Cinema 4D Basics: Model & Animate A 3D Robot

1. Intro: character animation could be a huge undertaking, but I'm going to show you some simple techniques that you can use to make a fun. Little three D robot will be working in Cinema four D or Cinema four D Light, which is available through after Effects CC. We'll be learning about the modeling primitives and how to work with, um, some simple rigging techniques to prepare for character animation and how to seki frames and use the timeline. When you're finished, you'll be able to use your robot. My Brother Jakes tutorial about three D tracking. Are you ready? Let's get started. 2. Modeling the Head: Okay, here we are in after effects. Just one point is we get started. You could do this in the full version of Cinema four D, But I'm going to be working in cinema four D light. What you normally do is go to file new Maxon Cinema four d file. But what if you had an object that you'd already created and you just wanted to reopen it? Well, the way you do that is to import it into after effects. I already made a blank file called Robot Toe. Open it in cinema four D light. Just goto Edit, edit original. So the first thing we're going to do is build the head before we build the robot. I want to show you where we're gonna be working. This menu has all the primitive shapes, and you can see there's a bunch of different kinds and this menu has all the vector objects . That's most of what we're gonna be using. So first we're gonna make a cube for his head. I'm just gonna leave this at the default size. I'm gonna hit s to zoom to the cube. When you hit s, you zoom to the selected object in the current window. When you hit H, you zoom toe all objects selected or not. If you're looking at multiple windows hitting Alter Option S will zoom the selected object to all of the windows and hitting alter or option H resume all of the objects to all of the windows. The first thing I'm gonna do is round off the edges on the Cube. You can do that by checking. Fill it. Now you can see how rounded off it is. It's a little bit much something we're going to see on. Basically, all of the shapes that we work with today are these little orange dots that you'll see at various edges. Now, if you grab one and move it, you'll change something. In this case, you can see that it's changing the radius on the fill it. If I grab one of these other ones, it would change the size on that axis. I'm gonna undo those changes. I can also take numbers into these fields. The fill it radius is set to 40. I'm gonna change it to five. That's more what I was thinking. And I probably don't need five subdivisions, so I'm gonna knock that down to three Now I want to give him some eyes. I want the outer shape of his eyes to be square. But I also wanted to be a hollow box. There's a couple different ways we can do this. I'm gonna show you one way to use a different primitive than you'd expect. I'm going to use the too primitive. I'll turn off my cube so you can see it. This is basically just a hollowed out cylinder and I can change the radius of the inside and the outside and the height. Since I want this to be on the Cube, it needs to be facing the same direction. I'm gonna change the orientation to Plus Z, I can use my middle mouse button or click on this icon to switch to four views. That way, it's a little bit easier to see what I'm doing. I'm gonna tighten this one way down in this one as well, and then I'm going to move it forward, going to hit alter option s to zoom in. I'm gonna tell you the length down because it's sticking out a little bit. I'm also going to add fill it to this one. I'll change the segments down to three and the radius down to two. Now I'm going to change the rotation segments from 36 down to four. So I have a box. It's just facing the wrong direction. I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees on the bank. Hit. Enter. Now I'm going to zoom out so I can see more. Then hit Alter Option H. So it'll zoom all the windows. This is actually a little smaller than I needed to be. I'm gonna make the outer radius 50 in the inner radius 45. Then I'm gonna move it up and over and out slightly. I'm gonna rename. This I underscore are for right. And while I'm at it, I'm gonna rename this head. So now I need my left eye. I'm going to duplicate this one by control or command dragging it. I'm going to rename it l. And then I'm gonna go down to my position Properties since the other one was that negative ? 42 on the X. I'm going to change it to positive 42 and now it's in the right spot. Now I'm gonna add some pupils to do that allowed a cylinder, switch it to plus Z switch to all views and you'll notice something here the way that those eyes air displaying they still look like the tube when they're not selected. That's kind of confusing, son going to change something. If you select both of those layers, then hit C that will convert them to a standard mesh. Basically, what that means is you're converting it from a dynamic object into a static object. We can no longer use the object properties to change settings like the Edge of the Radius, but we can edit the model on a point in polygon level now. It also displays in a way that makes more sense. I'm going to rename this cylinder pupil, right? I'm going to scale this one down a little bit, move it over a little further down like that, and then I'll move this forward and make it smaller. Now that looks like what I want, but it's bleeding through the edge of the box Now. If I go into slice, I can turn that on and then you'll see that it only shows part of the cylinder. It's the opposite of what I want. So I'm gonna change it from 0 to 1 80 toe 1 80 to 3 60 And now it's on the top. I think I actually want that radius to be a little bit bigger, so I'm gonna change it to 25. Great. Now will duplicate the people. Rename it to L. This one won't be a perfect mirror image, so we can just move it over. Now we've got some eyes. Next we'll add the mouth. We'll do this with a Taurus, change it to plus c grab the center and pull that way down. We'll also skill down the radius and then move this down slightly. And this one will also get a slice. Turn that on. And that's exactly what we need. Well, just slide it forward. Still a little bit big, so we'll make it smaller. Scale the radius just a little bit. Sometimes this can get hard to do, so you can always go back to the numbers. Now I want to make him some eyebrows. Those air less conventional shape so we can actually draw them. I'm going to switch to the front view, go up here and choose linear then I'll draw some happy looking eyebrows by clicking one point at a time. Once you get to your last point, you don't have to click again. Just come down here and click close spine. If you want to change anything, you can just switch to the live selection tool. Then pick a point. Move it around. I'm going to use a shortcut. I'll hit you W for Select connected. Then I'm gonna hit T to switch to my scale tool. It'll just drag up a little bit to make it slightly bigger. E. To switch back to move and to leave it there. Now you can see over here that it switched us out of model view into point mode. We'll just click here to switch back to model, and now we're going to add an extrude to give that spine some volume. So I'll drag the spine over the extrude and then I'll move that forward. That looks good. I just like to round off the edges on this, so I'll go into caps under start. Choose fill it, cap three steps quick, constrained so it stays within the original vector and I'll knock the radius down. Two looks good. So now I'm gonna rename this brow left and then we'll duplicate it free. Name it Brow. Right now, This one, we don't want to reposition. We want to flip it. I'm gonna click back on this, plein, go back into point mode, hit our for rotate, then on the heading all type 180. Then change the X from positive to negative. Then I'll go back to modeling. Just a reminder. You should probably be saving your files at regular intervals. I haven't done that. Someone to do it now. Okay, let's add some years, I'm gonna add another cube. I'm gonna stretch this one out slightly, a little bit down, and quite a bit in went around. This one ofus. Well, fill it a radius of five, three subdivisions. That looks good. Now we'll add a cylinder plus X. Make that a little bit longer and a little bit smaller. Add fill. It changed to three down to five. You're probably seeing a pattern developed by now. That looks good. So the last thing I want to do is add a little and 10 on his head. I'm gonna make a new cone object Let's take this opportunity to rename some of our stuff. Call this ear box ear round. We'll call this antenna base, shrink that down a fair bit and shrink down the height as well. Ive remove one thing worth noting about the move tools that when you're looking at one of the straight on views like top front or right, if instead of clicking on the arrows, you just click anywhere in the negative space. You'll only move on the two axes counter to the direction you're looking. You can also do that by grabbing this little arrow. Now I'm gonna add a sphere, which I'll call Antenna Top. A little trick you can do to get something like this centered up is parent the sphere to the cone. Then you'll notice the position. Properties just changed. I'm gonna zero those out. And now it's centered Where the cone is gonna close that radius down, move it up in for purposes right now. I'm just gonna move it back out. Now I'm gonna add some rings around the cone. I'm gonna add a Taurus switch to the top view. We'll do the same thing. Parent to the antenna and zero it out. I'll make this a lot smaller. It s I assume out a little bit. So now we can make it a little bit bigger, because that was too far. I'm just gonna let thes float, so I'm gonna make a copy. I'll move that up, then make another move that up. Then I'll tighten them down. Hit H. Okay, now I'm going to rename these. Bring one. Bring to bring three. Okay, now we've created the head, but I want to add some simple texture. I'm gonna do this guy with two colors, but feel free to do as many as you like. I'm gonna double clicking here to create a new material. Then double click that icon toe open the material editor. I'm gonna leave the reflect INTs with a simple default speculator that I'm just gonna change the color. I want him to be a nice bright shade of blue. I can click and drag this straight onto the cube, which, you'll see has been applied down here. That I'm going to duplicate this material by control or command dragging it, we can edit the second material in this window. I'm just gonna change the color to sort of an orangy yellow. Then I'm going to apply that a few different places. Once you've added those tags you can control or command drag the icons in this list. So I'm gonna add that to the rings and I'm gonna keep going until I've surfaced. Everything. One thing to be careful of, you'll notice that I have this yellow one highlighted right now. If I were to control drag this blue one while that one was highlighted, it will duplicate them both, even though that's not what I wanted. But you can always highlight the extra one and delete it. I forgot to rename this one. Let's call it mouth. I accidentally got that icon like I just mentioned and will finish with the eyes. And there we go. Control are or command are to render which, as you can see, doesn't really look all that different because we're using a bunch of default settings. But he's looking good. The fun of this particular project is that you can literally do whatever you want, So if you have any creative ideas for how to make it look cooler, go for it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm done with the head. So now let's move on to the body 3. Modeling the Body: So first things first, I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping to make it easier to continue working. I'm gonna add a no. Annul is just a placeholder object. It won't render and we can use it for organization. In this case, I'm gonna grab everything else and then parented to the no and close that down and I'll rename this head. Now, if we move the null around, everything moves with it, I'm gonna build his body, which I'm intentionally making a lot smaller. Since I wanted to look like the head, I'll select the head, then control or command dragon. And I'll drag that up above the knoll. Close that back down. I could use the scale tool, but I want to keep the edges the same so I'll just type the numbers and manually, let's do 1 35 hit alter option H. I'm gonna move the head up a bit. Now he needs a neck so I'll duplicate this object again. Ah, great learning opportunity. Once again, you can see that since I had the head null selected when I duplicated something, it duplicated that as well. Don't need that, so I'll delete it I'll rename this top 12 neck. I'll make that one a lot smaller and move it up just a little bit. So the edges don't show through. Rename this one torso. Now, I have a fun idea for what could go inside his chest. So we're gonna have to create a cavity there to do that. First, I'm going to duplicate the torso box. Then I'm going to turn off fill it because this one won't need to be rounded. Then I'm going to change the size of it. I'll pull this one in. I'll pull this one down, then I'm just gonna slide it forward. Now we can use this new cube toe hollow out the old one with a bull function. So if we grab both of the torso objects and put them into the bull, it does the opposite of what I want it. What a bull does. It has to objects interact with each other using a simple mathematical operation. The default operation is a subtract B in this case, a B. So, as you can see, the main part of the torso subtracted away the box, which is backwards. So I'm going to change that just by moving this up here and you can see that we've got a hollowed out whole, I'll rename the top one torso as well, and now we're going to make some gears to go inside it. Interestingly enough, there's an object called a cog wheel, which, as you can see, looks just like a gear. I'm going to pull this way in, and this, too. I'm going to switch to this view and it s to zoom to the object. We'll zoom out a little bit so I can see the whole box. I'm pretty close to what I wanted to see for the 1st 1 I'll tighten this down. There's a lot of settings here. If you want to play around with them and try to get a specific look, I just want this one to have less teeth, so I'm gonna change it to 16. That made it too small, so I'm just gonna make it bigger. That's great, but it's also a two dimensional object. It's not gonna show up anywhere, so I need to add an extrude. I'll put that inside. I'm gonna change the name to gear. Gonna change this size 25 then I'm gonna move it forward in about the middle. Then I'm gonna add the yellow texture. And now I'd like a couple more. So I'm going to duplicate that. And I'd like this one to be a little bit smaller, so I just switched to my scale tool by hitting t. Then switch back to the move tool by hitting E. Then I'll move that one around, duplicated again. Move this one over here. But they're overlapping. So I'm gonna move this one forward and this one backward. That looks good. Alter option H. Now he's got a body. Now he needs some shoulders. I'm actually going to duplicate his ear object. Another way we can do this is just by clicking on it. Copy with control or command. See de Select Paste with Controller Command V. Now I've got a new one. I'm going to rename it shoulders, Move this down that sizes and bads. We'll just tighten up the with a little bit. Then we'll notice that it's showing through. And that's not something that we want to see so I can fix that by just grabbing this box from the torso and then moving it forward a little bit. And then we need to go in and reorganize our gears. So I'll grab all three of them hit s and then move them forward. And now everything's visible again. Now we can create the rest of the arm. I'll make a new cube alter option. S I'm going to make this one a lot smaller. I'll make it just slightly less wide than his shoulder is. I'll add the blue material. Call that upper arm that will duplicate the shoulder. Call it elbow. Gonna make the width a lot smaller. Then I'll parent it for centering Change the x 20 unp Arent Move that down. Make it a little bit smaller. Duplicate upper arm. Call it lower arm. Move that down. So now he just needs a hand. I'll make a new tube object change this to plus X alter option s I'll make this a lot smaller. Zoom again, Then we'll move that down. Then I'll switch to slice. Turn that on. Then we'll change this from 92 to 70. Zoom all, Actually, let's do that with the arm selected so we can see both of them. Well, parent that to the arm zero it out on the X will rename that toe hand, and then we'll just make it less wide handle. Add the yellow texture, so because it's going to aid and modeling will do a little bit of our rigging right now. Apparent the hand to the lower arm, the lower arm to the elbow and the elbow to the upper arm. With the elbow selected, I can hit our for rotate. Then I can move this. I'm gonna hold shift and do 30 degrees. So now he's got a bend in his arm. I had forgotten that I wanted to round off these other objects as well, so I'll select lower and upper arm turn on, fill it, set it to two three subdivisions. Then I'll grab the hand object. Fill it three to since the arms were symmetrical. I'll just go ahead and copy it and will change my ex value from positive to negative. Now I've got two arms. I'll rename these right and left. One thing you can do when you have everything open or close is right. Click and choose. Unfold all or fold all toe, open everything up or close it all down so Now we just need to make him some legs. I'm gonna go ahead and select everything e for move, then just move them up to a reasonable height. I can duplicate the upper arm to create his leg. I'll just delete the rest of it called this leg right. Move that over and down. Make it wider and longer and taller. By the way, if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, you can use that to zoom in and out. Then I'll duplicate this and call it foot. Right. Move that down. Make it wider. I notice I accidentally set my fill it radius 20 I'm gonna set that back to two. I'll duplicate that one more time and call it ankle rife. I'm gonna change this one to yellow. If you drag directly over an existing material, it gets replaced. We'll grab all three of these, copy them, paste them, then I'll change them all to say left. Select them again. Change the value from negative to positive. I think the feet in the legs look like they need to be rounded off more. I'm gonna change the setting so they match the rest of the body. I'll just click on the head. See, I had it set to five centimeters and three. So I'll grab all six of these. Go up to five centimeters and that looks good. I'll double check in my front view just to make sure that they're not overlapping. There's just one more thing that I want to add. I want to put a wind up key on his backs that he looks like a toy. I'm going to use one more unique object, the flower. Weird choice. But we're gonna turn it into something more practical. I'm going to change the plane from X y Z. Why? I'm gonna switch over to my side view and move this up so we can see it. I'm gonna change it from eight pedals to three, and that's already pretty close to the shape I want. I'm just gonna change this of the inner radius is a little bit tighter, and that's what I want to see. So I'm going to scale the whole thing down by hitting T and clicking and dragging That will hit E for move and move this over to his back. It's still a little big, so I'll scale it some more cool. This is also a vector objects, so we're gonna need an extrude. I'll rename it to turn key. Now this is extruding along the Z axis, which is wrong, so we'll set that to zero, and then we'll change this to five. I'll add Philip Cap to the start and then because I want both sides to be rounded off two steps Quick, constrain, and we'll knock this down the three centimeters and I'll add the yellow texture. I actually want one more detail, so I'm gonna add a new cylinder. Change that to plus C move it up, make it a lot smaller, and I'll grab the key as well. Move them back out and I'll move this in a little bit. I'll add the yellow texture to the cylinder, then just call this key and there you have it. We have modeled our very own little robot. By all means, do not stop there. If you have any ideas for adding detail, anything you can think of, you can do it. It's just important to keep all the parts organized while you're working, so you won't be confused about which parts or which But it's always nice to remember that you can select things in the viewing window or in the list. I'd love to see what your robot designed looks like. So go ahead and upload it. Still. If you've gotten this far, you can even just save a screenshot from Cinema four D if you want to. Now let's move on to rigging it for animation. 4. Rigging: now, this part of the process is very simple, but it's very important. We're setting up the hierarchy that will determine how everything moves relative to everything else. Now we already parented all the head objects to annul. That was actually the first step. So that's taken care of. The next thing I'm going to do is create another null and call it body. I want a parent, everything except for the legs to this. So I'm going to select everything. But then I'm going to de select the legs. I'm gonna drag these underbody. I want to keep things more organized, so I'm going to reverse the order. Be careful when you're pulling things up. If you see that arrow pointing down, that means little parent. If you see the arrow pointing sideways, it just means it will keep it in that space in the hierarchy. So I'm gonna move that up to the top, followed by the neck, followed by the torso, then the gears and shoulders, which I'll put after the key. I also need to parent the larger part of the key to the smaller part. Close that and I'll leave the arms alone. No close the body. For the moment. As we're doing this, we can parent things, toe objects or knows it's really just a question of what's most logical. In that case, I could create a null for each leg, or I can just parent the foot in the ankle to the leg. So where did the turnkey object come from? Well, once again, if you leave things selected, then start moving stuff around, it's going to alter whatever selected. Even though we closed down the Nolan, we couldn't see it. So I'll undo that De select first venal grab, foot and ankle and parent grab foot and ankle and parent. And now we've got all this stuff. Now what does this mean? If I grab the leg and I move it, I'm moving the foot as well. If I grab the body, everything but the legs will move. Now I'm gonna add another know that will be a master control. I'm just gonna call this move. Everything will be parented to move that way. I can move everything all at once. Now there's a few more things that we have to do to get all these objects to move the way that we want. If I grab the head and move it around, it's moving everything with it. If I rotate, the same is true, so that's good. So if I select the body and I rotate it, that just moves the top part of the body, and that's what I want. However, this is highlighting a problem. The pivot point is all the way down at the floor, and if his body was rotating, the pivot point would be somewhere in the middle of his torso. The way that we fixed that is by clicking enable Axis switched to move that I'm going to switch to my other views so it's easier to see this will let us move the pivot point of the layer without actually affecting its position. So I'm going to move that up, but I'm gonna leave it closer to the base Now if I turn this off, switch to rotate When I rotate him around, he's moving from the base of his torso instead of the floor. We need to do the same thing to the arms to get them to rotate at the shoulder. Unfortunately, those objects air primitives, which means you can't change the pivot point unless you change it to an editor. Bill Mesh, I don't really want to bother with that. So I'm just gonna add another null. Move it down into the list. Call it arm. Right. I'll use our parenting trick to get things lined up. Up with the under upper arm zero out the X switch to move. Then I'm gonna move this up. I'll actually continue this trick by moving it over to the shoulders. I'll leave the X alone, but all zero out the why That way it will rotate exactly around the circle. That is the shoulder. Then we'll move this back out to the list. Close this down, parented. Now, if I take this arm and rotate it, it moves at the shoulder. Now will duplicate my no change it toe left. Delete this. Change the X from negative to positive parent the other arm and close them down. Now I have everything set up the way I want. If I move the leg, it affects all parts of it. If I move the head, it affects everything in the head. If I move the body, it affects everything in the body. And I have my master move to move everything. Those are all the things that I'm going to show you how to animate. But as you might guess, you could also move other things around like changes. Eyebrows, bend his arm at the elbow just about anything you can think of. If it exists, you can animate it. Speaking of which, let's get to that now. 5. Animation: All right, let's start animating some of the controls we're gonna work with. Obviously, this is a play button which when we press it, nothing is happening because we haven't animated anything yet. I want to make this animation five seconds long. We're defaulting to 30 frames a second, so that's 150 frames. So I'll type that in here. Zoom it out. Now we can see all of our frames. Now this button turns on auto key framing. What that means is, any time we change something, it will set a key frame on that property. At that frame, I'll show you an example if I move up to frame 50 and then I selected the move and then I switched to move and drag it back. Now there's a key frame that you can see showed up there and one at the beginning. I'm going to undo that because I don't want those. You'll notice the window is highlighted in red, which means that it's on if you turn it off, that goes away. Since we have the move highlighted, something else we could do is click this button record active objects, which just means to set a key frame. I click that and now there's a key frame there. But not at the beginning. Undo that. So quick explanation here. My intent here is to have this robot using a walk cycle to move forward. I want his arms swinging at his sides. I want the key to be turning around. I also want the gears to be turning around. I want him to be nodding his head and I want him to be tilting his body side to side while he walks. Will do his head first. So I'm going to select the head object. I'll go back to the first frame, which you can do by clicking this button. You'll also notice with a lot of these things that if you highlight them, it shows you what the shortcut is. Those could be very helpful. I'm just gonna set a key frame to get it started. Then I'm gonna turn on Auto King. I just wanted to turn his head a little bit, so I'm gonna start it by setting it to minus 10 on the heading. Then I'm gonna move forward to five and set it to 10. Now, if I go back to the beginning and hit play. He turns his head. Now the place where we really play with key frames is in the timeline editor. If you hit Shift F three, this is a more dynamic look at what's going on. If I highlight this, you can see are two key frames. You'll notice that they're the same ones that you can see on the timeline down here and you'll notice that there's Rose. This is called summary. That's just showing you every key frame on all available objects. Right now, there's only one thing. So it's only showing the two. I control this down and see that there's a whole bunch of stuff. Everything under head in the hierarchy is in this list. You'll recognize a lot of those things from the list, but you also see positions scale in rotation there the properties that got key framed at the moment. I don't want any of these other things to change, so I'm gonna highlight them and hit delete now that didn't actually delete the objects. If I minimize this, you can see that they're all still there. Since there weren't any key frames, they're just not in the list anymore. Now, I didn't change anything in the position or the scale, but you can see that it sent them. Anyway. If I twirled us down, you can see there's a property for each access. I didn't change the position or scale, so I'm just gonna highlight those and delete them. I only put key frames on the heading, so I'm gonna delete pitch and bank. And that leaves me with just the two key frames that I want, minus 10 and 10. Now there are only two key frames. I know that you can see eight here, but it's only the way that it shows it in the list of the hierarchy. This is the head thes air. All the rotation properties. This is the specific rotation property, and all of that falls under the summary heading. So if I close it down there, all still there is just showing me specifics. If you twirl this down, you can actually see an animation curve. In the interest of keeping this simple. I'm not going to explain animation curves. I'm hoping I might get to that in a later tutorial. But it's basically just a line graph showing how things are changing over time in this case , how much it's rotating. You can also hit the space bar and that'll switch toe F curve mode. This is a much bigger window toe. Let you look at all of the curves. One thing that's cool about the timeline is that it uses the same tools for navigation as the viewing windows use. So if you hold down alter option and you have a three button mouse, you can right click to zoom by, moving up and down, and you can middle click to move around. You can also use the shortcuts S and H to zoom two things Just so you're aware. When you highlight thes frames, you get these busier handles that you can use to alter things. You can also click on the object and change what frame it's on and change the value. We're not gonna be dealing with that, but you do want to be mindful that you don't accidentally move anything around because it will actually change the values of what's going on. Now. The goal is to get him to turn his head back and forth on a regular rhythm. We could just settle the key frames for this individually, but that would take a long time, and there'd be a lot of copying and pasting. The timeline has a cool feature that'll make that a lot simpler. With this curve highlighted, go to functions track after now, you'll see you have a bunch of choice is the default is constant after what that means is, after the curve, the value remains constant. I'm going to zoom out a bit so you can see the effects of this more easily. If I change this from Constant after to repeat after you'll see it's done the same function again. What this means is he's going to turn his head from side to side. Then it's going to snap back to the original position and turn again. If we watch that, you can see the head snout, and that's not what we want. So instead, I'm going to go to function track after and said it toe Ossa late after it creates a ping pong effect up and then back. If we watch his head Geico side to side like we want. Even though I only said the key frames for the one direction it goes back the other. Unfortunately, it only did it once. We're going to need it toe loop the entire time. This loop is based on 0 to 5 frames. We need to get to 1 50 so we're going to have to do it 30 times. I'll move this over so that we can see our properties window at the same time. If I click on rotation, this window comes up and there's a property called repetitions. Right now it's set toe one. I'm gonna change it to 30. Now the lines continue out. I'm going to zoom out. So this dark section represents are active area from 0 to 1 50 You can see that the oscillation bleeds passed out a little bit, so that means it's long enough. If we play the animation, we can see that he turns his head back and forth the entire time, which is good. The only thing is it's a little bit fast and frenetic, so I think I'm gonna slow it down. We'll go back to the beginning. I can do this just by sliding this key frame over to 10. You also notice that when I have this highlighted and It's orange, it shows up over here and I can change it. Just by changing this value, I'm gonna change it back to 10. Now. If I hit play, he's moving his head at a more reasonable pace. If I look at the timeline, you can see that the oscillation is now more stretched out because it's oscillating based on whatever key frames air there. So now I'm going to do the key. I'll select it, go to the first frame, said a key frame. This one's going to be constant over the entire animation, so I'll go all the way to the end. ID like the key to turn over five times now. I could do the math, but Cinema four D will actually do the math for you. So if I go down to the bank property and type 360 times five and hit enter, I get 1800. Since we had auto key framing on it, said a key frame there hit Shift F three to open our timeline back up. Now I have Key gonna open that up once again and added all these things that we don't want to animate, So I'll select everything except rotation and delete it. Then I'm gonna troll that down and delete pitch and heading. I'll select that rotation and hit H. I'll select both of my points by default. Cinema four D adds easing to key frames. What that would mean is the key would start slowly and then speed up at the beginning, and then it would slow down a bit at the end before it stopped. I wanted to look like it's turning constantly the whole time, so I'm going to change the interpolation from spine toe linear. I also could have done that by clicking this button up here. Now you can see it's a straight line. I'm gonna close this hit play and we can see the key turns. That's actually a little bit fast, so I'm gonna change it 23 times around. Type in 3 60 times. Three. You can see that some of the properties I didn't want to animate got added back in. I'm just deleting them to keep things clean. You don't actually have to do this. So now our head moves and are key rotates. The next thing I want to do is make the arm swing. There's a couple more things I want to show you about how to manipulate key frames really quickly. If I go back to the head and click and drag where these hash marks are, you make a selection area. You can see it highlighted that first key frame. If you click over here in the empty space, it will de select. If I click and drag across both, it highlights both. I can click in this area and drag it around, or I can click on the ends and actually scale my key frames. This can get a little tricky at times. You're usually better off using the timeline editor when you want to edit your key frames. So if you accidentally make a selection here and you don't want to use it, just click in the empty space in the hash marks to get rid of it. Another way that you can edit key frames is by going into this window, going into key mode, I'll zoom in. You can actually just grab these key frames and move them around. One thing that's worth noting If I grab the key frames on the summary level, it'll move everything that's underneath it. But if I were to grab, say key, it won't affect anything else. This is the simplest and safest way to move key frames around. If you actually want to change the value, then you need to start changing the curve or type numbers into the fields and the properties window. But let's get back to the arm. I'm going to select it with rotation on, said a key frame at the beginning, I'm gonna move forward to 15 just to mix things up a little bit. I'll rotate and then hold shift minus 40. Looks good. Then I'm gonna go back, and I don't want it to just be flattered his side. I wanted to go back a little bit. So do the same thing. Rotate, hold shift and I'll go to minus 30. Now if I play it, his arm moves back to front. Open the timeline window, troll down the arm, get rid of position and scale. I'll get rid of bank and heading because I only did the pitch hit space To switch views, click on rotation P. Hit H. Select this curve. Go to function track after oscillate after, then I'll click rotation and I'll set repetitions to 10. Now if I play it, that looks good, but it actually like his arm to be moving further forward the entire way. I can alter those frames by coming back in here. I'll zoom out, select both of them. These numbers denote the degrees of rotation. So this one goes from 30 down to minus 40. Holding shift. All go from minus 40 down to roughly minus 60. I like that better. You can change your navigation while you're playing, which could be very useful sometimes. So now let's copy those rotation key frames to the other arm. If I highlight this arm and then click and drag to highlight both of these right click copy while leaving that highlighted area as it is without changing it, I'll select the other arm right click in this space and paste. Now I have those same key frames. If I look at my timeline window and make sure that I have arm right rotation selected, I'm gonna grab both key frames that I'm gonna go to Key Mirror X, which just flips them. If I go to my other arm rotation key frames, I can see that they're acting the opposite of each other, which is what I want now, the arms removing counter to each other. Perfect. Next we're gonna rotate the gears. I'm going to show you a different way to set the key frames on this one. If I click on the gear and then go to the coordinates tab, I can see all the key frame A bill properties on the first frame. I'm gonna add a key frame on the bank by clicking this circle. You can tell one's been added because it's red and you can see it over here on the timeline . I'm gonna go to the end, and then I'll set this to 360. You can see it added key frames to pitch in heading. I don't want that. So I'm just gonna turn these off now. If I hit play, I can see that the gears turning. But much like the key, it's easing at the beginning in the end, and I just wanted to turn constantly, so I opened up my timeline window. Highlight my gear, delete position in scale, highlight rotation hit H, select both key frames and click the linear button. Now it's working. We'll do the same thing for the other two. We can't do them both the same time. Otherwise, it would rotate around the center and not their individual pivot points. So we'll set this one's bank to zero. Then this one's bank to zero. We'll go to the end. I'm gonna make this one go slower, so I'll set it to minus 1 80 Turn those off. You can see those little pink circles, which means there's more key frames on those properties that I don't want. Then I'll go forward. Grab gear one also set this to minus 1 80 Turn these off. Go to the front. Turn those off. Now. If I hit play, they're moving. Just have that easing problem. Go to my timeline. Select rotation, Rotation age select All linear. Now they're rotating constantly. Now will make his torso Bob side to side will select the body. No, which has a recall. We repositioned for exactly this purpose. Now we're just gonna add a very small bob. I'll set the bank to three said a key frame that will move forward to 10 and set it to minus three. Then I'll turn off, pitching, heading back up, turn off pitching. Heading. It's worth noting that the reason why these other key frames air getting set is because auto key framing is on. If you turn auto key framing off and use these buttons to set key frames, it can be a lot more efficient, because that way, you won't end up with any extraneous key frames that you don't need. So now, if we play it, we have one side to side movement. I'll go into my timeline window, go to body, select this property, go to function track after obsolete click rotation, set repetitions to 30. That looks good, but I'm starting to think that it looks strange that parts of him are out of sync with each other. Since this is supposed to be a wind up toy, I'm gonna go into the timeline switch views. Zoom out. I'm going to right click and choose fold all to close everything down. Although I didn't want to close everything, I'll open the body back up. I'm going to take all the key frames that only happened in 10 and change them to 15 now, even though it looks like I just made some key frames overwrite other key frames. We know that we had only set to key frames on each property, so that's not possible. It's just because this display exists in the hierarchy. If everything we're told down it be easier to see that nothing had over written anything else, they were just moving into empty space. So now everything is happening at half a second. This isn't the most lifelike, a realistic movement, but that was sort of the point. He's just a wind up toy, so he's operating on a cycle. It feels a lot more comfortable now that everything is on the same rhythm. So the only thing we have left to do is to animate his legs. This is gonna be a little bit more tricky than the other parts will animate the right leg. First, I'll switch to move. Our first position is gonna be all the way in the back. So move the lake backwards. We're only gonna be animating this on the Y and the Z, so I'll set key frames on both of those properties. I'm gonna move forward to 10 that I'm gonna move this forward to the front, so now it just slides from the back to the front. I'm gonna back up to five, which is half way, and then I'm going to pull the leg up just a bit. Not a lot. Now I can see that it moves like he's taking a step up and then down. Now, we could set this toe ossa late, But if we did that every time his other leg was taking a step, this one would float up and then backwards, which wouldn't make any sense since the way that you walk is by planting your foot and then shifting your weight to the other side, this foot should stay on the ground and then slide back to the original position, which it should do in the same amount of time. So I'm gonna move forward to 20 select this key frame, copy it, de select the area and then paste. So now the foot steps forward and then slides back, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense on its own. But it will start making more sense once we move him. So now we'll go in my timeline. Grab my leg switch views hit H Now we can see that we have different things that have been key framed. As we said we didn't change. The XO will just delete that. Then we'll select Z in the Why. So just to explain what's happening. This is the Y axis. The foot is moving on the Y axis up and then down and then holding for the duration. Here on the Z. It's moving all the way forward, then all the way back, which means we have one extra key frame in here that got set, which we don't need. So we'll delete it now. It'll be a smoother curve. I'm going to select all of my right leg key frames, right click and copy, select leg left, right, click and paste. And then they're both moving. So now we'll go back in here, select all of these curves. Good a function track. After repeat, quick on position will set the repetitions to 10. We'll zoom out just to make sure that those were more than we needed. They were. So what closed this back up and hit play? We can see that only worked on the left leg because we didn't have the right like properties selected Now they're both moving constantly. All we need to do is offset them. I want to make sure that the legs are moving opposite the arms, so we'll double check on the first frame. The right arm is forward. That means the left leg should also be forward. So that's the one will change quick on the left leg keys H to zoom. Select everything. Zoom out a little bit now hold shift and move this over 10 frames half of our cycle. Now with all of those selected weaken, see those counter oscillations that looks good. If we play it, it looks like what we want. But once again, we've created an animation that's on a cycle that's inconsistent with the rest of the body . So we'll change these key frames to match the cycle. We'll go back in the timeline switch views. Now I'm going to space these out. We'll close this down so it's a little bit less confusing. Ah, hold Controller Command to select more than one frame. I'm gonna drag that over 2 30 then the next over 2 15 And this one. Well, just round it off and move to eight. We'll watch our animation again. Now we can see that the offset between the two legs is inconsistent because they need to be exactly halfway. I'm going to select the left one again and then slide that. So it's centered. We'll watch that and it looks good. So there's only one thing left. He's just walking in place and we want him to actually move forward. So now we're going to animate our move. No, this part's gonna require a little bit of guesswork. I'm gonna go to the last frame, select the move null. And then I'm going to set a key frame on the Z for position. That's where we want him to end up. Now. I'm gonna go to the beginning of the timeline and just pull him back. You can see this line. That means it's set key frames to go from here to here. I'll turn off automatic key framing. As I mentioned earlier. You don't really need it if you're not altering a whole lot of different properties at once . If I hit play, you can see that he's moving forward. But we have a few problems here. The key frames air easing. You can see that he slowly starts up at the beginning, goes faster and then slows down at the end. He's walking at a consistent pace, so that shouldn't happen. So will change those key frames from spine toe linear. Now he's walking consistently. You can also see that he's kind of sliding forward. That means that he's covering too much distance relative to his footsteps. We have to find that sweet spot so that it looks like it's foot plants and then stays in the same place. We can use the grid on the ground to help us out. Right now, it's really big, so I want to change it. If you go toe options configure, then click back. You can turn on legacy mode now. We have a much smaller grid that's easier to see, so there's something neat you can dio if I stop this and I click on this point that represents the key frame. You can tell that it's highlighted because it's orange. I'm going to continue playing and then I'm just gonna change this value. You'll notice that the slipping is occurring a little bit less. I'm actually just gonna type a number into the field. I'll try something a lot lower, 1200 of getting pretty close. It's still just a little bit much, so I'm gonna set it to 1000. That looks pretty good. Obviously, you can tweak this at a more minute level if you want to try to get it really accurate. Bear in mind the size of the body that you made, which was probably different than mine was, and the size of the legs in the positions that you moved them to, which were probably different than mine were, are going toe alter what those numbers should be. So it's highly unlikely that the number you're typing in will be 1000. Unless you made a robot that was exactly the same. Size is mine, and all of your animation key frames for the legs were identical. You'll just have to tweak it until yours looks right. But you know what? Once you've done that, you've animated a robot 6. Exporting: very briefly. I wanted to show you how to export this stuff in case you didn't know how. If you're using the full version of cinema four d, just hit control. Be or command B to open up the render settings window under save. You can choose where you want your file to go. Pick what format to render to most likely a quick time movie. You'll probably want to turn on Alfa Channel if you're planning on bringing it into after effects that you can put a background behind it. If you twirl down this section and check save and include three D data, it'll export your seen toe after effects. That will include not only Orender but also three D cameras and lights that exist inside after effects so you can continue setting up a project that will work with it. Once that set, you just hit. Shift our to render and it'll save your file here the rest of the settings that apply, whether you're using the full version or the light version going upto output, you can change your camera to whatever size you want. I'll just set this to 12 80 by 7 20 Make sure that the pixel aspect ratio is square. I'm going to reset the frame rate back to the default of 30 and that should be good for this simple project. I'm going to save my robot one last time. Then I'm gonna close this window, then back in after effects. If I grab this robot and drag it into the timeline, you can see that he's showing up here. If I play my animation, you considered he's walking just like he wasn't Cinema four D. Now the default renders software, which doesn't look very good. You can change it to Standard Draft, which looks a little bit better, but it's still kind of crunchy. I'm gonna switch my view to 50% so it's not a weird resolution. Then, if you change it to standard final, it looks clean. Then if we play that back, we see that it's working. One cool thing about Sin aware is that it can respect three D cameras that air in after effects. If I change this from cinema four D camera to cop camera, nothing happens because there is no camera in the scene. But then, if I goto layer new camera, I'm gonna leave it at a 50 millimeter hit. Okay, you can ignore this, and I ruined everything. But that's okay. I'm gonna hit C to move to my camera tool. Then I'm gonna move it around. I can change my camera angle to somewhere different. Like if I wanted to. Just started a low angle. I could go to the beginning, said a key frame here on the camera, hit P for position, said a key frame. Then I'll go to the end, move around up higher. That'll hit play and the camera pans around. But it's kind of hard to tell what's going on without a point of reference. I'm gonna throw a solid in there, change it to a three d layer. I'm going to switch to a custom view so I could look around a little bit. I'm gonna rotate this 90 degrees on the X axis. Then we'll go to the end where I can see it better. I'll just move it back into the scene. I'll move it underneath them, scale it up a bit. Then I'm going to add some noise. Now, if I preview again, we'll notice he's kind of floating above it. if I go to the position, I can see that the why is set to 3 60 I'm gonna set that to zero. Now, if I preview again, it makes more sense. I'm gonna go to the end and just slide it up so he'll still be standing on it, then scale it out, which is highlighting the fact that our cameras a little bit too low. So you want to change our initial position to be a little bit higher? I obviously won't be winning any awards for this animation, but I just wanted to show you how it would react to a camera and other three D objects. You'll also notice that once you've rendered your animation one time, as long as you don't change anything like the camera, it'll render a lot faster on the second pass. Please feel free to do better camera work than I did and try to decorate your seen more nicely. You have the freedom to change things once you get back to after effects. If you rented a movie at a cinema four d, you'd be locked into the positioning. But if you import the object just like any other asset you'll be able to animate around it with the three D camera like we just did hear. Once you're finished with whatever your final set up is, just go ahead and go to composition. Add to render queue. Then you can click this to select a location. You'll probably want to change the output module toe H 264 That'll create a smaller file size. That'll be easier to upload and then click render to render it out. And that means you have completed the lesson. Once you're under it out, go ahead and upload it. I'd love to see it. That's it, you're done. 7. Use Your Imagination: Now we have a fun little robot friend. Hopefully, you can see the possibilities that come with the modelling tools, and you'll start experimenting with other ideas. One of the biggest things to explores how many different kinds of animations you can create by defaming different properties. Three D modeling and animation is limited only by your imagination. Be sure to let me know if you have any questions or things I can help with. I look forward to seeing your projects now that you're finished, head on over to my brother Jakes tutorial and you can learn about three D tracking and after effects. You'll get to put your robot into a real video footage. Have fun with that, and I'll see you next time, okay?