Animating Photographs with Cinema 4D

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to this course on Animating Photographs in Cinema 4D, my name is Ozgur. I'm a Maxon certified instructor and on this course, I'll teach you how to take a still image and bring it to life by converting it into a 3D scene, adding new elements, lights, animations, and finally, flying a camera through it. To be more precise, this is the animation will be creating on this course. We will cover subjects like camera calibration, soft and hard body dynamics, lights, motion blur, rendering, and the amazing new feature in cinema 4D called the magic bullet looks for color enhancements. The techniques I'll show you on this course will have a lot of different applications in your own workflow, so if you're looking to up your game in cinema 4D, let's get started. 2. Calibrating the Camera: Now, here we are in Cinema and the first thing we need to do is to go and create a camera through which we can project our image, so let's do that. I'm going to go and add that camera to the scene, and the thing that will sell this trick and the thing that will actually make the whole thing possible is a tag called the camera calibrator tag. Let's go ahead and add this as well by right-clicking on this camera and then coming down to the tracker tags, and then the camera calibrator. I'll start with the image tab here so it can load an image in here so that we can project the image through this camera. I'll just go ahead and click on the three dots, and I'll just go ahead and pick this tunnel image here. You'll notice that the image I'm using is quite a small file, so it's less than a megabyte, just over half-a-megabyte. Now, the higher the resolution and the better the quality of this file, the better the final result is going to be as well, so just keep that in mind. I'm going to hit "Open" and the image gets loaded here, and what I'll do first is to show you how you can change the scale of the image, so you can make the image here smaller or larger, or if you wanted to set the ratio to be different, let's say a square, you could just go ahead and click here, and then pick, say, square. Now, in this case, because our original image wasn't a square, it squashes the image, which I don't want, so I'm going to undo this by pressing "Command Z." I'm also going to scale this image back to 100 percent by right-clicking on these arrows, and you had the image offset x and offset y. This is if you wanted to move the image left and right on the scene. If I just click and drag, you'll see it will go left and right, and this one, we'll make it go up and down. I'll reset both of these by right-clicking on these arrows as well. The next option here is the brightness. You can make the image a little brighter so it's easier to see what's going on. In fact, I will leave this set to about 175 so that we can see all of these lines properly. Then next, you go to the calibrate tab. Now, this is where all the magic happens. Using the calibrate tab, we tell Cinema where the x, the Y, and the z lines are. Unless, of course, Cinema knows where these lines are, it's not going to understand how to solve this camera and then creates or reconstruct the 3D scene. To do that, I'm going to use some lines and grids, so I'll start by adding a line here, by clicking on this button. As soon as this line is added, I'll just need to go ahead and set this to be parallel to something that I know to be straight on the actual photograph. This could be straight on the x-axis, the y-axis, or the z-axis, it doesn't matter. In this case, because I know the lines here that I can see, all of these lines represent the z, I can easily go ahead and set this line to be a parallel line to one of those, let's say here, and then this end can go here. I'll roughly set this, then I'll refine this as well. I'm going to actually start from here where the lights and the darks, so the highlights and the shadows meet. We'll just go ahead and do this, and you can see I'm getting a zoomed-in view when I do this, so it's an easier process. I'll just put it right in the center here, and I'll do the same on this end. That's about here maybe, and that's our first line. Now, as far as Cinema is concerned, this line, that doesn't mean anything. We have to help Cinema understand if this is the z, the x, or the y. Now, I'm going to hold down "Shift" and click once on this line, which will turn it red, which tells Cinema that this is now the x line, which is not correct actually. This needs to be the z line, so it needs to be a blue color. I'm going to hold down "Shift" again and click on once more and once more, and now it's the z line. Cinema now understands that this is the z, this is the depth of the scene. But a single line isn't going to be enough for Cinema to understand how far these lines should be from each other and where the camera should be positioned. I'm going to need to create a second line, which is also going to be z. I can either add a new line or I can simply copy and paste by Command dragging this here, and I have similar lines that are going that way, so I could maybe use this one to go here. Again, I'll use this section where the highlights meet the shadows, and then this end as well, we'll go here, like that. You'll notice that there's a cross hair now that got created. Now, Cinema things that if these two lines were to be extended, that will be the vanishing points. So if the lines were going all the way like this, they'd meet on that cross hair. Now, having two lines sometimes will be enough, sometimes won't be enough. Now, on the right-hand side here, you see that all of these lines, the x, y, and z, need to be solved. The x and y, because we haven't done anything to them, aren't solved yet. The z vanishing point is solved, but it's not quite confident. That's why it's yellow. If you see the yellow bar here, the yellow color, that means that the line is solved, but Cinema doesn't quite know if this will work or not. So what you are trying to do here is to get this color to be green, and in particular, a green with a really small number next to it. I'll show you know what I mean. In order to get this to be green, so in order to help Cinema understand what the z line should be like, I'm going to need to create one or two more z line references here. I'm going to hold down "Command" and drag again. Let's say this time, I could maybe use this area here. I'm now going to use this section where the highlights made the shadows, and then the same here. Now, having the third line in there, you see that the z turned green and it says solved, and next to it, it says 0.001. Now, the smaller this number, the more precise the solution will be. In an ideal world, this number would be zero. That means it understands exactly what this is going to be like. But 0.001 is going to be more than enough for what we need. Let's do z then. Next, we have to tell it whether it's the y that we want to set or the x. Now, I can see lots of y lines here, and I can see a few x lines maybe here, and then maybe there, at the back. You have to decide. There's no right or wrong way of doing this. In this case because I think the y lies are a bit more prominence. I'll just use the y lines here, so I'm going to go and add a new line, and I'll just push this to, let's say here, and then this will go and follow the same line down. Let's say about there. I'm not trying to draw a straight line. I'm trying to draw a line that goes parallel to something that I know to be straight on this photograph, so these lines were straight. I'm drawing a line that goes parallel to those lines, like that. Now, like I said now, we need to turn this into a color so Cinema knows what axis this is. This will be the y, which is green, so I'm going to hold down "Shift," click once, and twice. Now, this is the y line, and again, one line isn't going to cut it, so I'm going to hold down "Control" or "Command" on the Mac, and then drag this, let's say to this side. Then I could do the same here. Just going to start from, let's say this black line is, and this one will be here. Now it says that the y is also solved, but it's yellow, so I need to add a couple of more lines maybe for y, so I'm going to hold down "Command" and then drag this, let's say here this time. Maybe let's say closer to us actually, here, and actually, you can see now, the y vanishing point is set to zero, which is perfect. This now understands that this axis is y and it can understand where the vanishing point for y is. Now, the x, although we haven't done anything for the x, is already indirectly solved, because we set the y and the z, it can understand where the third axis should be, and it does that for us, and it says this is indirectly solved and it's green as well, meaning that we don't have to do anything else to this. We can, if you wanted to, add more x lines as well so that it can use those as reference, but in this case, we don't need to. We're done with the lines for now. Next, we're going to go into the grid. Now, although you don't have to add the grid, it would help Cinema, especially when it comes to positioning and the center of the objects that I'll show you in just a second. I'm going to go and add a grid, which looks like this. I'll just click on these corners and then place them where the floor would be, let's say there, and then this one goes here, and then this one comes down towards us, and this one goes like that. We need to go ahead and tweak this a little more here. I'm trying to get this to be as close to the actual perspective of the floor as possible, and I think this is looking right. We can always tweak this further by clicking on these buttons or the points, and then moving them around, and I think that looks about right. Next, we have to tell Cinema where the center point of the objects should go when you create them. So where is the center of the world? Where is the origin point? That's done by clicking on this Add Pin button. As soon as I do this, this yellow pin gets dropped, and you can push this any way you like, but it will have to be on the corner of a grid like this and you see it snaps, or the tip of one of these lines, like that maybe. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and push this, let's say, to this corner, closer to us, so when we create an object, it knows where to go. It's going to start from here, and with that in place, if I check the right-hand side here, it's solved the x, y, and z vanishing points. It solved the focal length of the camera. It assumes that the focal length is 52. It also solved the orientation of the camera so it knows where the camera should be pointing towards, so that's going to be pointing towards the positive z, so towards this corridor here. The position of this camera is also solved, and this is done by Cinema, assuming the distance. Cinema thinks that the camera should be positioned where it will be in just a second. If you had more information about the lines that you are drawing, let's say, for example, if I go ahead and click on this line, if I know that the length from here to here is exactly, let's say 210 centimeters, I could go ahead and turn this non-length option on and dial in 210, and this will help Cinema understand a little better where the lines are, how long they should be, and where the camera should be positioned as well. In this case, because I don't know the actual length of these lines, I'm going to leave this turned off, and with that, we have all the information that we need so that in the next lesson, we can make use of that. I'll see you on the next lesson. 3. Projecting the Image onto 3D Geometry: Now that we've calibrated the camera, the next step is to actually make use of this information. Let's see how. I'm going to come down here and scroll. The next thing we need to do is to go and click on this Create Camera Mapping Tag button. What this is going to do is to create a texture down here, and it will apply that texture to the camera. Then we need to use that texture later on, project that image or this image onto the objects that we actually create in cinema. Let's see. If I go and click on this, you see that's exactly what happens. I now have a texture here called Tunnel, like the filename. Then I'm just going to rename this to be CAM Texture or CAM Material. Then you can see, it's applied here as well to this camera. Then the next thing we'll do is to come back and click on this tag, and we'll also create a background object. A background object, as you know, is going to be this one here. But together with the background object, it's also going to create a new material next to this one and apply that material to the background object. I'm going to go and click here, and that's exactly what happens. I now have this new material here. Let me just call this BG for background mats, and you see the background material here is applied to this background object. We now have the scene setup. The next thing we'll need is to create some polygons onto which we can project this image. Let's do that. I'm going to go and create a plane, and as soon as I do this, you see because I'm no longer inside this tag, I can freely fly around. The image I am seeing here is the background image. But as soon as I click back on this camera here, so I fly into this camera, we're now seeing the scene through the perspective of this camera that we created. When you're doing some edits, as we will do in just a moment, you need to come out of the camera, so you can see what's happening in the scene. When you want to check the results, you had to go back into the camera. You can see whether or not the thing that you've created fits the scene. If you remember from the previous lesson, we created a pin as part of this camera calibration and then we place the pin down here near the bottom right corner of the grid. That's why when I created the plane, that actually snaps to the same point. If I'm going to fly this or if I just push this back in the Zed space here, this should line up with the rest of the perspective. It looks like there's a plane that's actually traveling along the floor here. This grid here of Cinema 4D is actually getting in the way. I'll just go and turn this off by going to Filter, and then come down to Workplane. I'll also turn off the horizon lines here. I'm going to go back to Filter, come down to Horizon. Finally, I'll turn off these lines here, the axes. I'll go to Filter and then the World Axis, I'll just this off. Now I have this plane. What I'm going to need to do, is to go and set the plane up to be the floor. From that, we can start building up the rest of the room. I'm just going to go and push this here and I'm being careful not to move this up and down because then, it won't be on the floor level anymore. If I now want to move this backwards and forwards, you see I can't quite click on this blue arrow over here because the other two arrows are getting in the way. But what I can do is to go and turn off the X and the Y here. When I click on the object and drag, it's actually moving it's on the Zed. Although I'm not clicking on that arrow, I'm still moving it on the Zed. I'm going to make the plane a little smaller like that, maybe push this towards here a little bit, tiny bit smaller maybe there. I'll also make this a little wider towards the back, so a little deeper rather. I need to click on the yellow dot, and then push this out. Because the Zed is the only one that's turned on now, I can click anywhere on the plane and move it, and that will travel backwards. I'm keeping an eye on radius ends and where it starts as well. If I push this too far, then this area is going to be blank so that won't work. It needs to cover both here and also, it needs to extend all the way out to this vanishing point here. Now that the plane seems to be doing that. What I'm going to do next is to take the texture that I've applied to the camera and project it onto this plane. I'll do this simply by clicking and dragging the texture tag to the plane. As soon as I do that, you see that the tag, the material tag here, has the projection method. It's set to camera mapping, thanks to the camera calibrator that we used, and this means that we can see the image being projected onto the floor properly. If I now come out of this camera, the image will actually be stuck to that surface. If I fly in, you see this was the floor. It looks all too stretched from the side here because the camera originally was somewhere here like an angle like that. But now, this is independent from the camera calibrator or the background. I can actually go and delete both of these, and I will still have this object here with the correct floor tiled up. I actually want those two objects back. So I'm going to go and press Command Zed to bring them back, and in the next lesson, we'll have a look at how to build the rest of the room based on this floor. 4. Reconstructing the 3D environment: Now we have our plane. The next thing we need to do is to start building up the side walls and the ceiling and then the backdoor as well. Let's see. I'm going to go into this camera, oscillate the plane, I'll first lower down the segments to let's say one and one. Then I'll make this plane editable. I can then go to my edges mode here and then select this edge and then shift select this one. Now what I want to do is to extrude these edges up so that I can create this little section here. Let me come out of this. If I zoom in, what I want to do is to create an extrusion that goes up like that and then toward right as well. I'll go back into this camera. You can see I'm using this camera almost like a reference camera now. I can actually go and call this "Reference." I'm going to select the plane again. With these two edges selected I'm going press "D" or right click, and then choose "Extrude," and then click and then drag this up a little bit. You see this is moving up perpendicular to the floor. I'm going to move this up just a little bit. Remember, I'm trying to cover just this section here. So I'll push this down a little bit with this green arrow now. I also want to extend these sideways so I want to stretch them toward the outer parts so that we can add some dimension here. I'm going to press "T" to get my scale tool, and I can push these in that way or out that way. Now, in order to change the quality of this, you can actually go down to the background material, double click, and then come down to "Viewport," and then change the texture preview size to let's say 4k. If I now come out, this result should be a little better. Let me show that again. If I go double click, move this out of the way and then go to "Viewport." If I lower this down, you see how bad the quality is now. It's a little pixelated. Whereas if I increase this, then it looks much nicer. I'll come out of this. If I come out of this reference image or the reference camera, you can see now my floor has actually got some slant or these sides or at least has some slant apply to them. They're not going straight up, they're going a little more like that sideways. Now you can even do it this way. You can just click on "X" and drag it, but you need to stop as soon as you see the texture changing. Here is the texture change line here. If I go drag this in, that's how far I should go. I'll go back to my reference camera. The next thing we need to do is to go and create some lines going up. I'm going to press "D". Now the problem with this is if I go and extrude this again, these are all going toward the center again because the sides are now facing not straight up but inwards toward the center of this room. If I now come out of this reference, you can see this is what the extrusion does, which I don't want. I want these lines to be flat and going straight up, following the lines of the wall. I'll undo this. Go back to my reference camera. Instead, I'll hold down "Control" and then use this green arrow here to create a copy of these edges that are connected to the old ones. So here, "Control," drag up. Now these lines are going parallel to the side walls as well. But the problem with this is that the side lines here aren't long enough. What I'll need to do is to come out of this and then select these lines. All of these lines, I could try a loop selection maybe, so if I go press "UL," you can see there's loops selection, so all of these are selected. I can now deselect these lines because I don't really want them. I can select the selection tool, control and click to deselect these and also deselect these with control key. Now I have the lines that I need. I can go back to reference camera. I'll turn off the Y and the X and then get my move tool. I can click and drag this towards right. Those lines are moving toward the negative Z. So toward us. I'm now extending the rooms depth. That's enough. I'll now select this line and that line. I need to extrude them again, and then this time send them outward. We can see there's a bit of a slant going that way now toward left here, and then toward right here. For that, I'll just hold down control, drag this up a little bit from the Y and then T to get my scale tool, I can even come out of this reference camera. If I start stretching this sideways, you'll see at some point the texture starts changing. This is where the texture starts changing. It's all stretched because I'm at a really funny angle. Now, if I go and fly in to an angle like this, it might be easier to see. You see there the texture changes. You could either do it that way or go to the reference camera and then use this stretching function again to get this just in the place. Then I'll go and get my move tool control drag this up again. Let's say here. I'm just using this line again here. There's a bit of a discrepancy here as well. It looks like the photograph wasn't perfectly symmetrical, but that's fine. You can either manually move this up or in this case, I think we can just get away with it. I'll just leave it as it is. I'll then go and press "T." so I can scale these in to add some detail there. Maybe push this down with Y that much. Then control drag this up. That's gone too far now so let me just go in here. I now want this to go down a little bit until I get to this line here, this black line. I'll now come out of Z and turn on Y only. So I can click anywhere and just drag. This moves to Y, like that. I can also scale this inwards. You can see there's a bit of an outset here. We need to go toward left by scaling it that way. I'll get the move tool by pressing "E," and then control drag this up just a tiny bit. This might be a bit too much, so let me just push this down little, there. Go back into my reference camera. This one here will actually need to be extended all the way to here. Just keep pushing this up. You can see there's a bit of an inward slant as well. I'm going to go and press "T." Then I squash this inwards until there. Maybe lower this down a little bit, and then I squash a little more there. So effectively now if I come out of this camera, you can see this is what I'm creating. I'll then go back in and now on to create another polygon or another set of polygons, one for the left side of the room to cover this shade. I'll get my move tool, control drag this up again. Then T, I can scale this that way. That's gone too far. I'm going to press "E" to get my move tool and push this down, there. Then one last time control drag this up. Then T, so you can scale this inwards to create this final area here. Now that seems to have gone a little too much. I'm just going to go push this back just a tiny bit, there. That's it. That's going to be our room. The only problem we have is the ceiling and the backside. Let me come out of this reference camera. You can see this is our room now in 3D space, and the material, the texture here is projected properly on it. The easiest way to connect this edge to this edge is to use a tool called the bridge tool. If I go right click, this is my bridge tool. I can click on this and then just drag a polygon on to this one and that bridges that. If I come out right to this side, there's an even easier tool for this one called closed polygon hole. If I right click, choose "Closed Polygon Hole," I can then just go and click here. That will close that polygon as well, adding the same texture as this back wall here. If I now go back to my reference camera, I have exactly the same reference as the background and the image I was using. In fact, now I can go and turn off the background by holding the nodes and then clicking once on these. This will turn them on and then once more, so it now turns the background off completely. If I come out of this reference camera and now have myself a room, let me just fly to the entrance here, I now have myself the room that I could do whatever I like with. I can just fly the camera in, look around. Now traveling inside this virtual room now. This is it. Using a single photograph and the camera calibrator tag, we've managed to reconstruct this entire setup in 3D space. Now we can do whatever we like in here. We can create an animation. We can add objects. Let's say for example, if I go and add a cube here, that will go to to where the pen was, so then just fly back a little, select this cube, and go to my model mode here, then the move tool, enabled the Z and then push this cube back. I can make this smaller and it will look like it's actually inside this room. I can make this even smaller, lift it up, like that. This will move in line with the floor and the rest of these walls as well. In the next lesson, we'll have a look at how to add a couple more details to this to make it even more realistic. 5. Adding the Lights: Now the only detail missing from the room are going to be the lights. I'm going to go and delete this cube first and come out with this reference camera. I'm actually outside, so that's all good. I'm going to start let's say with this slide here. I'm going to do that with a simple cylinder, so let's go and add a cylinder in here. I'll just push this back in Z and downward here and then make it thinner, and then I'm going to change its orientation to Z as well and then lift it up. Now, to see where this should be positioned properly, I can actually see this from outside like that, and I can now see these lines or the lights. I can then push this here. That's where this one should be. Let me just check the thickness as well. That seems to be a bit too thick actually. I'm just going to make this slightly thinner like that. That's the first one. I'll just command and drag this one here, so I create a copy of that. This is the second one. Let me see if I've gone a bit too far. Perhaps I did. Let me just go here. Well, that seems fine actually. Let me just turn bit. Then command and drag here as well, so that's the third one. I'll make this one a little longer, so I'm just going to click and drag this to make it slightly longer like that, and then command drag again. That's where this one is going to be, here. A little shorter. Command and drag again. That's there. Non-command drag, and then finally command drag one more time, and now I have all these cylinders that I'm going to use as lights. It looks like I actually missed one here. Let me see if there's one inside. No. I actually did miss one here. I'm going to go select this one, command, drag it here as well. Then I go here and I'll select all of these cylinders and do Alt G to put them inside a group, and I'll call this group Lights. I'll make sure that all of these lights are actually inside the room by pushing these down like that. Then if I go to my reference camera, that's what these are going to look like now. Now, I don't want these lights to finally be visible in the output, I just want them to cast shadows. So what I'll need to do for that is to go and add a material to the lights. So by double-clicking here, we can add a new material. I'll call this Light, and then add this to these lights now. Then I'll just go and double-click on this material and then turn off the reflectance and the color, and only turn on the luminous so they act like light sources. So I'll come out of this. Of course I don't want these lights to be visible like this, so what I'm going to need to do is to go and add a compositing tag to this by right-clicking and then coming down to the render tags and compositing, and I'll tell the lights not to be seen by the camera, not to cast any shadows, not to receive any shadows, so that the only reason the lights are there is to be calculated inside the GI, the global illumination. Which means if I go and render this, the lights are going to be invisible like that, but when we turn the global illumination, the lights will actually start emitting light and then we'll be able to light up the scene based on those cylinders. Now, the other thing that will light up the scene is going to be this texture that we used as well. If you look at the camera material here, this material is automatically applied to the luminance channel, meaning that when you turn the global illumination on, it's going to light up the surroundings, which means if I come out of this, if I place an object here, let's say a cube or text or any model that we like, that model is going to be lit up with the same colors as the rest of the room here, which is going to make things look a lot more realistic, and that's what we'll talk about in the next lesson. 6. Realistic Light Settings: Let's now go and add a dummy object in here so we can see what's going on. I'm just going to go and add a cube and then push this back and then make it smaller. Maybe go to my follow up view here. Then from the front order side, doesn't matter. You lift a cube up to be on the floor. Now, because my Z is highlighted, I cannot move this up and down. Was going highlight the others as well. Can normal this up there. Then I'll just push this toward here so it's inside the room and then go fullscreen here on the perspective view, and then turn off y and x so I can just push this back towards the wall there at the back. If I rounded this now you see it looks a bit dull because the global illumination is turned off so that the walls and the ceiling and the floor and everything else in the scene, they don't create any lighting scheme for this cube. I'm going to go and add a simple material to the cube first, circle this cube. Then just drag this on top of the cube. I'm just going to now from this point on, do Shift R so that we can compare the current version, let me render to the version that we'll end up with. Let me turn on the global illumination. I'm going to go and press Shift R. This will create the initial render. I actually don't quite like these edges. Let me just go ahead and get rid of these as well. I'm going to come out of this by pressing Command W. I'll also come out of this reference file or the reference camera. Let me just go back out. Select my plane, which is the room with me. Just go and rename this to be room. If I select this and go to my edges mode here, actually I can't do much with this cause it looks like the texture actually ends up here. I don't want to move the camera around. If I move the camera here, you see the texture gets messed up. I don't want to do that. I'll then come back to my reference camera. I'll just leave this as it is, because later on we'll be creating a camera anyway and we can get rid of these. Let me just go and bring up my picture viewer again by pressing Shift and F6. This is what the initial version looks like then just zoom into this. The room setup looks a bit too boring. I'm going to come out of this now and then simply go and turn on my global illumination by coming up to my Render Settings. Then here where it says effect. Then I'll just turn on the global illumination with the default settings. I'm not going to change anything just yet or come out of this. The one more render Shift R and you'll see now that the lights we created here, they're casting or emitting light and the room itself is also creating a light source as well for the cube, and everything else that you'll be adding to the scene. Let's see what this looks like. Now already you can see that the cube takes the same color scheme as the room. This was before and this is after. Now it looks like a flat boring square directly because we don't really see any other part of the cube. Let's go and add a couple more interesting things there. So I'll just go ahead and close this and then I'm going to add some text maybe. If I go to more text, and I'll put the more text inside the cube so I can zero out the coordinates so it's in the same place as the cube. Now I'll come out of this camera, fly right in and then make this text smaller. Then push this here. In fact, I'll select this cube with my modal tool here and select the cube, I'll then extend it sideways and then maybe make it slightly shorter. Then pushes down again. So let me just go to my follow up view, my middle picking. Then in the front view here, I can just push this down. Because the text is the child that travels with the cube, which is fine. I'll also select the text and then turn on the x and y so I can push it this way and I'll just go and update the text that say something like "Come closer" and make it slightly smaller. Then when I come out, go my perspective view, I can now make the text, let's say slightly thicker by using, say, a different fonts like Tahoma. I'll go for bold. I'll make this a little bigger. Then center this on the cube again. Also, I'll make the text a little thicker as well. I'm going to go to the text and the depth I'll set that to, let's say two. Maybe let's go for four. Like that. I'll go to caps and then add more, fill it cap here like that. Then when I fly back to my reference camera, render this now Shift R and see what this looks like. Now the text is actually taking the color of the room as well. If I go back and forth you see, that's pretty cool. The only problem I think is that the scene, the cube and the text is a bit too dark. I'm going to come out of this and then go to my material there that's lighting the entire scene up. That was the material we applied to the room. I'll just go and double-click. I'll then got to illumination. I'll be using this as the polygon lights. This is going to optimize the set-up here so that the global illumination works for faster. Then the generate GI, I'll increase the strength from 100 to let's say 300. If I come out of this, render this again, you see that the result is going to be much brighter as far as the cube and the text is concerned, it's going to be much brighter. Let me just wait for this to finish. Now, this was before, and this is after. You can see already, it's much brighter. Let me bring the cube and the text closer to us so we can see what's going on a little better. I'll come out of this. Select the cube, turn only the Z axis on, and it's bringing this closer to us. If I now render this shift R let's see what this looks like. Now, this is looking much nicer. You can see now if I go back and forth, I now have some more detail here, which is looking pretty cool. You can see the light that we created here is actually creating these shadows of the text on the cube. Well, the problem is that the cube itself doesn't create any shadows on the floor. The reason for that is that the floor, which is part of the room and modal, is using a texture that's got the luminance channel turned on. It's acting as a light source, which means it cannot receive any shadows. To fake that, what I'm going to do is to go to my render settings and add the ambient occlusion as well. If I now go render this shift R again, that solution is going to create those contact shadows on the floor, even though it's got the material with the luminous shadow turned on, it's still going to make the edges of the cube where it touches the floor, a little darker, faking the shadows. It's going to make it look much more realistic. Let's have a look. Now you can see here the shadows are created and if I go back to the previous render, this was before, this is after. All of these contact points shadows are created now, which is looking pretty cool actually. The only other problem I realized here is that the light that we created are also being calculated for the ambient occlusion. Those cylinders are also creating these contact point shadows. Now I can exclude those cylinders from damage opposition calculations. Let me come out of this, go to my compositing tag for the lights. Then there's this option here which is seen by AO, ambient occlusion. I can turn it off. If I now render this shift R you see now that the ambient occlusion won't care about the cylinder, so it will just exclude or ignore those cylinders as far as ambient occlusion calculations are concerned. On the ceiling, you won't have any weird shadows where we don't actually see the object. Take a look now once it finishes rendering. Let me go to the previous render first by clicking here and then zoom in. These are the shadows I was talking about. These dark areas and this version, those are excluded from the render. We went from this to this now. Let's now have a look at some more settings of the global elimination. I'll come out of this, go to my render settings by pressing Command B and select the global illumination. By default, we only had the primary method turned on, so the light bounces only once. But if I go to the secondary method, set this to irradiance cache as well and then I can increase the diffused depth, which means that the light can bounce as many times as we need here. I'm going to set this a size it goes which is eight. The gamma is the overall brightness of the scene. I'm not going to set the gamma first, so we can compare the primary method on to primary plus the secondary methods. I'm just going to go render this by pressing Shift R. The only thing that changed was the secondary method from none to irradiance cache. I increase the diffused depth to eight. This should give us a much brighter result now. The light will bounce off more than once. It will just bounce off in this case, eight times, meaning that the overall result is going to be brighter. The room, mind you won't be brighter. It's only the objects inside the room that will be brighter because the room is already the light source itself. With the secondary method turned on, this is what the result looks like now. If I go back to the previous one, this was the primary method only. This is the primary plus the secondary method with eight bounces. This is looking much better now you can see the text looks much more realistic, but this comes at a cost of a much longer render time. Instead of 35 seconds, I now went up to three minutes so there's about six times longer than what I had before. This is something you have to keep in mind. The better you want the results to look, the more realistic you want them to look, the longer you had to wait for the render to finish. 7. Adding and Animating a Camera: Now that we have scene set up, let's have a look at how we can create an alternative camera that we can send through this corridor. First, I'm going to go and select this Cube and then send back away from us. I'll come out with this Reference camera here, so I can move back manually, like that. I'll have to figure out where I want the camera to start from, and this is going to be my limit. I can't go any further than this, so I'm going stick to something like this maybe, here. That's where I'm going to start from. With that, I'm just going to go and create a new Camera, and I'll call this one Action Cam, like that. As long as I'm inside this camera now, when I move my screen around by pressing 1123 on the keyboard. This is not changing the position of this camera. Let's say maybe I'll start from a high angle like this, and then I'll just go and keyframe this from the side here. I'll just go and keyframe this camera. I don't want to scale to be keyframed, not the parameters, but only the position and the rotation. Maybe let's not start too close to that wall actually, so I'll just go something like that. I'll go in keyframe this at the beginning. Then give this a bit more time to play with, so I'll just go and extend my timeline to 200 frames, and then go forward to 100. Then push the camera in, like that, and then keyframes again. If I now go back and play, this is the animation we have now. It's a bit too fast, I think. Let's go and slow this down. Let's now fly in like that. As the camera flies, what I can do to make it feel more like a handheld camera or an action camera, is to add a tag to it, a Vibrate tag so that as it flies, it actually shakes a little bit like a handheld camera would. For that, I'm going to go and right-click on this Camera, and then go to Animation Tags, and add the Vibrate tag. I'm going to turn on Enable Position. I will lower these numbers down to 10 by 10 by 10. That's 10 on the x, 10 on the y, 10 on the zed. The frequency of two might be a bit too much, so let's see. If I go back and play, it looks like a drunk person is actually riding this camera. I'll stop this, go back and lower this down to one. Let's see what that looks like. It's still a little too frantic. I'll stop this again and go back, and set this to maybe 0.3, and then try again. I think that's a little better now. It adds a bit of a movement on the x, y, and zed to the camera, to make it look not so stable. I'll do the same for the rotation as well. Actually, I was going to turn this on and set the amplitude to five degrees on all axes here, and the frequency to 0.3. The head of the camera can also rotate and bank and the pitch can change as well. Let's see. Yeah, that's looking more like it. Well, I don't actually like the camera flying that far, so I'm going to push the cube closer to us, and I'll go to that last keyframe of the camera. Holding down the Shift key, and then pull back a little bit to re-frame this on this cube, here, and keyframe again. If I now go back and play, this is what we have. This is how simple it is to create a camera and then add the Vibrate Tag to make it look like it's actually shaking. 8. Adding More 3D models with the help of Dynamics: Now let's see if we can make the scene look a little more interesting. I've removed that random-looking cube and I've placed two barricades here. As you can see, one metal barricade and the concrete one here. What I'm going to do is to scatter these two barricade around the scene to make it look a little more interesting. I'll start with this concrete one. My y-axis is turned off, which means if I click anywhere and just drag, it's only going to go on the x and the z which is great. Let's say you place one here and then I can rotate this a little bit on the heading here. Then just push this back. Then maybe I can command and drag this back behind this text. I'll rotate this a little bit like that and then pushes closer to that wall. Then maybe we can have one tilted over at the back. I'm going to hold down Command and then drag this further back and then say rotate it. Now, I want this to be on the floor like that but I don't know how much rotation I should give it. Right now it looks like only this part is touching the floor. You can see there this part is touching but the rest aren't. If I go to the side view here, you can see actually here that this is way off. Now I could try and get this rotation exactly right and then just push this down and then try and rotate again and so on. Or the easier way would be to use dynamics. So I could turn this concrete barricade into a rigid body and the floor into a collider so that when I let this barricade fall, it will be blocked by the floor, it would be stopped by the floor, and then it would be in the correct place. Let me just go back out. In fact, I'll do the same for all of these barricades because I don't really know if these are touching the floor. In fact, it looks like these are actually floating a little bit like that. This next solution, will be a quick fix. I'm going to go and create a null of all these barricades. Select them all and then Alt G and then I'll call this Barricades. Then I'll go and right-click on this now and add to it a rigid body tag and then I'll make the room a collider. So that when I play this, look what happens. All the barricades fall and now they're being stopped by the floor, by the room so that they're now making perfect contact with the floor. If I now go back, I think there was one more here. This one. Let me just rewind and play again. This was also floating. If I play, that's now also in the correct place. I'm going to go back a little bit first I'll just go and fix this a couple more times in the back. I'm going to go into my steel barricade. Let's say we have one here, rotate it a little bit maybe and then maybe a copy here at the back. Rotate it that way. Then another few at the back here that are going to be tilted like that. Then maybe one more, say at the back there. I'll just go to my arrows here but you can see the arrows the axes, they actually don't point anymore to the z, x, and the y as we're used to because we've rotated objects. But on the keyboard, if I just go and tap W, that resets the coordinates to be world oriented. This coordinate system now is based on the axis or the world as opposed to the local object axis. That's W on the keyboard or it's this key here. I can now hold down command and just drag this further back and then lift this up. Let me see if that would be enough. I think that will be enough, we don't need to do an overkill. Let's go and push this closer to us. I think that's going to be enough. What I'll do now is actually, it might be nicer if I lift this up as well. It looks like it's knocked over. Like that. What I'll do now, is to just go and play this and everything would just fall into the correct positions like this. Now I can see that these at the back aren't actually falling down or being knocked over. I'm going to go back and then zoom right in and I'll tilt these a little more. I'm going to select this barricade first, lift it up, tilt it more and then the same with this one here as well. Like that. It was this one. I'll tilt this a little more and then come back out. When I play, that should fall down properly. Let me see. No, it still doesn't. I'm going to go back, tilt this even more then play it. Now they're gone. That means you've got these worked as well. This one didn't, I think these legs are keeping them imbalanced. I'm going to go back and then select the barricade, I'll tilt this a little more, and now that should fall properly. There you go. That's all good, that's all good, and this I want to be standing up, that's great. This can be on the floor, that's perfect. Let me now go back to my action cam and let's see what this looks like. I'm going to go back to the beginning. I'll actually bring this one closer to us. In fact, I'll make this a little larger and now if I play, that's what this looks like. Looking good. Now what I want to do though, is I don't obviously when all of these to fall down cause it will just look like this is raining barricades which we don't want. What I can do is to let this play for a couple of frames and then go to the barricades tag and then come down to where it says set initial state. When I do this, then I rewind, the barricades will already be on the floor, which is great. I can now actually go and kill this tag, I select the tag, and then delete it. The object will actually remain on the floor like they have been knocked over already. If I go back and play, this is great. Now I can stop this and then go to the room. Remove the tag from the room as well, we don't need this anymore. Now we have to go and set up the framing of the camera properly. I'm going to go and play this once more. That's looking good but I feel like there's a bit of a gap here, which I don't quite like. In fact, what I could do is to take this text, make this a little larger, and then rotate this around a little bit. Then push this here and now if I go back and play, that should hopefully fix that issue. That's looking great. I'll stop the playback and in next lesson, we'll add a couple more random objects to the scene. 9. Creating Flying Papers with Soft Body Dynamics: Now, let's have a look at how we can add some flying paper, newspapers, brochures, flyers into the scene. For that, I'll use some dynamics and I'm going to combine them with emitters. I'll go to Simulate, Particles, and create an emitter. In fact, let me show you this on a different project so it's easier to understand, and then we can come back here and apply what we learned onto the scene. Let me just go delete this, create a new scene by pressing Command N. In here, I'll go and create a particle emitter. I'll also create a plane. Then I'll push the plane inside the emitter. But then of course, I need to make the plane smaller like that. I'm going to go to the emitter and turn on this Show Objects option so that when I play, I can see these planes. I'll go back to the beginning. I make the plane a soft body. If I go select the plane, right-click "Simulation Tags", and create a soft body from this plane, now what will happen if I play, is that they'll just fall down. If I increase the speed of the emitter from here, it will go faster but they still just fall down like they're rigid objects. Now, what I want to do is to go to the Planes tag, and then go to Force. Then here, there's an option where it says aerodynamics and lift. This will create a lift from underneath the objects, so they will resist the air relative a bit and they'll start folding. If I now go and increase this lift, and play, it doesn't work yet. Because if you have 2D objects like the plane or a disk, you need to also turn on this option here where it says two-sided. If I go and turn this on, this will now respect rather the 2Dness of the object. If I play this, you see now they'll start bending, and folding, and breaking as they go. Now, if I go back, let me just lower the segment on the plane so it's a little faster for playback. Let's say we got to have seven-by-seven, and then go to the emitter, increase the speed a little bit, and add some variation as well. If I now play, some will play faster, some slower. I don't want as many as these, so I'll just go to the birthrates. Let say three-by-three. I don't want that much variation, so I'll just lower this down to, let's say 25. I'll increase the speed a little bit. They are emitted much faster. Now, what I can do is to go and add the material to these pieces of paper. If I just go and double-click, and then call this flyer, and then double-click to go in, and you'll go to color, texture, and then load an image, and it will be this flyer image. If I go into Open, it asks me if I want to copy this to where my project is. Yes, I do actually. Now the resolution here, as you can see, is 900 by 1,273. I need to make the plane at least the same ratio so that it works nicely and we don't have any stretching or squashing. I'm going to keep this in mind, 900 by 1,273. I'm going to go to the plane and then set this to be 900 by 1,273. Of course, that's going to make the plane massive. I'll go back. I'll play it. You see, I have huge planes now, but that's fine. As long as the plane is selected and my scale tool is selected, and I click outside and drag, I can proportionally scale this plane. I won't see it now because I've already started animation. I'll go back and play. It is smaller now. Let me just take the plane outside the emitter and then scale it. It's going to be the size of each paper. Then put this back inside the emitter. Now, when I play, that's the correct ratio now. All I have to do is to go and apply this flyer to the plane. Now, we have ourselves lots of flyers flying about. Now, I can take this emitter, copy it, press V on the keyboard to open up my heads-up display, come down to Projects, and then go my barricades projects, and then come out of this action cam, paste the emitter here, and then reposition like that. When I play, this is what I'm getting. Of course, it's not interacting with the floor or the other object yet. I'm going to need to make the floor and all the collider objects. I'm going to go to the Room, Simulation Tags, Collider, and then drag this to the MoText, and also to the barricades. I now go back and play, and see that this object would be stopped by all of these smaller objects. Stop this, go back. It looks like the plane is quite massive. I can make this quite small actually since it's huge compared to the barricades, almost the same size as the barricade. I'll go back, select the Plane, and then press T. Make this maybe about 65 percent or so. Then when I play, that's looking a little better. But I'm going to need to shoot these faster. So I'm going to pause this, go back, select the emitter, and then go to the speed. Increase this to let's say 1,000, and then play. Some will fly faster, some slower. One other thing that can help is if I lower down the overall gravity so they don't fall down as quickly. If I stop this, press Control D or Command D on the Mac, and then go to Dynamics. Here, we have the gravity factor. If I lower this down by about half, so if I go 500, now if I play from the beginning, they won't fall as quickly. You can see they don't get collected all in front of this barricade here. Let's see what this looks like from the camera's perspective. I'm going to go into the action cam and then come back, play. This is what that's looking like now. That's pretty cool, but I don't quite like how all of these actually cover up this text and it's quite hard to read, especially the first part of this text. What I'll do is to go back to the beginning, go to the emitter and I'll just increase the seed now so this will just randomize the emission of these particles. Maybe lift the emitter itself up a little bit. Some of these particles will actually go behind this text here. If I play, that's looking great. You manage or sorted out with the seed, and a bit of change in the position and the rotation of the particle emitter. 10. Baking Dynamics: Since we've now used the dynamic animation and we've created these flying papers, we need to go and cache these frames to RAM so that we can scrub in a timeline back and forth without having any problems because right now I'm allowed to play this normally. You can see the papers are flying. But if I pause the playback and if I wanted to go back by a couple of frames, it won't let me. If I try, am going back, but you see the particles remain in the same place. I can go forward from here, the particle will continue, but as soon as I start going back, it will stop. So for this, and in order to be able to preview the timeline properly, I'm going to go back to the beginning and then select the plane's tag and then go to cache and then bake all objects here, which will take a couple of seconds. But all of these simulation animations are not being cached into RAM so that if I need to go and scrub the timeline, I'll just be simply able to move the plane back and forth and see exactly what happens then. So here's what I mean. If I click and drag, this plays normally, and I can go back, and it plays backward as well now. I can find out exactly what happens to every single piece of paper at any given time. This will speed up the processing a lot. The only downside to this is you can't make any more changes to this animation unless you go and clear all the cache, then you can make some changes, and then of course you have to go and rebake so that you can cache all of these to the RAM and then play from the RAM again. But this is one step that you need to take when it comes to working with any type of dynamic animations. 11. Adding Motion Blur: Let's now go and do a quick test render to see what our frames actually look like. I'm going to go push this forward and find a nice frame that I can render. Maybe let's say that frame looks good. We've got some information here and we're quite close to the texts as well. Let's see what this looks like when we render. I'm just going to double-check that my global illumination is turned on, it is and my ambient occlusion as well for the shadows, that's great. I'll come out of this and then just press "Shift R" to the quick render to the picture viewer. This is what the result looks like. It's looking good but the only problem I might say is that the objects that are moving are too sharp. We don't usually get this in real life. If I was to wave my hand about like this, you just see a blur rather than my hand on a sharp frame. But these objects, these pieces of paper, they're moving so fast, they're flying but there's still just as sharp as pretty much everything else. To fix that, we're going to go and add some motion blur and that's possible by using the physical renderer. Let me show you how. I'm going and close this and then open up my renderer and change it from the standard to physical. Under the physical tab now we had the motion blur option. I can just go and turn this on without changing any other settings, if I should go and close this and then render again, let's see what this looks like. It gives us a warning saying that we should cache the simulations before rendering with the motion blur. We've done that already, I can press" Okay" and now we wait and see what the motion blur looks like once it's rendered. You can see as this is rendering the bits that take the longest to render are the bits that are actually blurry. These are the bits that take the longest and everything else just pretty much flies with the render. Let me just wait for this to finish as well. There's going to be a couple more passes there. If I zoom in here, I can already see it's not only this one but everything that's moving. In this case, because the camera was moving, everything's going to be blurry. Let me just go back to the previous one. This is before and this is after. Now, this adds that much of a realism to the entire setup, the entire render. This is before again, and this is after. There's a big difference but this comes at a cost of longer render times. Instead of about half a minute, this took about three times longer than the first one. If you're happy waiting for that long, you should definitely turn this on and it's going to make a huge impact on how good the renders look. I'm going to go back and forth so we can check it one more time like that. I'll zoom back out and then close this to control the amount and motion blur you have, you're going to need to go to the camera and then come down to physical, and then here you can control the shutter speed. Just like an actual camera. If you leave the shutter open for longer then there's going to be more motion blur. If I go and set this to let's say 1/15th rather than 1/30th, it's going to have twice as much motion blur. Whereas if I lowered this down to let's say 1/60th, it's going to have half the amount. Let's try if I go to 1/60th and then try this one more time Shift R to the render to the picture viewer and I accept this warning and let's wait and see what this looks like now. This should be a little quicker because we're going to have less motion blur. Let's see what the final result looks like in just a second and you can see now this is a rendering much faster and let's see how long it takes for the bits that are blurry. Even those bits are a little quicker than they were before, these parts. You can see it's still blurry but not as blurry as it was before. We are allowing the shutter to remain open for a shorter period of time. This is the result we're getting then. Instead of about one minute 40 seconds, now we're down to 120 or so for the overall render times. If I now zoom in, this was the previous one with the camera shutter remaining open for 1/30th of a second and this is the one with 1/60th of a second. We have less blur on this. This is the most obvious spits here, we have less blur. This before, this is after. Of course, there's less blur everywhere else as well but this is the blurriest part that's why I'm using this section to demonstrate this feature. You'll also notice the quality of this blurry area isn't great. That's because in the render settings if I come out of this, go to render settings, the sampler quality here is set too low. If I increase this from low to medium, this is going to make it look better but this will come at a cost of longer render times again. In this case, I don't want this. I'm just going to go and set this to low, and then come out of this. That's how you add the motion blur to anything that's moving in cinema. 12. Colour Correcting with Magic Bullet Looks: Now, before we run the result, what I want to show you is a bit of Magic Bullet Looks, which has been added in the recent versions of Cinema. It's an amazingly easy way to create a really nice look and feel to the entire piece. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go to my Render Settings by pressing, Control B or Command B on the Mac. Then, down here we have the Magic Bullet Looks now, if you're using the latest version. I'm going to turn this on. Then if I come and click here where it says, Open Magic Bullet Looks, this will open up almost like a separate software in its own right. Magic Bullet Looks has been around for quite awhile and it used to be a plugin for Premiere Pro, and After Effects, and some other applications. Now it's part of Cinema 4D as well. I'm not going to go through every single setting here, that would be a different course altogether. But what I do want to show you, is on the left-hand side, you get these Looks. Yours might be collapsed already. If I click here, yours might be looking like this. We need to go and click here for us to open up your Looks. You have a ton of different filters here that you can use. You'll just have to go through each one of these and then if there's one that you like the look of, let's say for example, you quite like this, all you have to do is to click, and then come down here, and hit this tick mark here. It will apply this effect to your clip or to your Render rather. Now, let's actually go and have a look at how we can tweak a few of these as well. Let's say, we go to Filters and then choose this one called Day Trip. Now I can hide my Looks and in fact, I can hide these Scopes as well by clicking here. Now, at the bottom, you have all these elements that make this effect. If you click on each one, let's say, for example, if I click on this Star Filter, I can now see the settings of the Star Filter here and then start tweaking it. If I, for example, go to the Size, increase this. You can see the sizes here are getting larger. If I increase the Boost, this makes them even more obvious. I can now bring the size down or up. The Threshold, this will control which colors or brightness affects the star's appearances. If I go to Threshold, lower this down. Pretty much all the colors will be affected. Whereas if I increase this only the brightest pixels will be affected. I don't want this to be this crazy actually, so I'm just going to go and boost this back down to about maybe minus 0.6. If I go to Size, lower this down as well so it's vaguely there. The Threshold, I'll just go and decrease this a tiny bit, so that the scene is affected a little more. Now, this one is for the Star Filter. I can go to the second one here, the Lens Vignette. I can control the vignette amount. For example, if I go to the Vignette here, increase or decrease this, so we can control which section is getting darker, that's what vignetting is, the darkening of the frame's edges. I can also control the amount, how dark the edges get. We can see that. Or if you want to control the overall color, I can click here, for example, where it says HSL Colors. Or I can go to this Colorista and now this gives me more options. If you've ever done the color correcting before in something like Premiere Pro or After Effects or DaVinci, you'll be familiar with this. You can actually control the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights independently. For example, if I don't want the shadows to be as green as they are now, I can click and drag this middle point here, the pin up away from the green, you can see I'm taking some of the green away from this clip now. I'm going to exaggerate this so we can see what's happening. I went to the other extreme, I'm going to push this back here, something like that. Lets say, I'm happy with this, I'm just going to come down here, click this Tick, and it takes me back into Cinema. I can close this now. Now by default you're not going to see anything until you Render. But if you come up here to where it says Options, you can then come down to Magic Bullet Looks and if you turn it on, this is going to give you a preview of what your final Render is going to look like. Now, your Render is going to look a little different than this because of the globe elimination, and ambient occlusion, and the motion blur. But still, this is going to give you an idea as to what you might expect to receive a demo, that Render. Let's leave this on the screen and I'm going to do one more quick Render by pressing Shift R to see what the final result actually looks like. I'm going to press Shift R now. Again it gives us the warning because of the motion blur, we say fine. I'll see in a couple of seconds once this Render finishes. You see while this is rendering the Magic Bullet Looks doesn't actually appear. But as soon as it finishes rendering, it's going to give us the effect and you will see the green and the stary effect that we created after the render finishes, just like this. This is a great way of color correcting eclipse before you even take it into After Effects, or Premier, or anywhere else really for that matter. This was the previous Render, and this is the current Render with Magic Bullet Looks. It's a great addition to this latest version of Cinema 4D. 13. Conclusion: That's it folks. This is how you take a photograph and bring it to life in cinema 4D. I really hope you found the course useful and enjoyable. I can't wait to see what you guys create with the skills you've just learned. Go ahead. Take some photographs and bring them to life and share them with me here or on social media. If you don't have any images to work with, feel free to use the ones I provided with this course. Finally, I'd appreciate if you could leave a feedback or review so that other students can benefit from it as well. Once again, thanks for watching my course and I hope to see you on the next one.