that hair moves with that sphere. We can go into this hair properties. And we could change the length of this hair. We could change the counts of the hair. Right now we're at 50 thousand. What if we take it down to 25 thousand? We render this. It's gonna start getting a little bit thinner. We can take it down to 15 thousand. See what that looks like compared to the previous ones. Starting to get a little bit thinner. So now we can go into this hair properties Material. Double-click this and we can start changing these parameters. So you could change this color to one of your colors that you picked out in the beginning of this beginning of the series. And you could change this other color to something else that's within your color scheme. If you wanted to specular, you can have that on. You could turn it off if you wanted. You could change the thickness of this hair. So it's thicker at the roots, a little bit thinner down here at the tips. And other things that you could do is you can play around with this phrase. You can play around with this amounts. So when I take a render now, now we get this frizzy kind of look, if I hit play, dynamics will be enabled. And now we get this hair kind of bouncing around everywhere. Just get this looking at more realistic. What you need to do is add a lights. If I add a light in the scene, let's just pull this up here. What I'm going to do with this light is just enable shadows. I'll just turn on soft shadows because they rent you're pretty quick. Now we get these really nice shadows on his hair and it starts to look more realistic. You might find this technique useful. You might have some elements in your scene that could use some hair or some dynamics with this Herod kind of moving all around at some more movement to your animation. If you don't find it useful, you don't have to incorporate it. It's just an extra little tip that I wanted to show you guys. 12. Bonus Lesson 02: Xpresso: In this video, I wanted to show you how to use Espresso to create additional animation. So the way that this works is you can have one objects parameter, let's say this cube. If we move it up and down or side to side and we can have that movement. Dr, another geometries parameter like position, scale, rotation. If I create another piece of geometry, let's say a capsule. And I'll move this over other scale this down a little bit. What I could do here is I could take this cube and let's say this Coordinates tab. Let's say we take the z position. As I move this front-to-back, this cube, I'll drive another parameter of this capsule. Let's take this cube and this position z. I'm going to click on it, right-click expressions and I'm going to say Set Driver. And then I'll go into this capsule. And let's say we want this capsule to rotate. This way. If I take this rotation B, I can go to expressions and do set driver absolute. Now when I take this Q, when I move this cube front-to-back, back capsule rotates, That's going to give us this espresso tag. If I double-click this, what we will be able to do, click the range mapper. Then down here, this attributes manager, you can specify how much that you want this cube to rotate. I could take this output upper down. Now when I move this cube, it rotates a little bit slower. If you wanted to rotate faster, you just increase this number. Alright, so that's the way that you can control, that you can create additional geometry. What if you had, let's say a cylinder and you wanted to drive the cylinders rotation as well. You can do the same thing. If you go to the cylinder, take this, be set driven absolute. Now when you move this, again, you get some rotation in that. So I can click on this espresso tag of the cylinder again and go to this range mapper. I could do something like a minus 20. So it goes in the opposite direction of the capsule. Now with that together, now you could take all of this. What if you took a MoGraph cloner and you drop this capsule into a cloner. Now, you could take this into radial mode, change this, push this out a little bit, increase the number. Now another these codes are working. We need to do is go into this cloner and uncheck reset coordinates. So now when you move this cube, it rotates. With that. This is a really easy way that you can get a lot of animation in your scene very quickly by using Espresso. If you wanted to, you can drop this cylinder inside of a cloner. I will just go ahead and duplicate that cloner. Drop the cylinder in there. I can offset this. When I move this cube, I can animate this cube. So let's just say at frame 0, I have a keyframe for this cube. At frame 30, I have another keyframe for this cube, frame 15. I can just bring it out a little bit. And the other key frame, here's what that looks like. I can take this cube and I can go into my Africa. It's just the position z. I can grab all my keyframes, function track after, repeat after. And now I have this looping animation that continues to animate. So that's another way that you can get a lot of geometry animated very quickly. If you find this useful, use it. If not, if it doesn't work for your scene and you don't have to use this portion. 13. Cameras: Once you have all the elements that you want animated in your scene, now you're going to want to go through and animate some cameras. Move around your scene with some interesting compositions. Let's go ahead and create a new null. And we'll just call this camera's drop this down here. Take the camera that we made before. Drop that in here, and I'll enable this camera so I can see it. Now with this composition grid. I'm going to have this grid on so I can compose my shot a little bit nicer. Let's say we want this thing to start right here. And we want it to focus on these spheres. We could turn everything else off for the time being and keep this opening super simple. We're gonna use these cameras in conjunction with a stage object. So if I go down to here where these witnesses sky is, just create a stage object, dropped that underneath my camera. Now at key frame 0, it's going to take my camera 01. Let's rename this. Take my stage and just drop this camera into the camera field and depress this little icon right here to add a keyframe. Now we get hit play. Around. Right around here is where this first intro animation is ending. All right, so let's take this camera and we're going to animate this position. Let's say this camera wants to start here. We can add a key frame right around this frame right here. We can just take this camera and we can just move it closer to those spheres. Then we can add another keyframe. What ends up happening here is that camera and just slowly moves towards those spheres. Then we can create a second camera. So let's say we have another camera view. And this is camera to right around this key frame. Right around this key frame, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the stage object and we're gonna drop this camera two in there. Now, we can take this camera to it may be focused on this water or something. We're focused on those glowing spheres that are going to start pumping up. It's up to you how you want to compose this. But at this point we can go in here and we can start turning some of these elements on and off. The way that we're gonna do that. Just go back to the beginning. We know for the intro animation, we want to have this thing on right now. So let's go to the basic properties. We'll say visible and editor. Visible and renderer will add two key frames. Then let's go to the stage object. Right around here is when this camera view changes. So let's go back into this intro animation will go here and turn this off. These spheres are these cubes around under the water all the way up to where this camera changes. The second camera view. Once that happens, again, compose this camera animated however you want. And once this happens, we can go to this grid and spheres, turn those on and we can go to this background element, turn that on. So right here, say animate that background. And we can estimate that. We'll step back one keyframe and we'll, we'll change all of these to off. As that stage object changes in the camera view changes. So does so do our elements are elements get turned on and off. I just wanted to show you how I animated these cameras in this video. So basically, we start with this. That camera zooms in closer, zooms and closer to those spheres. Then it changes to an overhead view. Front view with all these spheres propping up a side view. This is kind of under the water looking up. Here's another view of a panning. Then it zooms into here these background elements created some additional geometry back here. Some additional geometry over here. Then it just kind of slowly fades in all this action. Then for the end and other overhead view. Then another simple animation. I included some of these hair elements on the ends here. You don't have to do that if you'd want to. But if it makes sense for your animation, go ahead and do it. And then it just ends here. And I fade it out in post-production. 14. Lighting: Let's go ahead and add lighting to our scene. So the first thing I'm going to do is grab a background object. On this background object, I'm just going to grab immaterial that only has color internal reflection. There we go. So right now if I take a render of this, right now, we don't have any lighting in the scene. No shadows or no intense lights. I'm going to keep this light setup really simple. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a new spotlight. And then I'll take that spotlight and rotate it 90 degrees. Is bringing this up. Make sure that that's over. The spheres. Bring that up. Let's take a quick render of this. I'm getting some light over top of this. So now let's create some fill lights to fill in some of these darker areas. Whereas a fill light here. Kind of push that over a little bit. Push that up. I'm going to take this phyllite. Good general. I'll just bump this intensity down. Maybe change the color a little bit, add some more color in here, and the color is completely up to you. And it'll take this command C command V, take that fill light, fill in some of these areas over here. I can add a little bit of green to this one. Take another test render. Now let's start to fill in everything else around here. Still our landscapes a little bit dark. We can compensate for that by increasing some of this fill light if we wanted to, increasing the intensity. See what happens. Now some of this is getting filled in a little bit more. You want to go through light your scene. Keep it super simple. Miocene. I don't even have any shadows that I turned on on any of the lights. That way it optimizes render time. Go through late everything, make sure you have some nice illumination on all your objects. 15. Rendering: At this point we're ready to render. Let's go to our render settings and we'll specify output. You can use the standard, you can use the standard render an output. I would recommend 1280 by 720. And then you go to frame range. All frames specify a safe path. We're going to do Format dot, MOV or MP4. And then you're going to specify a safe path here. We'll call this music and video whenever you want to call it, hit Save. Let's do an alpha. And this little button right here, this icon includes sound. You want to have this unchecked before you render. You don't want to render out sound through cinema 4D. We're going to composite that later in After Effects. And then for anti-aliasing, you want to go from geometry to best. Then what you'll do is hit this button render to the picture viewer and wait for it to get done. Sometimes it's best to just let this run overnight because it could take a long time, eight hours, ten hours. Whenever. I had a lot of animation in mind, some I took on one computer about a 100 hours to render or you just want to keep that in mind, your computer will be tied up for a long time. 16. Post-Production: Let's do some post-production work in After Effects to add some finishing touches to our animation in the project window. Let's just go ahead and double-click. We'll import our files and it will create a new folder and just call this assets. Will drop these into that folder just to help tidy everything up, keep it clean. We'll take this video, drop it into our project timeline, will double-click again and we'll import our final music soundtrack. Just import this full track and we don't need this for right now. What I'll do is I'll take, what I'll do next is I'll create a new layer and just call it create a new adjustment layer. With that selected, I'll go to effects and noise and grain fractal noise. Now we can play around with this Frankel type. Can play around with these parameters forever. You, for whatever you want, wherever you think looks good. I'm just trying to create a little bit of detail in the background sky area. So play around with this. See what you like, see what works best for your scene. Just use this one for now. And what we can do is we could turn this mode if you're not seeing that mode, just to press this little icon right here. And we can play around with some of these screen that's going to lighten everything up. We could do a multiply and see what that looks like. That darkens everything up. Overlay. I think that's going to work good. So I'm going to hit T on the keyboard and just bring that opacity down. And that's just going to give me a little bit of detail on that sky. Now I want to mask that out so it's not affecting these mountains. I'll take this Alpha channel that rendered out and put it on top of this layer. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to rename this layer and I'll just call this fractal. Then we're going to want to take this track mattes, this right here, where it says none. I'm going to choose Luma Inverted Matte video a. Now what that does is actually masks out all these areas, the landscape in the water. So this fractal noise is only happening in the sky area. I can hit T on the keyboard again and maybe I need to bring it down and opacity just so it's kind of subtle. Alright, so the next thing I'm going to do after this is I'm going to create a blur where the action is happening, where this main sphere is going to have that be in focus In everything else. A little bit blurred out. An easy way to do that is just go layer new. And again, we'll create an adjustment layer. I'll rename this blur. Now with that layer selected, I'll go to Effect, go to my Blur and Sharpen, and I'll choose a Gaussian Blur. We can repeat these edge pixels and add some blue to our scene. You'll see everything's starting to get a little bit blurry. Now we don't want everything to be blurry in our scene. And I'm going to bump this blurriness up a little bit just so it's easier to see, uh, probably turn it down after I mask everything out. With this layer selected. I'm going to go up here and I'm going to choose an ellipse tool. What this ellipse tool is gonna do is it's going to add a mask to this layer. As you can see, the sphere is blurring, but everything else in the background is in focus. So I'll take this mask and I'll click this inverted tab. Now we don't want this to have a really sharp edge. So we'll unfold this and where it says mask feather. Just drag these little sliders. And now that mask feathers out a little bit. I'm going to animate this, this mask path. So add a keyframe to key frame 0. Right here. I'm going to have that mask. Just kind of move along with where the action is. I can do page down right here. What I can do is just take this down and just have this sort of focus on some of these spheres above this water. Here's where the focus of this little scene is in this camera. Move that over and then scrub through. So maybe right here. I want this to be in focus in the center of the screen and blurred out on the edges. Then here we can do a page down on the keyboard. So we get to the exact frame we want. Right here. I'm going to change this again. Just kind of encompass the main action area of our scene. If you zoom in, you'll notice we're getting a lot of blur over here on these edges. And then as we move the a and we get a lot of crispness, you just want to go through. Animate this mask. Can add another keyframe here, page down. And then I'll change this again. Maybe right here. This portion is in-focus. Kind of fades out a little bit on the edges. Go through and mass the rest of that out. Once you're done with that, we can also add a vignette. Vignette, easy to just go File New Solid. And now what I can do with this color picker is choose a dark color and hit Okay, That's going to fill this with a dark, dark layer. I can go back to my blur. And now I can just copy this mask. I can hit Command C and then good, my layer Command V. And now I have that exact blur and vignette happening in the same area. If I wanted to do that, I mean, you don't have to do that. You can have the vignette be totally custom on this one. So if you wanted to create a custom vignette and you just go back up to here. You create another layer mask. And then what you can do is unfold this mask, either this out, you can invert it. Then you can go to this mode. Multiply, hit T on the keyboard for opacity. Bring that down. Just a subtle little vignette on the edges. Okay? After this, what we can do is we can create a glow effect where some of these things are glowing, where the sphere star pop it up. Let's create another, another layer. Go to Layer new. And we can do an adjustment layer in this Effects Presets. We can search for glow. Let's just take this glow, drop it onto here, and you'll notice right away we get this really nice glow happening. We'll go to this glow threshold. Maybe bump that up to get some of that color back in those spheres. And we can do the glow radius. Now these things are starting to like read a, radiates some light, which looks really cool. We certainly get some glow down here as well. Starting to get some glow up here in the spheres. Looking at real nice. We could toggle this on and off to see how it's affecting our scene. So if I toggle this on and off, you'll notice it's a pretty dramatic effect that we're getting here. And especially in this scene, you can really see it. If I zoom in, toggle it on and off. That's a really nice look right there. Once you get to your end, you can fade this thing out with another, another type of layer. So if you go up here, Let's go ahead and rename this one because we didn't glow. Let's go layer new solid. And again, I'm going to choose a color from an, a thin here, right around here. I'm just going to animate this thing fading to black. We can start the fade right around here. Hit T on the keyboard. The press this, bringing that to 0. Just kind of scrub through the timeline. Bring that up to 101. Last little thing that we can do is we could add a curves adjustment to the top of this. If I go layer, new adjustment layer, rename this curves, Effect, color correction curves. Now, we can start playing with some of the final look of this. So if we wanted the entire thing to be a little bit brighter, I'm just taken my mid tones of the nose up a little bit. We can go into this channel. We can go to our reds. If we weren't more red in the scene, we can bump this up over here. That looks cool because these edges are getting a little bit more of that purple color from our fill lights. What if we went into the green channel? We can start playing around with some of this stuff. Maybe we don't need any of this green the road until we're happy with it. If we go into the blue channel, looks kind of cold right there, go back into our origin B. What if we increase some of these contrasts? Got to give it a little bit more visual interests and see what happens here. With the curves on and off. You see we're getting a lot more contrast to this. Finish us off. What I'll do is once this thing fades out, I'll just add a text with some information on here. So animation by your name. Then what we can do is we could turn on this tidal action safe. We can take this layer and we can center this up over here. You could choose a fonts, tweak this however you want. What if this animation by that's a regular funds and then your name is a little bit bolder. We can turn off this tidal action safe. Now in this text, we can unfold this. We can animate, Let's say the opacity. If I go into here and unfold this range selector, we could turn the opacity to 0. Now I can animate the start position, finish it off. So right here, this black comes in for fades to black. I could start this Range Selector animation for a few seconds. Now that end card is animated. There we go. And now the last thing we need to do is just drop in our file for our soundtrack on top of here. And then we will select all our layers Composition add to render queue. Now we're gonna go with the, now we'll go to the best settings, specify in best full. Leave that as it is, will go to this lossless where it says Format options. We'll choose a video codec. So I'll choose this first one that'll compress it a little bit. Format options for the audio. If you have another codec, codec in there as well, then you want to specify an output path. You can save this to your project folder or wherever you want. Name it the first initial last name, underscore name of the project. Hit Save. And now you're going to want to hit Render. Wait for that to finish.