Introduction to Cinema 4D: A Beginner's Animation Guide

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Don Mopasi and I am a motion designer, a 3D animator, and Cinema 4D artist. Welcome to my class and introduction to Cinema 4D, a beginner's guide for animation. Today I am going to teach you how to use Cinema 4D from the ground up. This is aimed at absolute beginners but for people with a bit more experience, I am also going to be sharing several tips and tricks throughout the class to help you to work faster in Cinema 4D and expand your knowledge of the application. We are going to cover topics such as modeling, materials, lighting, animation, and rendering. We are also going to focus on developing workflows by working on real projects so that by the end of it, you'll be able to open Cinema 4D and start creating your own animations from scratch. I have been using Cinema 4D for about 10 years now and I also started by watching tutorials online. Back then I was watching these tutorials from various places and then trying to piece it all together and if you've tried to learn Cinema 4D that way, then you will know how hard that can be. In this class, I have brought together all of that knowledge and experience into one place in a way that's very complete and easy to follow from start to finish. If you're ready to start learning Cinema 4D the right way, let's get started. 2. Which Version Of Cinema 4D To Use?: 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 are 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 Version 23. But you can go back even further if you click past versions and we still have 22.21 available. Also, for this, 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 R21. 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 to 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. Navigation Shortcuts: One of the most important things when using Cinema 4D is knowing how to navigate quickly. If we start by just inserting a cube into the scene, so we have something to look at. If you Press one on the keyboard and then click and drag anywhere. This is going to pan around you'll scene or object. If you Press two and then click and drag, this is going to zoom in and out, and then if you Press three, this is going to orbit around your objects. You can also do this using these three icons up here. This is the pan, the zoom, and the orbit. Now, I prefer to use the keyboard shortcuts for two reasons. One, it's just faster, and two for the zooming in and out using this method, you can actually pick exactly where you want to zoom in and out of, depending on where you click and the same for their rotation. Also related to rotation, you can Press three and right-click instead, and that scoring to bank the camera. Let's see you find yourself at an angle you don't like, you can actually only undo the camera movement if you Press "Shift" "Control" and "Z", that's going to undo just the camera movement. You can keep repeating this until you get to an earlier camera position. Before we end this particular lesson, I want to show you one other really useful shortcut which has to do with, if you find yourself in a completely random sort of a part of your 3D scene and you can't see what you have selected. Well, if you go to the object and then simply press S, this is going to quickly snap to where that object is located and you can quickly find anything using that method. This cube over here, if I click it in the objects lists and then press S, it's going to jump to that particular thing. If you have multiple objects selected and do the same, it will try and show them both and if you press H, it's going to try and frame absolutely everything that is in the scene. Just a few more shortcuts to help you with that, navigating and traversing your 3D viewport. 4. Viewport Options: In addition to those shortcuts, there are other settings for our main viewport here. There are other viewports which you can access by going to this icon, and here we have the top, front, and right. You will see that each viewport has exactly the same menu above it, and let's start with the camera section. If I go to that, you can see that I can change the side or angles these cameras are showing me. If I didn't want to just see the right view, I can switch to the left. The front view could change that to, let's say, the back, just depending on what I need at the time. Notice the difference in the way that our objects are being displayed. Here is the full 3D view, but in the other ones, we have the wireframe view. Well, the setting for that is found under the Display tab. If I go to Display, we can see that we are in the lines mode and we are looking at a wireframe. To illustrate this more obviously, if I go back to the perspective view and under Display, let's go to Lines, and now we see a line representation of our 3D object. If I go back to Gouraud shading and Gouraud shading with lines, any mode with lines just shows you the same, except, you now see the outline of the segments. I tend to jump between Gouraud shading and then Gouraud shading with lines. That's these shortcuts next to that. You have N-B for lines and N-A for shading. So if you just press N followed by A, and then N followed by B, that's how you quickly switch between those two modes. Further down the list, we have quick shading, which on the surface looks just like Gouraud shading, but the difference is that Gouraud shading respects lights that you have in the scene. You can see as I move this around, my object reacts to the light. But in quick shading, you see that it ignores any lights that have in the scene. Further down, we have constant shading, which ignores any lighting or any shading whatsoever, and you get something which looks very flat, so you would probably only use constant shading combined with the lines mode, so you can actually see the shape and form of your objects. To continue, let's look at the options tab, and this has to do with what kind of effects we want to preview in the viewport. To illustrate this, I'm going to get a plane, and this is going to be my floor. Let's just enlarge this by grabbing those handles and simply moving them. We can get the cube and place it more above the surface. If I go to the Light, I can go to Shadow. Let's enable Shadow Maps Soft. Now we don't see a preview of that until I hit render. However, if I had been in Options and enable Shadows, and now you can see we get a preview of that in the live viewport. Moving on, we have the Filter menu or sub-menu. This allows us to choose what kind of objects we are displaying in the viewport. Our cube here and plane, these are generator type objects. If I were to go to the Filter and disable the generators, you will see those objects will disappear. Now, you really never going to do that, so let's just go back and re-enable that. But what you may do, let's say, you want to do a preview render of your animation and you just want to clean up what the viewport looks like, well, you may do something like this, where you go to the Filter and let's say disable the lights. Now, the light is still there and it's effects are still visible, but you just can't see it in the interface like you could before. I may even go to Gouraud shading only to get rid of the edges just to clean up what this preview looks like. Under Filter, once again, I will go and maybe disable the work plane and even [inaudible] default axis indicator. We would go to Filter once again, and that's the World Axis. Now I have a very clean preview of my scene and I would render this out if I was trying to preview an animation. Then when I am done, I can go back and just re-enable those things. You can utilize these settings in here. There's several things you can turn on and off. It's worth just going through each one and see what it does. Up to now, we have been accessing the settings for our viewport from this menu over here. But you can also do this by pressing "Shift and V", and over in the attributes section down here, it's going to show you the viewport attributes of just this viewport. You can see it's similar settings to what we were looking at under these menus. Here, we have the shading, this is where we would change that. We have our Filter menu, which has all the same things that we saw earlier on this list, except it's just a tip boxes now. But here, we even have extra options, such as if I go to the Safe Frames tab, we can display a title and action boundary border, which you can even change the size off, that might be useful for knowing where to keep the elements on screen. You don't want to exceed certain limits, you would set that here. This tinted area shows you everything that will be outside of the frame and you can change the opacity of that, but I'm just going to keep it at the default. If you change any value and you want to go back to its previous default, you can simply right-click and then reset to default. Make sure you're not resetting all unless you really intend to do that because this will reset everything you have changed. Reset to Default is for that particular setting, all is for all the settings. Just be careful because I believe you cannot undo either of these things. Moving on, if I go to the Back tab, you can see currently it's completely grayed out, that's because we can't change any of the settings in the normal 3D view. But if we go to any of the other views, let's say the front view, press "Shift V" once again to bring that back. Now you can see I can load in an image into this. Here's a picture of me and my brother's dog. You would use this particular feature. Let's say you were modeling something and you needed a side view, a top view of the blueprints. Well, that's what this section is used for. You would load up each respective blueprint in the correct angle that you needed for, and then you would use that as reference for your 3D modeling. You have things in here such as controlling the transparency if you don't want to see it as much, and even the size and the scaling. That's what this Back tab is for. It's literally the background of these particular type of viewports. Finally, the Effects tab is the same as the first section of these options here, except, once again, it's just some tick boxes. 5. Installing Plugins, Customizing UI: I don't always use plugins in Cinema 4D, but there is one which I use almost all the time and it's called Magic Solo. It's a free plugin and what this does is if you are working with multiple objects in your scene. Now, this is a very simple illustration, but if I just grab one of these cubes and then hit the "Magic Solo" button, it's going to isolate only the object that I currently had selected and its materials. If I just hit that again to bring back everything else. Let's just quickly apply a material to this one and then make another material, apply it to the one at the back. If I once again hit "Solo", now I can only see this object and I would do anything I need to do to this and then when I'm done, I simply hit the button again to reveal everything else. Now, the way to install this plugin is once you download it, it's a zipped file or whatever. You unzip that, then go to Edit and Preferences. Open the Preferences folder. This is going to open up a location similar to this, where you have this various folders related to your Cinema 4D installed. Here, there is a plugins folder. You open this up and you can see all of the plugins which I have currently installed but you can also see on this list, Magic Solo, and it's just a folder. You would place that folder here, and then you would restart your Cinema 4D application. Now, I have put this icon into my interface. If I go to Window and Customization and under Layouts, let's go to the regular Startup layout, which is going to look like this. You've seen that that icon has now disappeared. To bring it here, I would go to Window, Customization and let's open up Customize Commands. In this window and search box, you can find all of the commands and functions which are part of Cinema 4D, including those which are added by third-party plugins. Here, I would search for Solo and we have Magic Solo right there, and I would just simply drag this to part of my interface. Let's say you make a mistake and you want to place this elsewhere, well, you would have to click "Edit palettes", which changes the interface slightly by creating these outlines between icons and buttons. Then to get rid of one, you just double-click and it's going to disappear. But of course, we do want this one to be right there. When you're done, you untick "Edit palettes" and then you close this menu down. Now, when you've done something like this, you actually have to save this layout in order for it to be the same the next time you launch Cinema 4D. You would go to Window, Customization and under this submenu, you would then save this as a startup layout or simply as a layout, and then you get to give it a name. If I just call this one "example" and then hit "Enter" to save; now, I want I go back to the Window and Customization. Let's load up the default standard layout, then go to Window once again, Customization, and here we have our example layout. Now, I would always want this to be the startup layout, so it would also save it as that. 6. Application & Project Settings: When you first launch Cinema 4D, it's not going to look like my Cinema 4D, although it's going to be very close because I haven't changed all that much. But I'm going to show you some of the application and project preferences which I have set as my defaults. I would recommend you guys do the same too. If I go to "Edit" and "Preferences", this is going to bring up all of the settings related to the application itself. But one of the things I do change is if you go to "Units", the default animation unit is going to be frames. This is likely what your own timeline currently looks like down here where you see the frames labeled by a number like this. But personally I don't like that particular unit, so I change this to SMPTE because what this does is it displays the time in seconds. Above that anyway, I still get to see the actual frames and in addition to that, in my viewport, I have enabled the frames. I can still see what frame number I am at in those two places. If I also press "Control+D", this is going to bring up the project settings. This will be different on every project. But for most of the animation projects that I do, the one thing I always change is the FPS. This is always going to be 24 FPS, which is of course the film standard, frames per second. I guess for web 30 FPS is the standard and in some countries 25 FPS is the standard for television and so on. But 24 is the universal Hollywood film standard and I like my animations to look quite cinematic. That's why I choose that option. Once I have set my FPS here, I also have to go to my Render Settings, which is this icon right there and in the output tab, which is the top tab, the frame rate here needs to match my FPS here. I would set this to be 24. Also, you could make a template project, I suppose, or save a Render Setting preset and even do the same for project settings, where you can quickly load it up at the beginning. But personally, I like to be aware of those two options. I always do them manually because it takes just a few seconds anyway. Perhaps though, if there is one setting which is worth looking at is under "Files" and "Autosave". You should definitely have this turned on. It's going to save you from losing your work. It's very basic here you have the save option and you can set a time interval. Mine is set to every hour or 60 minutes. That's probably too long. I would go to maybe 20 minutes instead. I keep a maximum number of copies of let's say six. If it gets to the sixth or seventh autosave, it would delete the previous first autosave and then continue with that pattern. You would always have an earlier save to go to. Of course, if your application crashes whilst you are performing any sort of intensive tasks, then you don't lose as much progress. The maximum you would ever lose in this case would be 20 minutes. There is one side-effect to using the autosave, which is that it will engage itself regardless of what you are doing at the time. You could be trying to preview the animation and that autosave will kick in at the set interval and you would just have to wait until it has finished. Also under memory, this is where we can make another change. The Undo Depth, it's to do with how many times you can press "Control+Z" to undo what you've been doing in the project. By default, it's set to 30. You probably want to crank that up to something like 100. Anyway, those are the basic application preferences. We will leave it there and anything else that comes up we will deal with as we go. 7. Menu Iitems: The menu in Cinema 4D does a pretty good job of organizing objects. There are different types of objects that we are going to be using. But let's just quickly go over some of the more common ones. This cube icon, this is the primitives menu which contains all of these various shapes, which we are going to be accessing at some point or types of shapes. So the cube is going to come up a lot. The plane which is often used as a floor. We have there splines which are all to do with drawing different pods like this. There'll be a whole section on that in more detail. We can draw our own splines or we can use these presets, which again will come up at various points throughout the class. This section here is called the subdiv menu, or at least that's what I referred to it as. It used to be called the hypernurbs menu. That's what this object used to be called. So how it works in Cinema 4D is that there is an icon here which if you hold left-click over it, it shows you the other tools underneath that menu. That menu tends to be named based on the first one. That's why this is the subdiv menu. This is the Nurbs menu. It's called that because all of these things here used to have the word Nurbs next to them in older versions of Cinema 4D. You had Extrude Nurbs, Lathe Nurbs, Loft Nurbs, and Sweep. These tools here are all used in conjunction with splines. It's a way we turn splines into geometry. That's what this section is all about. Next up we have the MoGraph menu, which is one of the larger ones. You have your cloner object in here or your MoText. Probably the two most common objects in this menu and the various effectors related to MoGraph objects. This is going to come up quite a lot. We have the Fields menu, which is a newer introduction in later versions of Cinema 4D. This didn't used to be there. Then we have Deformers which as the name suggests, various deformers which can be applied to objects or geometry. Then Cameras. That's pretty straightforward. This is the Cameras menu and the lights. All of these will be used at some point throughout the class. I just wanted to quickly highlight how they are organized and how you find them. Some of these things we have just seen here will also be part of this main menu up here. MoGraph, for example, we have it here again with the various MoGraph objects. The effect is in a side sub-menu and then as well as other tools which couldn't fit in here. It's not just these icon menus that we are going to be accessing, but also these are the menus up here. I don't want to spend too much time on it just because we are going to be accessing this throughout the class anyway. Naturally, just by using Cinema 4D you will over time become more familiar with where all of these things and various objects are located anyway. 8. Moving, Scaling, Rotating Objects: Dealing with objects in cinema 4D, there is different aspects to this. The most obvious one is just a physical movement within the 3D scene itself. Here, we have a cube. In the normal live selection mode, you can click an object or click it here in the object list, and you can simply grab these axes handles to move that object. If you press T, this is going to change that to the scale handles and then you can grab these and scale the object up and down. You will see that if I grab the whole axis, it scales the other tool proportionally, but I can also grab this small handle, the orange handle before the axis itself, and that's going to change that one side at a time only. It's worth noting you will only get these smaller handles when the object is parametric, which is to say, when it's an object like this, which can still be manipulated using these object properties over here. You can turn objects like this into what are called editable objects, and we'll get to this later when we start looking at modeling. But essentially, if I had C on this object, it's now no longer adjustable using the parametric options. We have baked this down to a regular polygonal object. Now, we can still see the scale handles, except now, they do work independently from each other always. Also, if I grab the arrows between the different axis points, you can see you would do those two sides instead, so that's for there. Then if you click nowhere in particular, that's how you scale the whole thing together. If we continue with this and press R, that's going to bring up the rotation. Here, I can just grab any of the access points and move or rotate this. With the rotation, we can do things like press Shift whilst making the operation, and this is going to lock their rotation segments to increments of five degrees and allow you to easily select something like 90 degrees just by dragging to 90 degrees, and you can do that precisely every time. This works in the positioning too. If you press Shift, it locks it to increments of five centimeters, so you'd get to work with some nice whole numbers always. Whatever tool I'm using, if I press the Spacebar, it's going to jump to the previous tool, so we have just jumped back to selection. If you find yourself rotating this and then you've finished the rotation, you now want to go back to simply move it, you just press Spacebar and it jumps back to that tool. Spacebar is not a shortcut for live selection, it's a shortcut for the previous tool that you had selected so if I press it again now you see that it jumps back to rotation because that's what I had selected previously. If I do this over and over, it jumps back between the two last two tools that I was using. Hope that makes sense. 9. Object Attributes & Tags: In addition to physically moving objects, you of course have the Attributes Manager over here, which allows you to control various settings related to that object. So a sphere, for example, has a Radius control, or maybe if we get an n-side side while this is a completely different type of object which has its own unique type of attributes and this is true of any object that you can grab and put into your project in Cinema 4D. It's going to have its own attributes and sometimes there'll be several tabs depending on the complexity or use of that object. Another way objects can be manipulated is using tags. The way to access this is to right-click the object and the top part of this menu is going to have several sub menus and each sub-menu has different types of tags that we can apply to any of the objects. Let's just go through a couple of examples. The Vibrate tag, for example, this is found under Animation Tags. If I bring this in, you will see that the Vibrate tag has its own attributes and that we want to make some changes here. If I hit "Play" just so we can see the changes live, I will start by going to the position and you can see that it's vibrating our object using a range of position values, and so far we just have this in the x direction. We have x, y, and z. So let's go to all directions and set that to 100. We can change the frequency down to one. It's going to slow down the overall effect. We're going to vibrate the scale of the object or the rotation. I might go for something like 90, 90, and 90 and it's going to be jumping all over the place. But I just want to show you that it's the tag that is causing this object to move around as it is. Now that's just one example of what tags can do or rather it's one example of a type of tag. There are several other tags which are used for different things. One of them which you may use a lot is, let's say compositing. If I enable this, and let's get a plane I'm going move the cube itself and still Gouraud shading with lines so we can see the edges. I'm going to enlarge this. Let's insert a light and just place it above here. I'm going to enable Shadow Maps, soft on this. Then let's get a sphere and place it next to our cube and I can select both of these and center them like this. What's the point of all of this? Well, on the cube, because we have this compositing tag there's certain things we can do to differentiate it from the sphere. I can untick "Cast Shadows". This is in the Tag tab of that Compositing Tag. Now if I re-render, you see that only our sphere is casting shadows. I am applying object level control to the various objects in my scene using this Compositing Tag. There's several options in here besides just shadows. We can untick Seen by Camera, for example, and that object is no longer going to appear when we render. Where this might be useful in a creative sense, let's say you have a sky object that you want to cast reflections on your objects. Well, you can use it for that, but you don't want to see that object in the Render you only want to have it's reflections be seen on your objects where you would apply that sky and then you would put this tag on it and turn off Seen by Camera and then you would achieve your effect. But really we're just scratching the surface of what you can do with tags. Throughout the lessons when we work on real project examples or creative examples, we are going to see many more tags being used and sort at it at a more specific manner rather than generally just going through them one by one. 10. Coordinates & Size Options: Here is a quick note about moving, rotating, scaling objects. As you do this in the Viewport, you will see that in the corner point there, lower part of the UI, we have the coordinates of that object. There's actually two locations where you'll see this information. Here and also in the coordinates tab of that particular object. The difference between these two sections is that, for example, if I go to the Coordinates on the object itself, if I change this, you will see a live update in the Viewport. But if I try to change it here, nothing happens until I hit "Apply". That's one of the differences. It also does just display different types of information. Here, we get the actual size and scale of this object, but in the coordinates, we only see a sort of the scale ratio: scale X, scale Y, and scale Z. If I were to double one of these, you see it changes in that direction and it actually updates the overall size here as well. Essentially, that's two ways you can change the size of this object. You can change it using the ratio scaling or in the Object's tab itself, you can change it there, or you can do this in this section. Except if you try it here on a parametric object, Let's type out 400 and hit "Apply", it actually scales all three sides proportionally. However, if this was an editable object and you do the same thing, it would only affect the one side you do this to. That's how that works. There is another mode which is quite useful. If I make a copy of the cube here, hold Control, click and drag to make a copy. You can do this in the Object Manager or directly in the interface, actually. So if I just hold Control, click and drag, I make a copy. Let's say I wanted to know the overall size of these two objects together. Well, I would select both, right-click them, and group the objects or ALT+G on the keyboard for the shortcut. You can see you now that the size here just says zero. I don't get any size information directly because this is a null object. You only get that information if you had the actual object selected. However, if I click back on the null and then go to "Size +", now you can see I get the scale values and it's combining these two objects together and displaying that information back to me. So If I were to move this out here further and go back to this, you can see the x size has increased, because it's measuring from this point on this side all the way across in the space in between to the other side, and we'd get to the overall scale. There will be times where you want to do this to get the size or the actual size of your objects, especially if they are grouped in as null objects like you have just seen there. 11. Object Hierachies: This next section is very simple. It's about hierarchies of objects in Cinema 4D. Once again, our trusty cube. If I want to bring in another object, let's say a sphere, I can just bring it in as is, and then make it a child of the cube by simply dragging it underneath the cube. Now, if the sphere was to the side, and I go back to the cube, because the cube is the parent, when I move this one cube, it's going to move the sphere along with it. In addition, any tags which I place on the parent object, they will trickle down and also be applied onto the child object. Let's apply the Compositing Tag. I'm going to do something here which is press "Alt" and "R". This is going to bring up what's called the interactive render region because this is continuously rendering as you are changing different things in the scene. You have a quality slider right there which you can put all the way up to the top for final best quality, or you can just leave it there if you want faster feedback. The reason we are using this live preview now is because I want to show you a bit more about hierarchies and how they work. If we go to the Compositing Tag here and untick Seen by Camera, you'll see both objects would disappear because, of course, it does affect the child object. However, if I go to the child object itself and then go to Render Tags and then Compositing, because this new Compositing Tag by default has Seen by Camera enabled, It's going to override whatever the parent object is going to do. You get the best of both worlds. You can set it up in a way that the parent object overrides everything from the top-down, but you also have more specific control where the child object can also have its own options. I just made another sphere just to illustrate this. The third sphere, we can turn this off. Now we have very specific control in the way we set this up. Let's go back to our single cube. I have disabled the interactive render region by pressing that shortcut again, "Alt" followed by "R". If I select this cube and then hold the "Alt" key and insert another object, that new object will automatically be a parent of whatever I had selected. If I press "Shift", it's the opposite. That new object will automatically be a child of whatever I had selected. That's a very basic introduction to how hierarchies work in Cinema 4D. As we continue with the lessons and do bigger projects and so on, you'll be seeing a lot more elaborate setups in how objects are arranged. But before I end this lesson, I just want to quickly introduce you to something called the Instance Object. It's something which is going to be used a lot in different projects. With the cube selected here, I'm gonna go to this menu, the sub-div menu, and get this object code, the Instance. Now I had the cube selected when I did that, so it automatically named this instance cube Instance. When I click this too, in the Instance Attributes under Object, the Reference Object is our cube. Now if I click on that instance and move it out here, you see it's a direct copy of our cube, and that's what instance means. It's just a copy. What's great about this particular object is that whatever you do to the original, the copy is going to automatically do the same. There will be creative uses of this later. But for now, I just wanted to introduce this very useful tool to you. 12. Modelling - Intro, Selection Modes: Here is an earlier version of just the orb on its own, and this is what we're going to recreate. In this first section, we're going to look at various selection modes related to modeling. If I go to the Primitives menu, let's get a platonic. This is going to be our starting point and you may be doing this kind of thing a lot if you are modeling, which is to say you will begin with a primitive shape and then build on from that. Let's go to the platonic and under Type in the Object Settings, I'm going to choose Bucky, and then I'm going to hit "C" to make it editable. One of the things I need to do is to get rid of these lines which cut across the various polygons that make up this whole shape. You can see I was able to just select them there. That's because I was in this edges mode. That's one of the modeling modes you can be in. The other one is point, that's the first one on this list here. That allows you to move points around. I'm using the live selection tool for this which is just the normal tool. You can adjust the size of the brush, by the way, if you use the square brackets key, a bit like you can in Photoshop for those of you familiar with that program. Or you can use the radius, over here, too it works basically the same. This is the normal selection mode, but you could change this to something like soft selection. Now you see when I select one of the points, there is a radius of influence to the rest of the points around this one, and when I move it back, you see depending on their radius, the points will move more or less. This soft selection can be used to reshape areas of your geometry in general. Obviously, this thing would be more suitable for more organic looking geometries rather than this which looks very blocky and mechanic. But anyway, the soft selection has some options, such as their radius, which you would adjust based on the size of the object; we can make it smaller or larger. The strength, of course, just controls how strong that influence is going to be and then you have the width. Again, just to affect how that area is selected, and the type of falloff can also be changed for a different selection altogether. Let's go back to normal. I would change from live selection to rectangle selection, which as the name suggests, you draw a rectangle and anything that's contained within that will be selected. Lasso, you can just draw the selection area. Then polygon, once again, you draw it, but it's lines instead of freestyle. Those are the various selection modes. By the way, this will work at a geometric level or for objects in general, which in the scene. We've already talked about point mode. Let's look at edges mode, which as the name suggests, is used for selecting edges like this. I'm holding the "Shift" here to add to the selection or I can hold "Control" to subtract. Then polygon mode is used to select the individual faces that make up my geometry here. Let's continue. We're going to go to edges mode because we want to get rid of these points, all these lines rather, which cut on each of these polygons. Now, it wouldn't take too long to do this manually. But there is another way I could do this in this particular example. Because all the lines I want to select are laying flat on these surfaces, it means they have a zero degree angle, whereas all the lines I want to keep, those lines have some angle. I can actually use that information to select one set of lines or the other. To do this, I'm going to go to Select and Phong Break Selection or the shortcut for that is "U" followed by "N". When you press the first part of this shortcut, you can see all the various shortcuts which you can pick from this menu; so U and N. Anyway, in this Phong Break selection, we can see a preview of what would be selected right now if I were to execute this function. It's based on the angle of the aligned. With this value of eight degrees, I would be able to select these edges, which you can see highlighted in blue. But if I keep putting this up past a certain point, nothing is being detected by this range. But if I go all the way down to zero, you see it selects all of the lines. Here, I would just want to be above zero and I can select these lines. Let's do that. Then, in selection, I can invert the selection to select the lines I actually want to get, which is the ones going across the polygons. That's how the Phong Break selection works. It can be useful if you want to quickly select a set of edges if you can use the angles to do that. Anyway, I'm going to right-click here and "Dissolve". That's how we get rid of those lines. You've just seen one of the various modeling tools which you can use in Cinema 4D. There's a whole lot more which you can see here and depending on which mode you're in, this will either change. You can see in polygon mode, for example, that has the longest list of various modeling tools you can use in that mode. [MUSIC]. 13. Modelling - Extrude, Extrude Inner, Bevel Tools: I have gone back a step before I had gotten rid of these lines, so I can show you some other tools. We can actually do this in polygon mode also. If I right-click that and dissolve, it works in this mode also. But you wouldn't, for example, do this to two polygons which are next to each other. Not in this case anyway, because if you do, you also end up getting rid of the line that actually separates these two sections. You can still repair this by right-clicking and going to line cut, this used to be called the knife tool and it's even got that little knife icon. But we can get this and clip that point, cut across and connect it to the other side. If I press "Escape", it's going to confirm and add that new edge. You can also just do this anywhere on the faces of these polygons. It doesn't have to be from pre-existing points. I need to select these flat lines again. Let's just quickly do our phone-breaks selection, select All and invert, which is here and then we can dissolve these. Now, let's start modeling what we see here. I need to make a certain selection, which is all of the hexagons, so that's the six-sided shapes on this buckyball. I can solve all of this by itself just to keep things simple and of course, that's that magic solo plugin, which we spoke about at the beginning of the class. Anyway, I now have this selection and I know I'm going to use this selection later, so I'm going to save it. I can go to selection and set selection and this is going to create a selection tag, which I can always come back to if I wanted to remake that same selection. Let me show you what I mean, if I click Away and then double-click the selection tag, it's going to jump back to the previous selection. I also want the reverse of this, so let's select and invert and make sure that I click away from this first before I save this new selection, otherwise it would overwrite on that tag. That's the second one you can see there. This works in polygon mode. In edges mode, it's exactly the same process. The icon for that is a bit different, it's an outline triangle. In point mode, it's going to be three dots in a triangular pattern and you can always use this to jump back to those selections. When you do, it will automatically switch to the correct mode based on that selection tag. Anyway, let's go back to this selection and use one of these tools. We have extrude, extrude inner and bevel, so that's these three tools right here. These are going to be the most used tools when it comes to modeling. The one we are going to begin with is extrude inner. To use this, you just click anywhere and drag your mouse. You can see as the name suggests, it takes our selection and creates an inner extrusion. You could go the other way, but that doesn't make sense in this case. Let's go inner like this. Once you have started the extrusion, you can let go of the mouse and actually use the sliders over here and options to change what that looks like. We are going to set this to 7.5. By default, preserve groups is going to be ticked. The difference is if this isn't selected, the polygons will behave as individual shapes. It's okay if that's what you're trying to do, but in this case, I did want to stay as a continuous single piece. Subdivision in this case adds some segments behind where the extrusion is coming from. You can put this way up and create a whole bunch of these segments, but we don't need to do that here. Let's bring back everything else by hitting Solo again, I want to raise out this section you see here. That's this set of polygons we have made room for using the extrude inner. For this selection, I'm going to get what's called loop selection. If our press U followed by L, now I can select anything that's in a loop pattern, so all of these here, I'm going to work for this. Let's just go all the way around, we can solo again just to make sure nothing gets in the way. It's a fairly simple shape, so it doesn't take too long. Then what we can do is right-click once again and extrude, once again, if you just click and start dragging your mouse, and you can let go and use the sliders over here to set specific values. We are going to go with 7.5 for the offset. Offset variation can be used to change up how much these shapes come out by, but we just want them to be all the same. Subdivision, once again, it's going to create segments underneath that extrusion, but once again, leave that at zero and preserved groups works just like in the other mode where it would treat this as a single object or as a separate pieces. If it's not behaving properly, it may be down to the maximum angle which you have set, because if you do move this around, it may make a difference. This is on these pentagons, we need to make some changes now to the hexagon bits, and we made a selection tag for that. That was the first one. Let's go to Extrude inner. This time I do want these to behave as individual shapes, so I'm going to untake preserve groups. The offset is going to be five centimeters. Then I'm going to extrude and it's going to be 7.5, which was the same as we did for these sections. Then let's switch to extrude inner again. The number here is going to be seven. Then let's extrude and it's going to be negative five to create this side dip back into their shape, so just like what we have going on over here. If I can't see too well what my polygons are doing here, it's because I need to be in this edges mode. You can see how much denser this version is. But today we're actually going to build this one a bit better and a more economically. You will see this a bit later on. Anyway, let's do this section next. If I go back to normal shading, it's this bit on the inside which is extruded, but also it's at an angle, so it slants inwards. I think we can use our old selection once again, of the pentagonal bit. For this we're going to use the bevel tool, a way to think about this one is it combines extrude inner and extrude at the same time, when we are in polygon mode anyway. let's see how this works. If I just click and start doing something, it's not really moving much here my mouse is completely on the other screen now. But I can make the changes here too, so if I go to Extrusion, this is going to be set to five. But above that we have this offset control, which if I set to five, also, it's going to shrink that selection inward and the result is that it's an extrusion that is also a slanted towards the center of these shapes. If I reverse this, it's going to be like a canopy which umbrellas over the polygons instead. But we want to go toward the inside. The next detail is this depression on this other section, so we are going to need to be in polygon mode for this. I don't think here my previous selections can help me a whole lot. This is going to be a new selection. If I press U followed by L once again for loop selection and by the way when you press this menu, you can always see the various shortcuts available at that time. We need to select all of these sections at the top. Let's solo once again. That's it. Let's bring back the other one for reference and I'm going to extrude inner by about. Let's do two centimeters. In fact, before I do this, I'm going to save this selection, so select and make sure I click away from the old one first, so I don't overwrite it, then set selection. Now, I can extrude inner and let's go for two. I'm going to bevel this. If I just click to start the beveling, I want to set the extrusion to negative one and the offset to one. Also, If this offset is too large, the polygons end up intersecting. Maybe, I'm going to make this a bit deeper. Let's go for negative 1.5. We now have this basic shape modeled and complete. Next step, what we want to do is to do the subdividing and smoothing of the mesh. This involves taking our platonic object and placing it underneath a subdivision surface. If I hold the "ALT" key and bring this end as a parent of all platonic, you can see the initial results of that. Clearly this is not what we are trying to make. In the next section we are going to look at what other steps we need to do in order to get to this. 14. Modelling - Subdividing Edges: The reason why throwing this into the subdivision surface just rounded everything too much, is because we don't have enough edge cuts on this geometry. Everything is being rounded literally. But, of course, we want to make this here. I can just go to the platonic and highlight everything, then right-click. If I open up the subdivide, let's do one subdivision at a time just to see the effects of that. If I click "Okay", we see everything has been subdivided at least one time. Now, if I re-enable the subdivision surface, the shape of this is a bit closer to what we want, but it's still too rounded. Let's sub-divide once more. Once again, getting closer and it looks like we would have to do this one more time before we get something like the old example. The problem with this, of course, is it's just too much geometry. There is actually a way more economical way or the proper way you would do this instead. Let's see what that other way is. If I press "Control Z" just to go back to the original. Let's go to Gouraud shading so I can tell when I've gotten there. On their platonic, I'm going to just make a copy in case we need to go back to this earlier version. I am going to go to edges mode and press "Control A" to select all of their edges. If we just subdivide the edges alone, it saves us a lot of segments on polygons because we don't need to subdivide the flat surfaces, for example. Let's right-click and bevel. Because this bevel tool also works in this edges mode, not just the polygon mode alone. If I just click here and start the operation, you can see it's creating this extra edge cuts on our edges. If I just type in, let's say 0.2 as the offset. If I now re-enable the subdivision surface, you can see we are already very close or we are pretty much there now actually, it doesn't take much at all to do that subdivision properly. The difference is that this is a much better way of spreading our polygons and only subdividing where we need to. Whereas over here, this was just subdivided way too much. This is a much better shape, and the advantages of this, of course, it's just easier to manipulate moving forward, and it's a lighter object in terms of how much memory it's going to take up in the scene. If we were cloning this many times, you would be better off cloning a less dense mesh. Let's undo and look at a couple of other things we can do with this bevel. In edges mode, once again, set to 0.2 if I apply. I can also subdivide. If I put in one in here, it's going to create an extra edge in between. If I do two, that's going to be rounded even further. The effect of doing this, by the way, is to just sharpen those corners when we do drop this back into the subdivision surface. Now, you see that rounding we had here because we've thrown so many edge cuts. Those edges will be sharper than before and you get a completely different style and look. If you want something that's more hard-edged, that's what you would do there, you would just add more cuts when you do the bevel. I think you don't need to add three, I think even an extra one would do the job, and there you go. That's the difference between one subdivision and just the original zero that we had before. At zero, we still get the rounding in the right areas and then the sharpened edges elsewhere. I will show you one final bevel mode, which is changing this to solid, if I just click and start moving. It may be helpful to do a side-by-side comparison for your own sake. You see the way the edge flow is applied is going to be different in this solid mode versus Chamfer. Actually, I can switch between the two, and you can see the difference. Now with the solid mode, you don't get any subdivision at all. It's already going to be sharp, just because of how that geometry is being shaped. Anyway, let's go back to the normal Chamfer mode and set it to 0.2, and call it a day there. This is the final subdivided shape. 15. Modelling - Adding Loop Cuts: One final detail we need to model are these lines you see on the inside of this cutout that we made earlier. How this was done was I took some edges out of that area and converted them to splines. Then using the sweep object and a circle, we created the geometry. If I turn off the sweep object, we can just about see the spline on the inside there. I can, of course, solo the spline by itself, and you see that was the basis of generating that geometry. Let's look at our new Orb. By the way, up to this point, I have been working away from the center of the scene, which is maybe not the best practice. It's not a big deal, but it's a good idea to just always work in the center of the scene. I'm going to shift that back and then put our reference praise to the side. Apologies for that, I should have mentioned this from the very beginning, and this is how it should have been. Anyway, let's continue. If we look at this geometry right now, we can see that, that line needs to go somewhere in the center, but the thing is there is no edge along the exact center of this cutout. Now, we could just be lazy and go with one of these other lines instead, but I thought it would be actually better to do it properly. It's also an excuse to show you guys a different modeling tool that we haven't looked at so far. This tool is called the Loop Path Cut. If I right-click here is the tool. How these tool works is we can create cuts into the geometry, and as the name suggests, it's going to do this in a loop pattern. Now we have maintained this great edge flow when we have been building this up. It's going to be very simple and straightforward here. If I press the shift key, some guides are going to come up and then I can just click in the middle for the 50 percent guide, and we even get the slide up here to adjust where that cut is going to go. Now, here is something else which I can reuse the cut because the first one was made at 50 percent. I want to repeat this on all of these other sections and you see now with reuse tagged, it's always going to snap to 50 percent of where you're trying to make the next cut. It doesn't matter where this is by the way. It could be here it could be there. Anywhere, we can make a loop cut. If we reuse it, it's going to be using the same proportions as the previous section. I'm just going through these one by one. I have all of the cuts made. Now we have that segment which we can use to extract the center edge from. If I get U and L for loops selection, and this is an edge mode, we want to go ahead and select those new cuts. Now, this is going to take a minute. I think that's all of them. Now we can just go to Mesh, conversion, and the edge to spline. When I do this, a new child object will appear underneath our platonic, and it said this spline. If I solo this spline, you see this is what we have. The edge to spline command used to be in a different location and I can't quite remember, I think it used to be under tools and then there was a mesh thing here, and then you got the conversion, but if you can't find it go to customize commands and just search for it. Edge to spline, place it somewhere in your interface temporarily and then access it that way. Anyway, if you ever can't find any function I mentioned in the tutorial because you have a different version of Cinema 4D, you can try to find it using the customize commands section. Now that we have our splines, we want to generate the geometry. This is going to be done with a rectangle as well, the shape of the profile of this geometry. Let's set the width and height to one and one. Just a very small rectangle in the center of the scene there. This is going to be used in conjunction with the sweep object. From this menu, let's get the sweep, and I'm holding the Alt key with the rectangle and then place the Platonic as a child of this also. This is the hierarchy. The sweep object holds the two objects and the profile shape is above the actual spline. It's hard to see a change in this gray color. Let's apply this neon material to that section. Now, we'll see we have generated that part of the geometry. The great thing about this is it follows the same edge flow. It means that if I turn on subdivision surface again, it's going to line up perfectly and subdivide at the same areas. Now we can see the corners here don't look so good. The splines are not linking up. That's because in the spline itself, we should take this switch, so close spline. Here is something else I had noticed when I closed up the splines. This is before closing the map and three enabled subdivide surface, we see that disconnect. If I close up the splines, you see it fixes that problem, but it also introduces this issue where the rectangle that makes up this geometry is being rotated in various places along this spline. I don't know why that happens exactly, but in the sweep object, we can just go to the Object settings, let's switch off this banking here. This is one of the rotation modes. You could say in coordinates you have rotation, heading, pitch, and banking. For whatever reason, it's twisting the rectangle is it wraps it around the spline until we switch that off. There are cases where I guess you would want that thing to happen, but definitely not here. But with that, that wouldn't be the end of how to create this sci-fi Orb. We started with a platonic object, made it editable, and then using various modeling tools, we crafted the different parts of the Orb extrude baffling in all the right places and so on, and then towards the end we made some extra cuts to the geometry using the loop path cut tool and converted those edges to some splines and this is the final result. Because of the way we made this, the geometry inside of this subdivision object is very economical and clean and we have a really good edge flow. When we turned this on, everything gets smoothed out and curved in all their correct places. Anyway, that's it for this lesson. 16. Lighting - General Light Settings: Let's look at some of the more common light settings in Cinema 4D. I am going to bring in an area light, and place this above our car somewhere. Then let's right-click this, go to animation tags and target. I'm going to drag the DeLorean into this target object link box. Now, wherever my light goes, it's always going to be pointing toward my car, and that's through this target tag. It takes the object is applied onto, and orients that object z-axis towards your target. If you move this to, you will see it will continue to follow it. Anyway, that's just another quick tip. In the light settings under the General tab, we're just going to go down this list in order, so the color is produced straightforward. It's the color of the light. Intensity is the strength. You can go beyond the range of this slider using this arrows here, or you could simply type in any value you want. The type currently set to area, because we brought in the light as an area light. But we can change this to these other four. I am going to get the Doodle tool, so I can draw onto the interface. The area light, as the name suggests, is based off an area like this, and by default we get this rectangle. You get light rays coming out of this going toward the direction which the light is pointed. Then if we go back to this, and change it to, let's say Omni, the Omni light is sometimes referred to as the point light in different 3D applications and so on, because the light originates from a single point. Then you get light rays going in all directions from that point. Similar to the Omni light, we have a spot light except that with this you also get a cone angle, which you can use to direct the light. So it's still point-based. Then you have this cone angle, which you can adjust. If you go to the Details tab, the outer angle can be adjusted to be wider or narrower depending on how large you want that beam of light to be. The inner angle can be used to control the sharpness of the edges of that spot light. So the closer these numbers are together, the sharper that's going to be, and vice versa. Moving on, we have the Infinite light type in Cinema 4D. Unlike the other light types which are more localized in the effects, the closer to the object UI and so on, the illumination is stronger, or the Infinite Light just blasts the whole scene with light rays. It works like this. You have a light, and then you position it. Based on its angle, that's how you get the illumination. It's a bit like a line, and then you just get light rays from that direction. This is why sometimes this light is called the parallel light, because that's the direction that the light rays are going. They're parallel to each other and perpendicular to the Infinite light angle, which is defined by this line in this case. Because of how this light works, it's the reason why it's used often as a sunlight in large scenes, or you just need a very strong light that illuminates everything that's in the scene. Anyway, let's continue with some of these settings. We have a shadow, which we can change to three options, shadow maps, soft, raytraced; hard, and Area. Let's choose area for now, because in a separate lesson, we will look at the shadows in more detail. There is a Shadow tab which we are going to be looking at later. Going back to this, if this were back to Omni, we have an option to enable visible light. If I choose the first option which is visible, and let's move this light to the side of our car, and a bit closer maybe, for this very quick illustration. If I rendered this out, now we can see the light, it's visible. There are two options to this. The other one is volumetric, which is similar except that the light rays will now bounce into objects. You could say this one is more realistic, because it actually interacts with your objects in the scene. Back in the General tab, we have some switches down here, which are worth noting. No illumination, just straight up switches off the whole light. If you want to do that. Ambient illumination is interesting. What I would do for this is disable the shadows. Let's just do a render. I also want to disable the volumetric for this. That's what it looks like normally. Then when we enable ambient illumination, unlike normal lights, which depending on their angle, elevation, and proximity to our object, it's going to affect how the different surfaces illuminated. Whereas with the ambient light, it illuminates every surface with equal intensity. As a result, you get this very flat shading style. This is an effect which can be used creatively, if you want to do this shading style. There's a couple of other switches. The first one is diffuse, which when you turn on and off, you see that our color channel, when this is off, the color channel in our materials can no longer react to their light. So we are only now seeing their reflection layer. Similarly, the specular channel, this refers to the highlight channel in the various materials. On this basic rubber material on the tire, you can see if I disable the highlight, we lose that rubber effect. That's what the specular channel does. When we get to the section about materials, you'll be seeing these two terms show up again. Here is one thing I forgot to mention at some point, but you may have already discovered this by yourself. It's that depending on the light type we have selected here, the menu and options in the Details tab, will change based on that because each type of light has different options associated with it. So each time you change this here, each time you get back here, you get a different set of options. Finally, we have the Project tab, and this can be used to control which objects will be affected by this light. If I had two DeLoreans, for example, if we make a copy of this first one, we can see this light is still following the first DeLorean. What I can do is, if I don't want this car to be illuminated by this light, I would simply drag it into this object's list. With the mode set to exclude, whatever you place in here will be ignored by the light. Opposite to that, you would change the mode to include instead. Then whatever is in this list will now be seen by the light. This could be used just for extra control in larger scenes, for example, when you want specific lights to only illuminate certain objects. That's it for the light settings in general, in the following lessons, we will look at more specific topics. 17. Lighting - Light Fallof: So earlier, I mentioned that's depending on what light type you have selected, that's going to affect which settings you'll see here. But there is a setting which is always there and it's called fall off. This is used to control how the light decays over a certain distance. So you adjust that using this radius. There's different ways that this can happen. The first one we just picked there is called inverse square, physically accurate, which by the way, you can change the radius using this box here too. This mode is supposed to be sort of trying to simulate how lights behave in real life, right. Which is that the closer you get to a light source, it gets brighter using this inverse square ratio. If you never too show about what certain things mean in cinema 4D, you can right-click and show help. It's going to open the relevant section in the manual. Now, I know I'm just telling you guys to check out the manual, but this is a very useful tool, especially when you're dealing with very technical terms like inverse square. In the manual, you will get some very good explanations of all of this stuff with the diagrams showing you how all of it works. So it's definitely a very useful tool that you shouldn't ignore. So in this particular example, we can see that inverse square falls off based on this kind of graph here. Whereas linear is, as the name suggests, it's more of a line, and that we can see that in practice, if we go through the settings. So linear, it still has a soft edge to it. But when it gets to that edge, it does fall off quite quickly. Then step, you could say it takes it a step further, so to speak. When you get to the edge of that radius, it just drops off completely, so you get this very abrupt transition. Inverse square clamped. In my eyes, it's a bit like combining linear and inverse square physically accurate. The way it falls off in the distance is similar to invest square physically accurate, but closer to the light. It behaves more like linear. Here is one last option, which is gradient. We can use this to set different colors based on the lights fall off. So if I choose these two colors here, maybe I'll invert these. So we have blue at the front. Then as the light fades into the distance, it then turns into this purple tone and you can remap this to be closer, if you wish, to that range and pretty much do whatever you want. So it's just one of those tools you can use, once again, for a very sort of specific effect. 18. Lighting - Volumetrics & Light Rays: I thought it would be interesting to look at visible light in more detail. That's our volumetric options. If I enable with just this 1st option, the visible, you will see it gives us a 2nd falloff range or similar to how we're adjusting falloff earlier. If I go to the "Details" tab, I had the falloff set to Inverse Square Clamped and the radius at 400 centimeters. If I change that, you can see we adjust the reach of our light. However, the visibility is actually completely separate to that. If I hold Alt and R here to enable the interactive render so we can see the changes as I make them live, and the quality is at 50 percent just so we get quicker results here as I change this radius, I could lower this all the way down to 100, you'll see the visibility stays the same; but if I go to the "Visibility" tab, this has this Outer Distance control. We can either lower this; it can go down to 100. If I go the other way, we can make the effect a lot stronger. That's the Outer Distance. It controls how far the light rays will reach. Inner Distance controls the beginning of that falloff, so it's zero percent that starts right there. The light rays get weaker all the way down to when you don't see them at all about here. However, if I put this in a distance to 500, you can see it pushes that point at which the light rays start to fade. We can even do Brightness, which is a multiplier based on our light intensity. If I just lower this, this gets darker naturally, but I can also adjust it and multiply it using this brightness value here. Just like we could apply a gradient to the actual falloff, we can do the same with light rays. Let's lower the brightness to 100 percent. There isn't too much blue there, so I could push this further. You see it gets mapped back into the light rays. I'm going to bring the light down a touch here. It seems it's no longer pointing at the car, so let's fix that. Let's change it to "Volumetric" so it actually interacts with our car. It's going to interact with the shadows, too. I'm going to put the quality all the way to the top here. That, of course, this was using a spotlight. If I go to the Outer Angle, and let's see what's the maximum allowed here. You see it just remaps all of those settings based on that. We're going to also change the type to "Omni". You see now, the light rays going out in all directions. You cannot, however, do this with the Infinite light or with the Area light. Light rays only work when inside the Omni or Spot. Just one other note for this lesson which is that our light here is actually just this single white color. However, in the render, we can clearly see some blue and pink being reflected from the DeLorean. That's because these volumetric effects actually get reflected onto materials that way. It's an interesting way to introduce some highlights and color detail to our reflections. 19. Lighting - The Area Light: I mentioned something earlier about the area light being the only type of light that exists in the real world. In this lesson, I'm going to show you why that is the case. This is what I want to highlight, the fact that the area light, depending on its shape, size, and distance to our object, that is going to affect how the lighting and shadows look. This was the first example, just a rectangle setup. I changed the shape to a disk and already you can see a slight difference. Then I made the disk shape much smaller. You see that created this much more dramatic style, both in terms of how the light wraps around our sphere. It also created this much more defined shadow compared to previously. Then I put the size of the disk backup to this here, but I moved it further away. Once again, you see that affects how the lighting looks. Let's see the setup for that in Cinema 4D, I'm going to get an area light. Just move it up and above our object again. Let's do a quick target setup. In their light settings, the type needs to be set to area, and I'm also going to put the shadows as area too. Let's go to the details tab. This is where we change the settings for the shape. I'm going to make sure that this is going to be seen in the render and also as a solid in the viewport, so we actually see how it looks. To start with, I'm just going to render this to the picture viewer. Next up, let's change the area shape to disk, and I render this out and already that small change makes a difference. What's happening here is the fact that a disc shape is slightly smaller in area surface to a rectangle of the same height and width. Because it's smaller, it actually makes this shadow a bit more defined than before. Of course, as we've already seen, if we make this much smaller using the size X and Y here. You can also change it using the outer radius, which controls both values at the same time. That render looks much more dramatic. This would be more like a torchlight or something whereas this is more like a softbox in a studio much larger relative to its subject. Anyway, finally, we can go back and do 200 centimeters, but make it further from the object and we get this kind of thing. What we are observing here is exactly how lights behave in the real world. This example in particular would be like if you stepped outside on a bright sunny day and I live in England, so I don't get many opportunities to do that. But on the rare occasion, I get the chance, if I stood outside in the sun, it's the reason why the sun produces a harsher lighting style with well-defined shadows. Because even though physically the sun is a very large object, and I hope I'm not breaking any news with that information, but the sun is very large, however, it's also very far away. When we look up at it in the sky, it's actually just a small disk shape relative to the much larger sky around it. That's why we get this kind of lighting from the sun. In contrast to that would be this example which would be similar to, let's say, a softbox in a photography studio. Because it's much closer to the subject and it's much bigger. Relatively speaking area-wise, it creates this much softer lighting style and that's the reason why photographers use these kind of lights for portrait photography, for example. I say all of this not to turn this into some amateur lesson about the physics of the sun or photography. I just wanted to highlight this particular property of the area light, which is that its size, shape, and distance will affect how your lighting looks. If you understand that very technical level, then, of course, it helps with the, if you're trying to create renders that look more realistic, then you know how to set up your area lights properly and also creatively. Once again, if you understand exactly how all of this works, then it just gives you that greater degree of control with your lights in Cinema 4D. 20. Lighting - Custom Light Shapes: Area lights can also be used to turn any geometric object, or spline into a light source. Here is an example. This reflection you see off the car is this custom ring light. If I go to the area light, let's go to Details. It's set to object and that object is that tube, geometric shape. Let's show how this setup works. We have to delete all of this stuff, and insert another area light. Because of how this works, it doesn't matter where the area light goes actually. So even if I move it here, by the time we change the area shape to object/spline. Let's get a tube from the Primitives Menu. I can change this in the interface or using the outer radius value over here. Let's do 250, and the inner radius at 2-5, and a height of just 10. We want this to be smoother so let's give it 100 segments to go around. If I go back to the light and under object, you can't just drag in parametric objects like this, which is to say objects which you can still edit using these object properties. This needs to be baked into an editable object first by hitting C, and then now I can use it as my light source. You can see that the light itself doesn't seem to have changed. It still appears as if the illumination is coming from wherever this is placed. But when I do a quick preview render will see actually that isn't the case. You can think this here kind of ring light going around our car. Let's give it an area shadow. But in the Details tab we want to turn on show in render, and also in the reflection. We actually see this thing have an effect on the materials. There we go. A useful way this could be set up if you want to somewhat preview your illumination is you could make the light a child of the tube, and then zero out the position so that when you move the tube at list it's going to move along with it but it's never going to actually give you an accurate preview until you hit render. Now if I had it at disclose I perhaps wouldn't have it be seen in the render. Just like the reflection that I get from having this kind of ring light setup. At the beginning you saw my preview there with some color. I just got a couple of infinite lights. The first one I rotated by 90 degrees. So it's pointing toward the front of the car. It doesn't matter where it's placed because the illumination from an infinite light is all based on angle. It was this kind of blue color. Let think I angled it down just a touch. Then I made a copy, and rotated this one so it was facing from the side, so behind the car there, at 180 and set it to be the second color. Just a quick setup which created this kind of scene. One other thing I could do is to go to the Details tab and the visibility multiplier. We can put this up to, let's say 200. It's going to make that reflection stronger without adjusting the lighting. But of course you could also adjust, keep this at a 100 percent, and actually make the lighting itself brighter overall. That's the difference here. That's it. I just wanted to quickly show you this custom area shape mode which you can use with the area light. 21. Lighting - Shadows: Let's look at the different types of shadows. We can set this here. Let's start with Shadow Maps Soft, or we could also do this in the Shadow tab itself. We will get back to those shortly. Raytraced Hard is next, you can see that it took slightly longer to render. Then finally we have the area shadow, which takes longest of all. A quick comparison besides the difference in render time, the Shadow Maps Soft, I would say is the one that I use the least these days, just because it's not very realistic in the way that it's rendered. It is quite fast, but at that cost that it doesn't look so realistic. One of the problems with this type of shadow is how the contact patches don't always connect properly. Here it looks as if this wheel is almost floating for a little bit, and the shadow begins much further underneath the car. Maybe for preview purposes, you could get away with using the Shadow Maps Soft. But even in the back part of this car here, I can tell that these are not being rendered correctly, just because this type of shadow doesn't do such a good job to begin with. Anyway, compare this to Raytraced Hard and you see some of those areas now get filled in more properly, and it fixes the contact patches. However, this is artificially hard all the way around, and you don't get that more natural look that you get with the area shadow. That's why you would be using this mode here if you wanted the best looking results. We've already looked at how the area light in particular affects how this shadow will look. With this setup, we have this kind of thing, and comparing the hard shadow, a situation where you could use this is, for example, in a large architectural scene, an exterior scene. Maybe a city or something. If you're trying to simulate a sunlight shadow where you're not getting too close to any smaller details, you can get away with using the Raytraced Hard shadow from a distance. But in a scene like this, I certainly wouldn't go with that, I would go with the area shadow instead. One of the reasons this looks more natural is because this is how shadows behave in real life. The closer the shadow is to the light source, the sharper it is at that point. Then the farther you get, it gets softer and softer. It looks better, but naturally, the trade-off always in Cinema 4D when you get something that looks better is render time. Going back to the Shadow Maps Soft, a few settings related to that such as the size of the shadow map itself. We could increase this to let's say, a 1,000 by a 1,000. You can see it tells you how much memory that's going to use, and imagine you had more objects in the scene, that would take up more memory. In a way, changing that setting, giving it a larger map to work with, fixes some of the issues I had, for example, with certain parts of the car not being in the shadows properly. But it still really doesn't add up to what we get with the area light. In fact, in terms of render time, it's the same, and it still looks worse. But anyway, if you want to tinker with this, check out some of those settings. The Raytraced Hard shadow just has a couple of controls. You've got density, which you actually get with all the types. This basically just controls how dark the shadow is. The area shadow has density also, let's put this back up to 100. You can of course change the color to anything you want. Then we have some accuracy options down here which you can increase for better-looking shadows. Although I find the defaults are usually pretty good. Once again, if you increase these numbers, the render time will increase also. In general settings, I'm going to change the type to Omni. Because you have area shadows enabled, you can still actually control the shape of the surface area that the shadows are coming from. In this case, I can still see the shape which shouldn't be there. If I go back to area and untick seen in Render, and Reflection, and Viewport, this is now a more normal Omni light. Now, if shadows are set to none, that square disappears, but if it's on, it's a gray square this time instead of the white square from the actual area light. But this means that in the details tab, we can still control the area shape independent from the light. Of course, if you recall, this will adjust how sharp the shadows will appear, so making it much smaller. It's still an area shadow, but much more defined than before. If I go up to about 50, you can see it's just going to get a bit softer around the edges. You can still control how those shadows look in that regard, even if you use these other light types. 22. Materials - Lighting Setup: You wouldn't be developing new materials in Cinema 4D without thinking about the lighting as well. This is a render of this quick stage I setup for these next few lessons. If I go back to an earlier version of the project, and by the way, if you have multiple objects or projects open in Cinema 4D, you can go to Window and find them listed here. This version doesn't have any lighting or any materials on the floor. If I render this out, you see how much flatter it looks. Let's do a quick basic light setup before we continue talking about the materials. I'm going to do a basic three-point light setup. If we go to the lights menu, get the Target Light. I'm going to use this to point at my orb, or I could switch it out for the orb and the target object. Anyway, this light is going to be an area light type, and then the details, we want this to be a large rectangle. Let's go and set that to 500 and 500, and this is going to be our key light, which is the main light in the scene. It's going to be doing most of the illumination on the side we're going to be looking at the orb from. I've made a copy. This is going to be the fill light. We are going to send it to the other side. On the exposition, I'm just going to flip this from negative 350 to 350, and the intensity is going to be much less than the original. Lets go for 25 percent. The fill light is just going to illuminate the other side of our object which would otherwise be in the shadow. It's easier to see this if I removed the material from the orb. This here would have just been dark, but with the fill light, we get some of that detail back. This is all about placing lights with a purpose, not just placing lights randomly in the scene. The final light is going to be our backlight. As you can imagine, it's going to be behind the object. If I flip the Z position, and also I'm going to make this one a bit narrower. So the size X is going to be 200 and the Y is going to be 400, except it's going to be much brighter, let's go for 150 percent. Then on all these three lights, we are going to enable our shadows. Let's get the interactive render region just to see what's happening as we make the changes on all three lights. I'm going to go to the Shadows and let's get the Shadow Maps Soft for now. Let's apply a fall off on all of these. I'm going to go for Inverse Square Clamped. We've disable the interruptive render for this bit. I want to get these fall-off handles and just make them reach the orb and not go much beyond that. This light is actually too bright, and it's going to be putting too much light onto the floor. So let's go to the project tab and exclude our plane from this light. The final thing here is this flow material which I made prior to this lesson. We will cover that later, but I'm going to go to the texture tag, and on the Projection, let's change it to Cubic, and the length U and V, I will set to 250. You see, it just zooms into the material. I'm going to render this scene to see what we've done now. This is without any lighting, and then this is the key light. It does most of the illumination in the scene from the left side. The fill light, you see the side of the orb which was to dark, now just gets a bit more illuminated, and finally we have the backlight, which is going to give us a nice highlight coming from the other side of the object. It separates it from the background, and in the backlight we could even play around with the color just for an accent to an otherwise pretty monotone scene. That's what that would look like. One last thing I should mention in this lesson is, in the Render Settings, briefly, let's go to ANTI-ALIASING and set this to something else. By default it's set to Geometry, which is very fast and responsive. It's something like that, it takes just a few seconds to render. In the settings, let's change this to Best, and I'm going to go for a Minimum Level of one-by-one, Max Level two-by-two, and Threshold of five percent. Let's render this out now. You will see it's going to take longer, but the frame looks finer and better, particularly the areas with the blurry reflections and on the floor there. If we look at before and after you see it's just more refined with the Anti-Aliasing set to Best and those options I showed you. These are the levels I'm going to be working with as we go through this section. I thought it's worth mentioning in case you guys want to use the same settings as I do. This has been without any materials on the orb like we saw earlier. Let's go into the next lesson and start looking at how we handle materials. 23. Materials - Reflectance Channel: Let's make our metallic material now. We are trying to get to something like this here. In the picture viewer, this is what we saw last. To make a new material, we just double-click in the Material Manager that brings in a new material, and then we can open this. Let's go and rename this to Metal. In the color channel, we're going to go for a dark gray and then the metallic effects are going to take place inside the reflectance channels. That's what this lesson will cover. To begin with, we just have this default specular, and it's set to this specular Blinn type. Let's close this for now and apply this material to the orb. You can do this by dragging it to the orb directly in the viewport, also works, or you could select the object. If I remove this completely, you could select the object over here, right-click, and apply. That last method tends to work quite well if you have several objects that you want to apply the same material to all at once. You would select them over here and then right-click and apply, and it's going to jump to all of those things. Let's render this out just to see where we're starting. That's it, a dark gray material with a bit of a highlight onto it, but not much else. For a metallic material, we need something that looks very glossy with a lot of sharp highlights. These two approaches to this in Cinema 4D. One is the specular effect itself and also the reflection layer. Let's go and look at both of those things. They will both be applied in their reflectance channel of all materials. Let's go and make some changes to this first of all. For a glossy metal, I would have to make this specular much narrower, so that's the width control, and also much brighter, so that's the strength. The fall of controls, how that changes from the widest point to the very top, which is the sharpest part of the highlight. For metals, we have to change the type to something else. There's one here called GGX, and this works particularly well for materials because it's a much stronger highlight. The way it falls off here is quite nice for metals because it's quite gradual to begin with, and then it peaks to a very bright point. The way we control the width is different though. We just have a roughness slider. I would lower this to maybe 20, 25, and the strength, I would bump all the way up to 100 percent maybe. As I do this, you can already see it's a much stronger effect than before. Let's render this out. You can see that looks more metallic now. But still to this point, we are just using specular, which is a fake reflection effect. If we want actual reflection, we have to enable that. That can be added as a separate layer or we could simply increase the reflection strength. These various specular modes also have a reflection strength in them. Let's go back to GGX, and I would maybe bump this up to 100 percent. Let's render this out. It's going to take longer to render. That's just a rule of adding reflection, and also it's a blurry reflection because of that roughness control, so that's also adding to the time of this. But undeniably, this looks more like metal because of those new reflections. The object is reflecting itself in places, and it is also now truly reflecting the objects in our scene. Before, we were just seeing what specular approximated would be the color of these highlights, whereas here is actual reflections. Now this is not really quite where we want. Let's go and set this up in a different way. I would actually maybe not even combine specular with reflection in this case. What I may do instead is to turn this off completely and add reflection on its own. I'm just going to add the reflection legacy type. Let's go to the roughness. Leave that at 10 percent. The attenuation is going to be set to additive so that we still see some of our color from the color channel. This would be more obvious if this wasn't gray, right? If we set it to that color temporarily and put this back to its default average, you see we don't see our color through that. That's why this is going to be additive, because we do want to see our color also. Let's go back to the reflectance. Once again, roughness at 10 percent, strength, 100, and specular strength, we don't want any. I have disabled the other layer, so this blending mode won't make a difference if it's set to normal. However, if I want to blend the two together, with the first specular enabled, I would have to set this one to add so that it combines the two of them. But let's disable this for now. We're just rendering reflection on its own this time. You see the way we get our highlights this time is purely from the reflections and which are naturally in the scene, our big area lights that we set up. But if this were any other light type, so let's say spot, and I tried to render this out, because those types don't have actual physical area to reflect, we would lose the metallic look of this material because it's no longer reflecting anything in the scene. This is why I said earlier the lighting has a huge effect on the material. It's clearly having an effect here. Not just the lighting, but also what's being reflected in the scene. Then this is a case where I would use specular combined with reflection if I don't have real area lights in the scene. If I go back to this, but remember we also enabled reflection on this, so we would want to bring that way down. We don't double up on reflection. Now our specular and reflection are two separate layers being added together. Also this speculative effect I think might just be too strong. I can lower the roughness and maybe the strength to bring that down to about 30, 35, and then enable the reflection layer on top. Now we're going to see both layers working together to give us a metallic look still. This is all being done without anything physically being reflected onto the object. It's just the specular layer doing a lot of that heavy lifting. But because we still have the reflection, we get the object reflecting itself, which adds to the metallic look. Hopefully, this is illustrating the strength of this layer system and how customizable it is, and also the differences you would have to take into account when you're using different light types because that's going to influence how you may choose to design your materials. Let's finish up this lesson on reflectance. I'm going to switch back to some area lights, which means we're going to turn off this specular layer and just rely on reflection alone. There is a section down here called Layer Fresnel, and I'm going to turn this on and choose Conductor. Fresnel is a property of materials in real life. It controls the strength of the reflections as you look at the material. To illustrate this more, obviously, if I change this back to none, let's go to layer color instead and just enable the standard Fresnel effect. When I do this, look at this preview. It was quiet reflective across the entire surface before I turn this on. If I clear that, you see how it's reflective across the whole surface. If I go back to just Fresnel, now it's not as reflective in the center where we are looking at it directly. But as the angle of view increases to the edges, you see it's more reflective there. This is a property that materials have in real life, and each material is going to have what's called an IOR value, which I believe stands for index of refraction. In the Layer Fresnel section, we can use this to set those real-world values. If I change it to conductor, there are two types of Fresnel types in Cinema 4D. One, one is dielectric and the other one is the conductor. Conductor is better suited for metallic materials because you can go to the presets here, for example, and choose a whole set of these options. You can also set the IOR value manually. If you know what the IOR value for the material you're trying to create is, you would choose that there. But let's look at a preset. Let's go for aluminum, for example. That's going to be quite shiny and quite striking. You see the way that applies. You see this preset because we chose aluminum, it locked these settings. You basically have to use what they give you there. We can try copper, which even comes with the right color. Copper tends to be that sort of red or as deep orange. Just by changing the preset, we get something completely different. There are various options here or of course, you can use your own custom and choose the numbers if you know what those values are supposed to be. We could find gold on this list. There it is. What I would have to do is also maybe make an adjustment in the color channel. If I go to just pick off the color that's in the viewport, this is going to be too bright, but we can lower the brightness down, maybe bump up the intensity. This is going to be a very bright gold material because I'm combining it with the color channel. If we render that, this is the result. Once again, just showing the strength of the reflectance channel. I'm going to go back in here one more time, and let's choose silver. That means we need to change our color here to something more neutral. But if you do have a color in here, and then you set these options as they're using silver, for example, it would be like making a red silver material. I'm not just using gray because all silvers are gray. But you get the idea. Let's go in here, and I'm going to add another reflection on top of this and just set the mode to add and then set this to additive. This is going to have a reflection strength of 100 percent for this final very shiny, reflective silver material. That's the reflectance channel in Cinema 4D. It's an introduction to the channel, and it's going to come up in other lessons where we use it differently, but the basics of it have now been covered. 24. Materials - Using Images in Materials: In the next couple of lessons, we are going to be using image maps in our texture for various things or in our material, rather. The first is for the bump and normal detail, which is what you see on the surface of this orb now. If I go to the Material and turn off Normal, you see we lose the surface detail. In addition to that, we also want to use the images in the color channel, which is what we see here. I can mix this in more or less. Also, it's in their reflection and specular channel, which once again, I can mix in more or less using these sliders here. By the way, those maps were generated in this free application code JS placement. Anyway, going back to our project, I am going to apply an earlier version of the material without any images loaded into it. Let's enable Interactive render for this bit. I've put the Quality slider, the top, this little triangle. Starting with the Color channel, I can just click under "Texture", this bar here. This is going to open up my browser and I want to load in that seamless material from a JS placement. Seamless by the way, just means if we layout that material on a flat surface and tile it smaller or larger, we're not going to see any edges or visible seams. That's one of the really cool things about the JS placement application, or the materials, or images you generate from this will be seamless, which is quite important when you're working with the materials. When I brought this image into the Color channel, we could see that on the material, I can been the mix strength to completely dial it back. That's one of the things you can still do here. You can mix it with your original color. I'm going to put this at about 50 percent. Then in reflectance, I can load up the same image. I can just copy this shader, that's this drop-down copy shader, go to Reflectance and on the reflection layer, the first section down here, the layer color, this is where we want to paste the shader. What this is going to do is control the strength of the reflection based on the values on this image, so the brighter parts will be close to 100 percent reflection, and the darker parts will be less reflection. But if you look at this example, actually, and we can right-click this "Preview window" and "Open window". We can see if there aren't any really white parts of this image. Overall, the reflection is getting brought down a lot. What we want to do is to make some adjustments to that image. The way we're going to do that is by taking the texture and placing this into a filter. That's this drop-down and filter. Then we can open this filter. The section I'm interested in is the clipping controls. Let's enable this. The high clip, I am going to bring down to about 25 percent. When I do that, you see the image gets a lot brighter. Let's open this window again. What the high clip does is, based on the threshold you set here, any values above that threshold will be clipped to 100 percent white. For the low clip, it's the opposite based on this threshold, anything lower than that will get clipped to black. So you can use these two to increase the contrast. In the filter you also have a lot of other controls, such as saturation. But this is already black and white so we don't need to change anything there. We have overall lightness, which is a very sensitive control. If we want to inject some tone into this image, we can go to colorize, enable that. We would have to set the hue to something other than zero and the saturation would have to be increased and then you'll see we now start to dial in some colors using the colorizer, and it's based on the hue and saturation. You will be able to see this reflected in the color of this reflection, this not only controls the strength of the reflection, but also the color of the reflection. You don't have to just load up a black-and-white image into that section. I'm going to reset all of this stuff. I don't need any saturation or colorizer, just the black and white image. If I want to do the same to the specular layer, I can copy this shader once again, go to the Specular and let's paste that into the layer color. That's the difference. If I clear this out just so we can see the before, you see the specular is not broken up here, but when I paste this, it ends up just being a bit more broken up and we end up seeing a bit more detail from the image map itself. This is working, but there's one thing I want to change, which is how the material is being projected onto my orb. In the Viewport here, I can vaguely make out what the material is supposed to look like, but it's very low resolution. None of this detail is getting resolved until I actually preview the render. What I can do is go to the Material Editor and under Viewport, or previously known as the Editor tab, you want to go to Texture preview size and set this to be higher. I am going to go for 1024. But be careful not to set that too high in a scene with more images that would take up too much memory and slow down your performance. Only do it if you can handle this. So this is what I meant about tiling the image or changing their projection. If I go to the Material tag, you can see we have the old one still applied. I'll just put the new one over it. Let's delete the old one. Go to this one, and under Projection, we're going to go and change this to cubic. In cubic we can change the length u and v, these are the tiling controls. This may be easier to see if we temporarily disable reflectance. But we can go to this and the length u and v. If I want the material to be tiled smaller, I can just type in 50 percent of the original size. These two things are linked together. So when you change the length on either of these, it affects the tiles as well. The base levels are 1 and 1, and 100 and 100. When you go to tiles and put in, let's say 4, that is going to be 25 percent of the original size. It's much smaller. You see I just knocked it by accident. There we go. Anyway, the default 100 percent worked just fine, I am going to stick with that. But that's it in this first lesson in which we looked at bringing in images and using them in our materials. We saw the Color channel in the reflectance channel, a quick introduction to the filter and how you can use that to manipulate what images look like. In the next lesson, we are going to look at two different ways of creating bump detail on the materials, and that's by using the bump and the normal channels. 25. Materials - Bump & Normal Channels: The difference between the bump channel and normal channel is that, the bump channel uses black and white values to determine the surface bump detail where the brighter parts would be raised and the dark areas would appear depressed into their material. Then the normal channel uses normal maps and this is what normal maps typically look like. We're going to begin with the bump channel. For this we're going to continue using the same image we used in the color and reflectance. I am going to copy this out of here, go to the bump channel. In the texture, we can paste the shader in here and as soon as I do that, we can now see the preview on our orb. We now have this bump detail, so we can control the strength. That's just how strong the effect is, and it can also be reversed. But we're going to go the other way. In the render, let's see how that looks like. It's worth sending these to the picture viewer and doing some comparisons. This first one is going to be before any bump detail was applied. Let's turn on Bump. I'm going to put the strength to maybe 200. Before it was a quite flat, but with the bump, we get the surface there and those edges actually interacting with the highlights and reflections in a pretty interesting way. It adds another layer of depth and detail to the material that wasn't there before. That's what using the bump channel is like. But more often than not, I will choose the normal channel instead, I just prefer how it works. Maybe it's subjective but I think it tends to look better than bump when I do renders and when I change the strength and so on, it tends to respond in a way that I prefer. We have loaded in this normal map and we have a strength control up here. Let's go for 200 to start with. It is going to be different from the bump channel, but it's doing the same thing, which is to create some surface detail. But here's something else you can do. If you don't have a premade normal map, you can actually take any image and run it through a normalizer effect in Cinema 4D. If I take that original black and white image, go to the normal channel and paste it in here, because it's not a normal map, this is going to look completely broken. But what we can do now is to open up this texture using the drop down and go to Effects and Normalizer. Now you see we are back to normal. No pun intended, but let's say I jump into the Normalizer and the Strength, this will control how strong this normal map we're extracting is going to be. It may be hard to see on that small preview. Let's open up the large preview again. I think it was at 100 by default. We can see the detail is there, but we really need to put this way up for something more exaggerated. It is taking that map and reinterpreting it as a normal map. In this example, it does a pretty good job. We can close this down. I think I would want to lower this strength down to 100. But let's see what this looks like. Now, we can compare the old bump, which I think is this example and this is with a normal map. So you see they do look similar. It just depends which style and approach you prefer. As I said personally, I like normal quite a lot. When I don't have a dedicated normal map, I will always use the normalizer to generate one. 26. Materials - Concrete Material Breakdown: Here is a quick breakdown of this floor material that we have been using in our preview scene. This was made from putting together some images. I'm going to start with the main color channels. If I just drag that to bring it in as a new material and apply it to the floor, you'll see it's incredibly low resolution in the preview. Let's go to "Viewport", and that previous size is going to be a 1,024, at least. Also, let's set the projection to cubic. Because all of these materials are square, the length u and v is always going to be the same, so we don't stretch them. This was just the color channel on its own. Let's go to these other channels, starting with reflection. We can get the interactive render for this. I'm going to remove the default specular and let's add a reflection legacy, with the roughness of 10? I think we can leave it there, that's fine. The Attenuation should be Additive. We still see our color and underlayer color. I'm actually going to load up the same image as the color channel, so the main color image. Click "No" for that. It's going to start to break up the reflection, but it's doing it too much. I'm going to throw this into a filter to create some contrast. Let's colorize it first of all to make sure it's completely grayscale. Then in the clipping, we can enable that. Let's dial in some more contrast. I think I've brought this all the way to about 25 or so. Then some more low clip to keep these cracked bits from my showing any reflections. Because this is in that layer color of their reflection, that means those parts on the map will reflect nothing, and we get this nice broken up effect. It's an only layer, but I always have a habit of setting this to add in case I want to combine it with other things later. We need some normal bump to this image so we enabled the normal. Under texture, I loaded up this image here, which was initially used for the displacement of this particular preset. But I'm using it in a normal journal for this so let's just bring it in. Click "No", and of course, we need to run it through the normalizer so that's this drop-down Effect and Normalizer. Let's jump in here and go to the strength and put this all the way up to 500 percent. We can see this in the Viewport, but also in the render, the effects of doing that. That might be too strong though, so why don't we lower this to about 50 or so? We are pretty close. I think the original example of this was darker than this. If I make the color black up here and then go to the mix strength of our material, I lowered this to about halfway or even more. Don't quite remember the exact amount. That's just a dark overall effect. The final thing was not making it so reflective across the entire surface. That means enabling Fresnel. I went to layer Fresnel for that and under Fresnel, we choose Dielectric for this one. It's not a metallic material, so that's why we go in that direction. I'm going to just put in 1.4. The higher this is by the way, the more reflection you get overall. This is a concrete material so in real life, it probably wouldn't be that shiny. But we're just trying to stylize it a bit here. I'm going to go for 1.4. I think that got me pretty close to what I was trying to do. One last thing, and this is a pure self-promotion, that preset you just saw me reconfigure is from my concrete texture pack for Cinema 4D. It's one of the concrete presets in here. This is a collection of materials that I created for Cinema 4D sometime ago and I sell these on my other website, called Motion Squared. There are over a thousand presets in 10 different packs. This is some of them which you can see here in various packs. Metal is one one them, stone in the sections and subsections like you see here, wood, tiles and so on and so forth. I will leave a link on the screen now and below the class. For those of you who want to take a look at this, you can go ahead and do so. 27. Splines - Pen Tool: Let's now look at splines, and we're going to go in the front view for this. I'm going to press Shift V to open up the Viewport Attributes. In the back tab, I am going to load up this amazing logo that I made for myself. It's got my artist name on there. I'm going to set my transparency all the way up to about 80. I just need a faint outline. I can trace over this. This is a common situation where you may use the spline pen and that's what we're covering in this lesson. We're going to look at how to draw custom splines using this tool. I've zoomed in all the way, and I'm just going to start clicking and adding the points to this spline. As soon as I start drawing this, you can see it created a new object up here. That's our new spline. This is quite straightforward on the shapes with straight edges like this. You just click and add the points. To complete the shape, you just go back to the original point, and then you can move on to the next one. It's a bit different for curved letters. Starting with this straight bit, I can then click about here and then click and drag this time to create these handles which are used to draw splines around curved areas and that there is a bit of an art to this, which is you want to use as few points as possible whilst also tracing the shape as completely as possible. If you make a mistake, by the way, you can just Control Z and that's going to take you to the previous point that you had put down. I think about there looks good for now. We can always come back to this and make some adjustments anyway. At this point, I need to turn this corner. I can't just do it this way by clicking because you'd see it's still bending around those two handles up there. When you need to make a corner like that with a handle, you press Shift and point the handle down, and then you continue drawing the spline that way. Let's say you accidentally click away by accident, and you want to continue this. As long as you have the spline selected, and you can see it created a separate object for the S there. That's fine. We can just combine these later. But to continue drawing on a shape, you need to have it selected and in point mode and get the Pen tool. Then you simply click where you left off, and you can continue from there. It's that straightforward. We could do this from where we left off or from the other direction, it doesn't matter as long as you click that point, you can continue drawing the spline. Then we just close it up there. Now you see for the final point, I couldn't quite use the handles, but they are there. I can actually go back to this point and then move this to about here. If I want to adjust the handles, I have to press the E key on the keyboard, which gets the Move tool, and whilst you have that selected, you can actually move and adjust these handles. If you find you can't do that, it's probably because you are just in the normal selection mode. You have to be in this mode in order to adjust. Not only the position, but the handles too. Let's move on. The U should be easier than the S. That's probably the hardest shape to trace here. I'm just clicking, adding as few points as possible and letting the curves and handles handle most of the hard work, you could say the curved areas. You may be wondering why I wouldn't just use text to achieve this in Cinema 4D and the thing is you could and just use a font. But part of this is just because I want to show you how to use the Pen tool and also if this were a custom logo, which I had sketched on a piece of paper or something, in that case, I would have to use the Pen tool. You can't do that with a font. Moving on to the O, which is a curved, but I think that can do this quite well with just four points starting on this side, and then go into the top middle, sort of the central line of this and then about here and then holding this backup to the beginning. These two points don't have handles. Let's right-click and Soft Interpolation. This is how I quickly create some handles if there aren't some already. Then I can just click on this and make adjustments again using the E key. Moving the points and the handles until this is following my shape more closely. This is the final shape and I made a mistake on purpose, which is I didn't trace this slight corner there. I can show you that you can also add points in after the fact if you right-click and create point. This point mode even just click anywhere on the spline and that's going to introduce new points. We need one there and there too, and then I can get that point and move it out. Just a touch and move this one back in. Now we have traced that shape more accurately. At some point, I must have clipped away from this initial section because from the S to the N, that was a separate object. But I can still select both of these right-click and then connect and delete, and that turns it into a single object. After the initial drawing, I could come back in here and make some further adjustments. Just to make sure that all these lines are tracing my shape as closely as possible. That's just getting the individual points and moving them around. Also, I know that any letter with a straight edge at its base, all of this points should be along the same Y position. That's the V, the A, the L here, the letter D and N. If I select all these points and go to the size, the size is 0.824. I know there's some variation of the Y position on this point. If I just type in zero here, it's going to flatten out all those points I have selected and now the Y position is going to be the same on all these points and that's this value right there. Anyway, I can do this for the top part. This is where rectangle selection can be useful because I can grab more than one set of points at a time. I'm just holding Shift to add to this selection. Let's set that size to zero also. Then from here I can just go and adjust the rest of the points. Once again, just moving them around pressing E when I need the handles and doing it that way. I'm going to skip ahead to when I have finished this. If you want to reset a handle, you can right-click and go to Hard Interpolation, and then you can just do soft again. That's just a quick trick that I use. Seems to help out sometimes when I just need a quick reset. I'd say that's okay there. This also should be soft, so we can trace the inside of this curve a bit better. I'm going to move this, this way. Do the same there. You see all these points influence each other. When you make an adjustment to one, it's likely you may have to adjust another one also. This one down here can be shifted down just a touch and then move the actual point up. That's it from a distance, it's going to appear as if it's basically the same, but closer detail. These shapes are much closer to the traced logo that we started with. 28. Splines - Types & Intermediate Points: I want to talk about a couple of spline properties. If I click on this new spline, I have just drawn this sideways-eight symbol or an infinite symbol. Go to the Type. You see by default, it's Bezier, and that's the spline mode. The Pen tool is going to be in by default. Anyway, you can actually change this to these other types, such as Cubic. You see when I change that, it creates a completely different shape. If I wanted to use the Cubic type, I would have to be using it from the beginning as I draw this. Otherwise, changing it halfway like this completely changes the shape you had initially drawn. Anyway, one of the differences between Cubic and the default Bezier is that Cubic doesn't have handles as you are drawing. If we go back to the front view and let's get the Pen tool, change the type to Cubic. If I wanted to draw a similar shape, I would have to do it from the beginning like this. You see that when I create points, how it works is it will curve the previous one to try and create a smooth shape. Anyway, this is still on the same single objects, so let's undo all of that. Akima is, I think, a bit similar to Cubic in how it works, except it's smooth and isn't as rounded as Cubic. It just behaves similarly, but it is a bit different. The final type is B-Spline, which the points you create are not part of the actual path. Rather, they are guides that the path is going to be weaving in and out of. We have a bunch of points we have made and I can move those points. You see they're not part of the path; they are like at a distance. Some are closer, some are further. But you change the shape of the spline by moving the points and then the spline sort of averages the movement in between those points. With a lot of this stuff, it's easier to just show you like I'm doing here than trying to explain it. Because if you see how it works, of course, that's very helpful. Now, you've seen the different types of splines we can draw with the Pen tool. Personally, I like the Bezier just because I think it gives me the most control where if I need to draw precise shapes, I can have straight sections, curved sections, and handles, and so on. Whereas with these other modes, it's more for if I don't need something so precise, maybe a path for my camera to move along. If I was using a spline for something like that, then I could possibly use like the B-Spline for a smooth path where I don't need a lot of precision. I have gone back to this version of the spline so I can talk about the Intermediate Points. This has to do with how Cinema 4D handles the points in between our actual points that we created on the spline. We have just a handful of points here, so there's one, two, three, four, five. But in between those points, Cinema 4D is creating intermediate points to create this final shape that we see. To better visualize this, I'm going to go and get a rectangle. Let's give it a width of 20 and a height of 20 also. Get the Sweep object and place both of these under the sweep. I am jumping ahead slightly because, of course, one of the lessons, we'll cover how to generate geometry from splines and you have just seen a quick preview of one of the methods, which is this Sweep object, which takes a shape and sweeps it along your other spline, the original one we have here. We'll go into that in more detail later, but watch what's going on now, which is you can see the intermediate points. That's all these segments we can see on the geometry. Where there's curves in this default Adaptive mode, more points allocated to those areas where there is more of an angle, whereas the straighter paths of the spline, there are fewer points allocated there. This Adaptive mode adapts to the shape of the spline and creates more intermediate points where they are needed. In Adaptive, we can change the angle or the threshold. If I increase this, there will be fewer points created but still more where there's curves and vice versa. If I make the angle smaller, we have more segments now, but still, they are weighted to those curved areas. Let's look at the other modes, starting with Natural. This is controlled using the number and right now, I would say there's too few. We can go up to 16 for a smoother shape. Here, we see things a bit more evenly distributed, but I would still say that the curved areas have just a few more segments allocated to them. Let's try the other method, Uniform, which, as the name suggests, this time, the points will be equally spaced apart. It's a uniform way of creating the intermediate points. Then, you just control the overall smoothness by either increasing or decreasing the number. Then finally, we have Subdivided, which works a bit like Adaptive, except you have an extra control, which allows you to set a maximum possible length. The angle, if we put this back up to five and the maximum length to 50. I think I can show this at the back a bit better. You see this section, if this were simply Adaptive, this whole section would just get turned into one long piece. But when we change it to Subdivided, it largely remains the same. But because of this maximum length, this section ends up getting broken up, and the longest this can be is 50. That's how the Intermediate Points work. This will come up again as we continue these lessons on splines and also later when we start using splines as guides for animations and so on. Keep that in mind when we get to those stages. 29. Splines - Text & Splines: There are other ways to make Splines in Cinema 4D. If we go to the Splines menu, we can see that there are several parametric splines that we can use. Let's start with the text and I briefly mentioned this earlier. If you're just doing some text with a font and not much else, then this is what you would use. In here I can type out the same thing. I'll just type out my name and we can go to the Font. That font I was using is called Futura Condensed. I have already aligned it to the middle, the height controls the size of this, so we can lower this to 100. Horizontal spacing is the gaps between the letters and vertical would be if you had multiple lines of text. If it were like this, the vertical spacing can control this bit here. We can also change the plane the text is oriented along. XY is the default, then ZY which spins it sideways, and XZ which lays it flat. That's the text object. By the way, at any point with these parametric splines, if you want to make customer adjustments at the point level like we did when we were drawing the original, you simply just press C to make it editable and then now you can do those changes in point mode. Anyway, let's go back to the menu and look at some other ones. We have something like Helix which has its own unique options related to this object. I'm going to take it here and I rotate it 90 degrees to face up, and switch off the other spline. Here we have things like the height. If I go to 1,000, so zoom out here. The end radius, so I'm going to lower this to zero, so that's the radius at the top. The end angle controls how many twists and coils we want, so you could make like a spring effect or something. Let's do 2,000, maybe even more, let's do 5,000. That's another object. We can look at one more. Let's say the n-Side. This is used to create shapes with a specific number of sides. It's how you would create a triangle. You would go in here and type out three for the number of sides and then if you want a hexagon, that's six, eight for an octagon. Here is that plane control once again, which you can change to affect the orientation. On some shapes too you have rounding, which if I enable you can change the radius of that rounding. Let's make this upright so we can see this a bit easier. That's it on this lesson on these other parametric splines that you can bring into your project. Between these and the spline pen, it means you can basically create any shape that you want in Cinema 4D. 30. Splines - Open Illustator Files: If you prefer to draw your splines in either Photoshop or Illustrator, because both of those applications are arguably better at doing that, then you can still import into Cinema 4D, depending on how you choose to see things. Anyway, with Photoshop, for example, once you've drawn your path with the pen tool, you go to "File" and "Export" and then "Paths to Illustrator". You want to save the work path, click "Okay". We're going to save this as amazing logo_PS, for Photoshop, dot AI, because we also have the actual AI version which I have to go "File", "Save As". This time can just be amazing logo.ai. When you hit "Save" however, I believe Cinema 4D can only open certain versions here, up to a certain point. Let's try 2020 to begin with because I think they may have caught up recently, but for years it was always one of the older versions. But let's see. Anyway, from this point we can go to "File", "Merge Objects". Let's start with the AI version. See nothing happened. According to the boffins on the internet, Illustrator 8 should work. Let's do that one, and then go back to Cinema 4D once again, "File", "Merge objects". We are merging our current project with this version of our Illustrator file. There we go, it works. It also brings in the letters as individual shapes. So I would either keep it the same or right-click, and connect and delete. It doesn't really matter because you can always disconnect them by the way, if you want to do that. In point mode, you just right-click and explode segments. It's going to make all these things as separate objects once again. Let's now merge it with the version from Photoshop. You see it's exactly the same Illustrator import window. We just click "Okay", and there it is. It's exactly the same. It brings it in as separate objects. So really, you can bring in your traced logos into Cinema 4D in as many ways as you want, either from Illustrator, Photoshop, or of course, draw them in Cinema 4D. The N here isn't closed. Let's close that spline to complete the shape. 31. Splines - Spline Masks: We are currently in Cinema 4D R21 because for whatever reason what I want to show you here wouldn't work in the latest version of Cinema 4D, which at the time of this recording is version 23. You can see here this looks very blocky when really it's supposed to look like this here. Anyway, so hopefully this is just a bug with my copy of Cinema 4D. I have sent a bug report to the developers, let's see what they say. This is what I want to show you. The fact that you can join masks together in different ways using something called the spline mask. Here I have used it to combine my original traced logo with a rectangle which cuts through it, like you see here. I can go to this rectangle and I can change its height, for example, and you see this would change dynamically and update. Let's see how this works. I started with the original trace and then I just brought in this rectangle here. Then from their [inaudible] icon, I want to get the spline mask. Let's bring that in and I'm just going to drag this in here. By default it's going to be in this union mode, which just combines the two splines together. You can also change it to these other methods, such as A subtract B. You see that's a completely different effect. If the splines were in a reverse order, you may have to switch it to B subtract A to get something which makes more sense. But in this case, A subtract B was more correct. But anyway, let's bring this down for a different effect. If it were the other way around, B subtract A, I could put the height up, so we are now trimming the top parts of the logo off and it creates something completely different. The really great thing about this is, this works just as a normal spline. We can actually generate geometry from this, using let's say the sweep object again as an example, I'm going to bring in a rectangle and let's give it a radius of five and five and get the sweep object. To put both of these in here and you see we can generate geometry based on that. If I change the height of this or the mode and so on, it's going to dynamically update. Spline masks can also be stacked. We currently just have one level. If I take this current rectangle, make it smaller, move it to the bottom part, let's go forward, maybe just seven. Make a copy of that rectangle and then move it closer to the top here, I am going to get another spline mask and drag the first one and the rectangle into the second one. Now we're combining two spline masks. Because as I said earlier, a spline mask just behaves as if it's a normal spline. On this new one, let's change the mode to A subtract B again. Now we have a two cuts in this text and this could be dropped back into the sweep. Let's turn it on, and you see it updates accordingly. If your spline masks are not working properly like they are here, lets say you suddenly get lines crisscrossing everywhere. It could be because of the axis here. If I set it to be wrong on purpose, you see their whole effect doesn't work at all. This would depend on which way your splines are oriented. Depending on that, you would just have to come in here and change it until you see the correct result. Secondly, their splines have to be on the same plane. What I mean by that is if this rectangle were out here, it wouldn't line up with the original trace. It ends up pulling these splines out of here and that can cause some tearing and some problems. This works best when the splines are all on the same axis, the same plane, and you have the spline mask set to the correct axis. 32. Splines - Sweep Object: We now want to look at various ways of generating geometry with our splines. We are going to start with the Sweep object, which we have already seen introduced in earlier lessons. I'm going to repeat this setup I have here. It's just a Helix with these settings, so the Radius is 100 and Radius 102, and the End Angle is set to 8000. Then I just rotated it to point upright. Then let's get the Sweep. Along with this, we need a shape to use as a profile for the Sweep. I am going to begin with a Circle. Let's set the radius to just 10. Then for this to work, you have to take the Circle and the Helix and make them both children of the Sweep. The shape you are sweeping along your spline needs to be at the top. So that's why it's called the Sweep object because it takes a shape and sweeps it along another shape. At least in my head that makes sense. Let's go to the settings for this. We have the Object tab. Here we can do things like change the End Scale. So if I lower this to zero, you see we're now go from a 100 percent scale at the start, and as it spins around, it goes all the way down to zero. Further down we have the Start and End growth. If I change this, you can see the Start Growth changes where our spline starts growing from, and the End Growth is the same but from the opposite side, it changes where our spline grows too. Keep in mind that these values can be animated. Anything with a circle next to it like this means it can be animated. So this could be an interesting effect. We also have End Rotation, which I need to change the shape to illustrate this better. If I get an n-Side, let's get a hexagon. Give it a radius of 10, place this above our Helix. If I go to the Sweep object, I'm going to start by bringing up the scale on the n-Scale back up to 100 again. Anyway, the End Rotation, if I increase the frequency, it twists the rotation from the end of the spline and it weaves it back into the rest of the shape. So this can be used to create something that looks pretty interesting. The more coils you put in here, the more abstract this is going to look. We can change the scale and rotation here, but this can also be adjusted using these graphs down here under Details. If you open this up, you'll see two graphs, one for scale, and one for rotation. I'm going to go to the End Rotation up here and set it back to zero. We are back where we started. Then in the Details section, let's start with the Scale first. The graph is set to one along the top right now, so it means nothing is changing. But I could, for example, press "Control" and click to add a point along this line. Then if I take the start, bring that to zero, and then the end, do the same, you see now our scale on the spline is being mapped from this graph. It starts off as nothing, and then is thickest in the middle, and then tapers off once again. We can shift the point where it starts to taper off by adjusting the graph. You could do something interesting like adding multiple points. Let's say something like this. Then you could alternate between zero and 100 percent scale, and you see that just gets mapped back onto the overall shape. Their rotation works in a similar way. I'm going to just undo to reset all of this, or I can right-click, and let's Reset. Which oddly enough, reset it to something different than it started with. So we just need to pull this handle to the top. For their rotation, it starts off at 0.5, so 0.5 is neutral, then we can add some points once again. I'm going to add maybe just four points or three points, then we twist this part. Then we twist in the other direction. This can be combined with these values over here too. Which means that between the graphs and the settings up here, you can really do just about anything you want to this shape. 33. Splines - Extrude Object: We are back to our traced logo because I want to show you another method of generating geometry from splines and it's the extrude object. If I hold the Alt key as I bring this end. In the Object tabs, we have some options here, so the direction which is automatic right now, I would want this to be z, which goes backwards like this. So the offset controls the overall depth of the geometry. Let's go for something like 20. If I go to display with lines, we can see what subdivision does. It adds sediments going backwards. But I want a shape like this one is enough. Hierarchical or hierarchical, there is another c there, I think that's how you say that hierarchical, I think it's to do with, if you have multiple splines so if we copy this and move it down. You see it's not being extruded. But if I enable hierarchical, now you see it is. Let's go to the Caps tab, which was present on the sweep object as well so it works in a similar way. We can either turn the start and end cap off or keep them on. We can control the bevels which will be the front and back at the same time or separately. So let's just keep it the same for this example and if I bump up the radius tool, let's say just two, you see now it's rounding off these edges on the front and the back. Extended shape was introduced in newer versions of Cinema 4D. So you may have this or not depending on what version you are running. But it's one of those things which again, it's best to just visualize it and see what it does. If I go to the height, if I start to increase this, you see it just extends my entire shape. But the whole thing starts behaving very differently too. So if I bump up the size of the bevel, you see it really brings down the size of this front sections and that creates this very bulbous looking effect. It's worth always just trying out these settings. You will see segments, controls how smooth the overall cap is and shape depth we have already seen before. So we can go from either being rounded like this or if we go the other way, it's going to create almost like this chiseled text effect and the height. If you go the other way, it's going to actually go back into their letter. This is under extended shape, by the way. Lots of things you can do with this, particularly for text. Anyway, I'm going to turn this off, let's just continue with the standard caps, I'm going to have maybe you're just five segments and the size of just two. The last setting is the caps type, which by default is N-gon and you get these large front surfaces with no subdivision. If you want to change that, you can set it to these other types, such as a triangles and you see the effect that has. It now breaks up the front surfaces and adds a whole bunch of segments. We can also do quadrangles, which does exactly the same thing, but now the shapes tend to be majority four sided shapes. We also have a Delaunay which is pretty interesting. I think that's how you say that, but could be wrong. When you change it to that by the way, look at this little arrow which just appeared where I can change the density. If I keep increasing this, you see it adds more segments. We can make it quad dominant, just to introduce more four-sided shapes instead of triangles. Further down, we have regular grid, which allows us to control the overall size of these segments. But if you lower this enough past a certain point, and this would depend on the overall size of your text, you won't see any difference. But if we lower this down enough, you see we start to control the overall size of the segments we see on the front of our caps. This is pretty good. Let's go for five. Once again, we can make it more quad dominant if we want to see mostly some four-sided polygons. This section is quite important if you plan on doing the modeling on your text, for example, and you need those segments. Or if you are going to use the deformers on this text, you would need in our segments for the deformers to be able to operate properly. But I just wanted to address that in case you are wondering why we go through all this effort of changing these settings when in grouraud shading where we can't see the segments. It basically makes no difference which one of these options you have selected, it looks the same. But of course, a lot of these things have utility elsewhere. That will become more apparent as we continue with the class. 34. Splines - Loft & Lathe Nurbs: Here we have these two vases and they're being generated using the loft nurbs that's on the left and the lathe nurbs on the right. Those are these two other ways of generating geometry. With the loft nurbs, you see it builds vertically depending on how these splines are positioned. It wraps the geometry around based on that. It follows the shapes of our circles in that order, as you can see here. If I turn it on and then if I move one of the circles, you see it changes the shape. Let's say I wanted the neck of the vase to be wider or narrower, I would have to change one of those circles. There's one here in the middle. If I go to the radius and make it smaller, you see that's how we change the shape. That's how loft nurbs works. Interestingly, you can actually do things like rotation, and that's going to affect the overall shape too. So rotation, positioning, all of that will have an effect. In this Example 2, which is a vase, it needs to be opened at the top. In the caps options on the loft nurbs, I disabled the endcap to open up that top section. To control the level of detail with this one, this is the mesh subdivision u and v, so that's the sideways or vertical direction. A couple of other options; subdivision pairs segment changes how the subdivisions are being made. Right now it does take into account the distance between the shapes that make this up. These two shapes at the top are closer to each other, so we see more segments there. Whereas this is a longer distance between this shape and the one that's about here. You see these segments are a bit larger. However, if I untick subdivisions per segment, all the sediments end up being basically the same height. Then we have a linear interpolation which doesn't curve the shape as it wraps around. It just goes from one section to another in a completely straight line. The lathe nurbs, as we can see, the approach is different. It goes around in a circle instead, rather than building vertically. We draw a profile of the vase here. Then when we enable the lathe nurbs, it takes that and spins it around to form the shape. Let's go to the options for this. We have subdivision, which is straightforward. It's how many segments we have. The movement will offset the geometry as it spins around. Now, you wouldn't want to do this if you're making a vase. But maybe you're making some abstract sculpture, maybe you could try that. Here we saw the subdivisions only for the circular sediments. That's because we would control the vertical ones from the spline itself. Intermediate points, I would maybe go for uniform to get that equal number of segments going up. A quick extra on this topic. If I go to the subdiv icon, I can get a cloth surface. This can be used to give some thickness to this geometry that we have. If I go and get the loft, drop it inside the cloth surface, you see it subdivides it first of all, makes it smoother. But also the thickness can be increased. Let's try five to begin with, and that has a bit of volume to it now, whereas before it was just wafer thin. What else I could do here is drop this into a subdiv surface, and that's going to smooth out the whole shape. That's just too many segments, so I would have to go back to some of these shapes. Well, some of these settings and just lower it all down again. We need more of a lip at the top. That last one, I can take this final circle, make a copy of it, and move it just a bit above that to create this extra edge cut, which is going to help with just making sure that top part is shaped properly. Let's do the same for the lathe. Once again, drop it into a cloth surface. Let's get our lines again for this visualization. Thickness set to maybe 10 this time for a thicker shape. If this were dropped into a subdiv surface, that's what we get. If I wanted this top part to be sharp out, I would have to go to the spline that makes this up and add an extra point because this does look at the spline as well. In point mode, right-click and create a point about there. That should add that segment to the geometry. Now we get a slightly more defined top part of our lathe nurbs. Let's just double-check. We should be in the subdivided mode for this to have an effect and maybe make that maximum length higher. The angle all the way up to 90, now I can adjust the maximum length to create something that still looks uniform, but respects that segment at the top here. Maybe about 10 is fine. Cloth surface and turn that back on, and there we go. That's more defined. 35. Mograph - Cloner Object: The cloner in cinema 4D can do a lot of things. So let's see what some of those things are exactly. I want to bring in a bunch of primitive objects here. Let's throw all of them into the cloner. The default is this grid pattern. So that's the mode, grid array. We have other modes which we will look at shortly, but let's start with the basics. We can change the spacing between the clones by just selecting these handles and moving them that way or going to the size controls and setting the values here. I'm going to go for 400. This is setting the space between the clones in this pair step mode. So when I add in extra rows of clones, the spacing will stay the same, which means the overall size of the setup is going to expand to accommodate the new extra rows of clones. We can change the mode to end point which works in reverse. You set the overall size of the setup. So it changes to 1600 here, that's based on these values we set up in this mode. So this two will change at the same time. But now what happens is, if I insert extra rows of clones with the count, you see it just fills in the spaces in between and the overall size stays the same. By the way, here, that count is x, y, and z. Now we only have clones in x and z, only one in y. So that's why we were only adjusting the x and z size. If we had clones in the other direction, which we can, let's put seven in there in that direction too. You can see that we have to increase the size for that 3D arrangement to be apparent. Also when we have clones in all the directions, this is where this form controls comes into play. It's set to cubic by default which give us a cube arrangement. But we can also change it to sphere, cylinder, which gives us this kind of arrangement, or we can use object. So we're going to actually bring in a shape. Let's say another pyramid. Make it much larger though. Go to the cloner and the object, dragging our pyramid there. If we hide the pyramids, so hold the ALT key and click these traffic light circles to hide the pyramid. But you see if I moved around, it's going to affect how my clones are being distributed. It fills up the volume of that pyramid. Let's look at some other options. We have something here called instance mode, which is set to instance by default. So that just means that every clone that we see is a real physical copy of the original. So if our original shapes took up a certain amount of memory to start with, however number of clones on top of that we create, it's going to take up just that much more memory in the scene. It also means that if I were to hit C to make the cloner editable, it's going to bake that cloner setup into individual objects, like you see here. If I undo this and change the instance mode to render instance, visually, it's going to stay the same. But what's happening now is that instead of creating real physical copies of objects, it's merely just a random instance, which means that it doesn't take up as much memory and it improves their performance in the viewport. It does mean however, that certain functions, such as trying to apply deformers to this set of clones, wouldn't work because you can only use deformers on real physical objects. So if you wanted to do that kind of thing to your clones, you would have to stay in the normal instance mode. But if you don't need that kind of functionality, you will switch to render instance, which gives you superior performance in the viewport and your scene, remains more fluid and lighter. This is perhaps one of those instances where it is worth just having a peak at the manual just to have the actual official read up on this. How all of this work, they do a pretty good job in the manual for certain things like this. To continue, you may have noticed that our clones, we have this repeating pattern and it's based on the order of the original setup, doesn't look very natural. So what we'll do instead is change the clones mode to random. Now it picks randomly from this list and arranges them that way, which means we now have this seed control and we can change the seed for a different arrangement of our clones. So that's the difference between random and iterate. Before we look at these other modes, let's go to the transform tab. This is what you use to control the clones at the clone level. You can go to this scale and change that. We have the rotation too. It controls the orientation of the individual clones. Whereas if you want to move the whole thing, you of course just do that in the standard co-ordinates tab. Every object has this. Now it's going to move as a whole shape. So the rotation would rotate the whole thing. Whereas in the transform tab, these controls only affect the individual clones. Let's check out the other cloner modes. The first one on the list is object. You see when I selected everything disappears. That's because we need an object to clone onto. So if I get a sphere, make it much larger. Go back to the cloner, and under object is where we drop in our sphere. By default, it's going to be distributed on the surface of the sphere. We can change the count down here. So the more clones we have, the more of that surface is going to be covered. We can change the seed for a different arrangement. You see when we change the mode, the interface completely changes according to that new mode. This is a completely dynamic, which means if I make changes to the sphere, the cloner setup is going to change as well, so lowering the number of segments. For example, we may just have to turn the cloner on and off before that updates. But you see it makes a difference. In this surface mode too, by the way, we can restrict which polygons are going to actually accept the clones. So if I hit C on the sphere, let's go to polygon mode and pick out a small selection. Go to select, set selection and it creates this selection tag. Go back to the cloner, and we can drag that to the selection area. Now you'll see only that part is going to carry or contain some clones. We can also enable scaling, which takes into account the overall size of the polygon that is attached to. So if it's on a large part, it's going to be a larger object compared to, let's say if it had landed on one of these triangles up here, I think this would be more obvious if we switch the distribution to polygon center, for example. Now you see the shapes on the smaller parts are much smaller than the shapes on the larger polygons. As the name suggests, this mode moves the clones to the center of each of the polygons that make up our guide shape, if you will. We're going to remove this selection to cover the whole shape. Let's disable scaling. Now you see it goes back to the normal original scale. Another mode is vertex, which is the individual points that make up the shape. Then edge is for the edges, the lines. We've already seen polygon center, but we also have volume, which uses the inside volume of our shape. So if I hide the shape, hold the ALT key, and press the traffic lights, you see the clones have been cloned on the inside of this shape. We can once again control the overall amount using the count and the arrangement using the seed, and so on. That's the object mode. We have other simpler modes, such as linear, which just clones our clones in a line. The controls for that are as follows. We have the count, which is going to come up a lot. The spacing is controlled once again in this mode pair step, we have the position x, y, and z. So if we want to clone into the y direction, we use that control alone, or we can go in the x direction that works as well, or you can combine all three of the directions at once and it's going to average out. Let's just go in and up and down direction though. So I'm going to set the y movement to 250. But I would say that's it for the cloner. It's a very powerful tool and we have just gone through a very basic level explanation of what you can do with this. But really, when you start to use it with a specific purpose in mind, that's when it gets really interesting. When we get to the example projects section of the class, such as when we are going to create this futuristic city, then we're going to be employing all of those tools and methods to create something specific, ie, a sprawling, futuristic city like this here with tons of buildings, some highways and a lot of vehicles flying around. All of that was achieved in one way or another using the cloner objects just with a different settings or in different parts of the scene. 36. Mograph - Random Effector: Another very important section of MoGraph is called the effectors. We use this on the various MoGraph objects, such as the cloner. In this example, I've just set up a cloner with a 10 by 10 grid of some cubes. The effect I am going to look at first is called the random effect. This is one of the most used effectors. As the name suggests, this is going to randomize the size, position, and rotation of our clones. If we go to the Parameter tab, in their position, let's go for something much higher, say 500 for the X, Y, and Z. We can also randomize the scale. This can be done individually for the different scale axises, axi, I don't know what the plural for axis is, but we have X, Y, and Z. If I just do X, let's say typing one in there, you see now the size X of each of the clones has been randomized. Or we can do this uniformly, which is to say all three at once. I want to type in one, it's going to change all the sides at once. You end up with some very small cubes and some very large ones too. The larger this number is, the more pronounced that effect is going to be. You can do this inverse. If I do negative two, it's just going to flip the whole thing around. Let's put this back to zero for a second. I want to show you what absolute scale does. If I turn this on and tap in one into here, it means that we are not going to get any cubes being smaller than the original size. It's just some of them are going to be larger. If I increase this, those larger tubes will get even larger, but we still maintain the original size on at least some of the cubes. Whereas if I untick absolute scale, then some cubes get made larger and some get made smaller. Of course, we can randomize the rotation too. If you start to dial in this values, you see what that does. Yes, you can use all three of these controls at once. Once this is set up here, we can go to the Effector tab, change the overall strength of this effect by using this slider right here. We can even go beyond 100 percent for a much more extreme effect, but you probably wouldn't be doing that too much anyway. This is all in the standard random mode, but this can be changed to these other types, such as Gaussian. By the way, there's always a seed value here for a different arrangement. Next up we have Noise, which has a couple of extra controls, animation speed and the scale. If I play this, you're going to see it's animated. We can slow that down to 10 percent. The scale is going to affect the size of that noise pattern. Turbulence is similarly animated but also is a different movement and style to it. Then Sorted is still like random and Gaussian way, it just looks different. Most of the time I am just in the random mode. But it's worth knowing that these are the options there too if you want to go for something a bit different and these switches and so on. You turn this on, you just get, once again, a different arrangement. Anyway, it's worth experimenting and seeing what you can come up with. But that's it for the random effector in Cinema 4D. 37. Mograph - Plain Effector & Fields: Another very useful effector is called the plain effector. With our Cloner selected, we can bring that in. By the way, if you don't select your MoGraph object before you bring in the effector, it's not going to apply. But the MoGraph object is going to have an effector tab. You go to that, drag this in here. Now it's working. You see it's moving all the clones equally. That's just how the plain effector behaves. So on its own, it's not very interesting except that you can just shift everything that's inside your MoGraph object equally. But what you can do with the plain effector is to combine it with either MoGraph Selection or some falloff fields. Let's start with MoGraph Selection. If I go to the Cloner, I'm going to go to MoGraph and then MoGraph Selection. I have this brush now. If I click anywhere, it reveals a dot on top of each clone, which means I can select that clone. Let's go to the top view and I'm going to zoom out here, and then I'm going to use the square bracket key to expand the size of my brush, or I could change the radius over here. Click in the middle. I want to create a circle pattern of clones in the middle. You see nothing is changed except that the selected clones are now highlighted in a brighter yellow color, and it creates this MoGraph Selection tag over here. So now, if I go to the plain effector, in the Effector tab, we have a selection box. We can drag this selection here. Now you see only those clones which were selected are being affected by this plain effector. If I go to the Parameter, we can change certain values and it's only going to affect that selected set of clones. We can go to the Selection Tag, invert, it's going to reverse the effect. Let's invert back to the original. In the plain effector, I could use this to, for example, make these clones disappear. So position won't be changed but scale will. We can set the scale to negative 1. It's going to remove those clones. If I want to add to this selection, I just click the "Cloner" and the "Tag". It reveals my dots. Once again, if I hold "Shift", that's going to add to the selection, so I have to be in MoGraph selection for this to work also. Hold "Shift" to add to the selection or hold "Control" to subtract from it. If you do your selection prior to bringing in the effector and the selection tag is picked over here, when you bring in that effector, it's going to automatically populate this selection box. So now, we have seen how using the plain effector with selection can be used. Let's look at another aspect which is the falloff fields. I'm going to remove both the selection tag and the effector. So we start again. Once again, bring in the plain effector. Let's go to the Parameter and I'm going to move the Y position by 500. It's moving all the clones. So what we want to do is go to the Falloff. Then I'm going to right-click in this field, go to New Field, and let's bring in a spherical field to start with. It creates this sphere in the center of my clones. It's quite small there so we can change the size of this by either using the viewport and the handles. The color here represents the strength and the falloff of this particular fields. So closer to the center, we have more of an effect from the plain effector and then the effects of that start to fade. This is the overall size of the build or the falloff, the inside handle that just changes how the falloff is being mapped from the middle. So if I make it small all the way it means that immediately this will start to fade from that center. But if it were larger, it stays stronger for a larger amount of space and then it starts to fade. If I go to the Remapping tab, you can see this represented on this graph right there. As I slide this around, you see that is the difference. Also with remapping enabled, you can go to the Contour Mode. Let's change this to curve, for example, which gives us a curve graph, which allows us to have even more control. As I'm changing this around, you see how this affects the falloff. We, once again, see a representation of this on our graph up here. Even with the custom contour curve, all of these other controls can still be applied on top of that. So once again, that inner offset, the minimum value raises the floor level. The maximum value controls the overall strength, and this can also be adjusted with the spline range, which is its height, or I would drop this handle here. We can invert the whole thing that's going to just reverse the way the falloff is being applied. So now the center has zero falloff and then it gets stronger towards the edges. Interestingly, last time I did this, this was a purple color. So maybe this changes randomly when you bring in a new field. I'm not really sure there but it doesn't matter. You can go to this Spherical Field and in the Color Remap, we can change what color that's giving us. I guess it's a good visual guide, but it does color the clones. Maybe if I apply a material that's going to get overwritten anyway, and yeah, it does. Maybe there's some creative use for this, but yeah, it's just a way to give us an idea of what the falloff is doing to the clones. We've been looking at the spherical field this whole time, but the methods in here too and it's worth just going through these and seeing what you can come up with. Linear field, for example. This uses the linear direction of the falloff to control the effects of what we're trying to do. When I change this back to color once again, and you see it's changed to something different. This has the same kind of controls too, and just we're mapping them in a line rather than onto a sphere, but all of this will work essentially the same. We have a range and we have a falloff for that range. With the linear field, you can do things like change the direction. So if I change it to Z, it's going to flip and point toward that way, and also not just the position of this, but its rotation in the scene is going to affect how it's being applied to the clones. At a 45-degree angle, you see moving it side-to-side does nothing but if I move it back and forth, it cuts into the clones at that angle. Once again, if I lower the length, the transition is going to be more sudden, and if it's long, it's going to be more gradual. Let's just look at one more. As an example, I think the torus field, that sounded quite interesting. It's like a donut shape. If we go to the radius, you see how that jumps through the line of clones, and also its thickness would have to be increased in this case to have much of an effect. So now it passes through our clones and creates this round pattern of cubes being raised. That's all based on the values inside the plain effector itself. If I increase this, you see that range increases but the falloff remains the same. Here is one of the thing that's very interesting. You can combine different fields in the same falloff. Here, I just went ahead and added another spherical field. In this default max blending mode, this is how it operates. It's just like adding a separate falloff elsewhere. This is based on a maximum value. So our plain effector's maximum value was raising these clones by 500. So going to where they're already at that level doesn't do anything. But going back to over here where they are not at 500, you see it raises up those bits and everything in between. But we can change the blending mode or the opacity. So if I lower this, that's like lowering the strength, we can also change this to something like subtract. If I move this, you can see the effects of that, it's always going to be subtracting down to zero. So where it's already at zero, that doesn't do anything to the position of the clones. But going down to where they are higher, they get subtracted down back to the floor level, which was that zero. So from 500-0, we could try adding or screen that works similar to the max level, but just the way the two falloffs blend is a bit different. If this was set to normal, it's like it doesn't see through this first layer, so we only see the effect of the very top layer. 38. Mograph - Voronoi Fracture, Delay Effector: The Voronoi Fracture can be used to break apart any geometry, which then allows us to use effectors and fall off fields in a very interesting way to make animations, such as you see here. Let's see the setup for this. I'm going to delete everything and reset back to when we just have our 3D text, which is our Trieste spline inside of an extrude. Then I will go to "Mograph" and "Voronoi Fracture" and drop our extruded text into this. The main controls for this are going to be in the "Sources" tab and under "Point Generator", let's click that. The point amount controls the overall number of fragments. Let's put this all the way up to 250 and you see we have a lot more of these green dots and broken up pieces. We can also change the distribution type to be, let's say, exponential. What this allows us to do is to weight it toward one side versus the other end that's controlled by these "Axis Affection" controls, where, by default, it's going to be to x plus. If I do x minus, it's going to jump across to the other side. We can turn this off for a more uniform layout once again. We are going to affect this disproportionately to any one of these different axis signs we want. You can even combine the two to point in a specific direction or part of your object. Then we can control the strength of that weighting using the standard deviation here. So if this was larger, it's more spread out throughout our object, whereas a smaller value is going to weight it even more toward one side. We are going to go back to uniform, we want the pieces to be roughly equal throughout this whole traced logo. Because the Voronoi Fracture is a MoGraph objective, it means we can apply effectors and animate this with some fields. Let's go to "MoGraph" and get a plain effect. We are going to be affecting the scale, so let's turn that on "Uniform Scale" and I'm going to set this to negative one. Of course, everything disappears. We can go to the "Falloff", right-click and make a new linear field or click the linear button, that also works. Now when I move this around, you see we can reveal the text by animating this. I think the falloff is a bit too long though. I'm going to go to the length and lower it to half, let's go for 50, place it somewhere to the left of our text. My timeline is it five seconds. On the linear field controls in the coordinates, let's go and key frame the exposition. Hold "Control" and click this circle to set that key frame. I accidentally did that at frame 12, so if I highlight this and type in zero here, it's going to jump back to the beginning. Let's move towards the end of the animation, maybe about four and a half seconds. We're going to move our linear field to the other side of the text, just enough to clear the whole word and key frame that also. A quick review, this is what we get. We're just revealing the text tool, we can create something more interesting by combining the plain effector with a random effector. Let's go to "Effector" and "Random" and then the "Falloff", we'll just need to get the same linear field we put on the plain effector and now the two are going to be working together. I don't want any color from the fracture, so I'm going to go to the "Object" settings and "Colorized fragments", I am going to untick. Let's also apply this quick material to override the colors from the effectors and falloff. We can then hide the linear field and maybe the "Workplane" under "Filter", turn that off momentarily, just so we see our text not being cut-off by anything. That's the final effect. Just as a bonus, let me show you how to create a smoother animation. You see the way that N comes together there is a bit jumpy and I guess several of the pieces, we could increase the range of the linear field so that it's more gradual. But we can also use an effector called the "Delay." So with the fracture selected, let's go to "MoGraph", "Effector", and "Delay." In this, let's go to the "Effector" tab and we see this "Strength" and "Mode" control. The "Mode" is set to "Blend," which means it's going to try and smooth out this animation. See if you can tell the difference at the regular 50 percent value. If I go to about 80 percent, I think it's going to be more obvious. You just smooth this out, that faster motion to come together a bit slower. For something quite exaggerated, we can try "Spring", which is going to make the text jump around. So now you see what the "Delay" effect does, it affects the animation without adding any extra key frame so we can just adjust the strength of the values over here. If you make it too high, however, we almost don't have enough timeline to cover this whole thing. So use this carefully and you can create some very smooth-looking animations. Just as a final example, I am going to go to the random effector. Let's affect the scale uniform at one and the rotation, I'm going to set it to 360 on all of these. So these pieces are going to be spinning as they are revealed and coming into a rest. 39. Mograph - Fracture & Mo Text: Here is a similar effect on our text, except we are doing this at the letter level rather than breaking apart the whole thing. This was achieved using just the regular Fracture object. Previously, we had been using the Voronoi fracture, so these two are different. Let me show you how this works. If I go to MoGraph and Fracture, place our extruded text underneath this, go to the Effectors tab, and let's throw in the same things: the Plain, Random and Delay. If I go back to the beginning and hit "Play", you'll see it first it treats the whole word as a single object. We want to break this apart and have the individual letters be affected. So in the Fracture object, let's go to the Object tab and set the mode from the default Straight to Explode Segments. Just by doing that, we get the individual letters being animated with our effector and falloff field. Sometimes, this may not behave like you would want. Here, I have broken it on purpose. It's treating each part of the letter and all the polygons that make this up as a separate object, whereas I wanted to treat the letters as a whole. In itself, this could be an interesting effect, but we wanted to stay connected. In this case, what you would do is go to the Mode and change it to the next one, which is called Explode Segments and connect. This will be able to identify letters which are supposed to be joined together. Another object related to this is just the regular MoText. Let's bring that in. I'm going to align it to the middle. Let's type out my name again. We are going to use that same font. It's called Futura. This is much larger than our current text; let's lower it to about 100. Because the MoText is already a MoGraph object, we could just go to the Letters section and throw in our plain effectors in here. You can do this on the letter level, which is what we are doing currently. But we could have also dropped these into the words, the lines or treating it as a single object as well. A MoText is basically just like using the text spline except it has the extrude part of it built into the text object and of course, the MoGraph section. But if you want to do a custom logo, of course you can't use this section; in which case, you have to make your own text extruded by yourself. You can still have the option to use it with MoGraph by throwing it into an object such as Fracture and the Voronoi fracture, like we saw earlier. Also, just like we were able to individually select clones with the MoGraph selection, you can do the same with the text. If you go to MoGraph selection, these dots, you can select them, and it creates a tag like you see there. I believe this works the same with Fracture. The dots may not appear until you click, but it recognizes the individual shapes and you can use MoGraph selection here too, just as easily. 40. Animation - Keyframes & Timeline: In this first lesson on animation, we are just going to look at the very basics. We have a cube and we want to animate this. If we go to the coordinates and at frame zero, let's keyframe the x position. You now press Control and click the gray dot next to any property to set a keyframe. We can do this to the position, the scale, and the rotation, or any other property of any object which has this gray circle next to it. It means it can be animated. Once we have our first keyframe, we can move to the point in time which we want the object to animate to, and also change the actual value that we are animating. In this case, it's the x position. I'm just going to move it to this point, in time or in space. Then let's save the keyframe. You see when it's yellow, it means it's waiting for us to confirm the new position. If I scrub away from this, it's going to jump back to the beginning because we did not confirm the new position. So let's do that. Hold control and click to set that keyframe. Just like that, we have a quick and simple animation, just moving a cube from one spot to another. Whenever you animate something moving in space, you are going to actually see a path, that object took. Along that path, you see these dots. They represent the keyframe interpolation of this particular animation track. What is interpolation? Well, right now, the object is moving in a very interesting pattern. It slowly starts moving, speeds up in the middle, and then slows down at the end. You can see this on the dots; in the middle, they're further apart, indicating that the object is traveling through those sections quicker because each dot represents a frame in the animation or an interval along that key track. So when they are crowded, more towards one side, like they are eye it means the object is going to spend more time in those areas, so it's going to appear to ease in, speed up, and then slow down. Now, this is just the default keyframe interpolation in Cinema 4D and it's called spline. But we can change this, if we go to the window and Timeline, Dope Sheet. This is where we are going to see any properties in the project that have been animated. The object here is the cube. We can open this and see that the position has been animated, and particularly the X position. Let's open this up. Now we see those two keyframes. The keyframe interpolation is currently set to spline, which is going to be this easy ease pattern. I just want to make this window larger. I can grab some down here when this arrow appears. With both of these selected, we can change the interpolation from spline to linear. Now it's going to be a constant speed throughout the entire animation, and if we go back to our cube, we can see it moves at that constant speed, and the dots along this path, they're equally spaced apart. To go back to the spline method, we would have to select both of these, change it to spline here, or using these three keys at the top. So the first one is linear. Spline allows us to change the keyframe interpolation using these handles. So we could weight it toward one side versus the other. If I wanted it to take more time easing in, I would make this initial section longer by using the handle and then we can do it from the opposite side. We wanted to ease in a lot, speed up really fast in the middle, and the steeper this part looks, visually, the faster that object is going to be moving throughout that section. This is a visual guide, as much as anything else too. When we play this back, that's what we're going to see, a much slower start, speeds up a lot in the middle, and then a much slower ending too. If we weight this to one side, let's say it starts much steeper and quicker, that's going to look like this. Then if we play it back, very quick to begin with, and then spends a lot of time slowing down. So interpolation can be applied between any two keyframe values. Let's talk about something called overshoot. It happens when your handles have so much influence on the keyframes that it ends up throwing the range of your animation outside its initial run. We're moving this cube from zero to about, if I actually select the key frame, the exact value was 991. Let's just make it around 1,000. That's the movement we want the cube to move within, but if you look here, my handle is so high up here, it's causing the cube to actually briefly fall outside of that range before it returns to within 1000 again. What's going to happen is, it's going to shoot across to the other side and then come back like this. If you ever find your objects going past the values you animate them to, or any other property, then you want to go in here and just make sure that you're not overshooting your initial values. I have both of them selected so they're changing together. I need to do this one at a time, and the overshoot is gone. The other interpolation mode, by the way, is called step. As the name suggests, you go from one value to another in a single step. It's this one in the middle. If I click step, you see the keyframe, whatever I said to begin with, stays like that until I bring in the next value. So it's just going to jump from zero to 1,000 right at the end. I would have to set my timeline to, let's say, five seconds to actually see that happen. At that point, it steps to 1,000. I guess for values that you want to just flick a switch, that's the interpolation you would use. To continue with this, let's animate another property on our cube, starting at about one and a half seconds. I'm going to animate the Z position too, so set a keyframe. At frame 90, once again, we're going to go to 1,000 in the other direction. That's how this is going to look now, the X animation is still continuing, but now we have added in an extra dimension to their movement. Let's go to window and timeline. You see the new position, Z, has its own curves once again. We can change this. As I moved around, you see it physically changes the shape of the overall movement too. If I made this more linear in time, you see it corresponds to a more linear movement in space as well, so the timeline or the time interpolation, or temporal interpolation is linked to the spatial interpolation, in this case. Another thing we can do in that timeline is if we select everything or an entire track or, let's say, all the keyframes in the scene, we can then use this handle at the end, at the top, this larger apart here, to either shrink or expand the entire animation. So if you wanted to play out faster, you just bring it to the left. Now this is going to be very quick, and this will scale the distances between the keyframes and the curves and so on, proportionally. So the interpolation will remain the same. That's the quick introduction to keyframes in Cinema 4D. We looked at how to create the keyframes, keyframe interpolation, and the timeline window, and what you can do in here. In the next lesson, we are going to look at a different way of animating objects through space by attaching them to splines and using the splines as the path that the object moves along, and see how that works. 41. Animation - Animating Along Splines: Here is a much easier method for animating objects through space. We can use a spline as a path for the animation. Then all of this movement you see, the straight-line part, the rotation, and the corners, and all of this is being controlled by just two key frames, so on this position control, on the align to spline tag. We have our DeLorean once again. If I go to the top view, let's get the spline pen in the Bezier mode. We can start drawing from the center of the vehicle. I am just going to go to about here. Let's draw a turn or a rounded corner, and then about the same distance to the left, so I can see because of the guides that's going to be about here, and then we can turn in this direction and stop right there. In the main viewport, I'm just going to make a quick adjustment and move these points closer to the middle of this grid square. I want this section here to be shorter. We can call this the car path and on the vehicle itself, it's anchored at the bottom here, which is correct. That's the part at which the car will be attached onto the spline. So "right-click", "Animation Tags", and "Align to Spline". The spline is the one we just drew a few moments ago. We're now going to go to the position control in the align to spline tag, and that's how we animate the object to move along that path. Go back to the beginning here, this should be 12 seconds again. At frame zero, let's set the key frame and then move to the end and type in 100 percent, and then set that key frame too. A quick playback and we are going to get this. There's a lot of things we need to fix here, but we see that the object is moving along that path. It's not rotating so we just need to go to the tag and tick "Tangential". That's going to make it so that the object is going to follow the orientation of the spline when it changes direction. Now you see, we are animating both the position and the rotation of the object. All of that movement is being done by just the two key frames on this position control. Let's go to the timeline and look at those key frames. If we make them linear, we should expect to get some constant motion. However, when we play, we see that it's faster on the straight sections and then it slows down drastically on the curved bits. This is to do with the intermediate points setting, so we should change this on the spline from "Adaptive", to "Uniform". With the intermediate points spaced apart equally, the vehicle will now move in a more predicted way. This position value percentage is based on the number of intermediate points. In the adaptive mode, which was the previous setting, they were more points on the curved areas and so the car spent more time in those areas compared to the straight bits, which have fewer intermediate points. That was the reason for that strange motion. To quickly reverse the animation, go to point mode, "right-click", "Point Order" and "Reverse Sequence". Now it's going to be driving from this other direction. There are two main advantages to animating this way. The first is that it's really easy to change the path that the object takes. We just go to the spline and change the shape and everything will update automatically back onto the new shape. Secondly, by separating the movement of the object to the timing. It means it's very easy to create smooth looking animations because we can visualize the path with the spline. Here is a glitch you might run into also. You see when the car went around that corner, it jumps just a bit. This is to do with the way the spline was drawn. As the car goes over that particular point, it just wiggles just a bit. What we could do here is change the spline type or try and smooth it out with a curve handle. So if I go to the top, top view, there are no handles on this. Let's "right-click" and do "Soft Interpolation". Then just adjust these once again. So press "E" to be able to select the handles. Let's see if just putting handles there helped to smooth that out. That made an improvement, definitely. It's no longer jumping as it makes that turn. Alternatively, we could have changed the spline type. Let's try "B-spline". The way this is drawn is different. The points are not part of the spline, they are just guides. So as you move the points, the spline moves between those points to form the actual path of the spline. Of course, we covered this earlier in the section on splines and spline types. To maintain the overall shape better, I would have to create more points. So "right-click", "Create Points" and let's put one over here and on this straight section too, just so we can have a similar shape to what we were dealing with before. It's much more of a continuous curve now. Anyway, this would also help to fix any jagged movement. It definitely helps here, but particularly this would be very useful for when we do camera animations, for example, because this kind of setup is quite a common way of animating cameras too, by attaching them to splines. That's going to segue nicely into the next section about camera animation. But before we move on, we could also change this type to "Cubic". I think that's going to work quite well. Just in that cubic type, these points were already seemingly in the right places where I got very close to my original shape, so I don't need to make too many adjustments. But you see cubic is also producing quite a smooth animation. Anyway, let's move on to the next part and see how we can animate cameras using splines. 42. Cameras - Animating Along Splines: Here is a camera which is also being animated along a spline. We also have this target setup where the camera keeps track of our car. Very quickly, we created this very dynamic camera animation. Let's see how this was made. I want to create a dynamic camera animation to follow this vehicle here. What I am going to do is start by drawing a new path for the camera that intertwines with the path of the car. So something like the following. If we also do this in B-spline mode, it's going to make sure we get a smooth shape. I am going to begin somewhere behind the car on the left side here. Let's cut across and then maybe make a turn slightly behind the car too. For this section at the end, we are going to have our camera more to the right of the vehicle before maybe ending somewhere behind where the vehicle is going to stop. A somewhat similar path, but zigzagging through the original. In the main viewport, this is also going to be just raised off the ground. Let's make a new camera to animate along that new spline and use the align to spline once again and throw our camera spline into this. Here I run into something which I've never encountered before. The camera didn't snap to the correct position, which is the beginning somewhere over here, and also the position didn't do anything. I wondered what this was all about until I thought let me just change this sediment value to one and that seemed to fix whatever was going on there. If you run into a similar issue, you could try that. For whatever reason, zero didn't work here, although it worked just fine previously. This may be to do with the fact that we drew this as a B-spline. Maybe that introduced some extra variable I wasn't aware of, but either way, just setting this to one is going to fix this problem. We can also set this to tangential, so it follows the orientation of our spline. Let's animate the position from zero percent and at the end, we are going to go to 100 percent. So that's the full range of motion of the camera. I also set the camera spline to uniform and let's pump that up to 32. We would get some constant speed along the spline. This needs to be linear too for the purposes of this demonstration. Now looking through this so far, you'll see, of course, the camera is facing completely the wrong directions at certain points, catches up in certain areas, but it's always behind our car. What we can do is go to the camera, animation tags and target. Our target object is going to be our DeLorean, so DMC 12, drop that in here. Now no matter what part of the spline the camera is on, it's always going to be pointing towards the car. That's the kind of animation that we wanted to create. It's still quite extreme in certain areas. I think the camera just lags behind a bit too much. Also, the timing is a clearly different. This goes up to 12 seconds, the camera goes to 15. Let's match them up, that's going to help to keep these objects near to each other. So very quickly we create this dynamic camera animation. At the beginning, we can even start at a different height. I think that's going to be quite interesting. Elevated angle to begin with and then it swoops down to somewhere over here. It would be cool if on that corner as the car turns, our camera is at a very low angle close to the ground. I'm going to move that point to there. I wanted to see the car turn at this point right here and I'm also going to shift it this way so that camera can be right at this point as the car goes around the corner. Let's find that point where the car does that. It's about there. Our camera is still way behind here somewhere, so we can go to the timeline. This is the align to spline for the camera. I need to add a control key frame at this point. If I go to the camera spline, let's add a position keyframe right there. That's the point in time when the car is making the turn. The camera is way back here, so we need to go to the key value and just bring the camera closer to that point. It's going to work something like this. Let's make this linear for a second and then re-enable the easy ease. It's going to allow us to control that motion throughout that section. This kind of smooth arc. Now we have this very cool camera animation where the camera swoops down, follows the vehicle, and then as it turns here, we end up somewhere behind the car. With just a very few keyframes, we create some very dynamic looking motion. I thought this got too close at this point here. What I can do is get that particular point and just move it out here and just like that. Now this is going to be further away and then the car turns, turns again. It's probably too close right there, so we could make one more adjustment, which is bring this points in here. A bit further away from the car still. At the very end here we could even be on the other side of the vehicle. I also pulled this up at the end so that the car is going to be looking down again, but maybe pull it back just a bit. Let's see what the overall animation is going to look like. Whenever we attach objects to splines using the align to spline tag, it means we can no longer independently change that object's position and the rotation values because that is being determined by its position along the spline it's attached to. We can try this. If we go to the DeLorean and try to change the position, you see it just snaps back to the position which is determined by its position on the spline. Similarly, the rotation, we also lose control of that. You can't change the heading or the pitch, but you can change their banking since that is not determined by the spline, but that's the only thing you would be able to change in this example. If you do want to retain that kind of control to the object, you just nest the align to spline setup. You do this by creating a null object. Really you would do this before setting anything up. I am doing this backwards here, but you would just take your object, place it under that null, and then move the align to spline tag to that object or you just start out this way to begin with. Here I just need to go back to the DeLorean and zero out these values so that all of that information is now coming from the parent object. The animation is going to remain exactly the same, except now if I go to the DeLorean, I can still independently change the position and rotation data. This wouldn't be the practical use of this setup in this project example, but I just wanted to show you how you can still maintain some level of control on your objects and still animate them along a spline at the same time. You just apply that to the parent object and you can still control the child object independently of that. I can also control where the camera is pointing by moving the target, but in this example, I wouldn't be able to move the DeLorean because it would be floating, so I have to create a separate object to target instead. Let's create a null object and call this our target. At frame zero, make sure this is where you insert this. We need to also reset its coordinates relative to the parent. On this null object in the object tab, let's change the shape to sphere. Put the radius up. It's going to change how this appears in the viewport. The default for a null object is just a little dot, but this will be easier to see. In the basic tab, we can change the display color to on and I make this any color we want. Let's say a big green target and we can switch this for the DeLorean. This isn't the same place as the car was, so nothing has changed so far, but I could select it, move it to the middle of the car, and now I can change exactly where I want my camera to point. This could be easily animated at various points throughout the animation so that our car would not just be in the center of the frame all of the time as it was before. It's just another level of control that I can set up for myself. Anyway, that would be it as far as how cameras can be animated along splines and also this camera and target object setup with a lot of control, when you also create a custom target object that you can move around like that. 43. Cameras - Morph Camera: For the camera Morph demo, we're going to start somewhere back here. This is going to be our first angle. Let's just set that camera. Wherever you are in the scene when you insert a camera, that's where that's going to go. At this corner here we want that to be a different angle. Let's insert a camera there too, and continuing this corner here. If we scrub to where the car is going past, maybe a slightly higher angle here. Insert the camera and then go to the end. We are going to end up somewhere at the front. This last angle here might give us a few problems swinging from a completely different direction to this. Anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about shortly. But with these four camera angles that we have predetermined, we can select those cameras and go to the camera icon and then camera morph. This creates this whole setup here with a new fifth camera. This is the camera morph tag. We can see down here under source we have all of those cameras that we selected when we brought that in. This can be changed around and updated and so on. But the most important thing here is the blend control. If I just scrub through this, you see this blue camera appears. This is going to go through all of those different angles that we set. This is backwards currently, we need to change the order of the cameras. It should be 1, 2, 3, and 4 in that sequence. Sometimes you may get a glitch where this will refuse to update in the correct direction. In which case you just have to set your cameras in the correct order in the object list, and then you go to camera Morph. It's going to be in the correct order to begin with. Now we can animate the blend between these various cameras. At frame zero, we are on zero percent, and at the end, we go all the way to 100. We can look through our camera Morph and see what we get from the very beginning. We are going to have to do some at time adjustments to keep up with the vehicle. But you see the Morph travels through those different angles that we set up. This is not only blending between the different positions of these cameras, it's also going to blend the various properties such as focal length. One of these cameras will change to something completely different. The second position here, which is camera number 2, we could change the focal length to something extremely wide. Let's do 12 millimeters. You see that between the first camera, which is at 36 millimeter, the default focal length. When we get to the second one, it's a much wider frame. To see what properties are being blended, you go to the tag and under Morph Tracks, you will see that focal length is one of those synthesize and focus distance and depth of field will be the others. If you're using the physical camera, you can blend all of these things too. That means on the Morph camera itself, if you try to change those values, it's not going to let you because they're all being overridden by the blend section instead. If we take an overview of the scene we can see this red line. That's the path the camera is going to take. Our morph camera as it goes through the various intermediate cameras. We can change this to a couple of other modes in the tag, under the interpolation, let's choose soft 2, for example, and not really a big difference, but just a slightly different interpolation. This was one and this is two, the most different one here would be linear way. It's going to just be straight lines from one camera to the next, but this would not be as smooth. As you change between those cameras, you will see some very jagged movement so you probably don't want to do that particular mode, but it's an option nonetheless. I'm going to go with soft number 1 here and let's look through them morph camera again. We have a stabilize switch, which is going to help to keep the camera level. You see it's certain parts, when the rotation is changing a lot. If I untake this, the camera is allowed to do some tilting. But if it's enabled, It's always going to maintain a level angle. One of the things about the camera Morph is that whilst it's a quick way of creating some pretty dynamic camera animation, it's also very hard to aim precisely or control precisely just because of the way it works. There are certain instances here where the object completely exits the frame or goes to the edge of the frame and it's very hard to keep track off. In a scene like this where I would want more control, I would definitely be using the other method which we saw in the previous lesson. But even with the camera Morph there are some things we can do to try and improve the level of control. It's largely to do with the timing. At the beginning of, for example, you see the car shoots ahead too quickly and the camera has to catch up. What we can do is, at those intermediate points. There is a pattern to this, by the way. When you have four cameras, for example, let me get the Doodle to quickly draw this. This is our timeline here. We have the first and last camera and then we have camera number 2 and 3. These points will be zero percent, 33 percent, or a third, this will be 66, and then this is 100, and if we had just three cameras, it would be like this. Camera number 1, 2, 3 and this would be zero percent on the timeline or on the blend. This would be 50 percent and the third camera would be 100 percent. Then just for emphasizing this, if we have five cameras, we would have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 all with equal spacing in between. This would be 0, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75, and then 100. You get the idea right? What this means is if I want the second camera to be right there when the vehicle is in the middle of that corner, we have set the angle already when we setup this camera for the time into line up, it has to be on that 33 percent mark since we have four cameras. By luck, that is quite perfectly almost there already. But we still need the keyframe there so we can control it better. Let's type in 33.3 percent, and keyframe on that position. Move forward to the next one, where in the middle of the corner we clearly see the camera is too far ahead. Right there. As the car is rounding this corner off, we want to be here instead, but you see the camera is just slightly ahead. We go to the tag and this position here is 66.6 percent. Then we save that. The end one will naturally line up with 100 percent. With the extra keyframes, it means we can play with the curves. That's going to help us to keep up with the motion of the camera and just be able to point it a bit better at our object. This first section, we see the camera is slow to respond so we can get this handle here, make it more linear in the interpolation. Now you see we follow the vehicle closer. We get to the corner and we are aimed right to that vehicle still. In this section, there are no issues. Even this bit here, it's fine, I guess up until we start to exit the corner. Once again, we would control this with the handles. If I scrub to halfway or just after this corner, let's shrink the window itself and then adjust these handles here. It's mainly the actual last one. If I move this back this way, we see that we end up framing the car better in this section. It never goes completely out of frame. I think I mentioned this earlier when I said that using this last camera angle, which is facing completely in a completely different direction to the rest is going to be very difficult to control just that last section, but we can use the keyframes here and get quite far. You see there that's much better. This fast one could keep up a bit better at the very start. I think we just make that a bit more linear too. Now if I play this back, you see that generally we can keep up with the vehicle better. If you find your camera is missing the points, it's just a matter of creating more intermediate key frames to help you with the timing and be able to control this whole setup just a bit better. 44. Building The City: This is the starting point for this project. We have some low poly buildings, some futuristic low poly vehicles, and this highway section. I'm going to hide the highway section and the vehicles. On our buildings, we can see they're inside of this null object. There is a total of 32 buildings, and the number of the building or the name of the building which corresponds to the overall height of that particular building. The shortest one is 1,000 centimeters, and the tallest is 2,357. It's just something I did when I prepared these assets, so it's easy to identify. Also I made sure that the general footprint of each of these buildings, which are all currently is sitting in the same spot, but if I click and move them out, you can see they are indeed some separate buildings, but I made sure that each footprint for these buildings was roughly the same. So that when we arrange them in a grid layout using the cloner, it's going to be easy to create that kind of regular grid pattern with equal spacing between the buildings. Let's continue, on the buildings. I'm going to right-click and this is on the null object. Let's "Delete Without Children." This is going to remove the null object, but we still have all the buildings left behind. We're going to bring in a new cloner and throw the buildings into this. You see, no matter where the buildings were placed before the cloner resets all of their coordinates anyway. Now it's all based on the cloner itself. We are using grid array and we can increase the count. Let's say go up to 10 to quickly create a 10 by 10 city block like this. We would need to change the clones to random, so that we have something that doesn't look so repetitive. If we go back to the example, you'll see the way the buildings are laid out is a bit different. They are in groups of four instead. Then you have the highways going in between the buildings. If you look at the street level here, you can just about see you the vehicles at the lower level running across the highways. Let's go back to cinema and see how that was done. I'm going to temporarily hide the cloner with the buildings. Then we want to get a new plane and put the width and height to 800 and 800. The segments, it's going to be two and two. So we have these four segments on this square. This is what we're going to use as the guide for our buildings. On the cloner, let's zoom out here. Let's go to the mode and set it to Object, and the object is going to be in that plane. We need to change the distribution from Surface to Polygon Center. We also need to go to the Transform tab and rotate one of these, I think it's the pitch. Set this to negative 90 and the buildings will stand up upright. But clearly this is just one city block. If I were to clone this inside of another cloner, and let's just set the spacing to be larger. We are just cloning the same set of four buildings. So this is not going to work. What we need to do is to clone that guide plane and then use that as the guide for our buildings. So let's call this as such. It's the guide plane. By the way, the reason this was 800 by 800 was because these buildings, their footprint is roughly going to fit within a 400 by 400 square. So two buildings across any side, here's going to be roughly 800 centimeters. That's why we used that scale. But you would change that depending on the size of your own buildings if you were using something different. The idea is to just have a section of four like this. Let us take the guide plane and throw that into a cloner. Let's open it up a bit more. The spacing is going to be 1,200 between each of these. This is just from doing this project a couple of times. I know what numbers I'm going to need for this to work. But what's happening here is, each square represents a city block and the gaps in between are where we are going to place our highways and vehicles. So with this three by three grid, I am going to go to this cloner. Let's first of all call this one cloner guide planes, in the first corner with the buildings. So this is going to be cloner buildings. The object we are going to change to the cloned version of our guides. When I do that now you see we have the four buildings per city block. But also each one is different because it is still selecting from this long list of buildings and then randomly distributing that in groups of four. That's exactly what we want to. We can go to the Cloner Options and change the seed, for example, and that would give us a different arrangement of buildings. We can also go to the guide planes and increase the count, and you'll see it will dynamically update, and increase the size of our city block. That's it for the general city layout. We can go to the cloner and make sure we are using Render instance or Multi-instance on the buildings. But on the guide planes, this has to remain as instance because we do need each of those guides to be a real physical object. If I try to change this to render instance, then the whole setup is going to be broken, but because now those guides are no longer actual objects, they're just render instances. So the cloner doesn't see anything when we use this kind of setup, we have to make sure those are real instance versions. What's great about this is, it is completely dynamic. I can go to the guide plane and change the size of the city blocks. Lets say I want one side to be longer, I would add a segment in that direction and then just make that side longer too. That was the width, add another 400 to this we get 1,200. Then I would have to go to the spacing in that direction and add 400 to that too, that would be 1,600. Very quickly I've now created a three by two city block layout. It's a really nice setup that can be changed in a number of ways. I'm going to go back to when we just had the four though. I prefer that. We have an issue here where the buildings are noticeably facing the same direction, such as this one right here, this building with the slanted top section. To fix this issue, we needed to rotate buildings at a random 90 degree increments. If we tried to use just a irregular random effector. Let's disable Position and get Rotation. You see that it creates random rotation but it's not locked to the 90 degree increments. So you end up with something that looks completely random. We don't want that either. To do this, I had to use this custom formula effector, which is found under MoGraph effector and formula with this custom formula written into it and the rotation set to 90 degree increments. If I turn this on and off, you can see the effect. It rotates the buildings randomly, but 90 degrees at a time. So we still have the buildings arranged in a square pattern. How all of this works is beyond the scope of a beginner a class like this. But just know that if you throw this into your own C and apply it to your clones, it's going to have the same effect that you see here. If you want to really learn what's going on at a deeper level then checkout where I learned this particular technique as well this tutorial from Cineversity where this is explained, how all of those numbers work and that formula. But anyway, that would be it for this section on building the city block layout. 45. Making The Highways: Next up are the highway sections between our building blocks. Before we just try organize things here, let's go to the highway sections and unhide that. This was also prepared with this city layout in mind. The length of each section is there already determined. But once again, depending on the scale of your own scene, you would just adjust this accordingly. This is made up of these two sections, the overpass section which goes over the top, and then this underpass section which goes underneath in the opposite or at a 90-degree angle. Let's start with the overpass section. This is also going to be thrown into a cloner. This is going to be cloner highway. It's going to be in the grid array mode. Let's set the right scale for this. The distance is going to be the same as the length of the piece and if I click this, that's 400 in the z direction. The z size is going to be 400. Then in the other direction, we want to space it to be between the building blocks. That's going to be 1,200. Let's hide this other piece for now and then from here we are just adding enough clones until it covers the width of the city edge to edge in both directions. That's about 11 in x and 30 in the y direction, or z direction rather. That's that section, we can get this new section now, put that into a cloner. It's going to go the other way around. This time the distance going sideways is going to be 600 centimeters. Because if I click this, that's the size in the x direction, so 600 in the step size makes it so that these snap edge to edge perfectly. Then in this direction, it's going to be 1,200. Once again, the size of our city blocks and let's zoom out here and once again, have enough clones to go all the way to the edge of the city. 20 and 11 is going to work. Going back to the street level, we can see this is currently cutting through the pillar section of the highway section above. We need to go to that section and change the number down to 29 or 31 so that this section opens up for the underpass to go below. We just shifted where this pillars were by adding an extra clone. It sticks out a bit more either side. But that's fine. One final adjustment I would do is to go to the lower section and in the transform tab, let's use the y position and move that up just a bit. I don't want it to be completely on the floor, but just hovering, maybe at about 15 or 10 centimeters thereabouts. But that's it for the highways. 46. Making The Cars: Let's look at the setup for the cars in the scene at two levels; one on the street level, down between the buildings and then also some flying vehicles up here. The setup for that looks like this in cinema 4D. We have splines being used as the guides for the cars to be cloned onto and also to be animated along those splines. All of this is being driven by just a couple of keyframe tracks. Let's see how this would work. I'm going to reset this whole setup, which means just getting the original car models and removing everything else related to that. We also have our highways here. These are our vehicles, they're hidden somewhere there in the center of the scene. If I just solo them, you see that's what we have. The first step is to draw that guide spline. I'm going to do this in the top view. We would do the main highway first, the larger one which goes over the top. In this view, I will go to the pen to get the spline pen and set the type to linear. We just want to draw a straight line. The trick is to just start somewhere outside of the city area and cut through the middle to an equal distance on the other side. Press Escape to stop the drawering. Let's go back to selection tool, and I'm going to get that point up here. Set it's exposition to zero, and the Z position to be 10,000, a nice round number which places it right there. The opposite side, I'm going to also set that to zero and negative 10,000. Going back to the scene in the 3D view, we can just zoom down to where this line is. Let's maybe do constant shading with lines. We want to move this line over this side of the road to be somewhere in the middle. From doing this before this worked out to be at about negative 60. That placed it right in the center of this lane. We have our cars still just laid out here. Lets take them and put them into a corner. In the object settings, the mode is going to be object. That object is going to be the spline we just drew a few moments ago. This is going to be the road. I think I'm going to switch back to Gouraud shading. We need about 50 of these but you see it's too large. Let's go to the transform section and the scale X, Y, and Z is going to be set to 0.1, so much smaller than the original. But that's it, I can isolate these cloned cars, the spline, and the highway section. Let's solo these. The animation is going to be quite straightforward. But before we do that, I've noticed the vehicles are not actually sitting above the floor, so that means this needs to be higher. I think about 150 is going to work. This vehicle over here is still sticking into the ground. So what we can do is go to that particular vehicle, I think it's this 3, 2. Let's solo it by itself, and this axis modification tool we'll then use this to move the anchor point of this vehicle to somewhere a bit lower. If we exit this, bring it back, now we'll see it's going to be hovering over the road like it's supposed to. Let's isolate those elements again and go to the cloner of the vehicles here. We are going to use the offset to do the animation. If you move this around, you see it shifts the clones along the spline. Let's go to the beginning of our animation. I have set the length to 20 seconds, but we're just going to use the first segment down here. Also just to double-check, if I press Control D, the FPS is set to 24, so that's correct. At frame zero I am going to keyframe the offset, then move to one second, and I will set the offset to just one percent. Then also keyframe that, so Control and click this circle here to save that keyframe. When it's red, it means we have saved the animation. We just get this individual segment at the very beginning, the first, second, but what we can do is go to the timeline window, so Window, Timeline, Dope, Sheet, we can see the animation here on the cloner and offset. It has that default easy ease effect. Let's change that to linear using this button up here. Also, what I'm going to do is with the whole track selected by clicking the animated word, we can go to the keyframe or the track properties and change the after control to offset repeat. When we do that, we can see this black line represents what's happening to these keyframes after the play the first time. It's going to be repeated and also offset, so it will continue along that line as long as we want. If you don't change the repetitions, this is going to keep going on forever. If I just let it go like this, you see the vehicles will continue moving. Let's go to the timeline once again, we could limit this to a number of times. The repetitions I could have set to, let's say just four repetitions. That means after the initial keyframe, this will only offset repeat four more times, and then it will stop at four seconds, so that's how the self-control works. Let's make it 20 and our 20-second timeline. This is going to be playing all the way to the end because that initial segment is one second long. The keen-eyed amongst you would have seen the vehicles are going backwards, so let's go to the Cloner and the Transform. I'm going to go to the rotation heading and reverse this to a 180 degrees. Now the vehicles are going in the right direction. To copy the line of vehicles to the other side, we are going to go into point mode, press Control A to select all the points. We are somewhere close to the center of this spline, and I am going to hold Control and make a copy to the other side, just like this. This was at about what? Negative 60, this side, so this is going to be at about 120. That it's also 60 centimeters from the middle. If I go back to the regular model mode, I can see the anchor point is to the left, so I can go to Mesh x's Center and then just execute, and it's going to move that anchor point to be in the middle of our spline. Now it's shifted the vehicles, but I think I just need to reset the cloner and you see now it's working again, the side of the vehicles though should be going in the other direction. What I'm going to do is go to point mode. We still have that new side selected, but if not, I would just need to select the point at the end, which I can do in the top few very easily. I will point here, and the one on the other side. Let's go back to this view, right-click "Point order" and reverse sequence. Reset the cloner once more, and let's go to normal shading. Now we'll see the vehicles going in the other direction too. As you can imagine, we can extend this to the rest of the roads. What we're going to do is clone that road segment, so hold in the old key as we'll bring in the cloner. We're going to move this out to the same spacing as the original highways, which is 1200 in the X position. Then we'd just need more of these splines. Eleven to match the number of highways, and we just go to the cars cloner replace the road spline with the cloned guides. Let's call this cloner road guide. Go to the cloner once again and then use that here. It's going to be still recognized as a spline, although mistakenly, I think there's too many vehicles, that I think it's because we have three of these splines in the z-direction. There should only be one, so they are not overlaying on top of each other. It still works and I'm still getting a fast view port feedback. You can see my FPS at the bottom here because I went to my view port settings shift V, and in the HUD tab, I enabled frames per second. If I go to the cloner and change the instance mode on the cars to render instance. You will see that performance will improve even more. Now we're running at about 60 FPS, and if I change it to multi instance, there will be a further improvement. Now we're running at above 70 FPS, this is the best mode to be in for this. Let's just name a few things so we stay organized. This is the road number one, and cars number one, you will see why that's important in a second. If I bring back everything, let's zoom way out here. We also need some vehicles at this higher level. On our guide cloner, we're going to add another one to the Y direction, and the size is going to be 1-50, if I recall correctly. Then we need to shift the whole thing up so that this lower level set of vehicles still sit just above the highway, about 775 seems to do the job. Now we have our two layers of traffic and it's still quite responsive. This of course, needs to be replicated to go in the other direction as well. We need to copy these two things. The new one is going to be cars number two, and guide number two. We're going to isolate these two new copies with the underpass section, our lanes are the wrong direction, so I will press ''A'' for rotation on this second set of guides. Rotate 90 degrees, just hold the Shift key to select 90, but if we look from the top view, we can see that the guides are too wide. They're running at the edges of this smaller highway, so we have to change that. If I turn off the cloner for now, find the center line of the original guide, which is under here. Let's go to point mode and one side is already selected, let's start with that one. We want to move this somewhere to the middle of the road here, about 15 centimeters. I am locking this with shift to move in five centimeter increments, and that goes right in the middle there. Let's select and invert, and do the opposite from the other side. Now both lanes are in the middle of either side of that part of the road. Let's re-enable that cloner. Our cars haven't appeared yet because we need to update the object to the new guides, guides number 2. Now we'll see the cars will return, and the setup is still the same. Let's bring back everything else. We can see these are intersecting in the exact same place, so on the new guides, let's set the Y height to 1,500 centimeters. Then at this lower level, we need to move the cloner until the vehicles are once again, just hovering above that road. We started with a single spline, cloned it over each part of our highways. Then we copy the same setup span at 90 degrees, and we created all of these vehicles we see here and all of that animation is being driven by a couple of key frame tracks. I think the vehicles are going too slow, so we can go to the two end key frames and set the key value. If I did two percent, it wouldn't be twice as fast as it was moving before, but I think that might be too quick. If I open this app, the key frame is hidden I just have to reopen it. I can select it once again, I'm going to go for 1.5 instead, and that should be a good speed. The clones are all being repeated, because I think we left this in the iterate mode. Let's do random, so it looks a bit more natural. We can also apply a random effect to the vehicles, so the car's cloner. In this we are going to go to position and it's just the Z position. It's going to change the distance between one car, and the next one ahead of it. I think about 250 should work just fine. If some vehicles are going to be too close to each other, we just have to dial that back, so 250 might be too much. Seems about 200 before vehicles would be too close to each other. This depends on the overall scale of my scene. You would adjust yours accordingly. I can also randomize the roads. The guides if I get them and apply a random effector, which once again is just going to be the Z direction. If we look from a distance, the higher this is, the roads will start and stop at different points in space. We can go for a 1,000. I think that should be a good amount of fair randomness. The lanes are random and the vehicles are random as well, just helps to sell the effect a bit better. Perhaps before we end this section, a quick breakdown of the materials on the vehicles. The body is just a black material with some reflection. The windows are more reflective than that. Then we have a luminescent material from both the front, and the tail lights. Then that longer vehicle has an orange light at the front, but that's really all there is to this set of materials, very simple. One last thing we can do to help keep the scene organized is create an object called this cars, or highways, or something. Take everything related to the highways and the vehicles, place it underneath that so that if we want to, we can turn this off, and then work a bit cleaner and enable it when we want to see it, but that's it. That's how the cars in this scene where setup. 47. Lighting The City: Next up we're going to look at the lighting. Although strictly speaking, there isn't any actual real light in the scene or real illumination in the scene. Instead, the whole look is based on reflections and the luminance channels of our materials. That's what we're going to look at a bit later, but we still need to set up some lights which are used for atmosphere effect that you see this blue fog and then this other spots of orange form between the buildings. By default, this is what the render looks like. I'm going to make that a bit larger and let's go to our picture viewer or the render settings. Set this to 1920 by 1080 because I'm going to be sending some pictures to the picture viewer, just to see where we are at each stage. Just to start with, let's send the scene without any changes. I will preview this at 150 percent. Right now we have the default light, that's why we can see anything. But I want to neutralize that, so bringing in a new light and set the intensity to zero. This is now going to be my starting point. I can see gaps through the building which is the floor underneath. We don't have one, so let's insert a plane. Go to the size and just add a couple of zeros to make sure it covers the whole scene. I am also going to insert a camera so I can save this particular position I am looking at. This first light we're going to bring in is going to be blue. That's the color of our fog. The saturation will be about 70 percent. Then go to visible light and turn it to visible. In the visibility tab, we're going to set the outer distance to be much higher than this. Right now it's just about here. If I make it larger in the viewport and do a quick render, the actual size I went with for the final project was 20,000, so really large fog layer. But then I turned down the height. Relative scale put the height, which is this y value to about 17.5 percent. That seemed to work quite well. It just ends up going up to somewhere above the city like this. Let's look through our camera and do another quick render. It is working, but we have some actual illumination from the slide that we want to turn off. I just go to the light and then no illumination. We can't see anything in this preview. Let's go to, maybe quick shading with lines so we at least have some preview, but now with that fog at a low level and the illumination turned off. We have something like this. This will all start to look a bit better when we start setting up the actual materials. But it's useful to actually see just what the illumination is doing before we get to all of that stuff as well. Anyway, there is some other patches of fog in this scene. The way they were made was by once again, getting some light. Let's go to [inaudible] shading this time, we want to see the effects of these lights. The color is going to be 17 degrees orange, with the saturation, it's 70 once again. In the general section, let's enable visible light with the following settings. The outer distance is going to be 1000. We need a copy of this, and this other light is going to be blue, maybe about 200 degrees. These two are going to be thrown into a cloner. The spacing between them is going to be at 1200. We want them to slot in between each group of four buildings. If I go and type in 1200 in both x and z, let's see with a two-by-two grid that lines up between these first four building sets. We need to make enough to go all the way to the edge. Ten in either direction should line up exactly like how we want. If I were to render this out, you will see a lot of fog patches and also a lot of illumination. Once again, we don't want illumination from these lights, so turn it off. We just want them for their fog effects. I just worked out that maybe if I want to see what the buildings are, I should make a material and add a reflection layer to it and just apply it to their buildings. We're going to at least see vaguely where the buildings are supposed to be. That's a bit of a preview than just all blackness, I guess. There are too many of these lights, however, so let's create a couple of null objects and place them into the cloner, separating these two lights. Now, we are only going to get a light for every other set of clones. However, in this [inaudible] mode, we still get a regular pattern. Let's go and change that to random. If I render this out now, it's going to look a bit less uniform. These lights, I think, were stronger. The intensity is going to be 200. In the visibility tab we're going to multiply their brightness to 200 also, I could have just typed in 400 percent here it would have achieved the same as leaving the regular luminance to 100 percent. I don't know what's going on here. I must have knocked the wrong switch. There should be no illumination from these lights, but okay. It's because our reflection has some blurriness to it. Let's turn that off once again. The original blue light was turned off by accident. Let's bring that back. This is the combined look. We want to delete these two examples. We've gone from this to this now. But that's it for the basic lighting setup. I know it's a bit awkward working with a completely black viewport. Maybe what we can do is bringing a light above or something and disable that light in the renderer, but it is active in the viewport for preview purposes. Anyway, in the next lesson, we are going to create the materials which are going to help to bring this whole look together. 48. Building Materials & Shaders: There are various elements to this material that we see on the buildings, and at different layers. We are going to look at that now, but the first step was to generate some image maps which were used to build this material. For this I used a free application called JS Placement. The first map I generated was the JS Placement two type. You just click anywhere here to create the type of map you want. It's this Sci-Fi panel. You can change it to different types of maps to. But we just go with the classic set. Once you're done, you save this as the height map that's going to be the black and white map version of this. I already have mine, so I don't need to repeat this. Then we also generated a dot grid, this one I disabled some of these. So all the circles I got rid of, and I put the max pattern length up to be higher. It creates these larger looking blocks or groups of dots. We save this out and that's what we are going to use. So it's the height for this one too. You can see I've saved a bunch of these prior to this recording. We've already created the material earlier when I applied it to the buildings, so we're just going to continue with that one. Let's call that Buildings. In that color channel is where the first gray scale map is going to go into. If I just click that Texture bar and load in my [inaudible] two type map, you see it changes the color on their buildings, but it's being projected incorrectly and we need to change that. So go to the map, the projection, change it to Cubic and that, that's the Texture type, by the way, not the map, the material type or texture tag. It's being tiled too large. I found a length of 1,000 worked out quite well for this. Now we are getting this kind of thing. There isn't any illumination, so we're not going to see the effects of that yet. But we can go to Reflectance and get a new reflection layer. I think it's going to look like this normally. Let's add Reflection Legacy. The roughness is going to be at zero and specular at 02, but the attenuation will be additive. Let's add this to the layer underneath. When we hit render, we are going to start to see the buildings reflect those lights and that fog we put into the [inaudible]. It's a two reflective however, so we need to break up that reflection, and the way I'm going to do this is to use the same image in the Layer Color of our reflection. So paste it here and another quick render. We now get this kind of thing much more subdued, and I think it works better. Let's send this to the picture viewer so we can continue making those comparisons when we change something. We are now going to spend a lot of time in the Luminance Channel to create the rest of this material. The dot grid pattern is responsible for these lights that we see on the sides of the buildings, but we have more than that too. We have the highlighted edges of the buildings, those where some other layered effects built into their material. Let's jump into the Luminance Channel, turn it on and start with just bringing in our dot grid material. I'm going to pick this example here. Click now for this. It may be helpful to get the interactive render. Once again, we can see the changes as we make them. I'm going to do the whole preview window and the quality slider, this little triangular arrow, I'm going to put this all the way up to the top. Now we see the lights working once again, I'm going to send this to the render. This is before and this is after. We need to lay out those other effects on top. And for this, we need to click the drop-down on the Texture and the Luminance Channel and go to Layer. Now we can stack different effects and layers together here. The effect I am going to get is the Fresnel under Shader. You see this is going to create some bright edges over the buildings, except it's covering the whole building right now. Let's open this up and make this narrower, this white section. Bringing in the black handle from the other side, it's thinking about it, but there we go. It's covering up our bitmap image. So we need to go back to these layers and put the Fresnel blending mode to be add or screen or something, something which is going to blend with the layer underneath. I will go to the Luminance at this level and put the brightness up to 200 percent. You see nothing changes because the layer is overriding the brightness up here. So we need to put this mix mode to multiply so that it combines the two of these layers together. It's much brighter now, but I would also say it's looking too busy. There are just too many things being reflected around, but we will deal with that later. For now though, let's continue building the material, and what we want to do an next is this multiple colors effect. This was done by combining some things in the Luminance channel with the Shader Effector. So that's the Shader that came up during the MoGraph section briefly. We are now going to see one of the things you can do with that. I'm going to go back into the Luminance layer though, and this Fresnel I will drop down to 25 percent. I want the window lights to be brighter, but the edges don't need to be so bright. Anyway, there are quite a lot of steps involved with the multiple colors effect. But let's go through them now. The first step is to bring in a Shader Effector. I'm going to undo my camera move here. I don't want to lose that position I was rendering with this whole time. Let's jump out of that camera so we don't mess it up. On our buildings now let's go to MoGraph, Effector, and Shader. It's just going to make everything larger to start with. Let's go to the Parameters and turn off the Scale. So it's up here somewhere. Let's bring it closer to the buildings. In the shading tab, there are two ways we could do this. One is to just use this Shader section under custom Shader. But we could also choose color and do the set up in some materials instead. For this, we will need a new material to go along with this Shader Effector. In this new material, in the Color channel, we're going to add in a Noise Map, and that's all we do for now. Let's leave that as it is. This is going to be that Color guide material or Color Shader guide, something along those lines. In the Shader Effector, when we switch this to Color, it revealed this material tag link box. So we need a material tag to place in here. That means using our Color guide material on the Shader, and then getting that tag onto the material tag section here. I think this would actually work even if you don't put the material tag onto this link box. If the material is on the Shader Effector, it's going to automatically pick it up. But if this had been on a different null object, for example, you would have to bring that material tag in here too. But either way, the setup is going to work. So far nothing has changed because we also need to combine this Shader Effector with our actual material. Let's go to the material in the Luminance channel in the Layers, and under Shader we are going to go to MoGraph and Color Shader. Lets get back our interruptive render region, and if I render this out right now, it's just going to be a completely white with this new Color Shader. That's because we are adding the Color Shader on top of white already. By that I mean, if I go to the Cloners in the Transform tab, the default color is white. That's the base level color of the clones. I have to set this to be black, and when I do that, we are now going to see the effects of our Shader Effector. These colors are based on this Noise Map in this Color channel, which is linked to the Shader Effector, and we set this to color channel, and we pulled in that texture tag into here. So it's all linked together to create the effect you see here. If I go into the Noise Map and change the [inaudible] value. It's going to generate a different pattern so look at this building right over the center. If we change this around, you see it's changed to a different color. What we can do now is use these grayscale values to assign different colors to the material. Going back to our building material in the luminance channel, the grayscale colors are coming from this color shader. We want to convert them to color, and the way to do this is to right-click and throw this into a colorizer effect. Now we're going even further into this layer setup, and you could even go further into the color shader itself, but we're just pulling the color channel and nothing else. But inside the colorizer, we have this gradient, and we can start to dial in some colors into this. As I do this, you should start to see the buildings change color right now it's going from this orange to white, that's the range we see. We want to put in different colors in here. Maybe a teal after the orange, and we might go a bit pink, maybe back to more of a blue color. Whatever colors we put into here, we are going to see remapped onto the black and white maps from our original noise map in this setup. This appears too bright right now it's not a great preview. That's because the luminance channel is at 200 percent. If I drop it down to 100, it's going to be more apparent what these colors are doing. You'll also notice that I've weighted this range toward the left side of the color shader, that just happens to be the range where a lot of those black and white values end up. It's going to work if you shift everything this way past a certain range, those colors are not really going to show through so if I add in this extra color here, if I wanted to show up some more I would have to shift it more towards the left, but that's just how that gradient is working in this particular case. Anyway, I think we have a pretty good range right now. Now we can go back to this level and set this colorizer's blending mode to color, and it's going to overlay on top of our lights material, and that fresnel effect to give us this final look. Of course, we also need to go back and make this brighter once again, so 200 percent to bring back the strength of our lights. That's one of the things the shader effect can be used for, and hopefully that wasn't too confusing. We can go to this color guide material, and we could change the scene once again, and it's going to change what pattern we see and the buildings would be change in color. Let's render this to the picture viewer, it's better to compare these frame by frame. The default is 665, let's render that one out. Each time we change the noise map around, we're going to get a different set of colors. A couple of things to fix before we finish up this material. There are some lights on top of the buildings that we want to get rid off. If you look here, the tops of the buildings don't have any lights on them and also the fresnel effect, it fades from the bottom of the building and slowly gets brighter towards the top. Whereas right now that fresnel effect is just as strong at the bottom all the way to the top and of course, we do want to get rid of these lights. One problem at a time, let's start with feeding the fresnel from the top to the bottom. We are going to go into the material once again. For this we're going to have to create a folder. I've switched off the colorizer momentarily, and let's make a folder. Put the fresnel into this folder along with a new gradient, and this gradient is going to be 3D. If I change the type from 2D-U to 3D linear, we have x, y, and z. We want to use the y to create this 3D gradient. This is the bottom part of the gradient. The start and the end is the top. The end I'm going to set to 2,500. The reason for this is I know the tallest building in the scene is about 2,300 or so. If I just make this gradient a bit taller, that's going to cover from the smallest building to the tallest one and you can already see that the lower section of these buildings is darker and at the gradient gets brighter towards the top. Once again, if we drop down the brightness, that's going to be more obvious. It's an interesting effect in itself but here we just want to use it as a mask. We can raise that initial black point or where it starts to fade from. Maybe about here or so, and we can dial in the top part to be a bit brighter so the light will be strongest in those parts. Let's go back to this level and the gradient blending mode is going to be set to multiply. If this were a stronger, you'd see those effects a bit more obviously. This is with the gradient, it's now fading from the lower side. But if I turn off the gradient, it's just going to be equally strong throughout. Let's re-enable this and the strength of this whole folder will be about 25 or so, and we need to set the blending mode to add as we had the layer fresnel by itself so this can be normal now because it's the whole folder we are adding together these two layers combined. We can re-enable our colorizer and also put the brightness back up to 200 percent. In the picture viewer, this is the comparison before and after. I just prefer this effect where it's more faded towards the top. Then finally to cover up the lights at the tops of the buildings, we are going to use a different effect called the falloff. I've put this in the wrong place, it needs to be above everything. This uses the angle of the different parts that make up our object. If it's steeper, it's going to be brighter. If I move this gradient to make this more obvious, you will see the top parts of the buildings are now brighter. We actually want to do the reverse. Invert the gradient. By the way, this kind of thing would be used for example, if you were trying to create a snowy mountain scene, you would use the falloff shader to have the snow at the top of the mountain, and as the mountain slopes down, the snow would disappear. You would only have the snow caps at the top, much like we only have the white parts of the building here being at the top. Anyway, we want to invert the gradient so that the top parts are going to be black and also let's push the white a bit further up. We don't want to affect the sides, only the very top parts of the buildings. With this, I can go back to this level and set this layer to multiply, so the black parts are going to cover up anything below them. Sending this to the picture viewer, we get the final look of the material. So now the tops of the buildings are going to be dark. 49. Camera Animation: That's it now. This is actually ready to render, but we do need to do a quick camera animation. The way I did this was, it was this bird's-eye view, I didn't want to drop down the camera too much, because I would be seeing beyond the edge of the city, and where the cars are floating out there. But also I wouldn't be seeing the highways that we stuck down in between the city either. We want to make sure to have this bird's-eye camera angle. The center of the scene is down there somewhere, we can create a null object to see where that is roughly. I'm going to start somewhere just a bit off-center angle-wise. Let's make our camera a child of that null object. Once we find the angle that we like, go back to frame 0, and we're going to animate the rotation heading. Not really a whole lot to do here, start with a keyframe, go all the way to the end, and just maybe stop at about 35 degrees or so. From that starting point, we spun around this much. I want this to be linear. Let's go to the rotation, in the keyframe manager, this is in the timeline window, and make that linear. Just a slow panning camera like this. I think that might actually be too slow. At the beginning we can start with a negative value, let's say maybe about negative 10 or so. The camera has longer to travel now. But the original was that slow, so it's not very different, I suppose. We could also re-enable our cars, just so we can see a better preview of the whole thing. The flow material down there doesn't have anything on it, so we're going to make a black material, just turn off everything applied to that plane. I will also move it to negative one centimeter so it doesn't intersect with anything above it. This is the final quick camera angle. You could maybe increase the focal length to 50 for a closer look. That's something you could animate between frames to switch from being a wider frame to more zoomed in. That's exactly what I did in this original you see here, it jumps in at about 10 seconds. Let's go back up to 36 millimeter, set a keyframe, jump forward one frame and then change that to 50, and set another keyframe. So between those two frames, it's going to jump in just a bit. This angle looks like this. Our roads down there have a very dull material, there is no reflections, so we could maybe fix that by going to Reflectance, add a reflection legacy, set that to additive and roughness 0, specular 0, and then let's just add a Fresnel to that layer color. That might just catch a few reflections and make that a bit more interesting down at that level. 50. Optimizing Render Quality & Speed : We're now going to refine the look of the frame and set up our final render settings. Right now everything looks too busy and also the render itself is not very fine. Let's start with that second issue. We need to go to Anti-Aliasing settings. The default here is Geometry which is fast but not very good quality. Let's set this to Best. I'm going to go for one-by-one, four by four, with a threshold of five percent. The higher these levels are, the finer the render will be, but also it would take longer to render. The threshold as well, the lower that is, the longer it's going to take to render, but the render we'll also look better. I think for this scene, we can get away with one-by-one, four-by-four and, five percent. Sending this to the picture viewer, let's see if we can see a difference. This is at Geometry. This is at Best, one-by-one and four-by-four. It does look cleaner than it was previously. Of course, it also took longer to render, three seconds versus eight seconds. If I zoom in way in here to a particular area, this building with these vertical lines, you see in Geometry that wasn't looking so fine, but now it's a bit better. This is going to help with their smaller details and reflection each time when we increase the anti-aliasing like that. Additionally, I can also limit the number of reflections bouncing around in the scene. That's in Options, in this Ray Depth, Reflection Depth, and Shadow Depth controls. Now we don't have any shadows in here, but I tend to set these settings at 6, 2, and 6 just to limit how many times those effects will be bounced around and rendered. Because beyond a certain point, you hit diminishing returns where the render doesn't look any better, but takes longer to render unnecessarily. That's gone down by one second of render time, which isn't a whole lot. But spread that across hundreds of frames, that can start to add up. By lowering the number of times reflections are bounced, it does look slightly different. But also it does help to clean up the whole look. I want to continue along that same line. I might drop this down to one even. Let's see what that gives me. Generally, I wouldn't drop down to one on too many projects but in this particular example, I think the lights are being bounced around too many times and it just looks too busy once again. But with reflection levels at one, I much prefer this cleaner look. Also the render time has gone down by another second. So we've gone from this at eight seconds to this at six. Your own machine may be different but you should be seeing similar gains proportionally to what I'm seeing here. I can only do so much with the reflection depth here. I actually don't want any of those light to be reflected at all. What I'm going to do is I will clone the buildings, and apply a couple of render tags to this. With both of them selected, Render Tags and Compositing, on the first set of buildings, I don't want them to be seen by any reflection, so turn that off. But let me show you what that would look like on its own. Disabling the new copy of the buildings, with the building's not being seen by any reflections, it's going to change the look a bit too much for my liking. It's more washed out and we no longer see these dark parts of the buildings which create a better contrast. But those lights are not being reflected around as much, so the render looks cleaner overall. I like that aspect of this, but of course I still want it to be contrasty like the previous version. That's why we made this copy. On this new copy, it's not going to be seen by the camera, so untick this, but it will be seen by the reflection. The next step is to copy the building's material and switch off everything in the Luminance channel, and apply this copy of the material onto the new buildings, then the copy there. Make sure to directly replace the material tag, so that it inherits all the previous properties that we set for the projection and tiling. When I move around the scene here, we are going to get some flickering because we have two sets of buildings overlapping each other. This new copy we can disable in the picture viewer, so that when we do move around, it doesn't intersect. I've just noticed we still have our guides visible in this scene. The guide planes should also be hidden in the editor and also in the actual render too. But make sure not to hide the new buildings in the render because we're already hiding them with the camera. Let's jump into this angle once again and render this out one more time. Now we see this render is much cleaner than it was before. You may prefer the slightly busier looking frame, but I much prefer this. What's happening here is that these buildings that we can see are reflecting a copy of the buildings, without the Luminance channel turned on. Overall, there aren't as many of these small luminance being bounced around in the render, and that results in something that looks less busy. 51. Output Using Multi Passes: I'm currently outputting the final render to the picture viewer, it looks something like this. The render buckets will spin around and produce the final frame and ordinarily this window looks like this. However, if I go to the Layer section and change this from Image to Single Pass, you will see here there are several layers that make up the final image which I am also outputting separately as different sequences. We have the atmosphere layer, it's going to hold any fog of volumetric effects. Reflection it's just the reflections and the ambient layer contains everything inside of the luminance of all materials. Below this we also have some object buffers, these are black and white masks for set and objects that I set up, so you see these are the vehicles and then we have just one line of vehicles and then the other side, then the buildings and the highways in between. All of this is outputting at the same time as the regular render and it's going to give me a lot of control when I get into After Effects because I will be able to reconstruct the final image using its composite layers. The advantages of that are very obvious it means for example, if I just want to change the color of the fog, I can do that or I can duplicate the fog layer to make the effect stronger, that kind of thing. We could do the same with the reflection and even the various lights in our luminance channel or this ambient pass, and of course the masks can be used to specifically target particular objects in the render and applying separate effects to them. I'm going to go back to Image here and I've paused the render so that we can go and look at how this was set up in the render settings if we have a look, we have this Multi Pass section with these various layers and then the object buffers, and you can see each one has a different number corresponding to a different object in our scene. Let's go back to an earlier version of this before we did all of those settings in the Render settings once again, in the Save tab. Let's start with just the regular image. We're going to change the format to PNG, and it's going to be 16-bit. The file can go any where, I've already outputted this before so let's make a new folder just for this demonstration. We can call this CT number 2. Let's jump in here and make a new folder, call this one main. This is going to be just the regular main image sequence. Save that as main also and it's save. PNG 16-bit is my go-to format for I would say pretty much all of my projects, it tends to have enough information for anything that I need. There are other formats here too such as OpenEXR for example, which goes all the way up to 32-bit but that's going to create some extremely large files and really for this project we don't need anything that high. PNG 16-bit is going to be more than enough in this case. Further down we have the multi-pass image, which normally would be grayed out until you enable multi-pass up here first and it reveals a second safe path. This is where all of those various multi-pass layers and object buffers or going to go. Lets once again set up the format as PNG, and we can go back to this level and make a new folder specifically for this. It's going to be our multi folder, and we can save it as multi 2. We know this is going to output now but we actually need to set up the layers too. Let's go to Multi Pass, sometimes you can just go here and add all the image layers and it's going to add all of these various layers which would be part of our image and would be needed to reconstruct that same irregular image by combining and using blending modes and so on as you will see later in After Effects. But some of these layers here are not needed because we are not using those effects in the project, so what I'm going to do is to add these in one-by-one just based on what I know is being used. Let's go to Multi Pass and start with Ambient. This is going to contain everything in the luminance channels of the materials in the scene. Reflections is self-explanatory, then we also want atmosphere. This is going to contain the fog and volumetric effects. For this particular scene these are the standard image layers we need, there was nothing else being used here. There are some other layers which are quite common but we're not using them here, such as a specular or shadow. If we had some lights in the scene with shadows, we may want to output that too but we are not using anything like that here. The diffused layer would be the color channel in our materials but that's only going to show up if there is some actual real illumination in the scene, which in this case we don't. If I were to output this it would just be a black frame and nothing else. Let's ignore the rest of these, but we do need some object buffer layers for those different masks. Let's just start with one and the group ID is set to one, so we need to pick an object to be in that first object buffer. I will go to their Cars, let's say cars number 1, go to Render Tags and compositing and there's this tab here called Object Buffer. We can enable Object Buffer number 1. I'm going to copy this over to cars number 2 and switch that over to two, and then in both of these tags let's enable Object Buffer number 3, so each set of cars is in its own object buffer but they also share Object Buffer number 3. Let's go to the buildings and there are already some tags on this, so I'll click on the first one and this is going to be in Object Buffer number 4, this other one is not going to be visible anyway so we don't need to add this too. Finally, the highway sections are going to be Object Buffer number 5. Now we don't need to always click that buffer preset, we could simply use the box up here and type in the number 5. This means we can have object buffers beyond just the 12 which you can enable with a quick switch, you would just type in the number you need if it's above 12. Back to the Render Settings we need to insert more Object Buffer layers to match the number that we have just set up in the render tags, then we can select all of these at once and group ID just go in and change this to go from 1-5. One last thing to double-check in the Output tab, we are doing 1,920 by 1,080 that's correct. Frame rate is 24 and we're outputting the entire frame range. Before we set the render to run, we can and go and change this to Current Frame only and untick Save. We're just going to render one test frame to the picture viewer to test that our layers are working. This is how it looks normally. Once again, go to Layer, Single Pass and we can see the different parts from our multi-pass setup, so then this would be ready to go. I would go back to the Settings and All Frames once again and also enable the actual saving and output. Then go to Render and add to Render Queue. This is my preferred method for actually outputting the images, I never really use that picture viewer except for when I'm working and doing some comparisons like you've seen me do throughout this project. But for the actual final render, I use the render queue. Here is a previous version of the project I had queued up before I can just remove this here so we are left with just this new one. There's a control down here called Auto Renaming which I have switched off, and I would recommend the same if it's turned on for whatever reason go and turn this off. It's to do with when you start and stop set in sequences when they are being rendered. The next time you restart the render its going to automatically add a number to the end of the frame and what ends up happening is when we try to import those frame sequences into After Effects because those frames are named differently, they are not recognized as being part of the same sequence so just be careful. It's there to stop accidental overwriting of frames but personally I'm just more careful by not doing that because this ends up creating more problems for me than it's worth keeping on. Anyway, I'm just mentioning this because I've had a couple of questions in the class discussions about this before. The other thing is we can enable team render in the render queue that's this switch right here. If you have team render setup properly, it means you can join up multiple computers to process the final render. I'm not going to go into how that can be set up but just know if you have more than one computer available to you, you could be using those as extra rendering machines. It's definitely worth looking into if you just go on the maximum website or look for it on Google or YouTube, you will find plenty of tutorials about this. It's really quite straightforward, I just thought I would mention it here so that you guys are aware that is a feature. Anyway, I'm going to disable it here I don't want to use the other machine. I'm just going to start rendering this now. By the way this can be used to list multiple projects at once and then you set them all to render, and cinema 4D is just going to process all of them. The estimated time is currently about one hour 25 minutes, that's based on the time it's taking to render these first few frames. This estimate will constantly update but maybe it will give you a rough idea of how long you render is going to take an hour and something for this scene is actually pretty good and if it was going to take longer, I would let this render overnight or maybe leverage any team render machines which are available to me. Just for those of you who are curious about how that might look if I stop rendering here, and add the job to the render queue again. This time let's use Team Render. I have another machine that's available right now. If I start rendering, after this renders a few frames we can already see the estimated time is going to be much faster. It's going to be around 40 30 minutes or so because there is now an extra computer helping with the render. Anyway, that's it for this lesson. 52. Composting In After Effects: In After Effects where we're going to finish our scene, we need to start by just importing the render. Let's just double-click anywhere in their project section and then finding our sequence. It doesn't matter which frame we pick as long as the PNG sequence is ticked and we import; it's going to bring in the whole frame range. This is what we have for the main regular image. We, of course, have all those multi-pass layers. They are in this folder for me. These two can be opened either one-by-one. You click the frame you want. This might be easier if we go to View and List, for example. You see all the various sequences in here. You can pick any frame from any sequence and if the sequence is ticked, it's going to bring in that particular layer. If your machine can handle it, you can press "Control" and "A" at this window, but it may freeze for a while. Anyway, so I have all these selected, and multiple sequence must be ticked for this. If I click "Import", it's going to haul in all of those sequences and automatically setup the right layers. It took a while and it nearly froze again, but here are those sequences. Let's go to the first one and go to Interpret and main. What we want to do here is assume a frame rate equal to our project in Cinema 4D, so that was at 24. I'm going to click "Okay" then I can right-click Interpret, remember the interpretation, and then select all the others and paste it the same. Now, all of these will be the same FPS. We can bring the main image sequence to the New Comp button. That's what this is going to look like. I just like to keep this here for reference. There's two approaches to this one is, I can use the multi-pass layers to add on top of the original render, or I can reconstruct the original render from the multi-pass layers completely. If we bring an ambient, for example, start with that. I also need the reflection layer, so that's multi refl here. It seems I rendered specular by accident. You see it's blank because we don't have any specular materials, so that was unnecessary. But we have reflection in the comp now so we can set the blending mode of that to Add. If this menu is different, press "F4" to change between the two types of menus. Here we go. That's combining these two layers. This could also be set to screen, it's going to look slightly different, but works all the same. Let's get our atmos, which is the volume metrics layer and this can also be screened on top of the image. Now if we were to compare the original render with our combined layers, you will see that there is a slight difference may be if I put the atmos layer to screen, it's a bit closer. But it's not going to be exactly identical to the regular render image, but it's close enough in this case and I think we can continue with the reconstructed layers completely without even referencing the original. Let's also save this file just to make sure we don't lose any progress. I'm just going to call this "city comp". Another very important thing is that your color management for these important frames needs to be the same as whatever you're working with in Cinema 4D. If I go to this button over here and go to Set Project Working Space, you can see right now I am using the Display Color Management anyway. Cinema 4D uses the Display Color Management by default, so this looks how it looked in Cinema 4D and that's very important. If I wasn't using the Display Color Management and I'd go to the Set Project Working Space option, this is currently using sRGB for me, and that happens to be my screen's profile at the top here. But there is a whole host of other options that you could pick from and a common one might be, let's say Adobe RGB. We choose that and you'll see that's going to give us a completely different set of colors. If you bring in your renders and your different layers into After Effects and realized that it looks completely different. It could be because of that color management is different, so you would either use your display profile or better go to the Project Working Space and use that actual profile as well. That's going to give you the right look. One more thing to do with the color profile settings. Let's also make sure we are using 16-bit, which is the same as the bit depth we rendered out from cinema 4d. One of the things that I wanted to do to this render was I wanted to emphasize the glowing headlights on the cars. Right now, they're quite hard to see so that's why I outputted a mask just for the cars alone. What I did was I brought in the ambient layer, which is just the luminance, and then combined it with the mask for the vehicles. For this, we need the TrkMat menu. Once again, if it's not there, press "F4" to reveal the TrkMat menu. With the mask above the ambient layer, we can go to the ambient layer and change this to Luma Matte and point to the mask above. Now, if I solo this layer, we can just see the vehicle, and if I enable the transparency grid, you can see that's what we are getting. Let's un-solo this and precompose both of these layers together, and let's call this the car lights. How I did the glow on the vehicles was using the Trapcode style glow effect. I can quickly show you how to use it in this example so we enable it on the layer. The preset I'm going to use is red and the input channel is going to be the lightness. Let's go to the streak length. I'm going to drop this down to ten. But in pre-process, let's go to the threshold and drop this down so that the effect is stronger and more obvious. We can boost the light by about ten as well. That's how I was able to get these lights glowing. That might be too strong though. I also changed the transfer mode to none, but I went to the actual layer itself and set this to screen to be on top of the original render. This is before, and this is after. The headlights will be the brightest paths, but even on some of the rear tail lights you'd get some streaks coming off of that too. Anyway, I thought that was a nice detail. It makes it easier to see the cars and especially, at the lower level where the cars are in the fog between the buildings. I also applied some glow to the buildings. Once again, the ambient layer and the buffer for the buildings was number 4. Let's use the same Luma Matte set-up. Pre-compose these, and this is going to be building lights. On this I'm going to use the same effect. Trapcode as style glow. I'm going to use the red preset once again. We can leave it as lightness. That's fine. I will go to the transfer mode and set this to none and then this layer is going to be added on top of the buildings. That's how I got this hot glow effect on the edges of some of the buildings. Now, it's much stronger right now. Let's change it a bit. The strength I'm going to drop down to ten. It makes it narrower. That's the rays. Then I'm also going to press T for the opacity and let's drop this down to about 40 percent. It's not too strong, but it just creates this highlight on the brightest parts of the image. We can maybe go to the pre-process here and just bring it down to about 100. This is on the threshold. You just saw it glows on more of those surfaces. This is before and after. On top of everything, we can create an adjustment layer. I'm going to start with a standard glow effects or effects stylize and glow. We can increase this threshold but go to the radius and increase that. It's just going to create this diffused glow effect on top of everything. Maybe dial it back for a stronger effect. We see the fog in between the buildings starting to get brighter. About 50-55 with a radius of about 100-150. It's quite subtle, but I think it's a nice effect. I'll get an instance of a fog layer and let's add this on top. We can blur and sharpen this Fast Box Blur. It's going to diffuse the fog effect once more. Let's repeat the edge pixels to get rid of the dark edge. But this is only going to have an opacity of about 40 or so. I don't want it to be too strong. I'm just continuing to use the different layers to construct the final look and this is only possible because we have those multiple layers from Cinema 4D. Finally, we can have the color adjustment layer. This is going to be color correction and lumetri. My favorite way to adjust my colors. I'm going to warm up the temperature to about 25 and the tint maybe about the same. That puts in more purple into the image. They must too much, maybe about ten instead. The exposure we can do 0.5 or so, just to brighten everything up a bit. In the creative section, I started with the sharpen about 25, just to make those edges pop a bit more. That might be too much, maybe drop down to about ten. Then we have some curves adjustments down here. We can start with the red channel. I pulled this down to make the shadows cooler, then I raised green, but not by much and the same with the blue as well. In the blue channel, maybe about halfway between the green and all the channels together. With all the channels combined, we can boost the highlights to the classic S-curve to create more contrast and I'm also going to fade the shadows just a touch. From here, we can go to the vibrance, maybe do about 20 there and saturation, 120, it's going to really make all these colors very vivid much like this final example you see here. Further down we have this graphs. I like the hue vs hue slider, it allows me to change the tone of my colors. If we just put a couple of handles either side of blue, we can pick blue in the middle and make some adjustments in either direction. We can make it more blue this way or go in the other direction to make it more teal. Because the original image was rendered at 16 bit, we have a lot of latitude. What we can do in the After Effects. I would leave it around here somewhere. Maybe darken it a bit with the contrast. But I just wanted to show you what kind of process you can get in After Effects with all those layers combined together and applying various effects and so on. I never just leave a project how it was in Cinema 4D. We always have to make a few enhancements and definition touches in After Effects. It's all part of that workflow [MUSIC]. 53. Final Export For Instagram & Youtube: Let's do the final export. I'm going to go to "Composition", "Add to render Q". The output module, I'm going to change this to QuickTime, and the preset is going to be animation. We can then output this to somewhere on our hard drives. I'm just going to save it to the class folder. Let's call this City MOV. Saving as a QuickTime animation is going to create a large file size. But it means that it's going to contain enough information so that we can still continue to make changes later if we want to do so. Once this is ready to render, we'll just hit that button. If I press the caps lock key, it's going to disable this ram preview and save you a bit of performance. So make sure you do that. For my final edits, I use Premiere Pro and it's usually the final step in the process. I will do a quick import, just double-click anyway here. We're going to import that render from after effects, that huge MOV file. You see that was 2.6 gigabytes for 20 seconds. I right-click this new sequence from clip and it's going to create the sequence based on your clip. Here I would add any music I need or line things up. I can also go to the color tab and make further adjustments. This is that same Numetric color effect but it's in Premiere Pro and you can make a lot of adjustments. Because the image contains so much information, we can make a lot of changes to it without degrading the quality. That's the reason I export as a QuickTime animation. Then when everything is ready, I go to "File" and "Export media". I use the H.264 format, and under preset it's usually either YouTube 1080p or YouTube 4K depending on what resolution I need. For Instagram, I actually use the 4K preset for YouTube. But then I copy the height and link it from their width so that when it changed the width, the height doesn't change with it, and I do the scale to fill option. I always post square videos as normal video posts for Instagram, at least. This resolution would be too high for Instagram because it gets compressed down to 1080p anyway. But I find the general quality seems to be better when I post at a higher resolution than if I just post at a regular 1080p. But anyway, that's just a personal preference. You can try out different formats for yourself and see what works best. We would output this to a particular folder, and when it's ready we just hit the export for their final render. Or we can queue this up to Adobe Media Encoder. Often I would do this if I have multiple versions of the frames that I need or different ratios, for example, depending on where they're going to be posted to. When it's ready, we just hit the play button to render all of them at once. 54. Bulding The Wormhole: This is what we're going to end up with, or something similar. The main thing here is the wormhole effect that the astronaut is flying down the middle here and another section of the class is we're going to rig and animate this astronaut at mixamo.com and then bring it back into Cinema 4D to combine with our wormhole animation, which by the way, is also looped, so the initial section is only about 16 seconds long. But this fashion we'll see here is nearly three minutes, so when it gets to the end, it repeats seamlessly, so that's another aspect of this project that we're going to have to look at. In Cinema 4D, this is what the scene looks like. This is an overview, a third-person view. We see the camera flying down the wormhole effect. This blue thing you see is the fog light, which we'll see in the distance here. We're also going to throw that in at the end. If I just disable a couple of things here such as this spline rap. You see it's going to turn our tunnel into this straight shape, so the wormhole swell shape. Once we create the galaxies effect, and then we wrap it around this spline you see here, and it's also the same spline that our camera and character are traveling along, and all of that combined gives us the final effect. In a new scene, let's get an arc and that can come to a zoomed-in. Here we go. Put this into an extrude and let's see some lines on this. On the arc, we're going to drop the number down to the intermediate points here, down to one and the extrude is going to be offset to 2,500. In older versions of Cinema 4D, that's the Z movement. You have X, Y, and Z. In this new version we'll just have a single offset and then we change the direction using this control here. But automatically was correct anyway, and the subdivision I am going to set to 50. This section we have just generated. This is going to be equivalent to one of these galaxy images. There are six around the astronaut at any point, and then we also clone them into the distance. But that initial section is just six images being wrapped around in a shape like this. These are the images we are going to use for this, so let's bring them into Cinema 4D, into the Materials section. We can just click No repeatedly, and quickly applying the first image to our geometry, you can see it's all stretched and that's part of the effect. It's also going to have to be in the Luminance channel. Lets drag this color image into the Luminance channel and then turn off-color and reflectance. Also, for a better preview, we can go to each of these images in the Viewport tab, let's set the preview size to 1024, so we get a higher resolution preview in our Viewport. Right now we just have this single arc. This needs to be cloned into a circle and then into the distance and the setup for this was as follows. I created a guide plane. Let's give this 1 and 1 segments, 50 by 50 and we're going to put this into a cloner, change the mode to radio with the count at six and the plane is going to be XY, so it faces this direction. Then I can take the geometry itself, the original piece and clone that, set the mode to object and the object is going to be our guide plane. This cloner we created earlier, so this is going to be the cloner guide. Number 1, we need to change a few things in the new cloner. The pitch rotation in the transform tab, this should be 90 degrees, so this face the correct direction. Also, the distribution should be polygon center. We have one clone pair polygon from our guide. We can see they don't line up, so in the guide, the radius should be dropped down to zero centimeters and that's how that looks. This would be the single section except we're applying that same material, so let's make some copies to this. Let's start with just the six which are going to be visible and apply the rest of these materials. Just the first six so far and by the way, all of these need to be in the Luminance channel. If we open up one material and then in the attributes manager, lets actually select all of them first and enable Luminance to reveal the Luminance channel over here in the attributes. If we keep this window open and go to Color, and over here go to Luminance, we can just drag directly from the same material to itself, but in that different channel. That's the quickest way to do this, but I am going to skip ahead to when I have finished. This is the last one. We can go to all of these and disable the color and reflectance. I'm going to hide our guide momentarily here and also go to Filter and hide their web plane, so nothing is in the way. We do have another issue which is that these are currently overlapping. We need to go to the Cloner, MoGraphy factor and Random and we're going to randomize their position. Anything between 20 to 25 in all the directions is going to help to just make sure that these don't sit on the exact same spot. So we end up just making sure they don't overlap. We have fixed the overlap issue, but they're still not blending together compared to what we see here. Where going around, they do blend together and also going fine to the distance. You never really see where one galaxy or nebula begins because of the way they are blended together. A note about this is that you will need a certain type of image that's going to work better and anything that's brighter in the middle and darker around the edges, that's going to be better. All of these images share that characteristic. You see most of the detail and color is in the middle, and then it gets darker around the edges. The aspect ratio of the image doesn't matter too much because it's going to be stretched anyway, which is all part of the effect but it will help if the images are darker around the edges. Because what we can do is go to the Alpha channels of all of these and let's enable that. This is a case where we are going to have to do that trick again where we drag the same image from the Luminance channel to the Alpha at this time. It's a bit tedious, but it shouldn't take too long. After doing this, we saw the materials update in the viewport and of course, the way Alpha channel works is that the darker parts of the image will be transparent and we see they're brighter parts but we need to make some adjustments to this. If I select all their materials, let's go to the Alpha channel and we are going to drop this into a filter and then let's go into that and colorize, first of all, to make it black and white, because Alpha channels tend to be black and white, typically and it creates an improvement straight away. Then we want to create more contrast, so go and enable clipping. The low clipping is going to be at 10 percent roughly, and then the high clip bring that down to about 70. This should work in general for all the various maps, but it's also a good idea to just go in and fine-tune that based on that particular map to try and extract as much detail as possible whilst also creating a good blend effect. This one maybe is going to be 10 and 60 to just help to bring up some of that lighter areas. It was disappearing a bit too much. Maybe even as low as 50 can work here and with the low clip, we're trying to get rid of some of these gray values around the edge. Maybe about 12 percent on this particular image. Let's go to the next one and I'm just going to fine-tune this once again. This was generally darker around the edges, so 10 percent is probably going to be okay and also 70 is fine. After a few adjustments, this is where I ended up a quick render. This is one of the single sections. Now we need to clone this going back in that direction as well. For this, we need to update our guide. We are going to clone that initial section a second time. It's going to be a Linear clone and it's going to be in the Z-direction, with the space of 2,000. Going back that way, if we update our cloner to be this new level, we see we have just extended it backwards and then we can go in here and add more clones. The number was 10 in the original example and each section is 2,000 centimeters. Altogether, that's going to total up to about 20,000 centimeters. Remember that number because it's going to come up later. Now, our geometry is actually a bit longer than 2,000, which means that we're going to get some overlapping in-between the various sections, which, of course, is something we want in order to blend between these different nebulas from one to the next. With our guide updated, we can also throw in these maps, these remaining three. Let's make a couple of more copies of the extruded sections. This is 7, 8, and 9. This is going to help break up the repeating pattern we were seeing a moment ago. We can to also go to the cloner and set this to random. That's going to help with the general effect, except in some cases, it's actually worse. A better way to create more randomness would be to have more materials to work with different colored galaxies and nebulas, for example. We don't have more images, but there is a trick we can do. If I change this back to iterate, I am going to copy all of these just once. In all of them, let's go to the color channel or the luminance channel where the color is coming from. We are going to drop this into a filter. We want to use the hue slider to change the colors. On this first one, we can go into the filter. Then just by sliding the hue, it's going to generate a different colored nebula. We can just scrub through the entire range and see what's going to look good. I find a lot of the time, you could just go halfway at 180 degrees, which is going to give you a color far enough from the original two where it's going to be quite different. But you don't always have to go at that far. Sometimes just a minor adjustment is going to give you something that looks different. Anyway, with this one, I'm going to go further to the end. I quite like these teal and purple tones from this. Let's stop about there. On this one, we could go maybe just halfway again. It creates this really cool orange in the middle and then the cyan around the edges. On the mat number 4 copy, we can just move this one slightly, but maybe over on the other side. Just a more red version of itself and just go through these, making those those kinds adjustments. It shouldn't take too long. We could even do things like mess with the saturation, maybe about 10 percent extra on this one. That's it. I would be happy to stop there. We can view our materials with the larger icons, so we can see the preview is a bit better. Let's copy more extruders to map these extra materials onto. Copying all nine at once. Then starting with this new copied material with the different colors we're going to add to this list. With the extra variation, it's going to help sell the overall effect. Let's call our cloner guide number 2 and close it or rather hide it so it's not in the way. We have good blending going around this way, but the in-between, it's a bit too empty there. You can clearly see some gaps from one section to the next. The way to fix this is to simply select the extruded sections and increase the offset. We are going to go with 4,000, which is going to make them overlap some more and close up those open areas. That's looking pretty good. Let's go and just bring back our web plane. It's always a useful guide. The next step here is to create the swirling tunnel effect, because right now, it's faced completely straight. This was done with the helix spline, which I rotated 90 degrees or 180 degrees rather and set the height to 20,000. That's going to be the height of this single section, altogether. Unfortunately, this is a bit broken in Cinema 4D 23 and I couldn't quite work out why. You see this helix spline is supposed to be perfectly straight to where it begins, but for some reason, it does this weird hook thing. I tried this in version 21 and there was no issues. I think it's just a bug in 23. But we can fix it by going to the intermediate points and setting this to none. Now, it means that our spline is not going to be as smooth, so we need to compensate for this by going to the helix spline and then setting the subdivisions to something much higher. I am going to go for 1,000 just to make sure we still get a pretty smooth spline. It's going to be important when we do things like attach our camera to it. We want some smooth motion when the camera is moving along that spline. Anyway, this is going to be the helix rap because along with this, we are also going to take our cloner setup and put this into a Connect. Let's just put that under there. This turns this into a single object and we are also going to override the axis of the cloner. Click "Center Axis" and if I zoom out from a distance here, this is when the clone I was using, its own axis, just basically how we built it and overriding it with the Connect object. It's possible to actually just wrap the cloner on its own on to the helix spline. But from doing some tests, I found I got better results by putting into a connect first and then wrapping it on to their spline, which, by the way, for that, we need to create a new null. Place the connect under this, get our Spline Wrap Deformer, put this in the same hierarchy, but below that connect, and you will see it will automatically contain this whole Connect setup so we know it's working. But then we also need to set the spline. In the spline wrap controls and the object tab, throw in the helix into the spline section. Something is happening, but in the wrong direction, so we need to change the axis from x to z plus, and now you see it's being wrapped along our spline. If we get a camera, we can animate it to go along there too. I'm going to hide the spline wrap there so we don't see it in the viewport. Let's get a camera and looking through it, we're going to go to animation tags and align to spline and using the same spline as our wrap. But maybe it's a good idea to separate these, so make a copy, call the new one helix camera. Exact same properties, just a different object, and use that on the spline path. Right away, it's going to snap to somewhere at the beginning. If I were to scrub through the position, you see it would travel through that spline or along that spline. Click tangential to make sure it's always facing and following the orientation of the spline. That creates a better motion. This is the value we are going to animate. Go back to frame 0 and my timeline is going to be at 20 seconds. While [inaudible] , let me check that I am using 24 FPS, so "Control D," "Project Settings," and FPS is going to be at 24. At frame 0, let's set the position to zero percent as well. It looks like it's facing the wrong way here. It's just another glitch I encountered. But I'll show you how to fix that shortly. Let's go to the end and put the position to 100 percent, and set that keyframe as well. Looking through the camera now. There is a weird glitch at the beginning, but the rest of the way, everything is fine. We need some linear motion though, so let's go to "Window" and "Timeline," and open this up here. Press "S" to frame all of the track and then make it linear. It's going to be a constant speed throughout. Also, this glitch at the beginning, it's only at frame 0. From frame 1 and onward, it's fine. Actually, we need to take out that first frame anyway and you will see why shortly. It's not really too much of a problem. 55. Making The Wormhole Loop: After doing the initial camera animation, we need to make sure this also loops. The way these works is, we have to put everything into a new null object. Let's call this Main Section. That includes our Spline Wrap setup, and the actual spline involved in that, that needs to be part of this. There is a stray cloner here that shouldn't be there, let's remove that. Even these guides and random effector should be part of this main section setup. Then we want to take this whole section and place it inside of a cloner. So I just throw that in there. The mode is going to be grid array, that's fine. We want one in the x-direction and three in the z-direction. The spacing for that is going to be 20,000, so that number is coming up, again. What this means is that all of these are going to line up edge to edge, like you see here. There is a bit of a gap in between which we can address shortly. But it means that at frame zero, or I guess in our case, frame one, when the camera corrects itself, what the camera is seeing at this point, if I look through it, this right here, is going to be the same as what the camera sees when it gets to the end of the animation because this section here is a direct clone of the first section. That's how the looping works. Just to play this bucket list once, we are going to start at frame one and ignore frame zero. So starting from here, let's click "Play". We can jump over closer to the end here and when it reaches this point, it's going to jump back to the beginning and loop. Now the only hitch there was just to deal with the processing Cinema 4D does when you restart the animation. But if this were rendered out at full speed, that loop there would be more seamless. Overall, we know the looping is going to work, but we also have this issue here where there is a gap in between the clones. We need to close that up a bit more there. The way to do this is by, let's just disable the cloner for now. We need to make a copy of the Helix Wrap. This is going to be Helix Wrap Large. It's going to be a longer version of the spline we started with. It's going to be twice as long at 40,000 centimeters, which means the angle also needs to be double to maintain the same swelling shape. It's the same, it's just it extends beyond this initial point, and continues that way. Also, the number of subdivisions should be double just to make up for the longer shape. Then we can go to our Spline Wrap, and switch it for this new longer one. Drop that in here. Now that makes it too long, so we need to go to the Spline Wrap and change a few things. We could either just lower the To point. Right now it's running along 100 percent of this whole spline. We can bring it back to 50 percent. That wouldn't be the same as the same position it was going up to before. If I turn the cloner back on, then go to the Spline Wrap, I can change the To value once again, and just go beyond 50 percent slightly. As I start to do that, it's going to close up that gap that we were seeing between one clone and the next. From a distance, it looks like we could close that up just a bit more, maybe about 54 percent. We could have also changed it to keep the original length. Now this means we have to bring this closer to 100 percent again. The original length refers to how long our initial connect section was, and it was close to about 20,000 except it was just a bit longer actually. That on 100 percent is also going to do the job because it was actually slightly longer than 20,000. Anyway, two ways to skin a cat as they say. We have just seen that here I'm going to use the other method and go to about 54 percent. When I jump through the camera again, and we get to that section, you see it remains nice and closed up all the way through. 56. Animating The Astronaut: Next step is the setup for the astronauts. Here is the model I am going to use. Unfortunately, I cannot share this one with you because it was a purchased model from this particular user on CG trader. He has several models similar to this one. If you guys follow pages like mine on Instagram or similar, you would have seen several of these astronauts in different animations. Particularly this one here, the Mercury astronauts is quite popular. Anyway, I was using the interstellar one. We're going to upload this to Mixamo and rig it animate it and bring it into cinema 4D. Let's see how that works. This is a version without their materials which we can always reapply later, but we're going to file and export this. It needs to be an fps file for Mixamo to be able to recognize it. Let's click "Okay". We can save this anyway, I've done this before, so I'm just going to cancel that. Go back up to Mixamo. By the way, if you don't have models of your own, once you log into Mixamo you can go to the characters section and maybe just try out some of these other ones just for experimenting with. Then when you know how to do this, you can then try with some custom models. So Mixamo isn't just a library of animations. You can also have some characters, although I don't know why that's not changing. I just did to refresh. This is a pretty cool looking sci-fi one that maybe you guys could try out this animation with. But we are going to upload our own character. Let's just post that here. It's going to take a couple of minutes to process. This model in particular is very well-made. The mesh isn't too dense. It's detailed in all the right places and very optimized. Also it's in a fairly neutral pose, which is going to help with the rigging process in Mixamo. When you're looking out for characters, you want to make sure that the meshes are not too dense. That the poses that you get them in are neutral enough to where Mixamo is going to be able to rig on top of that. This would take a moment to load. Once it's uploaded, it's going to open up this auto-rigger window. This first section allows you to change the orientation of the character. If maybe it came in wrong, but it should be from the front like this. Let's click next. In this section we are going to help Mixamo identify their body parts on this character. The chin just somewhere near the face where the chin might be. The wrists, in this case, here, it's symmetrical, so it's going to line up the other side automatically. But if your character isn't symmetrically, you can untip this and place the individual size one at a time. But we're going to keep it symmetrical on this one. Next are the elbows. Let's put them roughly where they look like they should be and then their knees and the groin. When everything is all set up, we can just click next. It's going to take about two minutes to process once again. Just give it a moment. After a while it's going to be rigged and if everything has worked, your character is going to be moving around like this. We can click next, so we can apply some preset animations onto this. The one we want is called flying. If I search for that, it's this one right there. It flies away from their center of the scene. We want it to be in place. There's an option for that here. Now if I hit play, we see it stays in place. This is useful because we can then animate it to move in our scene however we want, but we do want the animation or the motion of the hands and legs and so on. The awareness control is going to change how much the character is looking around. Something like that. I think about 25 should be fine. The arm's can also be changed around. You could fly like Superman for example. But I prefer this pose here. There is some weirdness going on with the oxygen pack. It's getting squished. So we're going to have to fix that in the Cinema 4D. But that's okay. The Overdrive just controls the general speed of the animation. Let's go for 25. Something a bit slower, and Character Arm-Space. You can imagine what that does. I'm going to keep that at neutral 50 though. Then once we're happy with all these parameters, we can download the character. It's going to be at 24 fps. That's the only thing I'm going to change here. Then download the animation. This is it right here. I'm going to drag it to Cinema 4D. It thinks about it for a few moments, but it shouldn't take too long. Here we go. It's the same character even with the materials that were applied before. If we want to combine this with the textures that it came with we can still use these materials and load the textures into that. In the actual final example, I didn't use the textures from the model. I just created this super shiny material so that I would reflect the wormhole around onto the model. We don't need this camera. Let's get rid of that. Press S, with all of this selected to frame it again. One of the things we want to do is attach the astronauts to the same spline in the other scene so we can animate him going down the wormhole. That would be on a null object, which I am going to move up to where the astronaut is. Then taking everything and placing it under this, we could then attach the align to spline tag onto the null object. But look what happens when I move or scrap anyway in the timeline. This is going to jump immediately to away from where the null object was placed. That's because the Y position on this mixamorig is key framed. Whatever we try to do, that value is always going to be relative to the parent object. In order for this to stay where we want, we're going to have to remove the key frames from that particular track. Just right-click animation and delete track. It's not like this is moving up and down any considerable amount anyway. Let's just get rid of it and make our life a bit easier. Now I could take these out of here and create a null object, leave it at the floor level, go to this and zero out the Y position, place it into their null. Now you see that it stays in the same spot. I also noticed that between uploading and redownloading this from Mixamo, it changed the scale of the astronauts. This is a two meter cube. You see the astronauts is huge compared to this. We need to scale the scene down. Press Control D to bring up the project settings and scale project. We can put the current scale as 10, and then the target scale as one. It's going to scale this down by a factor of 10 or an effective scale of 0.1. If I click okay, it's going to shrink it down to size. Now compared to a two meter cube, you see the relative scale is much more correct here. This is supposed to be about six feet tall. That's a bit better. It also means that if we copy this out of this scene, so edit and copy, lets call it Astro first of all. Then go to window and go back to our other project. Edit and paste. Let's look out of this camera. The astronaut is somewhere in the center of the scene, which is right there. We can disable this cloner for a moment so we can see where the scene starts. This is the right scale I had in mind for the astronaut to be compared to the wormhole that he is going to be flying through. He needs to be animated along the same spline. I'm actually going to move him back to that zero point again. Let's create another null object. Call this one Astro Move, and place the astronaut null into that. We have nested this twice. You'll see why that's important shortly because when I attach another Align to Spline tag to the astronaut, move object and use the same spline as the camera. We can put that in here and take tangential once again. It's facing the wrong direction clearly here. Let's just animate the position. At frame 0, 0 percent except we need to make sure we're at frame 0. Frame 0 is going to be 0 percent and 480 which would be 20 seconds. This should only be 16 seconds. That's a mistake I made somewhere. Let's go to 16 seconds and set the position to 100 percent and key frame that. That's way down there somewhere. Let's go to Window and timeline dope sheet and this new align to spline, we want to make sure that is linear too. We still have the old camera spline and by the way, we should name these so it's easy to identify. If you click the tab you can actually go to the basic tab and there name it so you know what it's supposed to be. This is astronaut. If we scrap back to the beginning, we can see that first frame is still broken but from frame 1, it's the right way except it's just backwards. That's why I nested this twice because I know I want to be able to change the direction the astronaut is facing just by changing this value and the main null object is still facing and going along that spline. That's the thing we get. We don't need this old camera anymore, that was just to demonstrate and setup the loop. We are going to create a new camera behind the astronaut. Let's get the camera and look through it, place it underneath the Astro Move null objects so that when we play this it's going to follow the astronaut at the same rate. We just need to change their relative position to the astronaut. On this in the coordinates, the X position is going to be zero so it's right down the middle, no heading rotation and no banking. Let's go to the Object Tab. It's going to be a really wide camera which is how we create this very extremely stretched out nebulous effect. It creates a sense of a greater speed. We just need to be closer to the actual astronaut. In the coordinates, we're going to adjust the Y position and Z position to be closer and behind like this about 60 for Y and negative 40 for the Z position and then the rotation pitch was angled down at negative 10. So at 0 it looks like this. Let's look down a bit to negative 10 degrees and this was the final camera angle. We can see our astronaut is animated but after a certain point, completely stops moving. Let's go to timeline, these are the key frames driving the astronaut animation. The total timeline is 16 seconds. What I'm going to do is extend these original key frames which currently come up to three seconds and 17 frames. We're going to extend them to go up to four seconds. If you select the whole track with the parent up here, it's going to select all the rest and then grab this bit here, you can actually stretch out or shrink key frames to make them play slower or faster. Moving them up to four seconds is just going to be slightly slower than before. Make sure this is right on four seconds. It also means we can repeat this section because it is looped. A lot of the animations from XAML are looped as you download them. We can just repeat that. Click on the key frames again and in the trap properties under after, this should be set to repeat. If I open up one of these tracks as we change the number of repetitions represented by this black line, we want to extend this to 16 seconds like that and because it was four seconds to begin with, it's going to fit four times into this timeline. The original run of actual key frames and then this repetition we see and this is happening to all of the tracks that we have selected prior. Now, when we go back to this, the animation is going to continue and play all the way to the end of our setup. To finalize the animation, we're going to have to clean up this scrunched backpack because that doesn't really look good there at all. We can find that part. It's this gears on the astronaut. We need to make a copy. Let's solve the copy. Go to point mode and it's going to jump up to here. Let's go to the top view and I have the Lasso Selection. I'm going to get that part of the model and the selection is going all the way through to some stuff I can't see. When I go back to this view, you see it selected all the points. Let's say I delete this and go back to the astronaut again. We need the gears which still have their backpack. That's the original one. I did this a bit backwards, I should have deleted it off the original but it's okay. Let's isolate that. Go to point mode and this time we're going to remove the front part, so everything else but the oxygen pack and that's it. We can go back to model mode and live selection, bring everything back once again. What we want to do now is to remove this gears from the skin. That's what's holding this character together along with the bones to create the animation except here it's just crunching it too much. When we do that, you see it jumps back to its original position and it's not being deformed. Now we want to take this and place it back onto the astronaut. But first let's go to Mesh, Axis and Axis Center and execute to bring back the anchor point to the middle of this object. It's going to be easier to rotate it down by 90 degrees and then move it to roughly where it's supposed to be. These belts at the back here are supposed to click into this angled section here, so something like that. Maybe that's too sloped, let's bring it up by five degrees and then move it up. About there should be pretty good. The problem is that when this moves, it's not moving with the rest of the body. But if we go into the RIG and find the spine which is directly below spine number two, we could put the gears underneath that. When that moves, it's now going to move the backpack with it. It's not 100 percent perfect solution but I think it works okay here. With that fixed, we have completed the setup. I have re-enabled the cloner and we're just going to preview this one time in full just to see if everything is working as it's supposed to. That glitch we can avoid it by starting at frame number one. Let's go to the end and there we go. The reason by the way that frame is going to get cut out and there's not going to be any issue is because, if it was working like how it's supposed to, if this spline wasn't broken at the beginning, that initial frame would be the same as the last one because that's how the looping works. What the camera sees at the beginning is identical to what it sees at the end. What this means is that, if we were to play back the loop on a timeline back-to-back, that first and last frame would be actually repeated every time the loop plays. We actually do want to get rid of one of them anyway for a more continuous loop where we're not doubling up on that first or last frame. Hopefully that makes sense. But either way, cutting out that fast frame is not going to be a problem. 57. Lighting & Render Settings: We're going to set up the final render settings and output in this section, but also we need to do the materials and this light we see just ahead of the astronaut, this blue volumetric light. Let's start with that. It's going to be just a normal light. Let's set the color. It looks like it saved it from the last time I did this. This is also going to be animated along and Align to Spline, and we want to use the longer spline from our setup. The Helix wrap L, drag that into the spline in the tag here. Spline path and this is always going to be ahead of the astronaut. At the beginning, it's going to be 7.5 percent. You can just about see it right there. Set that keyframe. I should make sure this is at frame zero and then go to the end, and it's going to be at 57-and-a-half percent. Plus 50 brings it relative to the astronauts in the same place as at the beginning. Because the spline is 40,000 centimeters compared to the 20 that the astronaut is traveling along, just 50 percent of it is equivalent to the same length. That's why we went from 7.5-57.5 which is 50 percent, except it's always just ahead of the astronaut right there. It's easier to see if we go to the General tab and enable Visible light with the default settings that is not large enough, we have to go to the visibility and the outer distance is going to be 5,000 centimeters. We can see where the light is coming from. But there's another issue here which is we can see through the alpha channels of the galaxies. We should really enclose this inside something to block being able to see, and it certainly doesn't work so well with this fog effect here. The way I fixed this was if we jump out, get a circle and a sweep, a copy of the long spline. Hold Control and drag out of there and put both of these under the sweep to generate the geometry. This circle needs to be large enough to contain the galaxies. It seems maybe about 220 might be enough. But more than that, 225 seems to be enough everywhere. We can jump back to the beginning and a quick random now, it's going to show us that we can't see through that anymore. Let's create a black material for this and apply it to the sweep, also at the beginning and the end. This should be open. If we go to the Caps, Start and End should be open like this. Looking through the camera again with a [inaudible] light, which we should make sure is linear. This new Align to Spline should be linear for some constant motion. Now when we render, we can see the fog is contained within the wormhole. Maybe we can make it brighter though. Let's do 200 percent and I think that's closer to the effect we see in the example. I moved it closer to five percent and 55 percent. It's definitely more obvious, but maybe we would reduce the visibility to 4,000 perhaps. Maybe 2500, I guess that was a bigger difference than I thought. I think that works for the astronaut materials, we are going to go to all of these. Go to the Color channel, and this is going to be black. In the reflectance channel, let's add a reflection legacy. This is to all of these at once. The roughness I'm going to drop down to zero specular strength and additive. I don't actually want any specular here, so let's remove that. I do want it to be reflective, but even this is a bit too much. Under Layer color, let's go to Texture, and Fresnel. That's going to create a better effect. The material preview is comically large here. Let's bring it back down to the default medium. We can actually see all of them. I want to go to these materials and in the luminance channel, put the brightness up to maybe 120,125. The Mix Mode should be Multiply for this to work. It's going to make the effect brighter and also on the reflections. Let's go back to this material or this group of materials. In luminance, we are going to go to Fresnel, and that turn that on. Maybe make it narrower by bringing down the black level and on the gradient, it's going to be that same blue as our light. Maybe with less saturation though, about 85, 80 percent and I'm also going to make this brighter at maybe 122 multiply and this should be white up here for this to work and there we go. If all is set up correctly up to this point, it means anywhere we go and do a quick render, all of these colors are going to reflect off the astronauts for a really cool-looking effect. I would say this example, compared to what we are looking at right now, this was not as full. You can see more gaps in between the various galaxies, whereas here everything is blending in a lot more. To control that aspect, we would go to the Connect and the arc [inaudible] in here. If I search for arc using the search tool, I can select all of these and the end angle, if I lower it to something like 60, that's going to open up the space in between. That could be one customization you could do for this. But I think overall I prefer the more closed look where the blending is stronger between the various layers. At 90 degrees are liked that look. It just controls the amount of overlap between the images. This is ready to render. Let's go to the Render Settings, and we're going to start by going to best one-by-one, four-by-four, and threshold of five percent. This should be enough to give us a pretty clean image, and we then go to options, reduce the array depth to six, reflection to two, and shadow to six, even though they're not shadows in the scene anyway. This should help to speed up the render just a bit. A quick preview. We can see that this looks cleaner definitely than before with the best anti-aliasing. I spoke about this in more detail in the futuristic city lesson. If you go to the rendering part of that, everything we are going through right now was covered in more detail in that section. There's no need to really repeat most of that, except we're just going to set it up in a similar way. In the Save tab, under Format, we're going to go for PNG 16-bit, and we need to set a safe path. I'm going to use this location here. Let's create a new folder called main and because I've done this before, this is going to be main 2. In here, we can save the sequence as main. Then we need to enable them multi-pass layers. Let's set the same safe path acceptor. Let's open it and save it in a separate folder called multi 2. Just so I don't override the test I did earlier, this is going to be PNG 16-bit as well. The multi-pass layers would need as follows. The ambient, which is going to contain the luminance materials. Reflection, which is pretty straightforward and atmosphere, that's going to contain our volumetric effects, in this case, it's just the single light. I also want an object buffer or mask for my astronaut model. Let's go back up to our object, get rid of this search here. Go to the astronaut and apply a Render tag, Compositing, and it's going to be an object buffer number 1. We can try and quickly test this out before the main render. Let's go to output and do current frame only for now. It's at 1280, 720, that's okay for a test, but we're not saving anything for this. We just want to check the various layers are going to render. There we go. That's the normal render. If I go to layer and single-pass, we can see our atmosphere layer, reflection and ambient, and also this object buffer which is a mask for my astronaut. I want to apply effects to the astronauts separately from the rest of the frame that's why I'm outputting this buffer here. I know this is going to work just fine. Let's go back up to the render settings and in output, we can do 1920 by 1080 and the frame rate is going to be at 24 and all the frames. Make sure you always check you are outputting all the frames for their final output. I have done it before where I chose one current frame. Set the render to go and then woke up the next day and realized I had only outputted one frame. Not a very fun situation to be in. For the final output, I am going to use the Render Queue and something which is going to be turned on on your own machine by default probably is this Auto renaming feature which is supposed to stop you from overwriting your own files, but I find it creates more problems than it's worth. When you end up with the same sequence with different names and then when you import it, it thinks it's two different sequences. I just don't use this feature at all. I just try to be careful with not overwriting anything and normally, this is ready to go, and of course, it's called Untitled 4. A lot of my projects are called untitled. Anyway, we just hit "Jobs" and "Start rendering", and this will start to output so that first stream is completely broken but from frame one and onward is going to be fine. I can see the estimate how long it's going to take, and sometimes it will flash up how long a particular frame took. But this should be quite quick. There's not a whole lot going on in the scene. If it was going to take longer, I would line up a render, let this overnight or if I'm stepping away from my computer for a few hours, I would leave the Render Queue running. Of course, you can actually line up several jobs if you have a lot of stuff that needs to be rendered. Anyway, that's it. When this is finished, we can go into After Effects for the final part of the project. [MUSIC] 58. Composting In After Effects, Final Export: In after effects, let's import our sequence. Just double-click the project section to open up the import dialog and we're going to just get the first frame here. PNG sequence is ticked. So it's going to automatically detect the whole sequence. We also have the multi-pass layers and we could do this one by one, which is, you just select that particular frame from that layer or multi-pass. Let's also go to view and list here, might be a bit easier to identify these. They are all rendered to the same folder. We could start with ambient. Let's move across and do the utmost. This is one way to do this and it shouldn't take too long, but you could also double-click and do all of this at once. Control A and then this may freeze, so if that keeps happening, you just have to do this one by one. Anyway if everything is selected, we can do multiple sequences and then import. Let's go to our main layer and I'm going to go right-click "Interpret" and "Main", and we need to assume a frame rate the same as we were working it in Cinema 4D, so that's 24. Then we can remember interpretation and apply it to the other sequences too. Then we can bring this to a new composition button. It maybe worth just doing a test render from frame one. Press "B" to set this as the beginning of this sequence and maybe do half quality. Here is a preview of the full animation. We want to check to see if the loop works at the end here. This is something you would probably check, earlier in the project, but I had done this a couple of times before and I know there was going to be no issues. When we first put this in their composition, let's make sure that we are using the correct color management. If I go to this drop-down, I'm going to go to project working space. That's this icon with the three colored dots and in here we are using 16-bits per channel, which is correct because that's the bit depth were rendered out our frames at. That's going to allow us to extract as much information as possible. My working space is this sRGB profile at the top. That's my actual displays working color space. This looks just like it did in Cinema 4D, but there are several other color profiles here. A popular one is Adobe RGB, for example if I choose that one and click "Okay". You will see my image is going to look different. It's not as saturated as sRGB was and I would have to make some adjustments to this in order to get the same look and feel that this frame looked like in Cinema 4D. Really this should be matched to our render and how we have been working up to this point. But I just want to emphasize that if you find your images are not looking like you expect, it could be to do with that color management section. Just to make a few changes on top of this. This is pretty much how I want it to look, but I want to just make the astronaut stand out a bit more. For this, I'm going to use the ambient pass. I want to make use of these edges or this outline effect with the funnel. Using the ambient layer and the object buffer for the astronaut, we can go to the track matte menu. If it's not there, press "F4" to cycle to it and then on the ambient layer, let's go to Luma matte and point to the layer above. Then we can right-click "Pre-compose" to move these two layers to a composition on their own. Let's call this the edge effect. What I can do with this is stylize and glow. Let's lower the threshold to make it stronger or weaker, about 40 percent. The radius may be go to about 20-25. Set the bending mode to add or screen. It blends on top of the original image. This is a quick before and after. I'm also going to take the main image sequence and bring it in here with another buffer. Let's do the same Luma matte and pre-compose these two layers also. This is going to be astronaut pre-composed one. I'm going to move the edge effect to the top, disable it for a moment. Duplicate our new astronaut pre-composition, and on the lower one, I'm going to go to blur and sharpen, and do a fast box blur. Let's put the radius about 20-25. It's going to create this outline around the astronauts, but it's not going to appear really that much until I change the blending mode to add. It's going to create this glow below the astronaut and then combining that with this other effect up here, it's just going to help to make the astronaut stand out a bit more. On top of everything, we can now do some color adjustments with an adjustment layer, go to effect color correction and lumetri color. This is my favorite color adjustment tool in both after effects and premier pro. Let's start with the temperature. I generally like to warm up my images so about 25. Sometimes adding a bit of purple can work in the tint. We could try green there the side, but that doesn't look as nice. Leave that tint neutral. We could do things like adjust the exposure and because these are some 16-bit images, there is quite a lot of latitude in that, but it's already a bright enough. I think we don't need to really do too much. We could lower the highlights if we maybe think it's blowing out too much, maybe about negative 20. Not a huge difference, but noticeable in the curves. Let's go to the red channel to start with. I'm going to lower the red, and then in green, we can fade the shadows. I'm going to do the same in blue, but not as much, so about halfway as much as green. Then in the master curve which combines all three we can maybe just create a bit of contrast, that sort of shallow S-curve, and maybe fade that even more. This would be a pretty good final look. Perhaps there's too much green in the shadows though, let's diode that one back just a bit. We can go further down to the hue and saturation curves section to make some adjustments here. The hue versus hue, we can use this to change colors from one to another, let's save the blues, will create a couple of handles either side. Then select the blue color. We can make that more sine or more blue by going down in this direction. If you go to far, it's going to change it completely. Once again, we have enough bit depth information to be able to make these color adjustments. I'm maybe just going to put in a bit more blue, but not much else. We could go to the oranges. This handles, by the way overlapped and come back around to the side. The other handle I would have to put about here. Then for the oranges, if I move it, you see it affects the other side. Maybe here and just make them a bit more red, but not too much. That's all the composition work I'm going to do here. A lot of the look was achieved in Cinema 4D, but I just wanted to make those adjustments. This is the original frame, and this is the one with the adjustments. We didn't end up using all of the layers in after effects, but we did use the ambient on the astronaut and maybe we can use the reflection to enhance that part of the frame. It's the only thing on this layer, I don't need to mask it. We could just add it on top of our original, but that might actually be too strong there. Maybe only at about 20 percent should be fine. Anyway, let's export this. Go to composition, add to render queue. Before we do that, we should make sure to cut out the first frame. If I press the "Page Down" key to advance forward one frame and then press "B", that's going to make that the beginning of this composition. We are discarding that first frame. Anyway, the output module, I'm going to choose quick time with the animation video codec. This is going to create a big file with a lot of color information so that if I want to make more changes later in the premier pro, for example, I will still be able to make some adjustments without degrading the image. We can save this anywhere so I'm just going to go to that class folder. Let's call this wormhole made, I hit save and then set the render to go. We can press the "Caps Lock" key to disable the preview and just render a bit quicker. 59. Outro: That's it, that's the end of the class. Thank you very much for watching, and I hope you guys learned some new things. From here, you could check out some other classes that I have created. These are more project-based examples that I had done prior to this class. You can check those out, if you want to continue exploring Cinema 4D and the kinds of things you can do with this amazing application. Beyond this, you could check out my previous classes that are made for Cinema 4D. They are more project-based. At the time of this recording, there's six of them that I made prior to this new series, so you can use those as examples and ways of exploring Cinema 4D even further. If you make something, please share it with the class below and they'll be able to check that out and also, give you some feedback. If you have any questions about any topic that we have covered today or anything else to do with Cinema 4D, then you can also ask below and I'll be able to give you a response there. If you show your work online on Instagram or Twitter, you can tag me and once again, I'll check that out and just have a look. Once again, thank you very much for watching. I hope you learnt a lot, and I'll see you in the next one.