Motion Graphics in Cinema 4D: Design an 80s-Inspired Animated GIF

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Gustavo Torres, aka kidmograph. I'm a Motion Graphic Artist from Argentina. I learnt everything for myself and thank you to Internet. In today's class, we're going to make a gif from scratch. We are making a small sketch from the idea. We're using then Cinema 4D for the 3D scene, then we are using After Effects for making some kind of effects on post-production, and then we're making the final file for exporting to our gif in Photoshop. We are using different tools from the application, no third party plugins. So, you can cover a really clean way to make something simple, but effective at the same time. I started making these five years ago, when I started doing my personal animations, my daily animations. My thoughts or my feelings are based on sci-fi movies kind of future material that I saw when I was a kid, and that material was like seeing the future from the eyes of a boy trying to translate that into the actual technologies and the present day. One of the first platforms that I started uploading stuff was Tumblr. I am part of the Tumblr creator stuff, and we work with different brands, and doing different kind of projects with artists. It was like a really big place for me to show my work. So when you are finished, just upload your file in the project gallery and Tumblr so we can see it. Can't wait to see what you guys are doing with this. 2. Sketching Your Scene: Okay. This is the first step. I usually hide my sketchbook. I have a lot of different ideas and concepts that I'm using later. We are making just a rough sketch of the animation. The whole thing. I have a lot of questions from you guys. I'm making this kind of endless landscapes. So we are making one. We are just making like a perspective situation. We are just drawing and making the mountains, and the big sun. Just coming a rough idea of what we are going to do later. It's really useful at some point, because sometimes I just go straight to the application, because, of course, I'm doing these everyday. But it's really good to have a rough idea of what you are going to do before because having been in the situation of drawing gives you another buffs and another ways to show that the piece that we are doing after that. So, it's kind of a healthy process for you and your mind. It's kind of fun as well. Yeah, the landscapes gives you these kind of endless situation. It also for me goes with my kind of personality like traveling with your mind. Like also, I have a lot of different landscapes with cars, and the traveling situation is something that the GIFs or the GIF, whatever you want to call it, gives you that feeling that you are in an endless situation. That's a really good feeling, and landscapes is perfect for that. 3. Building Mountains in Cinema 4D: Okay, now that we have our initial sketch, we are jumping into cinema for gif. First thing we are going to make is the mountains. Let's go to the Object menu and take a landscape. Let's make in a bigger size, like 70. Maybe less, maybe 15. Let's select it and reduce the segments, like maybe, I don't know, 30 and 30. We also, we are using the Gouraud Shading Lines mode. So, we can actually see the subdivision of the object, so you can see your mountain there. Second, we are going to top-view, and click and drag, what I think is control or mark. We just duplicate the object. Also, the other way you can do this is in the Object Manager. So, you can just control. You can see a little plus there, and duplicate the mountain. Just bring in space a little more, and for making something different, not just duplicating the same mountain, we can just change the theme of the mountain, maybe something that you really think that fits the theme. We can do the same thing for a third mountain. Just click this one and drag it, and you have the third one. Okay. Then we are just a bit more. So, it's perfectly aligned or more or less. You have to have your mind actually that this is, for me and my work, this is an artistic one. So, I'm not so into the specific numeric stuff all the time. Of course, there is math, a lot of math in the process because it's an application, but at the same time, try to maintain some artistic interpretations of my animations. So, the second thing that we are doing is group these objects. We can do it by selecting them, all three, and right click on the mouse and choose Group Objects and then rename it, like Mountains. So, now that we have these three different mountains, we are just using Cloner Object. We go into the MoGraph menu to the Cloner Object and drag this mountain object into the Cloner. You can see that now it makes a duplicate. Let's take the Cloner Object here. Let's reset the Y position to zero. So, we are in the same plane. Move the set position far away from the initial position. So, let's make something like this. Maybe just adjust it a bit more on to the top-view and see if everything is okay. Let's change the mode here to Gouraud Shading to see actually the mountains. We can just make adjustments later. It's not so important that right now. So, now that we have the Cloner Object, another thing that we can do for making this wireframe style-. This is something that I really do. You have so many different ways, for instance, using sketch and toon, render and module, but I'm using an Atom Array Object. The only thing that we are doing is duplicating the mountain object again and make another. We are selecting both and make another object. Another option, group object with everything. We just put in again mountain. We can make them the Atom Array. I will just do it again in case you missed it. We are taking an Atom Array here. We have two ways here. We can duplicate these mountains and put it inside from the Atom Array, or go from one by one. In this case, I will duplicate these mountains. Just drag the Atom Array again. Let's group everything. So, we have the Cloner Object will act as we expect. The second part will be reducing these subdivisions of the Atom Array to three. So, it's very helpful for the view board and it's so heavy. Also, we are reducing the spheres up to two. Maybe we can reduce it by one. So, now, we can have this repeating Cloner Object. If you just select your Cloner and go to the count, you can increase your number of clones, and everything is aligned. So, if we are going to the top-view, I can increase the Cloner up to- at some point you'll, see that your memory it will lack, but we are just putting some clones until the scene is manageable. So, the next thing that we are doing is using symmetry object, dragging our Cloner Object into the cemetery. Now, we move our Cloner into, in this case, is an exposition. So, you can see we have our mountains. Again, I'm not using a camera right now but I think it's a good time to put a camera in our scene. So, let's go and put a camera, and you have to activate the camera in this little frame icon. Now, we are inside the camera. If you want to go outside the camera, you just click this, and you can see you have your camera outside, and you can just move your scene and navigate through out the scene without involving your camera, because if you have animated camera or a position that you really like, you must look the camera or use the camera view board. Okay? So, the next thing that we can do is just look the camera, and use the position of the camera on the coordinates. So, let's reset the coordinates of the camera to zero. Zero in all the three position, X, Y, and Z. Also, the rotation. Let's reset the rotation to zero, and you have everything aligned. So, now, you can just move your camera in Z point. See, you can move this camera around the object. If I'm going to the top view, you can see this is my camera and it's perfectly aligned, and you can see that we can animate the Z position if it's needed. Let's go to the perspective view. Also, in the Object menu of the camera, you can see the projection is perspective. This point is okay. The focal length, we can just use another focal length for the camera. For instance, this is a classic three and six millimeters but you can use the width angle that will give you more dramatic view from the scene, or even, you can just play with the super wide camera angle which is crazy for white landscapes, but you have to keep in mind that we are making a square gif today. So, we are resetting our workflow, our workspace into a square format because cinema for the art 18 is coming with a HD format 69. So, we are going to go to the perfect settings here. This is the Render Settings, sorry. We can change the output from HD, like let's say 1280 for 1280. The second thing that we are setting here, which is really important for the output, is the frame rate. You have to set this frame rate in the same frame rate that the project has. So, for instance, let's close this one. Go to the Edit, and go to the Project Settings. You can see you have a frame per second here. Okay. Back in the time, I was using 24-frame per second because you can reduce the size of your gif by lowering their frame per second, but this time, we are using 30-frame per second, and also, it needs to be the same frame per second that you have in your Render Settings. 4. Making Your Sun in Cinema 4D: Let's build a sun, we can build a tile in sun. I was just doing a simple sun where we can just make a tile in sun that people really likes from the show that I do, which is using a cylinder for that right now. We can go to the top view to see what is the cylinder or maybe we can just go to the perspective view and unlock our camera, and also we can deactivate our options to have more space and working closely without object and without so many other objects and making the scene really heavier. So, in the object manual, we can choose the plus Z, let's just reduce the size of these, and with the T key, you can scale your options. You can have A is for moving the object, these are kind of some useful shortcuts. A is moving your object, the R is for rotate your object, and the T is just scaling. So, if you just put the T and drag it outside the option, it would scale. Second thing that we are doing is adding a cube. Another advice that I will give you is just leave your objects in the view pole as the view pole puts it because it's really easier to know. It's like using a map for this using a 0, 0, 0 coordinate, you can change that, of course. But it's really useful to have everything in one place, not moving the options while you are building it. Then, when you have everything built, you can just move the objects and reset the position or the scale or the rotation. So, second thing that we are doing here is using another cloner object for the cube. Drag the cloner option inside and make the tile a big more like these, maybe more like 10 and reduce the Y space like 20 for this. We are going to front view, so it's easier for us. Another shortcut that is really useful for me that I use it all the time is the O. The O key centers your object into the screen. So, wherever you are in the complex scenes, you have in mind this is a simple scene, but if you are in really complex scene, you get lost frequently. So, the best thing that you can do is select the option in your option manager and press O, and immediately it's already puts you in the center. Let's bring this down a bit more and just duplicate it a few more times like so. The other things we have to make sure is that this object is bigger than the cylinder sphere because this option will be cutting the sphere, so it needs to cover in the entire cylinder. The next thing that we're doing is using a boolean object. So, we can just go to the perspective view now and drag the cloner object and drag the cylinder inside the boolean. We're just doing the second operation here. Here, it's extracting backwards, so the opposite. So, we have to move the cylinder up to our cloner object, and let's just rename these tiles and the cylinder. Just give it sun from now because we are just grouping everything later. So now, if you, for instance, moves your cloner object, your tiles object, you can see we actually have this kind of clone animation that we can do this later. So, it's just like that. Just animating the precision of your cloner still into the boole to operate it in that way so we'll extract these tiles. So, that's a cool way to make a tile in sun. Let's just rename this just Sun Big and go to the tab view, just bring this down, and move the sun way up into the Zed position. This is another important thing that you are using the Cinema 4D a lot. You have two modes here. You have the model and the object. If you are using model, you are affecting every kind of single modifier parametric object within their respective geometry. The second is the object mode. The object mode gives you the possibility to enlarge the object without losing all the kind of information you did inside that object. So, this is the mode that we are using to scale the object really big without losing our properties. Second thing is you can just go again to the camera and activate everything here. So, you can see now you have our sun. We can take the sun up in the Y position like this and also scale it way more. You see? Maybe like so. Maybe for now we can just put it a floor or a plane or maybe a plane here for the floor and just go to the option menu and reduce this segment to one, so it's really a plane object and move it into the Y position onto the floor. So, it's intersecting our mountains. Let's go again to the top view. Again, this is something that every kind of moment that you are making in your scene, you are thinking about it, that you have a lot of things that you can do it later once you have everything set. So, we can just, for instance, go to the mountains here and let's select the duplicate mountains with landscape two and go to the seed and change the seed of that mountain. So, everything in your composition is changing, and that's a cool feature. The same thing you can do with everything inside, for instance, if you want to add more segments or change the scale whatever you want to do, for instance, the plateau level. So, if you want something more like a plain surface, that's a really cool feature working with cloner objects. 5. Adding Color and Texture: So, let's make some basic materials here. Let's create a new material, double-click in the material. Let's change the color. We are going to make the color from the wireframe of the mountain, so it needs to be like a really bright color. So, you can notice that contrast between the actual mountain and the wireframe mountain. We can also leave the color activator, but we are using our luminance channel, our luminance channel is 100 percent of luminance. So, we're just going to pick a color maybe. I was thinking in my mind to make a really cool pink-reddish scene for today. So, we are just picking a really nice pink color from here and you can see if we're combining the luminance with the color, we have two options. So, here in the color channel, I can just go and change my color from here and everything is merged into a big one without losing the luminance. The second thing is maybe deactivate the reflectance channel and that's it. We have a really 100 percent color. Let's go into the mountains, into the atom array and drag the color into the atom array. So, now, if you hit render, you can see the mountains with these wireframe look. Maybe if you're working in different [inaudible] you can see everything but if I can change to quick shading here, I can see actually my luminance mountains. That's Okay. Also, another thing that I want to show you, if you want to reduce for instance, if you want to do a low poly sturdy or low poly models, you can just select everything here, go to the Phong options with your mouse, click, and you can see your have a Phong tag. The Phong tag gives you the softness for the volume. So, you can just log activate the angle from the Phong tag and put this on zero. This will give you a really rough. You can see here in this mountain, you can see also I will deactivate the atom array. The polygons are totally sharp and the edges are totally sharp so that's a really cool feature if you are a really cool tip I can say if you want to make like low poly aesthetics situation. Another thing that maybe you have to have in mind is to use cinema for the tag for your camera and protect and lock the position from the camera. So that if you want to move the scene right now it's impossible to do so because it's locked from this tag. Also you can just use this tag for just lock the position, the scale of the rotation of your camera. That's another cool thing that you can have in mind. Okay, let's continue with this. Let's lock our main camera and make another material for the sun. This new another material. In this luminance channel. Activite the luminance channel we are using a gradient. Let's go inside our gradient and use 2D-V for this kind of gradient sun and just double click on the clock and change the color. For instance, let's do it from a really big red, okay? And the second one here, the white one just change it into maybe a pink reddish one, okay. Another thing that we can do, maybe we can just exaggerate this one a bit more. Let's drag these notes a bit more here and just double click here and add another one like so. We can just drag, you can see our gradient here just go to the luminance channel, copy the texture or right click on the texture. Go to the color, go to the texture menu and paste it into the color channel. So the other thing is we are unlocking the reflectance channel and drag the material into the big sun. So now, you can see since our gradient is 2D is perfectly aligned with our sun. You can also try to change the perception of your texture but that's in another chapter maybe because it's really, you have different ways to treat the texture in cinema 4D. But let's do it for now [inaudible] and we can just a quick render. Second thing we are doing here is to create another material for the base of the mountain. But I'm not doing something more complex here as well. So let's just make something like a black thing and also maybe just, or maybe let's leave reflectance channel for now, and drag this into the mountains. As you can see, everything is going to be aligned. For now just hit command R for a preview or just go into this bucket and click it and it will render the scene. Second thing we are doing another material for the floor. Let's create another material. Let's make again a dark maybe violet color. This time we are using a reflectance and adding into the reflectance channel a beckmann. So it's reflective, 100 percent reflective just reduce the reflectiveness a bit more. Something like this so you can see actually your material. And if we are going to the roughness tub we can add more roughness so it's not so sharp the reflection. Okay? Let's drag this into our plane. This plane can be the floor for now. Let's make a render again. So now you can see your sun and your mountains are reflected. You can also use an interactive render view for smaller scenes because otherwise it will consume a lot of your computer, and also now you can see in live how to change your for instance reflectance. So reducing the reflectance, reducing the specular from that scene, for instance zero gives you no reflections at all, if you just increase the layer of the reflections. It will be 100 percent reflectance, if you remove the roughness it will be zero percent soft, so maybe something like this. Because we are trying to make a grainy look here, we are looking for something that is with old look. So it doesn't have to be a perfect. Because the roughness is something that is really time consuming. Okay, let's move this, let's reduce this a bit more. Another thing we can just remove the interactive ration. Another thing we are doing here is to actually move the floor a bit more and take the camera, let's remove the tag for now. Take the camera and move the YZ a bit more like so and hit command R. You can see how is everything set. We are just moving our position, our Y position of the camera. This is good because if you want to make for instance longer loops you can just also animate your position off your Z or the Z camera, also just move your rotation and make some more dramatic views. Let's see one more time this one in the table. Maybe another thing that you can see while you are working is, sometimes you are not happy with the, for instance the size of your mountains. You need bigger mountains. Another cool feature using the clone objects and the symmetry objects you just can deactivated it and go into your main object that we first did and just selecting for instance the landscape one and deactivate the rest. So let's just select both and scale it a bit more, just go here and reduce this a bit more and drag this up a bit more. Okay. You can do the same thing for landscape one, just drag it and make it bigger. Let's relocate here and here. So it's always in three positions. Let's do this one more time for the landscape two, let's select it by holding [inaudible] let's move this down. Now, again go into the cloner object and move our cloner object from our Z having more until the object is repeating. You see, we are just working in modules of three mountains. So, if we are moving the Z position of the option not the coordinate, don't confuse it with the coordinates just the seat position of the object. We are just align it again into our Z area. Now we can go into this display more hidden line. Okay, let's activate the symmetry option and everything is aligned again and move a bit more our mountains here. So now we have a bigger mountains, a really narrow space in between which is really cool for this kind of animations. We can also for instance not use it at all our floor and making another grill for the floor. Well, I kind of like it right now with the reflection and everything. 6. Animating Your Landscape: Okay, now it's time to animate the file in Cinema 4D. Okay, let's animate the sound first. Let's go in to our front view, just remove for now our mountains. Let's deactivate it just to see a bit more. If you just click into these two buttons with Alt selector, one click is activating the object, another click is to deactivate the objects, and another click is just in your scene. So, let's double click this and disappearing our mountain has disappeared and let's animate our Sun. First thing that we are doing here in Cinema 4D is to actual set the type of keyframes that we are using for animate the file. For default Cinema 4D comes with spline keyframes, that's something that you have to change actually. So, we have two ways to go into the Project Manager, like Command-D, if you hit Command-D, you are into our Project Manager. Let's go into Key Interpolation here because this is project settings. You have a lot of information here that you can just take our dynamics from the whole project, referencing to do things under Key Interpolation. The Key Interpolation by default is set in Spline, let's change it into Linear. So, the keyframe will be a straight keyframe into linear time, not smooth ECEs, or whatever another thing. The other way that you can do this is actually go into the Edit, Project Settings. It goes into this tab. Let's take our tiles object here into our Cloner Object. Let's go into the Coordinate Point. Let's put a keyframe in our Y position because we are animating this position into our first frame, right? So, let's put a keyframe there. Let's go into the final frame, and move the object like so it's repeating the last movement in our Y position and put another keyframe. Now, I always try to explain my type of work it's kind of artistic and not so math. I am trying to make everything like setting for our views in our eyes. So now, we need to add just a little bit more disposition from our Z, in our Y, sorry, in order to match with our first frame, so our first keyframe. This is our first keyframe. This is our last keyframe. Let's just move this a bit more. You can see if I'm moving the object, here our coordinates are moving as well, and the keyframe is yellow. That means that you modify that last keyframe. Always remember to actually push into the red dot here into the gray dot here to actually record their frame. Now, we are going to our zero and our 30, everything is set into our eye, so I can just play our timeline and you can see the seamless animation. Okay. Lets go and animate our second part here, which is the mountains. We have two ways here to animate it. We can animate the camera inside position or we can animate the mountains. I will use into the second option. We are animating the mountains this time. Why? Because otherwise our Sun, which is far away into the Z space can move if we move the camera. You see, I can just prove it to you. Just take the camera and move the Z position, you can see if I move the camera in Z position, the Sun is moving as well. I have a trick for that as just moving, dragging our Sun into our camera. So, if I move, right now select the camera again. If I move our camera, you can see the Sun is following the camera perfectly. That maybe can be tricky right now, so I prefer to use our second method and we are animating the mountains, which is an illusion of moment because we are staying in a Z position and everything moves towards us. By clicking Alt, we are activating our mountains again and just activate our symmetry object. Let's go into the top view this time, so we can see clearly our mountains, and because also we are animating in Z position. Let's go into our first frame in our timeline. As I was telling you before, we are making a group of three mountains here, so each three times we are moving this group of mountains. So, the first thing that we have to do here is select our mountains here, put a keyframe in our Z position, in our first frame. Go into the final end frame of our timeline. For now, we are just using the grids that Cinema 4D comes by default. It's really okay using that for now and we can also use a guide object, and just rotate it into the like, so I'm putting into Z space, and let's say, okay, let's move our objects until the fourth object is in the place of our first one. But, this is not a big deal to use right now because we have another kind of guides in our scene. Okay. Now, we are animating the mountains. You have to to keep in mind to keep our Cloner Object with at least a few more mountains right in behind the camera, so anything is cut. So, in this case, we are just putting three mountains before the camera and let's animate this by animating the Z position again from the main symmetry object. We are using this guide, for instance, as a reference from our three mountains. So, let's put a keyframe here. Now, our first frame in the Z position. Let's go into our last frame and move everything one time until our third mountain. So let's move this one, two, and three, which is matching our guide. Let's move it a bit more here when the Z position like so and put a keyframe there. So, now we have a rough setting of our position of the mountain. Let's just zoom it out a bit more. Let's refine this moment, just move this a little bit up, just a little bit more because, again, this is kind of like optical situation. You can also can go with numbers and go straight with the maths, but for me it works really well this, and I am really used to do this every day. So, now, if we are going to our main composition, you can see the first frame and the last frame, right? Everything will be animated, both the Sun, our mountains. 7. Rendering Your GIF: Okay, let's go into our Render View and see if you feel like the scene. Let's go into the Render Settings. Here we are setting because we are going to make a GIF file, we need to know that it would be a small file. This is not something quite big, for me for my years making GIFs for Tumblr and other social networks. Let's go with 500 pixels for 500. So, we are maintaining our square format here. You can see nothing has changed. Let's just lock our ratio. The second part is to see if our frame rate is okay, that's okay. Then, our frame range by default is the current frame because it's rendering still. We're going to make all frames because we are animating everything. That's okay. You'll see from 0-30, then we are going to save our file for that. Just click here and go into our main project and change our number four. Let's just click here and pick the same number underscore zero one. This is our render, the first render we're doing in Cinema 4D and then making the post after effects. Second thing, since we are adding our sky or different things in Cinema 4D, you have to know that we are making a QuickTime movie with Alpha Channel, so the sky will be transparent. Don't forget to check the Alpha Channel here and also go into the QuickTime Movie option. So, you have several formats, of course, when I'm trying to make quick renders I'm just using QuickTime, but, of course, if you have larger renders with a lot of timing and computer using, maybe the power went off or whatever, you don't want to lose anything, you are going to make sequences, you can make like PSD, TIFF sequences, PNG, Photoshop, whatever you want to. This time, we are using a QuickTime Movie and inside of the options we are using a codec for this. We are using for that supports are for channel, the animation color here. Also, you can use the progress 444, call the gas well. Let's just check the frames per second, we'll start 30, and here, this is important thing because the depth we actually have to say that it will be with Alpha Channel. So, the Alpha is the plus here. You see million colors is just a color file with the background, a million colors plus it will give you the Alpha Channel. So, it's click OK here. Second part will be the Anti-Aliasing. The Anti-Aliasing is how it is looking, of course, by default is putting Cinema 4D is putting in geometry. What it gives you, we can just play with this file. For instance, we are doing a low-fi animation like the ones that I really like. You can also go into non anti-aliasing, it's really cool because we have everything sharp and noisy. You can just take advantage depending on the render that you want. Otherwise, you can just use the geometry, which is a default render, you just render and then, of course, you get the best render. It will take just a little bit more time, not so much, and it's cool for now, let's just put it in Best. Minimum Level, we just leave it that way. Filter, I would like to use the Mitchell filter for animation. A lot of people use the Gauss (Animation), but I like the Mitchell. That's okay for ant-aliasing. Options, we are good and everything is okay, perfect. Let's just close this, go into our Render menu. You have two ways here, you can go to Add to Render Queue or let's just Render into the Picture Viewer. Let's go into the Render to Picture Viewer to actually see what we are looking. So, now, Cinema 4D is rendering our first scene. Okay. Now, Cinema 4D did our first animation and you can just check it everything here in our Picture Viewer. You have everything like playing and you can see how it plays animation. We also have all the frames, you can go frame by frame, and see if something you don't like, and go again to the portion and change it. But, it looks pretty good to me by now. So, everything is smooth. Okay, let's jump into after effects and make some post production and color correction there. 8. Finalizing with After Effects: Let's jump into After Effects and import our first animation in Cinema 4D. Let's go to the file, import file. Let's go into our RetroLandscape_01, click open, it will ask you how do you want to interpret your footage? You can see it's straight-unmatted, it's because it's already reading our Alpha channel so hit okay. Drag the RetroLandscape into our new field and it will create a new composition with the right duration of the file. Also, if you check here, you can see our Alpha channel as well. So, by default, I did 30 frame per second similar for the eight counts from zero frames per second, and it will be 31 frames per second. Sometimes we just have to put our brackets at one second there. You can see that now it's perfect. Everything is there. Okay. Let's make some color corrections and another stuff in the background, maybe a sky. For a thing that we maybe want to try is to use a gradient for the sky and we can use a shade layer. So, we can just select a shade here, and it's going to the fill tab into the wall and just take a linear gradient. Just hit okay, and that's going to the gradient editor. Maybe we can make this one dark bluish, maybe this one here and another. Let's remove the stroke. Let's just drag this into our composition and hold and drag to create our big rectangle. Now, just hit V for our move tool and just rotate here while you are holding shift, so everything is in right coordinates like 19 degrees, for instance. This time I want to rotate it into our cover. Okay, perfect. Let's take our point of our gradient. This is our gradient's points and you can just move in there and just bring the layer back on the background. So, we have everything here, and let's move again our gradient, for instance, like this and this one. You can just play whatever you want to with the colors. Back again here, remove these, and make everything more like being bluish thing because I wanted to do that at first, but then we are doing some color correction as well. So, it's okay for now tuning these ones. Now, usually, what I like to do is to use adjustment layers for adding different effects. Let's make a new adjustment layer. Go into layer, new adjustment layer, and let's go into our effects menu here. Let's add some glow, for instance. This is the must one, and wherever you just put our glow here, you can see immediately it's taking our scene. You can you can just uncheck and check our glow to see how it affects the scene. Also, you can just bring our threshold. This is driving our colors depending of our main scene, you see? But let's just pull this and make new another adjustment layer and put this before. Let's rename things before it gets messy. Just put glow here. This one, we are using tritone. Tritone is really cool to add some nice colors. Let's remove the glow for a moment. In our tritone selected, and you can see each value is for the highlights, the midtones and shadows. Let's change the highlights, for instance, to something more like here or move here, and then change this one square like you can see. Okay, that's cool. Now, let's change the positive for our layer here. Let's bring this down a bit so we can just actually have a bit more of our main scene. You can see if I drop this down, I just have our first one and the second. We are just dominating our tritone. I like something like this. Maybe you have to play with that at some point that you are comfortable with the scene. Let's bring this down. Sometimes the glow effect can make funny things on your render, so the good thing that you have to do is if you hold down shift and select out both lawyers, then go to layer pre-compose. We are sending these two layers into a new composition. So everything inside of them, it will be intact. So, hit okay. Now, you can see our glow is actually working fine. They are not making glowing edges and anything, and always you can go into your pre-composition and just change a lot of things here and go back into your main composition. We are going here, and let's just rename this into RetroLandscape. Command K, we are going to our composition settings. Let's rename this RetroLandscape_Main because it's our main composition. I would like to make everything set here. So now, you can see if you press play here, you can see the glow, how it's interacting with our mountain as well and making this noisy brightness situations for moments where the mountain is coming. So it's cool, that's cool. Another thing that we can just rename this, if you hit W, you can see whatever you are modifying in a layer, whatever layer you are using in After Effects that tells us that we are using a tritone here. But that's okay, we can just leave it there. Just put it tritone there. Another thing that we can is a noise. We can just add it in our glow. That's okay. If you press A, you can see our effects. So let's go here and just put some noise. Let's grab noise. You can just drag it into your layer, you can just drag it into your composition. Noise, let's increase the amount like maybe 20, so you can see now. You can see how the noise is affecting also the animation. Another thing that I would like to add to this composition is another kind of dust and scratches layer into our main composition. So, how we can do that from scratch? We have so many effects in Cinema 4D to use. One that comes to my mind is turbulent noise. Let's try to make another composition with that layer and just bring it into our main composition. So, let's make a command + N, a new composition, hit okay, make a new layer, new solid. White or black, whatever, is fine because we are not using this right now. Let's go into effects and presets or maybe you can go here into our effects and presets. I really like to use this one because it's really handy and fast for me to type, like turb and everything is here, like turbulent noise, for instance. Let's drag this turbulent noise in our solid. Now, in the turbulent noise, let's change from turbulent sharp, for instance, and let's increase the contrast a lot. We also can just play with this because, again, this is something that you have to feel comfortable for you and you will find your own settings for everything. I'm just showing my way to do some things, but it's a good thing that you can have your own ways. Just playing with the applications, and that's a really good thing to actually exercise your mind and the possibilities you have. So, let's just uncheck the uniform scale here and play with this scale to make something more like a narrow stuff, maybe here. So now, we have like a scratchy situation. For instance, if you want to make it more subtle, we can increase the contrast here. If I take this wheel and animate the evolution, you can see like seamlessly or maybe more like randomly, you can animate the seeds of this noise that we have created, so this is kind of cool and we can also use expressions to wiggle different things. Also, the complexity, you can add more complexity in our dust and scratches. The turbulence factor is another thing that you can animate to make this retro look or the vintage noise. Also, the random seed, I would like to use the random seed this time. So, let's make a key frame in the first frame in the random seed and let's go to our timeline. You have 30 frames in our composition. So, if I'm going to put, for instance, 30 here and let's just play, I will have a different scratch by frame, but also I can go higher and go into our last frame here. Let's say I will have may be 60, 70, whatever you want to, and I will have a crazy animation with more noise, so that's up to you. Let's command K and rename this and make it like Scratches. Another thing that we are doing here is inverting this noise because we are using our white points in our main composition, so we just use the invert effect here, double click, so we have a black background and our scratches are white. Now, let's go into our Landscape_Main composition, go into our project menu, and you can see you have your scratches here. Let's drag this into our composition, let's put it on top, and you can see, of course, it's black and you can't see anything. Let's change here on the toggle switches/modes, let's change the mode of our layer. So, let's change the mode into normal, let's put it in the screen mode. So now, you can see we have our previous noises and we have the glow and we have our dust and scratches. You always have to think that if you are changing everything, maybe something in Cinema 4D, just make this another render and let's come here and take the new footage and replace your original footage for the new one, and it will be okay and everything here in your main composition will respect all the effects. We can also add one more thing if you are going heavier. We can add like a 3D glasses separation, we can mimic that kind of 3D glasses separation. Let's make another new adjustment layer and put RGB Separation, hit enter, and put it below the scratches. Let's put here in our search panel 3D glasses. By default, 3D glasses is trying to recognize both right and left view, let's tell the effect which is the layer. So let's put RetroLandscape in the left view and RetroLandscape in the right view. Now, we are going into 3D view mode and just changing the stereo pair into the balanced colored red blue. This will give you the main composition settings here. But now, if I can change the scene convergence, for instance, just a little bit, you can see I can change. Again, this is another way to mimic RGB separation inside within After Effects without any third party plugins. There are so many cool plugins there, but I try to keep everything inside our main application. So, what happens now? We have our 3D glasses, but the 3D glasses, what it's doing is overwriting our first footage. Why? Because we told it to use the RetroLandscape here, which is this layer. So in order to respect also the glow or the tritone, you can have both two ways. You can just go and put this on top. Let's undo all this, just select everything here, and make another pre-comp from this. Let's go to layer, pre-compose, let's make landscape render, and what happens now we need to actually tell again to our 3D glasses, which is the layer that we want to separate. So, you can see, if I can just go in a big zoom, how is everything treated like I really want it to be. Okay. I really like the animation, the timing, the speed, the treatment, the colors. I think it's cool. Now, we are making the final render here in After Effects, and then opening in Photoshop to make the GIF file. 9. Export Your Final GIF: Okay, let's make our final render in After Effects, and open it in Photoshop to make the GIF. Let's go into the Composition and Add to Render Queue. Inside of our Render Queue, let's go into our Best Settings, which is okay, 30 frames per second. Best form, that's okay, we don't have to touch anything here. The Output Module, let's go inside here in Lossless. Let's change it. By default, this is QuickTime, that's okay. Because this is the final render, it doesn't matter so much which color we are using. So, let's make it maybe Apple ProRes HQ or Apple ProRes 444. Now, we are going into the output, and make a RetroLandscape_Final file. Hit Enter and just click render. That's it. Let's go into Photoshop. So, let's open our video. File open. Let's go into our main folder and open the RetroLandscape_Final file. This is just some of it and you can see, you have your own animation here. Now, we are going to the Export option here, because before, it was Save for Web, just like that. But now, we have to go to Export, Save for Web (Legacy) option. We can see already our file is in the menu. It's five megabytes, which is more than Tumblr allows you to upload files. So, we are trying to reduce our size here. So, what can we do here? By default, the GIF file is okay. Here, if you have in your preset, you have different presets. For instance, GIF 128 Dithered mode. That's another mode. We will use 128 colors for this GIF mode 256. So, this will reduce as well your final size. You can see here is almost 3.9 megabytes. Let's try to make, again, a color, a 256 colors. Another thing that is really useful to touch is here, the Lossy. Let's put in, for instance, 10 here. Let's put in maybe more. You can see, when 20 Lossy, we are with our 3.6 megabytes file, which is really good for this kind of animations because they are low file. Another thing that we can decrease is the dither. Let's put it at 70, and also uncheck the transparency. We still have about 3.42 megabytes. I think that Tumblr supports three megabytes right now. So, let's crank up this Lossy, and you can see we have like 1.9 megabytes, which is really cool because maybe you can use it in another platform that supports less than two megabytes. So, maybe this is a good set up for our GIF and we are also maintaining our 256 colors, and our 500 pixels of our main render. So, the other thing that we have to do here is to put it in Forever, Looping Options, because otherwise, it will just play once by default. I don't know why Photoshop just put it in that option. So, make sure you put it in Forever. That's much it. Then you can just also play with this another kind of different settings for GIFs like Perceptual, Selective, Adaptive, and Restrictive. I prefer to leave it in Selective. Just try to play with these settings here or maybe, you have another kind of settings like, for instance, Pattern and Noise. Pattern and Noise, they are really heavy files. So, it's really cool to have a Diffusion here checked and that's okay. So, now we are just saving the file in our main folder. We are going out in our main folder, and you have your GIF here. So that's perfect. Now, I'm uploading the GIF into my Tumblr. Let's go into your Dashboard. You already know how to do this. Pick our camera here. Let's go into our folder. Let's pick our final animation. Let's put our name, and just a few tags like GIF, cinema 4D, loop. That's it. Let's just post it. So, when you're finished, just upload your file in the picture gallery on Tumblr so we can see it. Can't wait to see what you guys are doing with this. 10. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.