Create A Retro Delorean Loop in Cinema 4D and After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Don Mupasi, also known as Visualdon and I am a freelance artists from the UK. I make mostly retro and space style visuals and most of my work so far has been formed music artists and music channels on YouTube and whenever I finish a project, I always posted to my own YouTube page or my Instagram page and this is why I've gotten some questions about my process. Today's class, we are going to be recreating one of my recent loop videos, this A2 style retro DeLorean animation. We are going to be doing this in Cinema 4D and After Effects, so here is a quick overview of what we'll go through. We will start by building our scene in cinema 4D, using various tools and assets will construct the landscape, road, palm trees and the sun. Then we'll animate the scene in a way that will make it loop seamlessly. After that, we will develop the materials and shaders followed by their lighting and rendering, then we'll finish by outputting our animation from Cinema 4D and taking it into After Effects for the compositing and final color adjustments. As you can see, there's quite a lot to go through and in addition to how to make this loop specifically, I have also included several tips and tricks that can be applied to other projects in general. I want you to keep that in mind as you are watching the class. Take what you've learned and use that to develop your own ideas and make something different. Anyway, let's jump in and start building. 2. Class Notes - Choosing Cinema 4D Versionm: The easiest way to follow the class is to use a version of Cinema 4D most similar to what the original class was recorded in. Now this is version 2,122.23. You can see there's a very similar. And if you use any of these Versions, then you will be able to follow the class very easily. Especially if you're a beginner. You can get these Older Versions Of Cinema 4D in your max on account. Some of them are listed on this page. This is on the downloads page down to Versionm 23. But you can go back even further if you click past Versions and we still have 22.21 available. Also, for these, you just dropped down the application installers and use the offline installer for Windows or Mac OS depending on your own system. And that's the same for 21. Version 24 changed things slightly. Icons look different and they're in different places and so on. But this is still broadly the same also and you shouldn't have too many problems with this version either. However, when we get two version 25, you can see at a glance that the UI is very different. And if you are using this version or later than certain things that are used in the class are going to be in different places and it may be harder to follow along. For this reason, I would recommend using 21 up to 24 because those Versions are most similar to the version used in the class, which I believe was either 21 or 22 at the time. But as you all know, Cinema 4D does change every year and every soft and there'll be a complete major shift like we have in 25. And up to the most recent version. You can make things a bit easier in 25 by going to the layouts at the top. Switch off new layouts and then you want to choose standard. And this is somewhat laid out similar to previous versions, although the icons is still in different places, they look different. And several of the tools have been renamed and we'll work a bit differently in the settings. Also. Once again, just to go over that, you want to use 21 up to 24 for a version which is most similar to the class. And then After 25, you will want to use one of the older standard layouts for just a bit less friction to the new class. 3. Cinema 4D Tips And Tricks To Work Faster: To start with, we're going to go over some shortcuts for working in Cinema 4D. This is important because there are several tasks and commands that you'll have to repeat many times throughout the class. If you know the shortcuts, you can work much faster and more efficiently. if you are in the view-port here, and you press the number one key on your keyboard, you can then left-click and pan around the frame like this. Then if you press the number two, you can zoom in and out. Then the number three will orbit around wherever you click. It's very good that way, because you can actually point specifically to where you want to go to either, on a specific model, or a different location in the scene. Once again, number one pan, number two zooms in and out and number three orbits around your object. In addition to this, there is a camera shortcut which I use a lot. If I get a new camera and bring it into the scene, and let's look through it using this small circle, the small square rather, when it's white, it means we are looking through this camera right now. I can once again just continue to move around. Let's say I set a camera position, and I really like where this camera is pointing, and then I accidentally move away or go to a different location, and I want to get back to where I started, well, in Cinema 4D, you can actually undo only the camera movement in your scene. If you press Shift, Control and Z, you will end up where you started. It's a very useful shortcut in case, you lose where you were before, and you want to get back there. If I jump out of the camera, this gives us a God's eye view of everything in the scene. I'm actually going to remove this to show you a few other shortcuts. One of the most used tools is going to be the selection tool, which is up here. You use this to move things and so on. You just do this by grabbing one of these three different axis lines. If we go to the next one, this is actually the actual move to. They do the same thing. Then the next one is the scale tool and then you can scale in one direction at a time, or you can click away from all three, and then that will scale the whole thing. This is already two scale, so I want to actually change it. I just wanted to show you. Then the final one is the rotation, which once again, you can just use to rotate your objects. There're shortcuts for all of these. If you press T, that's the scale, and then if you press R, that's the rotation and then if you press the space-bar, you will jump back to the original selection tool. Anyway that's it. Just a few shortcuts which should help you to move around your seen faster, and throughout the class, if I see any other opportunities to show you extra tips, I'll do that. That's it. If you haven't used shortcuts like that before in cinema 4D, it may take awhile to get used to, but it's worth memorizing because in the future, it's going to save you some time on other projects. Anyway, let's continue with our project, and start building our scene. 4. Creating The Main Landscape: In this lesson, we are going to create The Main Landscape in the scene. And we'll do this by taking a flat plane and then raising it using a Displacement map to create the Topography. So this is going to be our reference throughout the class. And we'll be jumping back and forth from this scene Cinema 4D to see where we are at each stage and what we need to create next. So to begin, we're going to create the Main Landscape that you see in this example. These kind of hills with these sharp edges and the grid lines and so on. Let's start with that. If I get a plane and I want to be able to see the segments here. So let's go to display and go to growth shading with lines. And I want to give this a width of ten thousand. So that's in the attributes over here. So 10000 centimeters and then a height of 20000 centimeters. So let's add another zero there. And this is all being built into the Z-direction. All right, so let's call this Our Landscape. We need a lot more segments. Let's go for 200 in the width, and 400 for the depth. And we end up with that is many squares sediments making up this one piece of Geometry. So let's take a look at this. It's this raised areas that have been displaced and then some areas of flat, but then some areas you have the hills. So to do this, we're going to use a Displacer Deformer in Cinema 4D. And that's found under this Icon. If I "Hold left-Click", it will reveal all the various deformers which in this menu. And we are looking for the Displacer. Let's make it a child of the landscape. And this is the kind of setup you need for this to have an effect. In the shading tab, let's go to "Shader", add a noise map. And when I do that, you will now see the Geometry being displaced. But so far it's a very subtle effect. We need this to be much stronger. So if I go to "Object" and we'll go to the height control and set this to 2000. And it's going to be much stronger now. So I'm gonna zoom out here. And you can see it just looks a bit crazy and chaotic. So let's go back and make some further changes in the shading once again. Let's jump into the Noise Map itself. And we're going to change the Noise type from the Default Noise to Fire. And it's going to look like everything was completely broken. That's fine. Let's change the space. The noise is currently set in from texture to UV 2D. And when I do that, now it's starting to look like what we want. The problem now is the Ground Plane is way down here when it should be directly under the car. So let's go back to their Displacer itself. And in the Object tab, let's change the intensity, or rather this type here from Intensity Centered to Adjust Intensity. And when I do this, it's going to bring the ground level to the correct level I suppose. So it's working, but our car is now stuck somewhere underneath this particular section, but it is at the ground level. So what we want to do now is make a clearing for our road and a car to go through right down the middle of this Geometry. And that's exactly what we have in this final piece. To do this, let's just go back to our Shader. Because currently, if you look at this, the black parts of the Noise Map correspond to the flat parts of the Geometry. And then the white parts represent the parts which are raised up. As you can see here, that displaced Geometry there. So we need to create a black line down the middle of this map to clear a space or an area for the car and road to go over. So to do this, we need to stack some layers together. So next to the Noise Shader, once again on top of it right there. Let's open this app and create a layer. And what this would do is just take everything we've created so far. And now we can stack various layers on top of each other. And I am in the layers now and I can always go back to this level and just "Click" to go back in. Under Shader, I want a gradient Shader. And as soon as I insert this, you can see that the black area of the gradient corresponds to the lower side of the displacement and then as it shifts across this way, the white part is the highest and that's over on this side of the gradient. So we can actually jump into the gradient. And let's move the black point to the middle. And we'll create a new white point over on the left side. Just "Double-Click" anywhere to create a new gradient handle. Just to make sure that this is dead centered, this new, or this extra black layer or the black line rather. Let's "Right-Click" and distribute the knots. And that's going to be equally spaced out now. We can go back the Level and the gradients blending mode should be set from normal to multiply, and this is now going to be blended with the Noise Map underneath, and you can see now that we have made a clearing down the center of our Landscape. Now, this effect currently is to gradual and too wide. You can see it fades in just like the gradient does. We wanted to be a much steeper and have a more clearly defined line down the middle here. So let's go back into the gradient and create more wide handles either side of the black center line. The actual number here should be seven. That's what I used in the original example. So you can go out and do something a bit different or just use the same as me. If you want identical results. Anyway, let's also create a second black handle and then "Right-Click" and distribute the knots also. And if you have done this correctly and the equal number of white notes either side of the two here. It should create a perfect clearing down the center of our Geometry. And that's what we have here. So let's go back up a level. I will go to Display and just have grown shading. And you can see how this is starting to look. Another issue here is that Cinema 4D is smoothing the surfaces of this Geometry, whereas we want something that looks a bit sharper and more of a grid and the polygon kind of Geometric style. And this smoothing is being done by the Phong Tag here. This just tries to smooth over geometry and when it's needed, it works great, but we don't need it in this case. Anyway, let's lower the phong angle to, let's say 10 degrees. And when I do that, you see now that our geometry just looks a bit sharper, but actually within just completely. Get rid of this completely, and there we go. That's the look that we need. Another step is the grid lines you see over the polygons. These were generated using something called the Atom Array in Cinema 4D. So before we do that, we first need a copy of this Landscape that we have so far. And to do this, we're going to use an instance object. This is found under this Menu. We go to Instance and with the original object selected, it will automatically named this the correct way. So it's an instance of the Landscape and it will also automatically link the reference object, which is the original Landscape object. If that doesn't happen by default, you can always just drag this in here. And this is going to work also. Anyway. An instance is just a, another way of saying a copy. As you can see now I have two versions of this landscape. And the great thing about this is if I go into the the original object, let's say the displacement, make any changes. It automatically updates the instance. So if I turn this back on, you see it updates over here also. Okay, anyway, we want to use the instance with the Atom Array to create those lines you saw on the edges there. So if I can find the Atom Array, it's under the same menu, it's right here. And let's put the instance as a child of the atom array. When I do that, you will now see a new set of polygons or Geometry based on the shape of the original landscape. Now we don't need as many segments as we currently have. If I go to lines, you can see that each of these links has about eight polygons going around. So let's lower the subdivisions to just four. And also the cylinder radius is going to be 0.5, and the sphere radius is also going to be 0.5. And in this case, the sphere is the joint points and the cylinder are these actual lines you see in between each joint. Let's make them both the same size and then you will no longer see the joints as you can see that. And as I said for their main landscape in the next lesson, we will look at the other elements in our scene. 5. Creating The Road And Other Elements: Next up we're going to create a road and a few other elements in the scene. Let's go ahead and create the other ground elements mainly the road, the lines I decide, the lines in the middle and also this floor area you see with the yellow grid lines. Starting with the road, this is going to be a cube shape and I will set the y height to just 10 and the x size or width rather to 600 and then the z length to 20,000 centimeters, which if you recall, was the same length we set for the entire landscapes. This is going to go from edge to edge, starting about here or starting there, all the way to the other side. We can then get our car here, which by the way is to scale, if you for example go to the "Main selection tool" and change the "Transformed section" here from "Size" to "Size plus" it will show you the actual overall size of everything inside of this null object and you can see it's about 4.2 meters long, about 1 meter high and then nearly 2 meters wide. Those are roughly the actual dimensions of this car in real life. It just means that if I insert other objects into this project and we'll have to do things like calculating how fast an object should go, because I am using real world scale values, I can actually do those things more accurately and I do some actual calculations and so on. That's why I like to work with as close to real scale as I can for most of my projects. Anyway, moving on, we need the lines that we see down the either side of the road and in the middle. Once again, this is going to start as a cube, and it's going to have a width of let's say 20, a height of 10 centimeters and a length of 400. I bring this out here just so we can see how that looks. Let's "Undo" and I'm going to place this inside of a Cloner. If I hold the alt key at the same time as I insert a Cloner, the Cloner will automatically become a parent of the cube and that's the relationship you need there to clone any object. By default, it's set to linear, so it just clones everything in a straight line going up. We want to change this mode from Linear to Grid array, so we have this kind of thing and we can set the count in the x, y, and z direction. The x is basically left to right, this is going to be just two and let's just make sure it's wide enough to be at the edge of the road. The actual exact number here is going to be 620 centimeters and then we have something like this, It lines up just outside the road surface. We also need to make it longer in this direction and if we go down here where it says "Mode". By default it will be set to "Pest step" and this is in newer versions of Cinema 4-D. In older versions, you didn't have this "size" and "Mode",you only had a different Mode which I think was labeled scale, which in the newer versions has been renamed to Endpoint. Anyway, if we switch to that for now, we can actually just define the overall length of this entire section. Let's type in 20,000 here, the difference between endpoint and pest step is that with pest step, you define the gap between the clones,whereas with Endpoints you define the overall scale or length of the whole Cloner object. If I zoom out here, you can now see that the Cloner spans the entire length of our landscape starting from one end all the way to the other side. We can now fill in the gaps in between by increasing the number of clones. Once again, the actual number here is going to be 26 and that's just what I did when I was doing the testing for this and any numbers you see me punching anywhere, I'm not just pulling this out of nowhere, I have done this project twice already before. Anyway if we do that, we see we have lines arranged in this kind of pattern. If we were in "Pest step mode", this value would be set to 800 centimeters and that's the distance now from the center of each clone to the next one. Moving on, let's just name things correctly here so we stay organized, this is going to be the Sidelines, we'll close this. Let's make a copy hold Ctrl on any object to just drag down, and you will make a copy of it, let's call this Center-lines. This time we're just going to have one clone in the x direction, still 26 in the other direction. We also want to offset its position either forward or backwards, It doesn't really matter here in the transformed section of this Cloner. Let's go to position z and set this to 400, now this line is just slightly offset from the two outside lines. You can see it's intersecting with the road surface, so let's go to the "Transformed section" once again. Just type in like 2.5 or something, just to raise it up slightly so that it sticks out and is completely visible. I think we already made sure that our car was sitting on top of the road instead of in it, about here or so. That's it for the sidelines, we just need to create this other surface we see on the outside. This is also going to be a plane, which I will call the floor. Once again, It's going to be 10,000 centimeters wide and 20,000 centimeters long, and I need this to be higher than the ground level of our landscape but lower than the road itself, that's going to be about 5, maybe that's 2 actually maybe 2.5 centimeters in the y position, so this kind of thing. Let's give this more segments, let's go for 50 and 100, this is also going to have an atom array version of itself so let's instance it and then put the instance inside of an Atom array. And when I do that, you see the new grid lines next to the floor. Let's give it a cylinder radius of 0.5 and a sphere radius of 0.5 also and subdivisions down to 4, and actually I think these lines are going to be a bit wider, so let us go for 1 and 1. We can see how that looks later if it's too strong, we can always turn it back down. Now that we have our main road, we now need a bit of decoration on the sides, and that's what we'll look at next. 6. Creating The Palm Trees: We are now going to build the palm trees on the side of our road. This is just a single palm tree model, but then using various tools and cinema 4D, we can make it look like there are a lot more. This is the palm tree model we're going to use for the project. You can go ahead and download this. It is included in the class files. If I click this, you can see that, and this is in the size plus mode in the transform tab down here. It's about 13 meters tall and put into the scene, it's relative scale to the car and everything else, this is the kind of arrangement we are going to end up with. So if you decide to use different assets, for example, maybe you have different types of trees. If you want to have similar scaling to what I have here, make sure that your assets are roughly this height. If they're not even just double-click, I mean click the object over here, press T for the scaling, and you can either make it larger or smaller. You can see the size change as you do the scaling. Anyway for the class, you can just follow along with this and you will end up with the same thing I'm doing. anyway since I have the asset already open, I can go to Edit and copy with it selected there, go to Window and I will jump back to our main project. Any projects I have open will be listed under the Windows section down here. So let's go to our project and I will edit and paste. Now this will insert in the center of the scene. Alternatively, I could have stayed in our original project, File and merge objects and locate that palm tree model. So it's right there. Click 'open,' and it combines the two projects together. This is going to be inside of a cloner, so once again I will hold the odd key as I insert the cloner. Let's change the mode from linear to grid array and we only want two in the x direction. Let's make it wider. The actual size here is going to be 1500. For the distance in between, this is in the per step mode, I will set this to 1500 centimeters. If I just zoom out for more of an overview, I can then increase the number of clones until they reach close to the edge of our landscape. I've done these calculations before, so I know that later when we start to line up these landscape sections, this distance that's left over is going to be doubled up when we join it to the next segment. So it ends up being about as wide as what we have between each palm model. If nothing else, just use the same numbers I'm using and you'll be fine. The trees look too uniform right now. We want to randomize their rotation and also height. Before we do that, let's insert a camera just to have reference of where the camera is going to be behind our car. I am looking through the camera and I will set the exposition to 0. So it's also in the center of the scene. Let's 0 out any rotation values that are there, the Y position is going to be 117 or thereabout. It's about just above where the car is itself. Then the Z position is going to be negative 550, so about 5 meters away from the center of the car. But you can see it's too close. So I will change the focal length from 36 millimeters, and this isn't the object settings of the camera, to 24 millimeters which gives us a wider view. This is exactly the angle which I used for the final animation. Things are starting to look a bit too dark with all these segments. Maybe I'll switch back to growth shading with no lines and I can just see it a bit better what's going on. Going back to our trees, let's go to mo-graph, Effector, and Random. We can use this to just make our trees look like they are a bit different. You can see it's randomizing the position by default. We want to do this but not in the Y direction. All the trees should remain planted to the ground, but we can leave X and Z to 50 centimeters. That's fine. We also want to go to the rotation and switch that on. We have rotation heading, pitch, and banking. So on the heading, we just want to type in 360 degrees. If I were to slowly adjust this value, you can see what it's doing. It's rotating each clone to a random value between 0 and 360, and it just means each tree is going to appear as if it's pointing in slightly different direction. Then for the height of each palm tree, we're going to use the scale and we only want to change the Y scale. If I go in there, type in let's say 1, you can see it randomizes it way too much. Some trees end up being too short and then some too tall. We want to use a much smaller value here. Let's go for 0.25. In addition, I don't want any trees getting shorter than where I started. I only want to randomize and increase the height at the same time. I'll make sure that I tick absolute scale. What that means is it's only going to randomize in the up direction and not make any tree is shorter than where I started so now if I turn the scale on and off, you can see we introduce some subtle height variation. If I perhaps jump out of the camera just to see more of the trees as we back off here by going to the random effector, you can see the difference in the height. Then if I turn off the whole effector in itself, you can see we go from perfectly uniform palm trees to something that looks a bit more organic and randomized. That's it for the palm trees. As you can see there, we started with just a single tree model and then using the cloner and random effector we made it look like there was a lot more different palm trees. In the next lesson, we are going to create the sun. 7. Creating The Animated Sun: In this lesson, we are going to create the sun in our animation. This is the classic Outrun style sun, or retro style sun, which you may have seen in other pieces of artwork in the style. So we are going to create our own version, and it's also going to be animated and it's going to be looping. So let's see how that works. So if we look at our sun here, which by the way, it could also be a moon, just depending on how you interpret this scene. You can see that we have this lines animating upward. That animation is also looped. So we need to set this up in cinema. The starting point for this is going to be a disc shape which inserts somewhere underneath the floor there. Let us change this orientation to Z+. For me to do this in a clean way, I need to just be looking at that object by itself and to do this, I use a plugin called Magic Solo. So if I select my disk, click that solo icon. It's going to isolate just this object and I can continue to work on it and then when I am finished, I would I just clip this once again and everything else will come back. This is a free plugin which I can include in the class files for you, but cinema 4-D has its own solo switch built-in. I just prefer how this plugin works, so that is why I used that. With cinema 4-D, if you click the solo switch, you can basically do the same thing and then when you are finished, go back to here. In my opinion, solo works better because it extends to materials and also the various objects which are listed here. So it's much cleaner and in my mind, a better way to work. To install this, you would have to go to preferences. Edits and preferences. In this window, you want to go down to the bottom left corner here and click open the Preferences folder. Then you will see where Cinema 4-D installs, plug-ins, this folder right here. That's it, right there. This magic solo plugin, say very small but very useful plugin. Once you unzip the folder to hear or place the folder here, you want to close this. Restart Cinema 4-D and then you also need to place this icon in your user interface. To do this, go to Window, customization and customize commands. You want to search for it here. So if I just look for solo, you can see all commands in cinema 4-D related to that solo function, but our plugin is clearly this one right here. I would just drag this somewhere in my interface. Wherever is easiest for you to click, you want to place it there. Now I already did this before, so I don't need to do this twice. By Edit pilots, I can double-click and make that disappear. To save this layout, I would then have to go to window customization and save as startup layout so that the next time I launched Cinema 4-D, it will remember that I added this extra icon and you need to do this each time you rearrange your user interface. Otherwise, you will lose all those changes. With that disk isolated, I will continue and I make some changes here. One of them is there aren't enough segments. It is a bit jagged around the corners. So let us up this from 16 to 100. The next step I want to get a cube and set its y height to ten and the width to 400, anything wider than our disk shape. Let us clone the cube. So if I hold the ALT key as I insert this Cloner, it automatically makes the q by child of the Cloner and this is already working. Here, I want to lower the position y from 50 to just 20. I also need more clones. So let's say something like 50. What I want to do is cut into their disc shape using these cubes. So the way this works is there is a tool called the Bowl Tool. If I get this, place both these objects into the Bowl Tool reverse the order that they are in, the disk shape needs to be above the cloner. When I do that, now you can see I am using the cloned cubes to cut into the disk shape and that is how we create those lines. Now you can see as I'm moving this it gives an animated effect. That is exactly how I constructed this. Now, there is more to do here. So let us continue to animate this and make sure that it loops. You have to use some very precise numbers. Now, I have already done this before. So I know what numbers they need to be. I'm going to show you now. Before we do that though, let's make sure that our timeline is going to be the final length, which in this case is eight seconds. So if I just type in eight and then extend this here to make sure we see the entire timeline. If you are wondering how my timeline is in seconds, not frames, you want to go to Edit and Preferences and then in units. Change the animation unit from SMPTE or rather to SMPTE. So by default this will be set to frames. You want to change this to SMPTE. That is how I work. I just prefer this method of displaying my time because above that anyway, I can still see the actual frame numbers. Anyway, eight seconds is the actual entire length of this animation, but because it's a loop, if I play it back here, it just keeps going back to the beginning and it just looks like it keeps on going forever. Let us animate this and make sure that it loops correctly. If I click on the cloner, let's go to the end of our animation. The position of this, so this isn't the coordinates of the cloner. It needs to be set to negative 200. I just know this because I tested this already and I will key-frame this value. So if I hold Control and click this Grey circle, when it's red, it means that I have set my key-frame and it also shows up in the timeline as this small rectangle here. Let's go back to the beginning of the animation. I will set this position to negative 100. The reason that's our starting point is because if I disabled the Bowl Tool for a second and go to the front view, you can see that's just where the disk shape begins. So I just wanted to make sure that it is contained entirely within the arrangement of our cubes and not outside. So negative 100, that's why that happens. Then our animation is going to do this. I've noticed this is actually backwards. So what I want to do is select this key-frame. I can do that here in the timeline by just scrubbing over it until it's orange. Set the key value to negative 100 and then the beginning should be negative 200 because I need this to be going up instead of down. So now if I play it back, we can see the lines are going up in the main view port, the 3-D view. Let us re-enable our Bow tool. If I go to Window and timeline. I want to make sure here that the key frame curve is linear. Because by default it's going to ease in and ease out. I extend this, so you can see to what's going on. So, if I click the linear switch with the key frames selected, it's going to make sure that this moves at a constant speed throughout. If I go back to the beginning and play this, it moves at a constant speed, and it's also going to loop and move back to the beginning. So this is a working perfectly. If we look back at our example, we can see that the lines here or the gaps rather, they vary in width, the widest ones at the bottom and then as you go up, they get thinner and thinner until they actually disappear past a certain point. So let's go ahead and do that here. Right now they're just the same with throughout the entire shape, this should have disappeared by about two-thirds of the way up the disk shape. To do this, I need to select my clonershadder, go to moGraph, effector and plain. By default, this just shifts everything by 50 centimeters. If I go to the parameter for actually a 100 centimeters, I can see that position is enabled and it's moving everything up by 100 centimeters. Let's turn off position. We want to affect the height of each cut. So this is going to be adjusted in the scale. If I simply turn this on, it's the y scale, so the height, so that's x, y, and z. X is the width, height, and depth. Let's set this to negative 1 and this is going to make all the lines have a height of completely zero. So that's also not going to work. What we want to do is have a falloff. So that at the bottom down here, it's the lines have a 100% of the original height, and then as you move up, they slowly get smaller and smaller. With the plane effector selected, I want to go to the falloff tab and let's create a linear field. Just a note here; this will be different in older versions of cinema for 4D. So I will have to create, an extra lesson. Just a bonus showing you how this exact same thing works in older versions of Cinema 4D. But for now, let's continue with our current version. This linear field I will change its direction from x plus to y because we're affecting this in an up and down direction. Already when I do that, you can see how this is going to work, right? You can see the lines are thicker down here and slowly gets smaller as you go towards the top. I need to move this down. This top or this upper limit needs to be where I want the lines to completely disappear. So that's about two-thirds of the way up the disk, or about negative 50 centimeters in the position if I go to display and just do grow shading. We're not looking at any lines here. Play this through. You can see what the effect is for the lines get smaller and smaller because of this falloff until they completely disappear. What I will do is take this entire setup, place it inside of a null object. I will call this sun number 1. Then I will create another null and nest that in there for a second time. Let's call this sun 2. You'll see why I have just done that shortly. Let's hit the MagicSolo button to go back to everything else that's in the scene. Who can quickly make a for that sun actually. So if I go to my materials and click all materials and that is appearing in layers by the way, because I have put the DMC model or the DMC 12 model in a layer by itself, just to keep things organized. So if I go and just show all the materials anyway, double-click and open this new material. In the luminance channel we want to create a gradient. This is going to be 2D-V so it's vertically oriented and that one I have this kind of colors. One is like a pink and then one is more of an orange, yellow. Let's solo the Sun once again. You can see the materials disappeared because I didn't apply it yet. So let's apply it. This can be on the disk itself, on everything all at once. These colors are actually flipped. Let's go into the gradient and invert. So the reason I nested this twice is because of the next step. It was kind of a hack I had to do because of the way I set up the scene. This is going to be really far out in the distance, but I didn't want to have to navigate away from this area of my scene all the way out there each time I wanted to make a change. So what I did instead was I would instance the sun at this level, the first null object I created. So if I instance that I create a copy of that whole setup, and this is what I can then throw away into the distance and then anytime I want to make changes, I just continue changing it inside of this layout and then the instance that's out there in the distance will automatically update bozo. Let's see how this works. If I jump back into my camera and move the instance to 80 thousand centimeters away and also up to about 12,500 centimeters. It's now so far away that it's no longer visible. If I selected that new instance in the coordinates, I can set its x size to 175 and the same for the y size and this is going to extend it to be much larger. Now, the reason there was a second level null object is because I want to be able to hide the first one down here. Because if I just hide this one, it affects the instance and makes it disappear too, that's why I nested twice. Instance's the first one and then just use the second one to hide the first one. Okay, I hope that makes sense. Hopefully I'm not making everything too confusing here. But that's, so that's just a hack I came up with in order for me to continue working with my scene without having to go all the way over here each time I wanted to make a change because look how far this is compared to the original scene. Okay, and now that we know how to create a retro style sun, we can move on to the rest of the animation in our scene. 8. Bonus 1: Plain Effector In Older Versions Of Cinema 4D: This is Cinema 4D version 17, which came out I believe in 2015. A much older version of Cinema 4D, but there are some people out there who will still may be using this and other older versions. Anyway, you can see that our sun setup is no longer working. We don't have the lines going across, and this has to do with the way the falloff works in older versions of Cinema 4D. Let's "Solo" our setup and in the Falloff tab, this is set to Infinite by default. Let's change this to linear, and we will get a similar looking type of falloff to what we had in version 21. Let's change the orientation from Z plus to Y so that it's pointing up and down and I believe here it actually needs to be Y minus. The Falloff also is going to be set to 100 percent and now we can move this to roughly the correct point. I think it's going to be the same as what we had in 21, negative 50, and if I play this through, now you see it is fixed. 9. Why The Sun Loop Animation Works: And that just a bonus note here about why the looping is working. If I disable the Boole tool, just so we can see the shapes. Let's go to the front view. And I'm also going to temporarily disable the Plain effector at Frame 0. Let's look at the position of this cube which cuts right down the center of our disk shape. And then if I scrub through to the end of the animation, you see it ends up in the same relative position. So that's what creates the seamless loop. If I wanted the whole animation to be faster, I would have to use a starting position at Frame 0 for this Cloner, which is what we animated and its starting position would have to be basically lined up the same. So I could go for, let's say, negative 300. And I'm doing this by selecting this key frame here and changing its value in the key frame properties. Let's go to negative 300. And you see there was no visual change because that ends up in the same relative position. The difference is, it's much lower than negative 200. So if I play this back, at 300 is going to be a faster animation and it's still going to loop as well. Because if you put in a number which doesn't line up, the loop is going to be disrupted. So let's say negative 275 as an example. Now, the starting position, and if we look in the center, it's not lined up compared to the end. So there would be a jump in that animation. Anyway, that's it. Let's turn this other stuff back on and move on. 10. Animating And Looping The Scene: In this lesson, we'll would do their main animation, which is the car and camera animation together and we need to set up our scene in such a way that the animation loops seamlessly. So let's jump in and see how that works. So the way looping works for a scene like this is that whatever the camera is looking at at the beginning of our animation that's what the camera needs to be looking at at the end of the animation saw that when it plays through from the beginning, all the frames in between and then plays through to the end and starts again, that should create an illusion or the illusion of a loop. So let's see how we set that up for our particular scene. We need to select all the objects which make up the main section of the entire scene. So that's basically everything from the original landscape to the palm trees and all the objects in between. I haven't selected the car or the camera or the Sun out there in the distance, just everything else and this is going to be put into a null object, which I will call section and let's take those objects again, place them in here and now what I wanna do here is instance, this entire thing.So if I, with it selected, I will go to this icon, get the instance, which once again, it's just means copying it. I can move this new instance down, range like this and this needs to be set to 20 thousand centimeters so that it lines up perfectly with the first section.So now if we animate our car and camera to go from the center of the first section all the way down to the center of the second section, which is going to be 20,000 centimeters. That should create the illusion of a loop.So if I jump back into our camera, I'm actually going to create a new null object. Let's call this move. It's going to be the one that moves our camera and car at the same time. So let's take our camera and car, place that in here and this is what is going to have the actual animation. So if I move this now you can see that it's moving the car and the camera at the same time. So at frame zero in the coordinates, let us say I go to the position z and set a key frame. So hold control and click to turn that red and set the key frame. Scroll to the end of our animation and set the position here to 20 thousand, and then set the new position. If I look through the camera, go to Window and timeline. We have a new object here that's animated. Let's also make sure that those two key frames are linear. So this is the position z on the move null object. So select the key frames, click linear and now this should have a constant speed throughout. If I rewind to the beginning and hit play. It is going to lag just because of how many objects we have in the scene. So we then try and improve the playback rate here, starting by temporarily disabling the atom array and the instances because this is part of what's causing the slowdown and also in the cloners of their palm trees, I will set the instance mode from instance to render instance. it reduces the memory footprint of those models to just as if they were one model and it speeds up the view port performance. So if I do that again, you can see it's a bit faster, although not at full speed yet but for a preview purposes, this is absolutely fine. Anyway, as I scroll through to the end here, you can see that parts of our scene are looping, especially anything that's near to the camera but the sun out there, we get closer and closer to it as we travel, saw that ends up jumping. So to fix that problem, we just need to go back to frame zero. Currently the sun is at 80 thousand centimeters away. So that's the sun instance. Just leave it there, but make it a child of the movie null object two and it's important to do this at frame zero so that it maintains that same relative distance throughout. So now if I play this through, when we get to the end here, you will see it stay in the same relative position, which completes the loop for that part of the frame. Now another issue here is that when we get to the end, at the beginning of the animation is looking through two whole sections.The original section and then the second instance section that we just created moments ago.Whereas at the end, because we have traveled through the first section entirely at the end, we are now only looking through one of the sections. So we need to extend this out further so that we make the illusion as perfect as possible.We just need to make copies of the incidence. The second one I moved to 40,000 centimeters away, and the third one is going to be moved to 60,000 and I think with those three instances, that should be enough to make this loop jump in perceptible. You can still see a slight jump right on the horizon but it's not too much of an issue because by the time we do everything else in the scene when we add the camera shake and all the other effects, that slight jump at the end there won't be as noticeable.And we're going to always just do this another time and push this out to 80 thousand and that the more we have lined up, the less imperceptible that jump is going to be any way that's it. That is how we would loop this particular animation. It's really just a visual trick we achieved by lining up several of these instances, any way if I jump out of the camera here, so we have a God's eye view of everything.You can see the sun there is so far away that the camera is clipping and it's going out of view. If that bothers you or you can press control D to bring up the project settings and the view clipping, change it from medium to large and the view port is not capable of containing objects which are further away and their performance is still quiet good, regardless of all those objects that we have is just only when we try to play the animation that we have a few problems. That's just because we have so many generators and things going on that Cinema 4 D needs time to calculate each frame but if you're looking at just one frame and just, you know, panning around like this. It's perfectly responsive enough. So as you saw there by just lining up several instances of our original scene, we can animate through it and create a seamless loop effect. The next lesson is a bonus, and in it, I show you an alternative method of refining the seamless loop effect by reducing the difference between the first frame and the last frame in our animation. 11. Refining The Loop Animation: This part is optional, it's not going to massively affect how your loop looks but if you're interested in really optimizing things rather than using a brute force solution, then you might find this interesting. The main issue with the loop is that even though we have lined up five long instances here, there is still a slight jump just because of how the geometry is set up. If I go to the beginning and then switch to the end, you can still see a slight jump in the palm trees, in the way they are arranged. Now it's not a massive issue really, like I said, you won't really notice this in the final piece unless you were looking for it. But if I were to, let's say take away the third instance and this is something I really would want to do because having many instances in a scene increases the size of the project. Much more heavier lifting for cinema 4D to do. If you have a slow workstation that could be a real problem. Instead of just throwing several instances to try and fix the issue, we can take a different approach and try to optimize the scene within our means. I will actually completely get rid of this instance. Now I'm down to three. The difference now between the first frame is more obvious because of that missing x-ray instance, but it's not a problem because if we once again just take a look, the main object that's visible in the jump is the palm tree. The landscape itself is really not changing at frame zero, or at the end so we are just dealing with the palm trees in this case. What I want to do is select the palm trees, which in the original section, and it's this cloner at the top. Let me call it cloner palm so that it's easy to identify, and I'm going to insert a plain effector. That's what that cloner selected so mograph effector and plain and by default, the plain effector just moves everything up by 100 centimeter. What I want to do is set that value to negative 1500 and I use that number because that's roughly the length of each palm tree or the tallest of the palm trees, and a way you can just see them sticking out a bit. Then if we select this plain effector, I want to go to the fall-off tab, and select a linear field. Let's click this, change the direction from x plus to z plus instead. Now what will happen is if I move it from its original position, it's going to reveal the palm trees behind it. This is moving the linear field itself but really I should be moving the plain effector, the whole thing together, and it has the same effect. Let's expand the fall-off distance, so that this effect is more gradual, instead of just popping up like this. If I click on the linear field, we just want to go to the length and let's go for something like 5000. This will be much more gradual of a reveal. We want to move this all the way to the end of the animation, which I'm already at here and let's move it to the point at which it would just be about to fall off the edge of the last instance and see I moved the field again, I need to move the whole thing instead. The visual result is the same, but I just prefer to keep the objects together so that's going to be about here somewhere, seems to be about 65,000 in the z position so let's put that there. Then if I make it a child of our move null object, which is currently moving the camera and car, and make sure you do this at the last frame of the animation. Place this as a child and if I rewind this backwards, you can see that this is going to be now moving with our camera and car and the effect of this is that, if I look through the camera itself at frame zero and at the end, because I am slowly revealing the palm trees, you will no longer see just a slight jump in the way that the palm trees are arranged because they are slowly being revealed as we are traveling along this road at the same rate. By using this solution, I end up with a smoother looking loop. Any apparent differences are completely gone now, and also I did that with less instance objects, so my scene is lighter and are more optimized than it was prior. Simply lining these up, that's what I would describe as the brute force method, where you just throw as many objects as you can at the problem and it does work. I think overall this is a better solution to this particular scene. Different things will always require different solutions but it's good to know as many approaches as possible. We will once again open up this project in an older version of Cinema 4D because the plain effector and fall off will be, it works a bit differently. I just want to make sure that everyone is on the same page. 12. Refining Loop In Old Versions Of Cinema 4D: Optimizing the palm trees in earlier versions of Cinema 4D is going to be very different. Let's start by turning off the plain effector because it's just completely hiding our trees, and also the way the cloner works in older versions of Cinema 4D is very different. You can see all the trees are bunched up in this location. Let's go to the attributes of the cloner and what we need to change is the total Z size. I'm actually just going to go to the object mode here and with my live selection and just grab the handle to scale that cloner. Until it's the correct size is going to be somewhere close to 20,000 grid. Let's start with that, except I think that will put a tree right at where the two sections meet. We have to make this a bit smaller. But from here, I can take this and just move it manually until the spacing is correct. It ends up being about 18,600 or so for that total size. Now if I re-enable the plain effector and let's see where it is in the scene. It seems to be way over here for some reason I'm not sure why. If I scrub through to the end of the animation, you can see it's just completely in the wrong place. It should be way out there in the distance. I'm just going to remove this plain effector and start again. If I now select the palms and go to mow graph effect and plain it will once again just move or the palm trees by 100, we want to move them by negative 1,500 to be below the ground and I don't know where this object is in my view port. If I select it and press S, it's going to be framed, and I can find exactly where it is. I can see it's at the zero point of our C and if I rewind to the frame 0, that's where the car begins. We need to set up our fall off to have the same results as we did in version 21. Let's go to the plain effector and in the fall off tab, instead of having linear fields setup, we have a drop-down instead. This is set to infinite. Let's change this to linear and now we'll have a similar behavior to what we had before. Let's change the orientation to Z minus so that it's going to be revealing as it travels in that direction. The size is also controlled in X, Y, and Z. Let's set the Z size to 5,000. It has the same length and the reveal is going to be more gradual. I am also going to set the fall off to 100 percent. We use the entire range of this fall off size. I want to move it to the point at which it would be about to fall off the edge of this, the last segment. It ends up being the same position as we were dealing with in version 21 so about 65,000 centimeters. And that lines up perfectly with the last segment. Now if I move my timeline marker to the end, and then place this in here. If we reverse the animation now we can see it's revealing at the same rate that our camera is moving, and we have now created the same effect we had in version 21. Anyway, that's it, that's how the cloner and plain effectors and fall off used to work in older versions of Cinema 4D. 13. Creating The Materials And Shaders: So now that we have finished building and animating our scene, we'll move on to the actual look and style of the animation, starting with the materials and shaders, let me "double-click" to make a new material. This is going to be our floor material. And throughout all of this I should be looking through our camera. Let's "double-click" that new material. Call it the road actually, not the floor. This is going to be black. And in their reflectance, let's "disable the Default Specular". We are just dealing with reflections here. Let's add a reflection legacy. There Roughness I would turn down to zero. And Specular strength do the same. The Reflection strength itself is just going to be 20. We can set the Attenuation to additive, and the Layers bending mode if we were combining it with the one below, we would want to set this to add, but makes no difference in this case. Let's apply this to the road tube, which I didn't name correctly yet. Let's do that. I can place this directly or apply it onto the object in the list over here. Essentially we're doing the same thing. I will make a copy of this, and I will just make one change, which is their Reflection strength. I'm going to turn down to just 10 percent. And this will be applied to the floor, which was the larger grid pattern just on the outside here. And once again, if I can just aim for it and place it down, you see it works, or I can find it in the object list, and do the same thing over there. And at this point, maybe I should enable my interactive render, so that I can see the changes as I make them live. This is enabled by a person, the ALT key and, A, and if I just expand its reach, and make it a bit wider perhaps, and I will also move the quality slider all the way to the top. Now any changes I make, I can actually see what they look like in the final render itself. Right now, I can see that the default light in cinema 4D is ten Don, that's why we can see anything at all. So to counter that, I am going to create a new light, and just give this an intensity of zero. And that overrides any default lights which Cinema 4D tries to throw in by default. The next material I want to create, is the one on the landscape itself. Once again, I will just make a copy of one of these materials, and in their reflectance, let's push this up to about 50. Also in the luminance channel, I'm going to enable this, which is going to make everything brighter. I haven't applied it here, that's why it's not making any difference. Let's call it landscape, and let's apply it to the landscape object. And anything we're doing in this first section, and instance will be automatically abated in our other instances down the stretch here. Let's go to that material. Instead of just having a full-on white-color, let's use a funnel effect. That's found under texture, and funnel. And what this does is, it illuminates the different parts of our geometry based on the angle that the camera is looking at them. If it's a steeper angle, you see it's brighter, but if we're facing it at a 90 degree angle, you see that it gets darker, and it creates this really nice looking effect. What we want to do is jumping here to "click " the gradient. And let's just pull it back, attach maybe to about halfway, move the effect closer to the edges of our geometry. And then I'm going change the color to about 265 on the hue slider, and then put this all the way up to a 100 percent for the saturation. This kind of blue slash purple, it's too strong though. Let's go back to this level, and we can set the brightness to 50, but it's being overlaid on top of white. Let's put the original white brightness down to zero, and we end up with something like this instead. And hopefully, as we create more of these materials, you can start to see how this is going to shape up for the final look, and style. Let's see what we can do next. We have this illuminated lines, for these we will create another material. Let's "double-click" anywhere. And in luminance, let's start with the yellow lines. For the hue, that's going to be about 40 to 45, and saturation all the way up. Let's turn off any other channels we just need the luminance channel from this one. And let's find those lines. That's the side, and center lines, which I will just drop in like this. It's also the grid lines on the floor, which I have currently disabled to speed up the performance of the scene. But, we know that everything is going to work because, we have previewed our animation already. We can turn those atom array lines back on. Let's apply the materials onto them. The floor on this right here, is going to be atom array floor. And the other one is atom array landscape. If I "click" away, and just give this a few seconds to process, we should see the lines on the floor there. Let's make a copy of this material and give it this kind of color, about 290 on the hue slider. And this is going to be the grid lines over the landscape, so that's the other atom array. And slowly it starting to shake up. Next up, we have the trees, and I gave them a similar treatment to the landscape objects where we have the funnel effect. So if I copy the landscape material, and let's call this trees, except I'm going to remove any reflection, therefore now is going to be a different color. If I jump in here, let's make this 290 degrees or so. For the hue slider, I will apply this onto the Cloner, which contains all of the palm trees. And as soon as I do this, you will see that shading now kick in. That's it for the main materials we do need to create the stars now that we see in the background. For this, if I "double-click" to create a new material, let's call this BG for background, and once again, in the luminance channel, I will "Disable" the other channels. Let's "enable" luminance. If I just "click" this bar, this will open up the import dialog for our image. And I have this JPEG here, which just contains these stars. We can bring this in. "Click" No. We need to attach it to a plane, and place that plane behind our Sun. If I press "Alt", and "A" we can get a plane. And it needs to have the same ratio or dimensions as our image, so that our stars don't get stretched out in either the app or sideways direction. The orientation first of all needs to be z plus, so it's facing up. And then if we "click" on our material, I can see the resolution is set to 4,007 by 2505. What I will do is, start by giving my plane those same dimensions. So 4,007, and then 2005. That's four year, not two. If I apply that to the plane, which I will call background, let's move it past where our sun is. That's at 80,000. Let's move this to 81,000 centimeters. Now it's somewhere way behind there. It needs to be much larger. What I can do is, the size, if I change the size here on editable objects, it automatically and proportionally changes the other sides too. If I go for, let's say 100,000 centimeters for its x size and hit enter, you see that the y size is automatically adjusted too. This only works down here, but you can always change them individually without affecting the other in the actual object properties too. That's clearly not large enough still, so let's change that to be, let's say 120,000. Maybe even 125,000. Basically, until it's large enough to contain the entire frame. We need to be on the first frame to line this up. Actually, I think it needs to be even larger. I've gone for 140,000 here. Then here it also needs to be inside of the move null object so that it moves at the same rate as our camera and car, that way it will appear static in the distance, just like we did for the sun. Now, the material itself looks very fuzzy there, we can't really see any of the stars at all. If we go to the editor in the material, let's change the texture preview size from default to, let's say, 2K, and we can now see the stars a bit clearer. Also, I know this image is upside down because of the orientation, it should be z minus. If we once again enable our interactive render, let's see what it looks like with the stars. In the example, the sky has a bit of a gradient to it, and also a lot of color, right now it's just completely black. Let's go into the material. In the luminance channel, let's take everything and place it inside of a layer. Let's just go into this arrow, this drop-down layer, then we can open this up, go into the shaders, and let's enable a gradient shader. Let's go to the type, set this to 2D-V so it goes up and down instead of sideways. If we create three handles, the first one being this color here, about 290 again, basically using the same colors throughout for some consistency to the style, and then the third handle is going to be the other color, which was about 265 or so. I think this is upside down. I should be seeing from the halfway point, the transition from this color to the other color, which would go from about here to the top of the frame. I know this is happening because the plane itself is upside down. I will change the orientation from Z plus Z minus. In the preview, you can already see that it's going to be the correct way. I could have just rearranged the way I did this colors here, but either way we end up where we want. Let me right-click and distribute just to make sure that's right in the center. Then if I go back, place this gradient below my styles image, this bitmap. We want to set the stars blending mode from normal to, let's say, screen, and that will combine those two things together. You can now see the stars through the gradient. This needs to be a lot weaker, let's go for about 25 percent. Right now it's too bright, about there. I want to tone my stars a warmer color, right now they are more of a white cold color. Right-click this bitmap image, I can place it inside of a filter, and if we jump in here, let's colorize this, set the hue color to about 40 degrees, which is roughly like an orange/yellow color, and put the saturation all the way up to 100 percent. There is a preview here, but it's very small. You could open this up, and right-click open window, enlarge this and you can see the changes you do to the image in the filter, but it's almost like re-rendering this each time you make any changes. You would just have to give it a few seconds to process before you see any difference. Anyway, we can see the differences in the actual image itself. If I go back, I can maybe change the blending mode from screen to add. This should make it brighter. If the stars are not bright enough for my liking, I can copy this shader, go to shader and paste, and then add this on top of the original also, and this should create a brighter stars effect. It's very subtle and it might get lost in the quality of the video you're watching, but that was just a bit punchier than before. But that's it as far as the materials we have to create. From this point, I am just going to make some changes to the existing materials. Starting with the sun, it's simply not bright enough. If I go to its material, that gradient we created earlier. To change its brightness, I have to go to the luminance channel and to the brightness here, if I go for, let's say, 150, you don't see any change at all yet. That's because the mixed mode with our gradient should be set to multiply. Now, when I make this brighter up here, you will see a difference, and it actually updated by itself there. I will leave that there for now. We can actually adjust these colors later in After Effects anyway. Another change I will make is the material on the windows. Currently I can see through it, which I don't really like that much. I prefer this dark tinted look. I will go to the car's materials, which in this DMC 12 layer, and it's this glass material here. We're just going to turn off the transparency. Then in reflectance, we could maybe put a slight shiny effect to that. That's just a classic reflectance layer. Set this to add, and roughness set all the way down to zero. Same for the specular strength. The reflection strength, I will put down to about 50 attenuation additive, and the layer color I will throw in a fresnel to create this kind of material. This should have the effect of just completely blacking out that window, and I like that for this particular scene. Another adjustment, you can see right now my car's white paint material is completely invisible, that's because there are no lights in the scene. We do have a light, but if you recall, I set its intensity down to zero. Let's get another light, and this one I will set to about 25, maybe 20, and that will enable this ambient illumination switch, which applies the same level of illumination to all of the objects in the scene. Since the car's paint here is one of the few materials that has a diffused channel in the color channel, that's why you really only see a difference. Everything else is being made up of luminescence and reflections, so it doesn't really affect much else, but now we can see that paint on our car. Furthermore, if I go to the color, let's give it that same color that we've been using up to this point but with a saturation of only about 40 percent or so just so that it's not completely white. We want to give that a slight tint to blend in with the rest of the scene. As I do that, you see the slight change there. But that's it. That's how we create the materials and colors for our scene here. One final thing is I will point out that the lights on the back of the car here, of course, that's this red material that you see which is just a simple red color in the luminance channel, it already came pre-applied onto the car model. If I just show you what that looks like, let me disable this interruptive render and solo the car by itself. It's on the lights at the back here. If I open this up, this piece of geometry right there, and I just isolated the color to be on the actual tail lights. I think these are the brake lights here, and you've got your indicators, you reverse lights, and so on. The middle strip here is where I applied this back light material. If I solo just that piece of geometry, you can see how this works. I simply selected those polygons. If I press U and F, I can select any polygons which are connected together, and I'm holding Shift to make a multiple selection, and we'll do that over here. If I were to just quickly create a new material as a test, I can enable luminance on that. They are over here, and apply it to there, and you can see it applies to only those polygons I selected now. I think I had the other one selected prior to that, so it went there too. But just in case you were wondering, that's how I ended up with just that part of my rear lights illuminated, and that's what we want for this scene. The materials and shaders are just the first step in developing the style and look off our animation. In the next lesson, we'll continue with this. 14. Fog And Atmosphere Effects: Continuing to develop the style of our animation, we are now going to create a fog effect, and this is going to give us some depth and dimension and the atmosphere to our animation. This is where we left off in the previous lesson. Once again, I will enable my interruptive render region by pressing alt and A on the keyboard. So we can see the changes as I do them. We now want to do our fog effect, and this is going to start with the physical sky. Lets just bring that in, and we need to disable the sky and sun in here and just keep the fog turned on and that's it, and then in the fog itself and by the way, those switches were in the basic tab. But the controls of the fog in the fog tab at the end here. I will go with a color, that we have been using up to this point about 292 degrees on the hue. Then maximum saturation and brightness, and you will see the change immediately. Then I will go to the height and set this to negative 2500 just to start further below the ground level. The end height i will set to about positive 3500, now this is going to be completely too much fog, so let's dial it back and that's going to be in the density here. Let's go for 12.5 instead. When I do that, we pretty much have our entire fog setup for this. That's all we need to do. Of course here you could use different settings if you wish. You could make this more intense by increasing the set density if you wish, or changing the start and end height. I'm going to render this single frame to the picture viewer so in my render settings I have unticked save because we just want to preview this in cinema 4 D. Because I want to show you a problem which will occur anytime you use fog in cinema 4 D, it's a bug which has been present in them, basically all versions of Cinema 4 D up until now. But it's very easy to fix. You just need to be aware of it. If I close this project and then reopen it. If I got to recent files and it's that one at the top, and without doing anything different and just hitting render to picture viewer once again, you will see that the fog is not rendering correctly. At a glance, it might seem like everything is fine, but if I go back to the original, you can see here the fog is how we wanted, then here it seems to only render behind all the objects in the scene, and we've got nothing closer to the camera here. This just happens because the fog effect in cinema 4 D does not reinitialize when you open and close a project. But when you close and open a project, rather, you have to change one of these values and then it will render correctly and reset to where it should be. As You see there. To fix this issue, you just need to attach a key-frame to any one of these values at the beginning of your animation so that the next time you open this, or maybe you send it to someone else for to render or something like that. The key-frame will force Cinema 4 D to reinitialize the fog correctly from the beginning. If I, let's say do this on this start height i will just drop it down to negative 2499. Set a key frame at frame zero, move forward one frame, and then set it back to what it should be, which is negative 2500. The whole point here is that between frame zero and one, I have made a change to the value and that's it. The next time I open this project, it's going to always render correctly. Now, I may still lose the first frame because it only re-initializes after it detects the key-frame. But because this is a loop and because of the way we have set this up, the first frame of our animation is actually identical to the last frame of our animation, so if you lined up those clips back to back, you would always be repeating where those two frames meet. We actually always need to take out the first frame or the last frame from the animation anyway. So it's not a big problem if we lose the fast frame because we are always going to cut it out. Anyway, from the final animation, so that's it. Just a weird quirk in cinema 4 D that's been there for several versions. But if you encounter this problem, which you will, now you know how to fix it.That's how we do the fog effect in cinema 4 D for just a few steps. Also just be aware of the glitch which will occur. Anyway, in the following lesson, we are going to start refining all render and getting ready for the output. 15. Render Quality And Speed Optimization: In this lesson, we're going to refine our settings with two goals in mind. One is we want our animation to look as clean as possible. Secondly, we want it to output the whole animation as fast as possible too. Let's see what those settings are. The first quick change I would do is I'm going to point my cameras slightly up. If I go to the camera and then the coordinates, let's set the rotation pitch up by one degree. Now that ends up revealing the top of this frame here, so this background, I'm going to move that up manually using my mouse, just to the point where it's no longer visible at the top there. Let's go to the Render Settings. In output, I will go for 1920 by 1080. I will just keep firing shots to the picture viewer to see where we are at each stage and what refinement we need to do next. Also part of this is trying to get as fast a render as possible. The first thing is that in general, some of these might look a bit rough. For example, the reflections of the palm trees onto the landscape object. That's just is going to look too messy in that final animation. We need to exclude the palm trees to appear in these specific reflections. The way to do this is if I go to the object that's casting the reflection which is the palms here. Let's right-click. Under render tags in cinema 4D R21, I think this was called compositing tags in older versions. Let's get the compositing tag itself. We want to go to the exclusion tab. Let's drop the landscape here. This whole object is now going to exclude the landscape object when we render it out. If we send that to render, as soon as this starts to reveal, we will see that change has occurred. This is before. I want you to watch these two main areas where you can see the reflection of the palm and now it is completely gone. This also works to stop the palm trees from occluding or from obstructing the reflection from the sun onto the landscapes here, it just looks a bit cleaner. I preferred this to what we had before. Let's see what we can do. Because of where the car is, I don't really think I'm going to see much of a reflection from the palms off the car. I may as well just remove the car from this equation too, which is just drag the whole thing here. Now this will no longer bounce off the car either. I noticed with the palm trees themselves look a bit too dark. I'm going to increase the strength of the luminance which I had turned down to 50% before. Also may be just extend the reach of this funnel effect. Let's also output this. We can already start to see the difference. By extending the funnel just a touch, I have made the palm tree is a bit more prominent. I think that's a bit better. Also by removing the palm trees from being reflected on the car. That has almost cut the render time by half. Before we were at 18 seconds for this result, now we're at 11 seconds. That's an extra bonus there. Also a cleaner looking render. Another speed improvement we could try. Let's see if this has any difference. In the options we have some depth controls here. This just controls how many times. For example, the reflection depth currently is set to five. That means it's going to bounce around five times before it stops being rendered out. If we cut this down to two and for the ray and shadow depth, we actually don't have any real shadows in the scene, but if I had, I would maybe put this at about six. The same for the ray depth. The default values are generally overkill. If you lower those, you can actually get a faster render time without really affecting what your image looks like. The whole point is just find where that number is and see if it can improve anything for you. In our case, I didn't really get any extra speed because it's a fairly simple scene. Like I said, there wasn't any shadows to cut out anyway. Any reflections which are there are very simple. But you would have seen different results in different projects perhaps. One final change I could do here is make the sun itself brighter because all of that fog actually made it appear a bit dimmer. If I go to the brightness, I would just go all the way up to 200% this time. Once again, make sure that the mix mode with the gradient is set to multiply. Otherwise you won't see any change here. Then in the anti-aliasing settings, this will control how smoothly pixels are rendered out. By default it's just set to this geometry control. Let's change it to best and we'll go for a minimum level of one by one, max level two-by-two. I will go for a threshold of 5%. This should give us a slightly smoother looking image without increasing our render time too much. Even if it does, we don't really have that many frames to output anyway. At 24 FPS, there's only going to be about 200 frames total. The whole thing can still render in a reasonable amount of time. But let's just preview this one more time. This is what I will move on with to do the final output and set up our export. Let this finish through. We can quickly compare to the previous frame. We've now got the brighter sun out there in the distance. In some areas, the pixels are visibly just a bit better looking because of the anti-aliasing. Some of this will get lost in the streaming quality of skill share. At 17 seconds of frame that's still a very reasonable render time. I think for me the whole thing would have taken about two hours or so, which wasn't bad at all. That's on a CPU which is native seven years old at this point it's a Intel 3930k. It's a very old computer, but still very capable of producing some images like this. [ MUSIC ] There you have it, by changing a few settings and applying a few tags here and there, we we're able to clean up our image and also make sure that the render times are reasonable. In the following lesson, we will look at the actual outward from cinema 4D. 16. Advanced Output Render Settings For Cinema 4D: This is the final lesson in Cinema 4D. We're going to output our frames using an advanced method where each frame is going to be broken down into different layers. This is going to give us more control later when we get to the after effects section. This is how the final export is going to work. If I go to my render settings in the save tab. Let's start there. This is where we define the format for our output. My favorite, by far, is PNG sequence and it's always in the 16-bit channel because there's just way more information in the frames that way. I can specify an output path. You can see I've already done this before, so let's create some new folders. One is going to be called main number two. Let's just jump in here, call this main. This is where my main render would go to. Just another note before I continue with this. If I press "Control" and "D", to open up my project preferences. This entire time I've been working in 30 FPS, 30 frames per second. I really should have been at 24, but it doesn't really matter, you can simply just punch that in and the whole project will conform to the new FPS. Anyway this is important because we want that to match our output FPS also. In the output settings, which is defaulted to 30 here, I'm going to make that 24 here. The frame range is going to be all of the frames. Eight seconds at 24 FPS gives us 192 frames and that's what we have here. We could at this point, just output this to the picture viewer or maybe using their Render Queue, which I will get to shortly. But I want to output this project in a way that will give us more control later when we get to the after effects section. By that I mean I want to break down the image into various layers that we can then blend together with much more control later. Let me show you what I mean. We want to go to multi pass. If I open this up and let's say add ambient, and then I will also add reflection and diffuse. Let's make sure that multi pass is also enabled here. In the save tab, we now have a new extra save path that we need to specify. This is for the multi pass layers. I turn this off, you see that disappears and if I turn it back on, it reappears. This is also going to be in PNG. We just need to place this in a folder by itself, so this is going to be a new folder called multi, I'll call it number two also and then in here I will just call the filename multi. All of these various layers will end up in that folder. Anyway let's see what's so special about this. If I close the render settings for now or before I do that, let's just not save anything, we're just throwing this to the picture viewer. It will warn us that this is not being saved anywhere, but that's okay. You can see it has started the render and it's lined up all of the frames. We just need one to use as an example. If I go to the layer section, we can currently see it's set to image. Let's set this to single pass. You can see this various layers which correspond to the multi pass layers I set up a moment ago. If I press "Escape" here, I can stop this render from continuing. Let's just look at the one frame by itself. You can see our final image is made up of these different layers together and Cinema 4D just basically blends all of that into a single frame. But by separating it this way, it means that when we get to after effects, we can control each layer individually and that gives us way more control than we would if we were just using a single flat image like this. Anyway, once again if you go to layer and single pass, that's how you view this various layers together. In addition to the three layers that we have so far that make up our image, there are the multi pass layers you could have in the other sieves perhaps, such as specular. But we don't have anything like that here, so it's not going to be part of our output. But we do have atmosphere effects, and this is going to contain the fog layer. So I would enable this. In other scenes if I have things like shadows, I would also bring this scene. Basically you're just tailoring this to your specific scene. For our scene, we just need these four particular multi pass layers. In addition to that, I also want to be able to control different parts of the image individually if I want to. For example, let's say we get to after effects, and I just want to change the color of the sun, for example, or the color of this grid lines. To do that I need to output masks along with my regular image layers. To do that in Cinema 4D, to output black and white masks, we have to use what's called the object buffer system in Cinema 4D. Let's pick an object that we want to isolate. Let's say the whole car itself. If I go to the car model and "Right click" go to Render tags, which again is composite in tags in older versions of Cinema. If we go to Render tags, I want to go to compositing and we have a tab here called Object Buffer. Let me enable this. This is in Buffer number one. In the Render settings, I'm going to go to multi pass and then get an Object Buffer. This group ID in this buffer needs to correspond to the object that I am trying to output. So far, it's just the car. If I output this once again. Let's do a single frame just to keep things simple for now. This is in the output, let's go to current frame. As this renders through, if I scroll down my different single passes, we now have an extra one here called object buffer number one. You can see it's a black and white mask of just our car. This would allow me then in after effects to use this layer as a Luma Matte to control just the colors or anything else on just the car. I want to go ahead and set this up for several other objects but on the car itself. Let's go to the geometry which holds the back lights, and I will insert another compositing tag. This is going to be in buffer number two. Let me show you something else you need to be aware of if I do another render. If we look at buffer number one, you will see that the lights have disappeared. That's because Cinema 4D processes these in an order. It will always look at the object level first and then look at their parent. In the object level, we have removed the lights from buffer number one. We just enabled number two. We need to make sure that it's in both number one combined with its parent, but then also it's just in number two by itself. I hope that makes sense. It should if I just insert number two here, and then set the group ID to match that one more render. Now we see both buffers appear. The first one contains everything that's in number 1. Then the second one is just the lights on their own. We can continue and set the rest of the other things up. I'm going to go for, let's say the background object. This can be in a buffer by itself. Put this in number three. Then for the main geometry, let's say the palm trees, they can be number four. Basically anything that can be selected I should set that up for it. I will combine the side and center lines though. We don't necessarily need those to be separate. That will be number six, the road will be number seven. The array for the landscape, I would drop into eight. The landscape itself is going to be number nine. We can also put the sun in an object buffer. That's going to be the sun out there in the distance, and it's inside of this node over here. If I just copy any of the tags onto it, I think we got up to number 10. No, we got up to number nine down here and then this can be number 10 for the final, sun. I think that should be everything. I will go back to my render settings and go and enable save. Let's enable all the frames. I could render to the picture viewer like we have been doing up to this point. But I think it's better to line this up in the Render Queue instead. But before I do that actually I realized that I did not set up the remaining buffers. We just need to keep inserting these until we have the right number. It was about 10 in total. You can select all of them at once like this and then just go through the different numbers, making sure that it goes through the same numbers that you set your buffers to. We've got seven, eight, nine and 10. Now I can send this to my Render Queue for the final output. If I go to Render and add to Render Queue, you can see I finished a render prior to this. This was the first version of the project, and this is what we have just created for our class. Here I would simply just go to jobs and start rendering and it will start to output in the background. You could do something like this and leave it running overnight perhaps, or maybe just step away from your computer whilst this is processing, it's obviously very CPU intensive, so you really won't be able to do much else whilst you render is going on in the background. After it renders a few frames, it will estimate the overall time it's going to take to complete the entire animation. All of our frames are roughly similar. How long it would take to do each one. This is quite accurate. It's going to take about an hour and a half to render this entire animation which is embed at all. If I look in the final output folder, I can see the frames are writing to my disk. The first frame rendered incorrectly, if you recall because of the fog glitch, but it's not a problem. We're going to take it out anyway. But from the second frame onward, you see everything looks correct. In the multi pass folder, we can see all the several multi pass layers rendering into here all at the same time. That it. That's how the multi pass system works in Cinema 4D and you will see why this is so useful when we get to the following sections in after effects. 17. Importing Renders Into After Effects: To begin with, in "After Effects", we're going to take the frames from "Cinema 4-D". This is very simple, and it will take just a couple of minutes. This is our project in "After Effects", and we have been looking at this reference, throughout the project. We now want to take the renders we outputted from cinema 4-D, and build them into what we see here. So if I go to the project window, I can just double-click here to open up the location, where my renders went to. So at this folder, I have the main render itself, which we can just use as reference, but the actual final image, is going to be built by the various multi-pass layers, that we outputted from Cinema, so let's go and get those. If I double-click here once again, and go to the multi-pass folder, you can see there are several types of multi-passes in here, and all of them, would have outputted to this one folder, at once. So to import all of them, just simply select any frame, press "Control A", to extend the selection to everything, and your computer might have to think about this for a second. But once this is done, you can tip this button here, which says "multiple sequences", and if I import, "After Effects" is going to automatically detect the frame ranges of each particular sequence, and it will bring them all in, as separate layers. Like this. I'm not sure how long this feature has been around, the "multiple sequences import", but if you don't have it in your "After Effects", you can still click any sequence, or any frame render, from any of the sequences, and bring them in, one at a time. You just have to make sure, that the "sequence" button here is tipped, and if you do that, it doesn't matter which frame from which sequence you select. It will still bring in the entire frame range, but obviously, the quickest way, is to select all of them at once, and use the "multiple sequences" switch. If I click on any of my sequences, I can see that they 24 FPS, but by default "After Effects" is set to 30 FPS. So to make sure that your footage is the right frames per second, you want to right-click "interpret footage" and "main". Then in the "main" option Down here, where it says, "assume this frame rate", You want to type in "24", and then you can right-click "interpret footage". Remember the interpretation. You can select all the other frames, or all of the sequences," interpret footage", and "apply", and just double-check when you click on them, and see what the FPS and duration is up here. It should be 24 FPS and eight seconds. At this point, you may also want to just organize your project a bit better, so we can say, for example, these are our main image sequences, right? Then all these other ones. We have the buffers, so we can drag them to a new folder, and let's call that "buffers". In addition, it's also a good idea to name the object buffers, or the masks here, so that it's easy to identify in our project. You can double-click each one, and preview it in the window here, and you can tell what it is, so this is clearly the sky on the background. Just double-click the next one. This would be the floor. Now, depending on what order you did yours in, all of these are going to be different. So just go through, and try and name everything, as much as possible. After a couple of minutes, I have now renamed all of my buffers, so I know what each layer contains, and this will make it much more organized, when we start doing the compositing itself. Okay, now that we have all of our frames and layers in "After Effects", we can move on, and do the actual compositing. 18. Compositing In After Effects: Continuing in After Effects, we are going to take the layers that we brought in from cinema 4D, and we're going to layer them together to build up our final image and then applying various effects on top of them. This is where we want to end up after our compositing in After Effects. There are several things to go through here, so let's just jump straight in. I am going to begin with the multi ambient pass. And I will just drag this to a New Composition button. And at this point, it's worth just going through our kind of management settings to make sure that everything stays consistent. Currently, this is using my display's color management, and even if I untick this, it stays the same. And then if I go to the "Project working space", I can see that this is set to this sRGB color profile. And for me, this is what my screen is calibrated to. So there is no change whether I set it here or use my display's color management in this section. But if I were to come back in here and use something like Adobe RGB, I will get a slightly different response. This particular profile tends to be a bit more muted and less saturated, and personally, I am not a big fan of that. So I tend to stick with my sRGB profile. So if you get to this stage and suddenly find your colors looking a bit odd, just make sure you are using the correct color profile there. And also, the color depth should be set to 16 bits per channel so that we extract as much information from our renders, which if you recall, were also outputted at 16 bits per channel from cinema 4D, those various PNG sequences. So with our multi ambient pass imported into this new composition, let's bring in the other layers that make up our final frame. So we have Diffuse and I will place this below the ambient layer. And on the ambient, let's set its blending mode from normal to screen, so that we blend the two layers together. If this Blending Mode menu is not visible, just press "F4" on your keyboard and it will cycle through, and you just need to do this once or twice. Now we have it there. Okay, moving on, we have the reflection layer. Let's bring that in and once again, screen it. And finally, we have the utmost layer which contains our fog. So very quickly by just combining those four layers, we have reconstructed what our image looked like in cinema 4D. Except now because these are four separate layers, we can control each one individually and make some adjustments. So for example, on the fog layer, I could go to the Color Correction in Effects and let's say "Hue and Saturation", and here I could change the color of the fog. So let's say, just using the hue slider, we can go to the left or to the right, and that's going to change the tone and color off the fog. I'm just going leave it as it is, but I just wanted to quickly illustrate the level of control we have now. I wanted to create a glow effect on the sun and several other elements in my frame. And for this, I am going to make use of the object buffers we outputted from cinema 4D. Now, I actually accidentally did not export the buffer for the sun, so it's missing from this list. But luckily, I can take all of these, what we have, and put them to a new composition. And of course, if you have been following the class up until now, you won't have this issue because, I outputted this correctly in the class. But this is the older project I am looking at here. Anyway, if I bring all of these into the new composition and it's a single composition, I can set all of their blending modes to be Add, which means they will combine, and the only thing that's missing is the sun. So this will still be useful as a mask. I just need to invert how I use this. Anyway, let's go to the multi ambient layer, which is our main composition. Maybe I should call it that. So in the composition settings, let's call this Main and click "Okay". This new composition with the combined buffers, I am going to call Sun Mask. And let's bring it into our main composition. Take another copy of the ambient pass and place it below the sun mask. And then let's press "F4", and we want to go to this ambient layer and, under Track Matte, let's point to the sun mask, except we're using the inverted matte instead. And if I solo this to appear on its own, you can see I have just now selected those pixels. So let's precompose these two together, and it's going to be called Sun. Click "Okay". And if I bring it back and apply a glow effect, which is found under Stylize and Glow, we can put the threshold all the way up to 100 and the radius I will set to 50. And if this layer's blending mode was set to screen, it will blend on top of the original and just brighten everything up. But I also want to put a bit more color into this glow effect. So if I just set this back to normal for a second, I can go to Effect, Generate, and Gradient Ramp, and we're just coloring the sun. Let's put the glow effect below the gradient. And the start color is going to be the yellow slash orange at about 40 degrees or so for the hue. And the end color will be that sort of pink, red color about here. And let's get the gradient's handles and bring them closer to where the actual sun is. So something like this. And as I am doing this, we can see the glow changes color. And this is It without the gradient ramp and with. And let's set the blending mode to screen. And once again, this is with the gradient and without. I just prefer the tones that we have changed here in After Effects. So let's continue. I am going to do the tail lights. There is a glow effect I applied onto that, this kind of cross glow effect. Let's do that here too. And once again, I will make use of the ambient pass. And we have a mask we created for the rear lights. And it's just this right here. Place that above the ambient pass. And once again a luma matte, except this time it's just the regular luma matte because we outputted this mask correctly or this object buffer. And if I solo this on its own, you can see it's just the rear light. Let's precompose this and call it Lights Precomposed 1. I want to go to effect, blur and sharpen. We want directional blur. Set the direction to 35 degrees and the blur length to 80. Let's triplicate this and just reverse the directional blur on the new layer to negative 35. Let's precompose both of these layers together and they are going to be cold lights precomposed to like this. I can set this layers blending mode to screen so that it adds on top of the original or to Effect Stylize and Glow. I want to drop the threshold all the way down until I start to see some orange pixels start to appear. It creates this haute looking red glow. About 10 percent for the threshold, anywhere between 8-10. The radius I will set to 50 just to diffuse the whole effect attach. The blending mode can also be set to let's say add and this is going to just make it pop just a bit more. The next object I want to have glow are the lines on the outside of the road and the lines in the center as well. For this I have two separate buffers. For the class, we outputted them all at once, but it's basically the same thing. We have the sidelines and the center lines. I will drop this into a new composition and once again, single click "Okay". Just make sure the top layer is set to screen or add so that both will appear at the same time. Let's call this composition lines and in the main complex bring our ambient layer and the lines, configure the track matte, just like this and then precompose that layer. This is going to be lines precomposed. Number 1, go to Effect, Stylize and Glow. Set the threshold to be lower, maybe all the way down to zero and for the radius, let's say 50 to start with. However, for the glow itself, I want more of an orange tone. So instead of using the original colors, let's switch this to A and B colors and then I can define what colors I want this to glow as. For color A, let's do about 40 degrees on the hue slider and maximum saturation and brightness. Click "Okay" and For the B color, I will pick the one above and then just make it a bit more orange. Maybe about 25 degrees instead. Let's copy the glow effect. On the new one, I would change it back to original colors because it would take the colors from the one above. We want to set the radius to 100 and then play with the threshold until we get something we like. I think about 60 is what I used in the original project. This second effect just makes the effect a bit stronger and a bit more diffused. Then one more area I want to target using one of the buffers is, the sky in the distance there and the stars. Once again, we will make use of the ambient pass and the buffer that I created for the sky. Place this above the ambient layer. Let's set up the track matte. If I solo the sky layer, it looks like this. What I want to do is go to Effect Generate and Gradient Ramp. Let's turn off the Gradient Ramp Effect so we can see the colors behind. I want to choose those as my two starting colors in the same positions. If I re-enable the gradient, let's move the lower handle to be in the center. This is where the horizon line is. This one can stay at the top there. I want to have this be about half as bright as it currently is. For the start color, which has a brightness of 53 percent, I will drop this to just 25 and it ends up looking a bit too purple. I will drop its hue to somewhere around 230 degrees perhaps. Click "Okay". The end color, I will also just drop the brightness down to 25 percent. If I bring it back to reveal everything else, you can see the stars are missing, but the sky is indeed much darker, too dark. If we place it behind the outmost layer, it brightens up a bit. It's just that the stars are missing. To bring back the stars, I'm going to make a copy of this layer, the sky with the gradient. Let's rename this one, stars and remove the Gradient Ramp. This will once again brighten everything because we're just back to where we started. I can go to Effect Color Correction and Levels. If I just create some contrast on that layer, and let's solo it to see what's going on, It's going to get rid of all the colors and leave just the bright spots and those our stars. Let's bring everything else back and set this star layer to add. By separating the stars from the background color, I was able to darken the whole sky behind the sun there. Furthermore, I can now deal with the stars on their own. I want to give them a similar glow effect to what we did on the tail lights. If I duplicate the star layer, let's go to Effect, blur and sharpen and directional blur. At the top, let's just zoom in somewhere where we can see the direction is going to be at, say 40 degrees and the same for the blur length. It's going to give the stars this streaky blur effect. Let's triplicate this layer and just reverse the direction of the blur effect. So negative 40 instead. Now we have them going in the other direction. Let's combine these two layers or maybe we don't have to because they just appear the same anyway. If I just zoom out and turn this to on and off at the same time, we can see the glow effect we have on the stars. If I do a quick preview by pressing the space bar, this is what we have so far. It takes a few minutes to do a full preview just because we have so many layers being rendered out here. For your own project, I encourage you to continue making further adjustments. You could create something that looks completely different in how it is styled, the colors, the various glow effects and so on because you have all of these object buffers we outputted you can target specific parts of the image and customize them to look like however you want. Play around with that and see what you can come up with. Anyway, in the next lesson, we'll look at doing some final color adjustments, as well as this old school VHS effect. 19. Vhs Effect And Color Correction: This is the second main lesson in After Effects. We're going to do the VHS effect and then apply in the final color adjustments. This is the final loop, once again. Now we want to do the final color adjustments as well as this old school VHS effect. This is made up of three main elements. We have, which is just some stock footage, these lines you see flashing up on the screen. The whole frame is shaking. We will do that with a wiggle expression in After Effects. Then we have an RGB split effect. Let's start with that. In the main composition, if I select everything, I am going to pre-compose. Let's call this Main Precomposed 1. I will press Control D to make a copy, go to Effect, Channel, and Shift Channels. On this first one, we want to just leave the Red channel enabled. Green and Blue will be switched to full off. That just leaves the Red channel. Let's make a copy of this layer once again. This time we want Green. Finally, let's switch off Red and Green and turn on Blue. We have split our image into the three different color channels and now we want to add them back to each other. Just do this on the top two layers and we are back to where we started. But because these are on three separate layers, I can go to the first layer or the second one, which is holding the green, and let's set its scale. Press S to bring this up to 101. By offsetting the scale, we can now start to see the RGB split effect. Let's do the same to the top layer which is holding the blue color, and this will be set to 102. If we go to this side of the frame, you can clearly see the three different colors that make up this RGB split effect. We've got red, green, and blue. This is too sharp, though. I want to blur the whole effect, so if I go to each individual layer, I will apply a Fast Box Blur and set the radius to just two. Let's put this onto the one below and also the Red. Now we have to take these three layers, pre-compose them and call it RGB Split. Click Okay and the mode will be set to Color, the blending mode. Now this overlays on top of the original. If I turn it On and Off, you can see the difference. The next thing is to make our frame shake. If I take both of these and pre-compose them, let's call this Main Precomposed Number 2, and I will go to the position of this layer. Press P to bring that up. I want to separate this into the two different dimensions, so X Position and Y Position. On the X Position, I'm going to hold the Alt key on my keyboard and click the keyframe there to enable the expression editor. We're just going to type in Wiggle, open parenthesis, eight and five. The wiggle, that's basically the shake expression, and the first number, which is eight, that means how many times a second this is going to shake. It's going to be eight for us and then five is the amount is going to shake by. If I click away, you will now see this X Position value is red and if I scrub through the timeline, you can see it is moving very slightly. Now the frame is shaking side-to-side. Let's do the same for the Y Position, except this is going to be slightly greater. Wiggle, open parenthesis, eight, and this time I will set this to ten, and close parenthesis or bracket. Now if I just play the whole thing, let's quickly preview what this looks like. I will go to a quarter quality just so we can do this quickly. The quality is very low here, but we can now see the shake effect. When the frame is moving, though, we can see it leaves the edges of our total frame size, so we have to press S, go to the scale and set this to be just a bit higher. If I go for 102.5, that's going to close up any gaps we see on the edge of our frame. If you were shaking the frame by a larger value, this would also need to be larger in order to accommodate all of that shake that we are doing. Anyway, moving on, in the final piece, once again, we have these VHS lines going across. That is just some stock footage. I also want that to be affected by the RGB splits, so I will dive in back to this level which contains all of our layers. This is the piece of stock footage we're going to use. This particular clip cleans up at about 30 seconds. That's going to be my In Point. Once I have that, I can drag this to be in the project and it just overlays on top. Let's press Control, Alt and F to full-screen this automatically and set its blending mode to Screen. The effect is a bit sparse, so I will copy this whole thing, press Control and D, and trim it all the way to the end and then bring this to the start. I am overlaying this twice and doubling up on the amount of lines we have on the screen, and even then there's still very few. But that's what I did for the original project, so I will leave it there. If I press the Tab P, I can go back to the main composition. Let's go back up another level to the very main one. Now we can see our VHS lines are part of the RGB split effect as well as the camera shake. All that's left now are the final color adjustments. Let's go for an Adjustment Layer and Blur & Sharpen, Fast Box Blur. I will set the radius to 50. Let's repeat the edge pixels to get rid of the dark outline we currently have. This is the difference with and without. Let's set this blending mode to Screen, which is going to diffuse glow everything. Let's drop the intensity on the opacity to about 30 percent. Turning this on and off, that's the difference. Let's take another layer. Go to Stylize and Glow, 100 percent for the threshold and the radius of, let's say, 400. This is just going to make the brightest parts of the image just pop a bit more. Finally, let's go to Effect, Color Correction and Lumetri Color. In the basic correction, I want to warm up the entire image, so the Temperature I will set to about 30 percent. You could actually dial in any number you want. The higher you go, the warmer the tones are going to be, so maybe about 40. In the Creative section, I want to fade the colors, so let's change this from 0 to about 20 for this kind of final look. Another area of the color adjustments you could play with is in the Curves section. This is past the Creative, you've got Curves. Go down to these graphs here. The Hue versus Hue one, you can use this to change the tone of the colors. Let's say the yellows here. If I go to whether yellow is in the spectrum, let's create a couple of points either side and then put a point in the middle and I can move this up. As I do this, you can see it's changing the tone of all of the yellows in my frame, so you could play with that. Let's say the purples, we could also do the same. Put a couple of points either side and then put the one in the middle to control those tones you want to target. So we want to make them a bit more blue, perhaps, we can do that very quickly. You could also try out the other graphs here. Let's say the Hue versus Saturation one. Instead of changing the tone, this time we're changing the saturation based on the hue. Let's say I want the yellows to be more saturated. I can do that here very quickly. That's it. The Lumetri Color effect we used at the end there is one of my favorite tools in this program just because of how many different settings within it and the various targeted adjustments you can make for the colors and tones. I think it's very useful. Anyway, in the following lesson, we'll do the final export from After Effects. 20. After Effects Render Settings: Now that our project is finished, all that's left is the final export and here are the best settings for that. Outputting the project from after effects is very simple. We just go to composition, add to render queue and in the output module I will select the quick-time format. If that's missing, you may need to install quick-time on your computer and then go to the format options and I just always use the Animation Preset. This is a very large file which is going to contain a lot of the color and bit depth information. Which means that if we want to continue making changes and adjustments to the colors later in programs like Premiere Pro, we will have that information in the file. The last thing here is to just output this to the correct location and for me that's the folder I've been working with for this project so I'll call it main dot MOV, save, and then simply hit Render. Here is a cool trick if you press the Caps Lock key, it stops the preview whilst you're rendering and its going to output faster than if you leave this preview running at the same time. You also get an estimated time of completion and for me that's going to be about six minute so I'm not bad at all. 21. Youtube And Instagram Render Settings: Finally, in Premier Pro, I want to show you my best rendered settings for both Instagram and YouTube. In Premier Pro, I will double-click the import section to bring in our final render. We can double-click this to do a quick preview over here. Because it's such a large file, it may start when we play it back, but I know it's all there. Let's right-click and use sequence from clip. That's going to bring it into a new project we can edit. Let's select this control C to copy and then control V to paste, line these two up and just check that the looping is working and it is. Let's say you are editing this with a song. You would just continue lining these up as many times as you need to fit the length of your music. Anyway, when you are ready to export, I'm just going to the end frame, press O to set the out point. Then I will go to File Export Media. In premier you have various presets you can use to export your final footage software. For YouTube, I always use this 2160p 4K ultra HD. Even if it's a 1080p original clip, I always exporter as 4K because in YouTube that will play back at a better quality than if I just uploaded as it's native 1080p. So that's something I always do. For Instagram, I have the same approach of uploading an oversize-d image. I will take the height which is 2160, Press control C to copy this and make sure it's not linked to the width and paste it in here too. In the source scaling, I will set this to scale, to fill so that I have a square frame and this is the resolution I output. I think Instagram sizes this down to 1080 by 1080, but this seems to help with the overall quality, anyway, that's it. I would also add just set the output name and location and then just hit the Export button to see the final export finish. 22. Final Thoughts: So that's it.That is the end of the class. Hopefully you guys learnt a lot of new things and I know now you know how to create a retro style animation in cinema 4 D and after effects but I want you guys to take what you've learned from this class and use that to create something that's different and if you make something feel free to share it with the class and that will be able to also give you some feedback myself and if you run into any problems with any lesson in particular or any point in the lessons. You can use the discussion section below and post a screenshot maybe and I can help you out as best as I can. You can also e-mail me directly at visualdawn@yahoo.com and once again, I will be able to respond there too. But once again, my name is Dawn and if you guys want to check out the rest of my work, you can go to my Instagram page or my website.I'll put the links on the screen here. But once again, thank you very much for watching and I'll see you guys next time.Bye.