Chromatic Balloon 3D Type in Cinema4D

1. INTRO - Chromatic Balloon 3D Type in Cinema4D: Hello everyone, My name is Clarence and in this course I will teach you how to create this balloon chromatic three D text in cinema for D. I've been exploring this kind of style for a while now, as it has been trending a lot lately. And I thought I could show you what I've learned so you can implement it in your own workflow. We will start in Photoshop to prepare the text files and then move to Cinema or D to convert it to three D. First I will show you how to create this chromatic style where we will also work with the octane materials, the light settings, and then continue with the balloon effect. Here I will show you a different way of using this technique to come up with unique variations of three D text animations. In the end, we will finalize everything in after effects. For this course, you will need Photoshop Cinema for 2023, and up and after Effects. The purpose of this course is to teach you creative ways of using all these techniques so you can find a way to keep exploring and learn more yourself. 2. 01 Showing Examples and Inspiration sources: Okay, before we get started, just wanted to show you some examples or some sources of inspiration that you can use for your own creations. Here are some examples of what I've worked so far using this balloon effect. For example, here, I've combined the balloon effect also with this frame. And it pushes the text inside. And I put this text, I can breathe to make more sense from it. Here I tried again the same effect but with the chromatic background. Just try to do some combinations here. I tried to create an environment and also combine the balloon effect with a static three D text. In this case, besides the balloon effect, I've tried to add a displacement on the texture. You can see that it's not flat here. I converted chromatic shape to a balloon effect. What I'm trying to say is that there are different ways of using this effect. And just wanted to show you some examples. For example here, apply it to a three D head, the effect. This is the result Also I've found Instagram profile, some artists that have been experimenting with the effect and that I'll share it with you so you can get inspired from it first. There is this guy, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but yeah, you can go through all these and take inspiration from them. This other profile, you can see all these experiments. I really like the graphics that are created behind the, the three D text. You can see these for inspirations as well. Of course, you can also use Pinterest. You can just search balloon three D texts or things like that and there are a lot of results that you can find. I just wanted to show you this because for me, whenever I want to start something new, I always do some research and see what other people do, see how they use these effects. I can combine everything I know with what I see. This is why I wanted to show it to you. 3. 02 Finding Fonts: Okay, so before we start in Photoshop, I wanted to show you some funds that you can download for that you can go to this website to download free funds for the balloon effect. I guess you can go with this category, fancy cartoon right here. And you can download any of these. I'm going to download a few as well, just to test it. Of course, if you will use screen tablet, you can use the font and then draw on top of it, just so you can have it as a reference for the chromatic type text. You can go with this Gothic category and see what you like. For example, I can download this one, make sure that they have the sharp edges because the three D effect will look better on these shapes. Okay, I'm downloading this one as well. You can explore and see what you'd like. You can also go to other websites to download these funds. But just have in mind that for the balloon effect, of course you need something around for the other effect. Go with this look with the sharp edges. Okay, now let's move to Photoshop. 4. 03 Create and Export your Text: Okay, I just installed the fonts, and now I'm creating a new document in Photoshop. Now I'll just type two words using two different fonts. So I can start with the one for the chromatic text, and I'll go with this one. Let's increase the size. Okay, I just made the first and the last one bigger just to create more symmetry. Now I will use another font for the balloon effect. Okay, now that you have the text, the next thing that you can do is to export this as an AI path. But before we do that, I want to create something using my screen tablet. Just having this as a reference, I'll create a new layer and now I'll use my screen tablet. Okay. As you noticed, I made the text thinner than the example that we have. Because have in mind that in this text we will apply the balloon effect. It will get bigger. It's good to start with something thinner. Yeah, I'll create a new layer Now, go to the paint bucket tool. Make sure to select this all layer because we want to fill the space inside the text. If we do this now, it won't affect the space inside. So we need to check this and make sure you are on a new layer. Yeah, let's do this now. We can uncheck the layer below. Let's make a copy of this because you can also, it go to filter and go to Liquefy. You can use any of these tools. Let's increase the size. Yeah, I'm just showing you some effects that you can use to edit your text. But of course that's all up to you, what you'd like to use. I just want to show you the tools. Okay. Now it doesn't look really nice, but have in mind that we will apply the balloon effects. Now I'm going to show you how you can export these as an AI path. Let's make this figure. We need to select the text. For that you hold Control key and click on the text here. Now it will be selected. Now go to Paths, go to this icon right here. Work path from selection. And now we have the path, we go to File Export Path to Illustrator. And save this. Okay, now let's undo. And I'm going to do the same thing for the other text here. I'm going to select this, go to make work path from Selection file Export path to Illustrator. And save this as well. Okay, now let's just save this document and we will move to cinema for D. 5. 04 Text to 3D Object: Okay, now we are in cinema for D. And let's open the AI path that we just created. Okay, I'm going to position it in the center, so I'm going to make these zero. Now we can see that each letter has its certain path. If we can start, yeah, it starts on path one because there are some glitches that happen. For example, this doesn't represent any path, is just one point. I can delete this. Same for these other ones. Okay, These are all the letters. Instead of having them separately, I can select them all and connect objects plus delete. Now we just have one path now to convert this to a three D object, we just need to go to this extrude effect and we can hold old key. The path is below the extrude effect and you can see that it is converted to a three D object. What we can do is go to object and here you can adjust the offset so you can see the depth. Okay, I'm going to make this three for now, and then we can adjust it later. Now the important thing is to go to caps. We just need to adjust this size on the both levels. As you can see, immediately you get this effect, extrude effect that, as I said, looks nicer on fonts that have these sharp edges. To make this more round, you can change these segments right here. You can see if you decrease it, it is sharper and if you increase it, we get more round shape. That's up to you. The two main settings are the size and the segments. Then of course, you can also play around with a curve right here. So you can select this and change it and see how the text is affected by it. That all depends on the kind of look that you like. Usually, as I said, I just change these two settings, the size and the segments. Okay, now I'm going to convert this to an object. Let's make a copy control and hold check. I'm going to keep this just in case. Now select the whole thing, right click, connect objects plus delete. I'm going to delete these as well. Now if we see the polygons, we can see that they are not regular. To fix that, we use the Volume Builder and volume measure hold old key and go to volume builder, make sure to decrease the voxel size. I think 0.1 will be better. But first of all, let's apply also the volume measure by holding old key. It is applied on top of it. As you can see this does the remash of the three D object that we have. But first of all we need to go to volume builder and there we decrease this. The more details we get, longer it takes to calculate. Okay, As you can see with 0.1 and the volume measure here, 50% it works. Okay? I'll leave it like that now. I'm just going to add re measure to make it more smooth. I'm going to make the measured density 50% I'm going to select the whole thing and go to this current state to object. As you can see, it creates a new object. I'm going to group this by holding olden G. I'm going to disselected so we can have just one object. Now if we go to polygons, yeah, we can see that we have regular polygons. Of course, you can also use this other one as an object if you want more of these sharp edges. It's up to you personally. I like this one. It seems more organic to me. I just wanted to show you these options. It's how do you want your three texts to look like? 6. 05 Chromatic Type Light and Materials: Now I'm going to work with the lights and the materials. I'm going to open octane light viewer. I'm going to create an octane camera making the focal length 80. Now let's just adjust the position. I'm going to make sure that it is in the center. Same for the text. I'm going to axis. Okay, Now I'm creating a key frame. I'm going to create an environment and as you can see now it's all black. Of course, there are different ways of creating the light. You can also just use an area light that's adjust this. I'm going to put it from behind so it creates a rim light. I'm going to make the light itself invisible. For the material, I'm just going to create a metallic material. So let's increase the metallic here. And now I'm going to increase the roughness as well. The next thing that I'm going to do is apply an octane sky. Let's check the light for now. There is this environment that I usually use for this works, that I like because it creates the reflections on the text can see better. Then what I can do is change that orientation of the environment so we get different reflections on the text. If you want to render it as an image, of course you can just pick one position that you like and do the render. You can also work with the power here. If you want to do an animation like I will do, I will animate the Y X. First of all, let's make this longer. I'm going to create a key frame in the beginning, Now go to the end. Okay? Actually even from the start, I'm going to go on the other side. Just so we can create a loop. I'm going to make the animation linear. Now if I click play, you can see the reflections that happen on the metallic material. Depending on how you adjust the roughness, you can see how sharp the reflections look like. Again, this is something else that you can change based on what you like more. Now, I can also apply the light behind it and I'm going to decrease the power. I'm going to apply a black background behind, just so I can see better how it will look like. Let's make a copy of this one. I'm going to make this a diffuse material now. Actually I need to change this one. Let's make this diffuse. And I'm just going to make it black. Okay, let's apply it on the plane. Now we can see better how this looks like. Of course, you can make post production on octane camera, you can increase the bloom power, make some adjustments here. If you want more light, you can just go to the octane light and increase it here. Again, it's up to you. You can decrease the temperature to make this in another color. Something else that you can do is also play around with this film layer. You can decrease it here and increase the float and you can get these colorful reflections. Okay, I like this one. You can also apply a color on the texture. Also, I make some adjustments on the camera imager. I enable this and I can adjust the exposure, usually I these different color variations and see what I like more, saturate to white. Hopefully, I'm not giving too much information at once. But what I'm trying to say is that there are different ways of editing the lights and the color of the text, basically by changing the material, by changing the HDRI, by changing the octane sky, by animating it, by working with different area lights, and also with the adjustments on the octane camera. I think I like this look, so I'm going to leave it like this. Yeah, Now I'm going to save this as a project and move to the other project with a balloon effect. 7. 06 Balloon Simulation: Okay, now let's continue with the other pact with the balloon effect. So the first few steps are the same as the previous workflow that I showed you. Let's start by opening the AI pad that we created. Okay, I'm going to do the same steps and then continue with the rest. Okay, now that we have the text as a three D object, the next step is to inflate this. For that we go to the polygon object, right click, and we go to simulation text, And we just click on this balloon. Now we can click plate to see what happens. You guys see that it falls because we need to adjust the gravity. For that we click Control D, we go Simulation, Go to scene and make the gravity zero. Now let's click play again. You can see that nothing happens because we need to go to this balloon effect. Go to balloon, then we need to increase the pressure. The more we increase it, the bigger the text will get. Let's try three. The expansion time is when the inflation happens. Let's click Play. Now as you can see, the text inflates. Let's try five. Basically, with this kind of effects, you just test different numbers and you see how it affects your text. And then you decide what looks better. I really like how the is animated. Maybe I can try this to four. I'm going to increase also the length here. Now, there are a few settings that you can, you can change. If you go to surface and you want to see more wrinkles, you can increase the bendiness. Let's try this. Ten for example. Okay, let's increase this more. You need to change the bendiness. Also the target length. Help? Yeah, as you can see in the beginning, there are some wrinkles. I'm going to test different numbers and see what I like more just changing the bendiness and the target length. Okay, I think I'm going with these numbers now. There are also some other adjustments that you can do by clicking control D and going again to the simulation here. You can adjust the collision. You can also decrease sub steps. The whole thing that I'm trying to do is to get more wrinkles. This is why I'm doing this. Okay. Just trying to make the wrinkles more smooth. But yeah. Again, this also depends on the text that you have. Okay. Now I'm going to show you another adjustment that you can change so you can have more control over your simulation. Basically, you can go to this mix animation. If you don't want your text to go like hold over the place, you can click on this with force, you can see that it will stay more static. Yeah, as you can see, it stays in place somehow, actually, because you just check the force here. The more you increase it, the more static it stays. So let's test it to 0.5 okay? Maybe 0.2 Again, that's up to you, but I think this is a really nice tool to have more control over your text. I think I'm going to leave it like that to simplify all of these numbers a little bit more. Basically, you just apply the balloon effect. Click control D to make sure that the gravity is zero. Then on the balloon effect, you decide about the pressure and the expansion time based on the inflation that you want to have and the time that you want it to happen. Then to add wrinkles, you go to the surface and work with the bandiness and the target length to make it more smooth. You go again to the simulation tag, to the simulation to adjust the collision, the sub steps and the damping. Then to make sure that the three D text stays more in place, is more static, you just check this with force under the mix animation and adjust the strength. 8. 07 Inside a Balloon: Now the next step to finalize this one would be to work with the lights and with the camera. Like we did on the previous projects, you can also apply this subdivision surface Yeah. To make the wrinkles look better. But before we do that, I want to show you something extra. I want to show you how you can mix two objects with the balloon effects like I did. In this case, basically what I did is created two cubes. Let's increase the segments here. First of all, I'm also going to adjust size. I'm going to make a copy of this, Decrease the size a little bit because I want to create frame for that. You need to apply this effect right here. Bull, I don't know how to pronounce it, but yeah, just drag the two cubes and put them below it. How it happens is one cube extrudes the other one. In this case, we want the opposite to happen. We just change sides. Yeah, here we have it. Now what I can do is just make some adjustments. Okay, now that we have this, we can make a copy of it just in case we want this for any changes, we can keep this. I'm going to do the same step as I did with the text by using the volume builder and remeasure. Okay. Now that I have this frame, I'm just going to reposition it. Okay. Now that I did all the positioning of the frame, the camera, and the text itself, what I'm going to do is just apply the balloon effect on the frame itself. Again, simulation te balloon here. The only thing that you need to keep in mind is to check this with force under the mix animation, because we want this to be more static. The rest is basically just adjusting the same settings as we did with the text. Let's click Play. As you can see because we haven't checked the force option here. The balloon effect is too dynamic on the frame. Of course, if you like this effect, you can apply it, It's up to you. But for me, I think it's better if we have this more static Also, I'll try to create some wrinkles again here. Okay, I like these kind of settings. So at this point I'm just going to maybe animate the camera a little bit. So I'm just going to zoom in, make sure it's linear. Now, the next step is just to work with the texture and the lightings. 9. 08 Balloon Octane Materials: Now first of all, I'm going to apply the subdivision surface on both of them just so you can see how the final look will be. But of course, while you are working on it, you can uncheck it because it may slow down your work process with the materials. I'm just going to create really simple materials. Actually. Again, for the frame itself, I'm just going to make something dark. Going to increase the roughness. I think I can apply it and then decide what looks better. I think I can decrease the metallic look, make this all black for the environment. You can add an octane daylight here. You can play around with the power itself, with the sky color, for example. You can go with something more. Also, you can animate the light again by using the rotation tool. Okay, I would animate it just from this axis. Now I'm going to make a copy of this and just pick a color for the text. I can try to use a gradient. In this case, again, I'm creating really simple materials because I want to focus more to be on the effects rather than the materials and things like that. Because, yeah, these are things that you can play around with yourself. So just choosing some colors that I think would work well in this case. Okay, What I don't like about this frame is that it is too dark, so maybe I can just add some. I'll go to image texture. I have some PNG Hacker type text. So okay, I need to change also the projection to box. Okay. Yeah, now I think it looks better. I can also work with the UV transform, so I can scale this down. Okay. And also I can decrease the power. Yeah, now I think it looks better. Now I can apply the subdivision surface. I can also make again, some color adjustments on the octane camera. Yeah, now this is also ready to render as well. 10. 09 Octane Scatter: Okay. So before we render everything, I just want to show you another tip of how you can use this effect to create something creative. I'm going to delete the frame now. Yeah, I just want to have the text itself. Basically what I want to show you is the octane scatter. What it does, it distributes objects to a certain object that you decide to use. In this case, we are going to use the text itself. If we go to octane scatter, go to distribution, change the type to surface under the surface, just apply the text or the object itself. As you can see, it creates these spheres around it to show you that you can put any object there. Let's check this for now. Here is a part that you can get creative. Under the octane scatter, you can apply any objects that you like. Of course if you have forester, you can apply flowers, grass, and create something nice with it. But in this case I'm just going to use any random geometric object. For example, I can create a sphere. I can displace it a little bit by holding shift go to the shading and let's apply on Noise here. I'm going to make the global size maybe 600. Okay, I just want to make this random here on the objects, I can increase the strength or the height to make this random. Now let's convert this to one object. I'm going to decrease the size. Now I can put this below the octane scatter. As you can see, we get this bubbly shape. Of course, under the octane scatter, we can do some adjustments. For example, we can have less of those objects and we get this look. We can increase the count. Also change the scale here of the object itself. For example, we can go with 0.3 on each of them. I can increase the count a little bit to make these more random. You can also apply some factors, for example this random effector. And make sure to apply it under the effectors on octane scatter. We need to go to parameter and check this position because this is what caused this kind of explosion. Yeah. Okay, so basically you can change the position, the rotation, and the scale. I'm just going to put some random numbers and make sure to check this uniform scale and the absolute scale as well. Okay, I just wanted to put some random numbers on the position and on the rotation to make it more random. You can also apply shader. Again, make sure it is under the effectors here on the shader. What you can do is basically just apply, for example, a noise here. Based on the noise, you can see that it will effect on the distribution of the object, increase the contrast, and increase the scale. You can see the effects that it has on the distribution of the text. You can also animate this animation speed and period. Let's click Play. And you can see how the objects are animated as well based on the animation that happens on the shader. You can also increase the count here. Okay, now I'm just going to create another material for these random shapes. Maybe I can keep the gradient effect but with some other colors. Okay, I did a lot of color adjustments, material editing, because I really wasn't satisfied with any of the combinations. But I'll go with this one. I think this one looks nice even when it is animated. I think now I'm just going to work with the renders and then move to after effects. First of all, you can go to octane settings. Something that you can do is change that direct lighting to path tracing. And yeah, you can see this made a huge difference. I don't know why it didn't change since the beginning. I thought it was a check, but sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes not. Basically, it affects the specular depth and the scattered depth showing how much light affects the object based on the material and the environment that you have. In this case, I think this looks better just adjusting the samples. If you want to have a transparent background, you can check this alpha channel. Then in this case, you would have to uncheck the plane. You would get something like this. Now, go to Render settings here again, I go with the same ratio for five. Make sure to check all frames to save. Again, if you want to have it as a PNG, just check this alpha channel. Go to PNG and just pick a folder where you want to save it. I'm going to do this with all three renders and then move to after effects to finalize everything. 11. 10 Finalize in After Effects: Okay, I just rendered the first animation, now I'm rendering this one. While these ones are rendering, I thought I would move to after effects to finalize this one, as the process will be similar for the other ones as well. Let's open After Effects. Under the project sections, I'm just going to double click to open the PNG sequence. I just have to click on the first frame. Make sure to check the PNG sequence. Click Import and just drag it to the new composition. Now we have the timeline. Yeah, this is the animation that we have In after effects, what I do is just really simple color adjustments. For example, I increase the contrast, the brightness depending on how your animation looks like, but I'll just do minor changes. Also with the color balance, you can do some adjustments here. It's not that I have a formula, I just change these and see how it reacts on the image and then decide what I like more. Not any big adjustments because also in Semper D, on the octane pulse production section, also we have the hue, lightness and saturation that you can change. But in this case, I don't want to animate it, but in case you want to animate it, for example, click on the hue to create a key frame. Make sure you are on the first frame. Go to the last one and let's make this a full rotation. Yeah, you would get this color animation. In this case. Something else that I will add is grid that I created in Photoshop. It is this frame just going to adjust it? Yeah, I just put, I don't know, numbers, these dots, these shapes on the side here. I type design journey just to have it more as a post. That's the only change that I want to do. I'm going to test something else but I don't think it will work if I apply the CC star burst here. Yeah, I can increase the scatter. Let's make this to screen mode. Decrease the speed. Decrease the opacity. Yeah, I don't know. It's up to you. Okay, I think I'm going to keep it like this just to make it more dynamic. Now, once the animation is ready, you just go to file export add to Adobe Media encoder Q K. Make sure the format is 26. We can have this as an video. Select the folder, and here I'm just going to adjust the target bitrate. The estimated file size is 17 megabytes. Usually on the target bitrate, I go with ten. The less the estimated file size is, the better it is. Because in this case, Instagram doesn't compress it more. In case you will use this for social media, let's just check this as well. Click Okay. Now I will just render. Yeah, this is what I do in after effects. Even for the other ones, I'll go with the same things. Just adjusting the colors, maybe adding the frame. I hope you found this helpful. As always, my idea for the courses is to try and show you the techniques that I use, show you how you can use them in a creative way. And of course, leaving you the space to experiment with your own things and see what looks better to use. As I didn't want to focus too much on the technical aspects. But of course, for any questions just let me know. I'll make sure to answer. You can reach out in social media or whatever you feel more comfortable. Okay, thank you so much and I'll see you on the other courses.