How To Create The DAREDEVIL Titles Look in Cinema 4D

1. Introduction: Throughout the ages, artists have learned and grown by observing the work of the people that came before them. They learned from their masters. In this class, we're going to be learning from one of the contemporary masters in motion design, the studio elastic. They created the title sequence for the serious Daredevil, and I think it has a really cool esthetic. I think you're going to enjoy learning how to create something very similar. Using Cinema four D, my go to tool choice for the class project. I'll challenge you to take what you've learned and incorporated into something that is completely and wholly your own work. Learning from a master and applying the technique to your own work. I'm Travis Familia. I'm a digital media artist, a medical animator and an associate professor of digital design and illustration at the University of Colorado, Denver. I'm excited to share this with you, so let's get going 2. Setting the Scene: Okay, here we are once again in cinema four d r 21 we're gonna begin creating are seen for our daredevil look development And just to recap sort of what we're gonna build This is a scene that I created. It's referencing the look that's used by elastic in the daredevil title sequence that was are directed by Patrick Clear. And I just think it's a really cool esthetic. And I've had people in the past asked me how to do this. So I thought would be nice to create a class that teaches people how to create things like this. And so let's go ahead and dive in. The first thing we need is a model to work with. I don't have a daredevil model, so I'm just going to use some of the built in models from Cinema four D. So I'm gonna go into the content browser and I'm going to navigate through the presets. So hopefully you've downloaded these. If you don't have them downloaded, you can download them in your installation of Cinema 40. So he opened up the three d objects volume and go down to you humans. There is a section that says three D people, medium resolution. I'm gonna use one of these. Which one did I use? I believe I used this guy, but we could use anybody. I think I'll for the what we're gonna do now. I'm actually going to use this one. I think he will work pretty well. It's all you need to do is double click on this and then loaded into your scene. So this guy's looking down at his phone, and now I'm gonna go back to my objects panel so that I can see my original scene. And what I'm gonna do is pretty simple. I'm going, Teoh, remove the material from this model and I'm gonna create my own material. Let's go ahead and just delete the material here and we'll go into this material tag and go ahead and delete that as well. And when we do that, you can see the geometry that is created for this model. And it's a little bit low, Polly. So what I might want to do is actually increase that a little bit by throwing this object in this subdivision surface container. So we'll go ahead and throw that in there by holding down option and clicking on it or Ault and clicking on it. And now it's being subdivided. It looks a little cleaner, and what I'm looking for is kind of like I dig this sort of back view and maybe we can get some nice lighting. That sort of mimics what's happening in the daredevil title sequence in while we're out here. Why don't we just go ahead and pull up the daredevil title sequence? Um, and scrub. I'm just gonna go to the art of titles Web page, and they have. If you haven't gone art of the title, it's a great place to just go and check out some scenes. No one here. You can actually see some of the thumbnails from the final piece, and they actually walk through their entire creative process. So it's a It's a really nice way to come out and sort of find out how you know, professional studios, air making things. And so if you notice that they're using some three D models, and so I like to learn from the Masters when I can, and so I've got a model that's sort of like that on will use that as our base. So let's go ahead and create the material that you see in our videos that we've got this sort of metallic. It's one of material that we're gonna use and to create that I'm going to use, Ah PBR material. So PBR materials or physically based Orender materials to the try to mimic the real world, and they basically used the reflect INTs tab to do all of their work. So I'm just gonna open up, reflect INTs, and I'll go ahead and give it a color and we're going to go for red, but kind of a more subdued sort of red, so darker, maybe a little less saturated read. And on top of that, I think I'm going Thio, added Beckman. So I'm gonna go ahead and just delete the default reflection, and I'm gonna and my own Beckman reflection so off the bat, it just shows up very, very reflective. But you'll notice here I can change the way this letter works so I can change it to add, and now that is going to add the reflection to the one below it. So instead of it being ah, separately or capacities and things like that. It's using a mathematical operation to add it in there. Okay. Actually, I believe I'm going to delete this default Diffuse. I'm just going to start with my own Beckman and they'll put that back to normal, and I make a new one, and this one will be the had layer. So let's hide this top one in the bottom when I'm gonna go ahead and change the color similar to what I did before. And so now we would get this deep red color that it like, seems to be working really well. We can play around with speculate strengthen that Bottom 1 may be turned up the roughness. So it feels a little metallic underneath there and on the top one that we just created. We're going to go ahead and just turn down the reflection strength on that one quite a bit . And I'm gonna add a lot of roughness for the color instead of a color, I'm going to put in the noise, So let's just go ahead and added noise layer. I'm just trying to build something up that feels a little bit like a car painter, something that has some nice texture and layers to it. I'm adding I'm selecting blister turbulence right now, and I'm going to go ahead and change this down. Make this scale a little smaller, maybe 20%. So it's more grainy. Andi will go up one level now, so we've got our base layer at the bottom. We'll call this color base. So if you just double click on these, you can change the names of them. We'll call this metallic and do one more, and that's gonna also be a Beckman. And this one is also gonna be set to add It's gonna have a little bit of roughness, but I'm gonna turn down reflection strength all the way. And I turned down the speculum strength just a little bit and roughness I'll kick up a little bit. Um, this is going to give us our bright reflections. This is gonna be giving us our metallic color layer underneath. There might actually change the color of that one a little bit. She didn't give it a little bit more red inside there. That'll make it feel a little deeper. I'm just looking at this and going back and forth and making some changes. Roughness. No, eyes overlay. It looks pretty good to start with. We can always come back and manipulated a little bit more. So now when I drag this onto my character, that metallic sort of look, it's gonna be applied to him. And if I render this right now, you'll see I'm not getting a lot because I'm I don't have any lights in my scene, and it's using the default light, and it's blowing it out quite a bit. So let's talk about lights. I think the next thing we're going to do is set up some lighting for this scene. And if we look in the video that I created for you guys, it looks like there's this fuzzy halo sort of light coming down, and that is a visible light. So Cinema four D allows you to create different types of lights. Visible light is something that actually is visible. You can apply noise to it makes him really interesting effects with it. So let's go ahead and just create a light. I think we'll create just a standard light we're going to zoom out of are seen a little bit and just drag this light up right above this guy's head and move it a little, so it's a little bit behind him as well. And so when you're seeing, maybe you wanna replace this object with instead of a person, that could be, you know, building structure or something like that or something unique to your individual scene. But I'm looking at these reflections, and I'm trying to figure out what is this really gonna look like for me in my scene? I kind of like the way this is glinting off of his shoulder. Maybe we want to rotate around this way. I think I like those of you better. So as I'm rotating around here and getting the sort of reflections that I want in my scene , I'm actually going to go ahead and set up a camera view. So while I'm rotating around starting to frame things a little bit, I'm gonna set up our initial camera view. I'll go ahead and add a camera in place right now, and then we'll look through that camera. Oh, and I'm gonna go ahead and key frame that camera on the first friends. So what that does is it locks the camera in place. All right, So now if I were Teoh be looking through the cameras. I am and then rotate my scene moving My timeline is gonna snap back because I have a key frame that now one of the things I like to do at this point is to start setting something else so I can begin doing test renders without getting into too much trouble and feeling like I'm getting lost. And so I am going to go ahead and set that up right now. When I create a new view panel, I'm gonna drag that view panel down here, and then I'm gonna create another new view panel and I'm gonna drag that view panel right on top of this one so you'll notice it snaps right up there. And then what I'll do is use this top view for all of my preview renders so that I can get an idea for what this is actually looking looking like in my piece. And so I need to set this camera up to use my camera that I've created in my scene to these match. But what's nice about this feature is if I unclip my camera now, this one is no longer looking through it. This one is not looking through it. But this one still is. So I can always do a preview rendered by it in command are and see what I'm actually getting in my scene right now, which isn't much. Let's see what happens if we add some, uh, changes to our light here. So let's go ahead and just add some visibility. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn on interactive region render so interactive region render is a way to see what's being rendered all the time. So this is great. If you don't have a great graphics card in your machine and you want to use the standard render, which is what I'm going to use to this project, you can use the interactive region render and get something that sort of mimics a real time renderers. So if I were to you rotate my scene right now, this is gonna update. It's going to give me new render based on where I'm at at the time, So it's really handy. Let's get our light and go ahead and turn on some visibility. So we're in the general setting for a light and we come in, we can see light type. We're gonna use visible, you can see right off the bat that's going to give us this foggy sort of appearance, and we've got to fall off control that we can move in. If we go into our visibility tab Now we can see that the outer distance is set to 500 centimeters. That number might be different for you, or it might mean something totally different for you, depending on the scale of your scene. But for the purposes of this, I I know that I don't want it to be very big, right? I wanted toe just be sort of a glowing spot. And so hopefully you're starting to see that That is that glowing sort of halo that we're going to have coming down. You can set up the inter visibility distance in the outer visibility different distance. So you haven't interviewing that you can change, you know, make it brighter in the center or darker in the center. Right now, this light is set up to both highlight or light shine on my object as well as create this visibility. Sometimes I like to create a light that is just visible. And sometimes I like to create a light that is just illuminating my scene. And it really depends on sort of what I'm going for and how much control I want to be able to change for each individual light. How much I'm gonna be able to change the settings for each individual light. Um, so I'm actually gonna do that. I'm not. Go ahead and double click on this guy. I'm gonna call him Visible Light. And I'm in a command C command V and duplicate. Um, and this one is just going to be called elimination and call it whatever you want to call it in this light, I'm going to go to general on. I'm gonna say visible. None in this light. I'm going to go to the general settings, and I'm going to uncheck chick that check this button. Sorry. Check this button. This is no elimination. And so now you'll see if I turn off the visible light. But I'm checking it. I'm still getting elimination. I keep the visible light on and check off elimination my highlights gyms because now my scene is switched to my default light and turn this light off. So it's a nice, powerful way to get a look on and be able to also manipulate a few more things. So, for example, I could now say, you know what? I want the elimination highlights just to be a little bit more forward than they are. But my visible lights not going to be changing if I do that right now. So that could be a really nice thing to be ableto to work with. Let's go ahead and work on the color for this. This light. I'm gonna go ahead and give it a little bit of a red color. Maybe a subdued sort of red. I'm looking at the visible light. So now we're bringing that reading this into our scene and it's a little vibrant right now . I think I could turn that down a little bit more, so I'm turned down saturation and turning up the brightness or the value just to make it a little more pink. Little bus red. Just gonna keep playing with that until I feel happy with it. Um, I'm also going to come into my noise area for this light. I'm gonna turn on noise I'm gonna do that for? Well, because this light is only visible. I'm just gonna do it. Indiscipline, Visibility now the noise feature. And here is really nice Weaken. Do a standard noise. We could do a soft turbulence. Hard term means wave turbulence. So whatever you want to do for years is fine. I'm trying to, you know, create a certain look. And right now I can see that things feel a little dark. They feel the noise isn't really coming through. And so to get that to come through better, I want to come in here and change my scale. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and change it all down to about 20%. And now you can see that noise being generated in in the scene. And you can see that if I moved to my play head and pause a little bit, that noise is moving. That noise is being controlled by the velocity. It's a 25% and it's also being controlled by this wind which is at one centimeter right now in the X direction. I'm gonna change that from the X direction to the Y direction. Let me go and change my velocity down to about 5%. And then I'm gonna go through and just go through a few frames and see where we're at, see what kind of movement I'm getting from happy with. It doesn't look like I'm getting very much movement at all. Let's try turning our velocity up to 15%. It always takes a little bit of playing, manipulating. I'm seeing some motion happening in there now, and that's probably enough. I don't want it to be too drastic. I just wanted to be a subtle sort of background motion that's happening, and let's go ahead and work on our illumination now. So this light currently is eliminating infinitely, and I don't want to do that. I want toe be really bright right here and then fall off its soon as it gets down to the bottom of this guy's shirt, a right to the bottom of the frame. So we have this nice, dark halo of what's happening around the bottom. And so to do that, I'm gonna turn on Ah, a fall off. So I'm going into my light object settings going to details and I'm gonna say fall off, inverse square physically accurate. And what's that going to do? It's gonna give us a similar fall off radius that we saw in the visibility of our other light. Right? So we've got an outer distance and this only have fall off radius, and I can change that dimension. The more I change this down, the less it's going to be eliminating my character and my scene. And it's me really hot or bright now the closer it is to my person. So if I drag this light down by his head, you'll see that it's brighter here. It shows us that in seen as well, and so it just takes some manipulating of this light to get it to be where you want it to go. Yes, I'm starting to like what I'm seeing here. I'm getting really bright light that's happening. Let's snap back to our camera view, and what I'm not liking right now is the way it's kind of hitting. This guy was top of his head. Um, I think I might actually move that light forward a tiny bit so that it's more grim light. And based on what I'm seeing here, I'm gonna make a decision to go ahead and change the type of light that I'm using. So right now this is Ah, a single omni light. I'm gonna change it and change it, Teoh An area light. Why am I doing that doing that? Because I want to have a little more control. So I'm just gonna rotate this light around. It still has the same fall off settings. But now I can Korea long, wide light, uh, probably don't want to be as long as that, But you notice what's happening with that white now is it's spreading across the top of this gentleman's head is that I'm getting something that feels more like a nice room light . It's giving me the kinds of highlights that I'm looking for. And so it's really important to sort of understand how these lights function and how you can manipulate them to your advantage in your scene. I'm looking at this and trying to evaluate what else do I need to do to get this look to be the way I want? And I feel like if I go back to my quick time movie that I created earlier that apparently closed, you can see that it's very bright in the center and it's falling off. I'm getting the night silhouette on this guy's face on the back of his neck, and I want to be able to create that similar look. Now I will say we're not going to be able to get all of that in Cinema four D directly. We're gonna actually take some of this into after effects and do some post work on it. But right now I'm gonna do just one more visible light. And this will be our base sort of setting for a scene, and you can see how that's already brightened it up. Incredibly, on this visible light, I'm gonna change to be just a little bit more on pinky side. It's just slightly, and I'm also going to change the size of it of the visibility. So let's change it down in the center or make it a little smaller, and the outer part will make it a little smaller, and I'm actually gonna move it down so that it's closer to him. And so what this is going to do is create that sort of visible halo that's right above his head, and it's gonna light things up. And what I'm also going to do with this visible light will rebuild relabel this with in college. Smaller, great, visible. I'm gonna actually turn illumination back on for this one. And so let's go ahead and let it eliminate. It's gonna add a couple more highlights in there, and that's okay. Um, you know what? I think I'm changing my mind, and then they go ahead and leave it off. I don't like the way those highlights looked, but I do what I do. Like the way the light was looking pumped this up to 120%. Okay, 1 50 So it's all about sort of playing and manipulating things to try to get the look that you want. That's the baked basic level of just how to get things set up and sort of get the look development going in the next segment for the class. I'm going to talk about how to set up some of the particle simulation so we get these reflective little glints and highlights that are happening. So play through this again. You see these little floaties that are happening and moving around on that is a Mo graph feature and then later on in the class, we're going to actually render this out and move our camera that our camera movement up rendered out, and then we'll go into after effects and do some post work so we can get it to look just like we want to. 3. Mograph Dust and Camera Animation: Now that we've got our scene looking pretty good, we've got a visible lights up. We've got some noise in here. The highlights are looking pretty cool. Um, what's go ahead and think about particles that are flying around his head and we'll get a camera motion in place and start getting ready to do some final tweaks before we render our peace out. And so let's go ahead and do that. Particle simulations not actually particles. We'll call them floating particles. And to create that, I am actually going to use mo graph. So in my mane of you here, I'm just going to stop looking at my camera and I'm gonna go ahead and create a McGrath Kloner and I'm gonna put that Kloner near the light. And what I want to do is generate sort of ah sphere or area of reflective tiny particles that exists around this area so that in the render they're going to show up right in here. But not so much down here in these dark areas. I don't want them to show up down there. I just want them to be mainly around this light, so it feels like lights coming down and highlighting some dust particles. And so to do that, we're going Teoh clone in just a polygon. So I'm gonna go into my shape or my primitive menu and creative polygon, and that's going to create a big rectangle down here at first. Gonna tell it to be a triangle, and I'm to tell it to be tiny. I won't make it to Tiny at the start. I'm just gonna say two centimeters and I'm gonna drag that polygon into my Kloner. And now that cloner is creating duplicates of that polygon and if I move around in my scene , you can see that it is indeed creating some polygons, and right now it's creating three of them. There they are. So it's creating three polygons and they're not very close together. They're really far apart. Eso let's go ahead and change the way it's creating them. So I'm gonna change this down to Grid Array. So now it's creating three of them in the X Dimension, one of the wall I and three in the Z. We're gonna tell it to create about 06 in each one of these dimensions. We're gonna change the mode here from per steptoe endpoint, And I'm gonna change that endpoints down to about 200. Why am I choosing that number? Because I know that when I was selecting fall off radius for my lights, I used 500 at the beginning, so that gives me a rough understanding of how big this area is. If I really wanted to know exactly, I could select one of my lights like a smaller one. Look at the visibility and see what my outer distances. It's only 100 writes about 100 for the outer distance. It's not in that area right there. That's 100. Is that Yeah. So it's Ah, roughly 100. So that tells me a 1000 size endpoint for my grid array is going to be really big. So let's just try 200 for each. And now you can see those coming in a lot more closely. And indeed that is still too big. I think so. I'm gonna go ahead and set it up about the same as my light are 100. So we're creating six of these in all of these dimensions. We've got this grid array off. Little are triangular objects in space. That's not gonna do it much for us right now. It's going to feel a little odd them. It's kind of cool looking, but it's not what we want. So let's go ahead and get these to move around the way that we want them to and be the size that we want them to. So the first thing I'm gonna do is create a random effect. Er, and that's gonna move these around randomly. So I'm gonna make sure my cloner is selected and this is very important. It's important that you have the cloner actually selected. You want your McGrath menu inspector and make a random defector. When you do that, because it's selected automatically applies it to the Kelowna to the co owner of that. And just to double check, I'm gonna go into my defectors, and I could see Yep, there it is. So let's see what this random a factor does. In the parameter section. We can see an X y and Z dimension that it's random izing the position for, So if we change that, they're gonna be farther or closer, all right in those dimensions, and I usually like to use the just default bears fine for this particular need that's just scattering them about. So it doesn't feel like they're on a perfect grid. Not gonna turn on scale that I am gonna turn on rotation rotation. I'm going to say 360 degrees in every dimension, so they're gonna randomly rotate 360 degrees in every direction. Now it feels like this sort of scattered a group of triangles. The next thing I'm going to do is create another random defector. So the corner is selected going into mo graph defector Random. And in this case, I'm going to go ahead and leave the settings the way they are again for position, been a change rotation. And I'm gonna set it to 3 60 again in every dimension that seems kind of redundant. But you'll see why in a moment. And what I want to do is make one very specific change here and under effect, Er I'm gonna change the way this is affecting for being random, too, using noise. And when you do that immediately, we have malleability, have animation and scale change for this noise that's being generated in space. And so if I hit play. Now you can see that these particles air just kind of moving around in space. And that's because of this animation speed. And it's because of the strength and scale that we're setting this on. If I shames the scale down to something like 50 they're gonna move a little faster and closer together like a little bugs buzzing around or something like that. But she was the animation speed down the half. It's gonna move half its fast. I'm gonna change it down to one because I just want them to kind of uber floated. It may be, too. I just kind of want them to be like floating a little dust particles that are rotating and floating through space. They're very gentle, moving very slowly, And I'm gonna go up here and look in this of you so I could see what's happening with my actual scene. Obviously, these are huge. Let's pause, let it render and see what's going on. So we're getting these huge, huge triangles rendering now. I made them big right now because I wanted to be able to see them, so I know what's gonna happen. The next thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and scale them down the size I want them to be. And I'm gonna make them maybe Point Teoh. And so now they really are just little dust backs. And let's go ahead and look through our camera. Selected this report had command arm will do a preview render so we see what we're getting and so you can see the little dust specks now floating around. I want to give these guys a material s so that they all that they do is reflect the things around them. And to do that, I want to create a new material. It will be a PVR material as well. In that material. I'm going Teoh, go into my default diffuse deleted default reflection deleted. Then they add my own Beckman and that is it. That's all I'm going to do and close it And this material, I'm going to drag onto the polygon and then you'll see. And the view here it has made most of them disappear from. That's great because what's gonna happen is we're going to get that little glint of reflection on Lee when that triangle particle like these over here are aligned perfectly to bounce the light into our camera's lens. Yes, that would make it feel like dust. And they'll be black little spots when they're not being reflected. Now they are showing up. And if I go ahead and do a command are render again. They are actually showing up all over my scene so you can see some down here. There's one here, Here, here. They're not being isolated to this sort of sphere around his head, which is what I want. So how am I gonna do that? I'm gonna create another cloner affect er, and this one is going to be Ah, plane defectors. I've selected my Kloner going up to mow graph defectors plane and in the plane effect, er, I'm going to set a parameter for scale. Only some going unchecked position check scale. I'm gonna check uniforms scale. So this allows me just to move one thing, and what I want to do is increase the scale. Dominican bigger. Why would I make it bigger when I just made them smaller? Um, I'm working back and forth kind of this way because it allows me to see what I'm doing without having to guess so much. And so guess what I'm gonna do now. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna scale these down even more. So I'm gonna do 0.2 0.2 What that does is that makes them almost completely invisible and tiny little nothings out here. Uh, it makes him almost invisible. Tiny little nothing's really I have to come back and scale this up. Even Maurin my plane defector to make them visible. So I'm going to scale them up until they look the way I want them to look all the time getting some that are floating around in here, they'll show up, and now I'm gonna make the ones outside of this fear disappear. The way we'll do that is using fall off and fall off. Now, in cinema four D has all of these fields that you can use. It's very nice feature. I'm gonna use spherical fall off, spherical. Fall off gives me Ah, sphere. And basically what's gonna happen is this effect. Er only works inside of this seer and there is a center portion and there's an outer portion. Let's turn off these lights so we can see that we can just turn off the visibility of the light in the editor. And now we can actually see that field really clearly and so that fields scale and position is going to determine how big and where these particles are. So if I scaled this down a little bit now the particles are only gonna be existing biggest inside the center sphere and then smaller outside there. That's got moving down a little bit more biggest around his head, smallest to nothing outside here. If I feel like they're not showing up enough, which is kind of how I feel right now, I can come into this plan, affect your again, and I can come into the parameter and go ahead and increase that scale some more. Now I'm seeing these particles around its head just bouncing around, and it feels like little dust specks. But out here, nothing's happening. That is exactly what I was looking for. So it's a little bit complicated. Take some time to set up, but once you get used to using the cloner and doing things like this, you'll be putting dust particles on all of your work. Let's do a couple test renders. Yeah, That's pretty cool. I see some out here. That's that's nice. I don't see that many down here. I feel like that lighting is pretty cool. And like in the way it looks, I think the next thing I'm gonna do is go ahead, just set up my camera motion. And so we'll go ahead and look through the camera, come down to 90 frames, and I'm just gonna actually I'm gonna refrain this when a tad. So I'm gonna be on frame zero reposition my camera down. I just wanted to have a little bit lower. Yeah, I like. I like the way that I can see more of that light coming down. He's not quite as prominent. One might rotate around just a little bit too. Trying to get a view like I don't want to feel like he's actually looking at phone. I'm gonna stick with my original view. So something like this and I mean to say, that's good enough, And we're gonna keep frame that position, go ahead and move to the end of our We're just gonna do a three second video. I'm gonna click close the top of his head and zoom in just a little bit. I want to be too crazy. I want this to be a little subtle person and make sure my camera selected key from that. Go ahead and play it through. Right now, it's easing in and it's easing out and stopping at the end. I kind of don't like that for this view. I think what I want to do instead is have just a linear push camera motion. So I'm not coming here to my camera on the right click and say Show tracks. So sorry. I think they moved it down. So show tracks and these air already selected and is gonna click Linear. That will change it from being a easing ese vowed to completely linear push ins. And now when I play in my screen here, you'll see that it's not easy. Nanny Morris is simply pushing in, and then it's stopping at the end, looping over and over because I have to constantly manipulate change things. I'm actually gonna do one more change, just refining things a little bit. I'm gonna make this pushed in quite a bit more. Yeah, I like that ongoing pushing again here. It'll stay, winning her I'm being aware of my little horizon wind motion. I'm not super happy with that. So I'm gonna go ahead and in this frame, pull it up a little more. Yeah, I feels good. So I wanted to be just like this push and story to sort of the back of his head is that we'll see what that motion looks like after we've seen with that motion. Look, look, looks like I'm gonna come up here, check a couple of my frames and see how they're looking. Looking for particle motion, looking for the highlights of my land my on the top of the head and looking for how the lights are looking. And so I think I want to do is get more room light on this top guy. So I'm actually gonna go ahead and zoom out a little and sort of real time of him. So I get what I'm looking for and lets it will help If I can actually see that light, Let's push it forward and let's rotate it. Yeah, I like that. Okay, So I think I'm pretty happy with the way the light looks. I'm pretty happy with the, um visible lights. And from here, we're going to go ahead and just get our renders set up and, uh, move into some post effects. So in the next segment, I'm gonna set up the render settings for you and show you how toe get that rendered out, and then we'll go ahead and jump in after effects. 4. Rendering and Post Effects: now, our files all set up and we're just about ready to send this out and render it. We'll get those setting set up for you, and then we'll jump in after effects and do some post work on it. So let's go ahead and set up our render setting. So I made sure that my file saved. You can always check to see if your file saved, because if it's not, you'll see an asterisk right here. So I'm gonna go into my render studies using the standard renderers. We're going to render out what size we're gonna. This is, uh, 2020. We can't be rendering out 12 80 by 7 20 when you did you 1920 by 10. 80 full HD. We're gonna go ahead and render out 30 frames per second and a resolution is set to 72 which means our image resolution is the same as our size. That is what we want. Output. We're going to render all frames that should be 90 frames, three seconds of animation and we need to make sure we're setting things up to save. And so I don't need to save out any outfit channels or anything like that for this one. So I'm just gonna go ahead and save, um, PNG sequence. And there are lots of different things you could say if some people say about J pegs, I do that on occasion, depending on what I'm trying to do. If you're gonna save out data for, um, three dimensional space and that sort of thing, you may want to use one of these tips also good, but for loading quickly and working quickly and after effects. I typically just use P and G's, and they seem to do well for me now. The other thing I like about PNG is I can use a 16 bit image if I want to. And so let's go ahead and save this as Daredevil. Look days later, and then I'll select where I want to put that I'm going to put it in my cinema four D files for Daredevil and I'll create a Frames folder. It was just called this Dedee look, frames create, and now I will be placing the individual frames there. Now, if you're new to animations of rendering things out, you may wanna be wondering why save out frames? Well, if your computer crashes and you're saving out frames. You've got individual frames that are already saved. If you're rendering to something like a quick time movie, well, if your computer crashes, then you are out of luck. You have to do it all again. So it's always best practice to save out frames when you can. And so it's safe. Just double check everything. Saving my image. PNG 16 bit. I don't need out of channels. Um, output 1920 10 80. Yes, all frames standard. That's it. So I'm going to go ahead and close this, gonna save my file one more time, and then I'm going to say render render to picture viewer that will begin rendering out our frames. And so I'll go ahead and speed this up for you guys so you can see the finished product. All right, so our render is now complete, and we can play through this and see what it looks like. And so it's looking pretty nice. You see a lot of those little dust specks coming in and glinting off the reflective surfaces. It's exactly what I was hoping for. Some of them are kind of hanging out and feel like maybe something heavy you're floating in the year. So this is looking good. Let's go ahead and take this now in the after effects and will continue to do some post effects on it just to make it even better. And so here we are and after faxing, and I'm going to import that footage so I'll say important file and I'm going to find my frames. That is actually my cold one. So let's go into Daredevil. I made a boo boo stop. It's okay. We make mistakes. It happens. So let's go ahead and try that again. We're gonna say 7 40 files there, Devil look, and this is the one that I just created. I want to click on the first file in my list and make sure that PNG sequences highlighted, then hit open, and that will bring it in as actual footage. And so, from here, all we have to do is drag it down into our timeline, and then we'll have a new composition that's created from that, that we can then play through and see. So here it is playing through and then actual real time playback. So I'm pretty happy with that if I were to go back now, some of the things that I might change or a notice in that I really see that this is a triangle. So maybe I'd change these from polygons, that air triangles, tiny disks or some things that it feels more ground and less triangular. That's really a sort of a personal aesthetic choice. But we're gonna do a couple things. So I've noticed. And if you notice my original quick time, it feels a little fuzzy. And I noticed this on the original there. Devil work as well is that it feels fuzzy on the outside edge is sort of like shallow depth of field, but it feels kind of faked, too. So it's crisp in the middle on the focus area, and everything else is just a little blurry. And so to do that, I'm going to duplicate this layer and on the and I'm gonna turn the top layer off on the bottom layer. I'm gonna go ahead and select that layer hit enter on my keyboard. You'll change this to board, and then I'll do the same thing here. Select layer, enter sharp. Call them whatever you want to. I'm gonna use a simple, fast block box blur because it renders quickly. If I were actually doing this for my own work, probably used a different blur. But for right now, I think the box blur. It's gonna be just fine. So I'm a wreck. Click on effect. Go to Blur. Sharpen Jane. Get too fast box blur. I usually use a gosh and blur, and we're gonna give it a setting That may be too. So it's just a little fuzzy. And then when you using something like those, it's really important that you click this repeat edge pixels and you see that that will fix this little border thing that happens. So I just want this fuzziness not looks pretty good. Now, my top layer that is hidden right now I'm going to turn back on, and that's the sharp one. What I want to do is mask this one off so that the center of it is sharp. Everything else is blurry, so let's go ahead and create a mask. So I have this layer selected, and I'm going to use my lips tool and simply drag down and lips sort of surrounds my guy's head and I'm doing this sort of at the end because I know his head's gonna be right there. I can still scroll through, and I feel like it's gonna work just fine where it's at right now. But where you place it in what frame? You're out when you do that depends on what you're trying to do right now. If I were to use my select tool and click off of this, there is a sharp edge right now, right? So it's sharp, and then it's blurry right at this boundary. You could see that clearly if I turn off the background. Right. So we're getting this sort of selected area. I would change this a little bit so that its feathered. So I'm gonna just open the mask up, but I'm gonna feather this and a little bit so that that sharpness is really just right here and it eases in to the center. So now it'll look like this sort of effect. So we get this blurriness that's out there. I also want to just turn down the opacity of the Sharp player a tiny bit, maybe make it like 80%. So some of that fuzziness is eking through, but not all of it. So it just it creates a nice look. And, you know, this may be something you want to play around with, depending on what? What? You're trying to treat you for your own peace. But I like the fact that these particles in the outside here kind of blurry now and the ones in the middle are sharp. So let's go ahead and play through this and see how it looks. So it's feeling nice. We've got a nice, subtle pushin. We've got some little glinting reflections happening around with the dust particles that some they feel blurry. Now they don't feel some sharp and crisp. Feels a little more mysterious. I think we could do a little bit more. I feel like the saturation level on this is a little too high. I want to kind of just pull that in a little bit. And so I'm gonna do that with an adjustment winner, New adjustment layer, And then I will go into my effects and I'm gonna pull up a human saturation. So just typing you find human saturation, and I'm gonna put that right on my adjustment layer so I can pull this saturation down the tad, so it's not quite so punched up. I can also maybe bring a whiteness up just a tiny bit. And perhaps I want Teoh. Um, bring it up just a tiny bit and I wanted to be purple. I wanted to be just a time talking about me, minus two or three. I was playing with that little pink sort of ah characteristic that I want to pull into it so it feels a little nicer. If you ever want to see what those changes are, you can turn that adjustment layer on and off. So it's It's subtle, Um, and then I think I'm in. Add a curves to that as well, so let's look, it curves. It's drag that on here on occurs. A lot of times you wanna pull down the shadow areas, punch up bright areas, but that's going to give us. I grab just the red that's gonna give us kind of a bit of the nicer look. I think let's see if I change the order of these, I can then have my curves adjustment and then come in with my lightness area. Just turn those up a little bit. Then I think I'm actually gonna mask this off as well. So I got it looking like I want to hear. But I want this area to be darker, and so I'm gonna actually mask this layer off using again in the lips. So I'm gonna zoom out a little and click up here, make a mask. It's gonna be kind of a vignette, id sort of feel, And then I'll feather that mask quite a bit. So like that. But I'm gonna I'm gonna tone it down a little. I think it's just a little too much. So I'm actually just gonna change the opacity on the adjustment layer so you can faded in a little, So it's not quite so drastic. No, I think I'm pretty happy with that. Look, there's one more thing I want to be. I'm gonna add. I'm gonna add another layer on here. It's just gonna darken up this outside ring a bit. And I think what I'll do is just add a solid layer and let's select like a really dark, dark, dark, red, almost black. And let's set that to multiply so we can see some of that coming through. And now I'm going to mask that office. Well, and for this mask, it's gonna be pretty big. And so what I'm gonna do is mask it like that, you know, feathered that out quite a lot. And then I'm going to invert that mask so that it's making a dark ring there. And again. I'll make an opacity change on this so that I can simply just fade this in slightly. And I'm getting that very dark halo that's happening on all of it with his bright center. So I'm liking that a lot more so you can see this just takes some manipulation and some just the modifications. And so let's see what our before and after is worse. So here's our, um, manipulated layer from after effects compared Teoh what we rented out directly in Cinema four D, Not a crazy amount of change, but subtlety goes a long way. Just adds a little bit more drama pumped. It's not more you can always, you know, continue manipulating and changing things to get the effect that you're looking for. So I hope you've enjoyed this. I hope you've learned something. Um and you can apply this technique to a whole bunch of different things. If you look at a lot of the title sequences that are out there and the renders that have been done by studios, you can see that they have used some of their techniques over and over and other things. And so I think learning from these kinds of techniques and processes is really beneficial. And one of the best ways of getting better and software and learning how to do things that you didn't know how to do is trying to. You know, Mitt Manipulator mimics something that somebody else is done and then make it your own. I think it's really important than to go ahead and move to that process of making it your own thing. So in the next video, we're gonna talk about your project. Just some closing thoughts and maybe some more samples will take a look at 5. Your Project: Let's talk about your project. But I'd like you to do is to take everything that you've learned in this demonstration. Released components of the things that you learn in this demonstration and come up with your own unique project. So how can you take the techniques that we've learned here the visual aesthetic and apply it to something that you're excited about? Here are a few examples of things you might consider. Whatever you do, just make sure, but it's your own work. I can't wait to look at it. Please post your work in the project section. I'd love to comment on it and please comment on it on each other's work as well. If you like this class, please follow me on skill share. You can also follow me on Instagram. I'll see you again soon. In another skill share class