Transcripts
1. Intro Video: Hey everybody, My name is
stereo Stan, aka Christmas. I'm an animator and designer
obsessed with the 1880s. Currently, I work at a motion design studio
in Salt Lake City. And I'm also a teacher at a local high school
and community college. At the beginning of this video, I shared one of my
favorite projects. I loved it because it
forced me to where I had a transition between different
parts of an animation. I believe transitions help keep a 3D animated story
interesting and energized. In this class, I'm going
to teach you a few of those techniques I've learned while AN immediate transitions, we're going to talk about
cameras, keyframes, and matching animation
curves as we look at four different practical
examples of transitions. This class is for anyone
who wants to make their 3D animated
transitions fresh. And I'll do my best to
explain everything I do. But I recommend students
having the basic understanding of the Cinema 4D interface
before beginning this course. By the end of this course, I hope you have the confidence
to tackle any kinds of 3D animations that come your
way in your everyday life. I can't wait to start. See you in the class.
2. Set Up & Basics: In this tutorial, I just
wanted to quickly show you how to get set up and
running for this series. And just talk very briefly
about a few concepts. So normally with
dooming transitions, if I was doing this just on a project with a team or
working on a project by myself. I would normally set up
each of these files, sorry, each of these scenes
in their own Cinema 4D files. So for instance, I
would transition from Cinema 4D file one to
Cinema 4D file too. But for this tutorial series, I am keeping everything
inside of one Cinema 4D file. Each scene, they're
both in one file. And that's just to keep it
a little bit easier for setting up a tutorial and just
doing some practice stuff. But I did want to mention
that normally the way I would set it up is I would render out each scene separately and then combine both of those into
After Effects. The basic setup that I have
for these files is I have a null and there is seen one. And all the things for
scene one or in that null and then have another
null called seem to. What we will do is we will transition from
scene to scene two. And we also have two
different cameras. So I will create two cameras. So what we wanna do
for these cameras is we want to put these
inside of a null. And let me tell you why. Because if you have a
camera in Cinema 4D, It's kind of a weird thing and you want to animate
the rotation. So I go to the
coordinates and I want to rotate the rotation. It gets all messed up. It looks weird, right? The way it's rotating. One simple way to fix that
is to zero out your camera. I'm just going to
zero everything out. I'm going to delete this other
camera just for a minute. And what we wanna do is
put it inside of a null. So here's a null object. I can grab that, drag the camera and
drop it into the null. And so it's really important
that the camera is zeroed out before we put
it inside of the null. The null is also zeroed out on the position
and the rotation. I can click on the camera. And right now we're right
in the middle of the scene. If I click this little button, will come out of the camera so we can see what's happening. There is our camera. It's right inside of the cube, which is also at
zeros, zeros, zero. And so what we wanna do is get our camera and
we're just going to back it out on the z-axis. And we can also move
it up a little bit. So you can kinda see
what's happening there. Let's look through the camera
again. And there we go. So what we wanna do is use the position coordinates
to animate the camera. And then on the null, watch what happens now
when we animate the null, we've got a lot nicer of a rotation happening
here with our animation. So we'll use the null
to animate rotation. It's kinda like a tripod. So that is the way the
cameras will be set up. They'll all be inside
of a null and that is the reason for doing that. The last thing I
just want to mention is what we want to do is we want to have a camera for s2, in a camera for scene one. And what we'll be doing is animating scene one on and off by coming over
to the basic tab. And there's this
thing called viewport visibility and
render visibility. So we want to animate
both of those on and off to transition
between the scenes. And then to animate between
the two different cameras. We're going to use something in Cinema 4D called
the stage object. So a stage object
is pretty simple. Basically, if I click on it, go to the Object tab, we can just animate different
cameras right here. So at the beginning
of our animation, we would probably
start with camera one. So I'm going to grab that
camera and drop it in. And now we're looking
through camera one. So I'll record that by clicking this little diamond,
which is a keyframe. Wherever we want to
switch to camera two, we will just go to that frame and we'll
drag in camera two. And then we will record
camera two in there. And now you can see we're
looking through camera to not looking
through camera one. If I go back one frame, now we're looking
through camera one. And if I go to camera two, Let's just change this so we can kind of see a
different angle. Maybe this one's like
something like that. So as we go back, there's
camera one. Camera two. Alright, so I'm excited
to get started, so I will see you in
the next tutorial.
3. Motivated Jump Cut: In this tutorial,
we are going to be doing a motivated jump cut. So the idea for this is we want to start outside of this house. And then we're going to
use a motivated jump cut to jump inside. So I've got a scene
here for the house. So this is seen one.
Let me turn this off by double-clicking these
little stopwatch things. There were a little
circles in open UP s2 from an hiding these. And so this is what
s2 looks like. We're inside of
the house and it's basically just going
to be a kitchen. Let me hide that again. I have my camera is right here, so we're going to
jump between camera one and camera two right here. So they're both
inside of a null. And let me click
on the camera one. And so if you remember from the last tutorial
I talked about, we're using the cameras to animate the position
here is X, Y, Z position, and then null
to animate rotation. So I click on the camera
back at frame zero. If I can hit Control
or Command D, it'll pull up the frame
rate so frames per second. So all of these animations in this tutorial series are at 24 frames a second.
That's at 24. And then when you do the render, you just want to come up
here and make sure that your render is also 24
frames a second right there. Alright, so I'm gonna
go back to the camera. We're going to animate on the z. So I'm going to click a keyframe for where we're currently at. And we're just going
to slowly go forward, maybe up to right around 30. We're just going to do just a slow movement forward,
something like that. Then from 32, 36, we're going to start
our transition. So I found that a good number
for these transitions at 24 frames a second are
right around 12 frames. For the full transition. You could do more or less. But I just found that
to work pretty good. And it also depends on
how far you're traveling. If you're not
traveling that far, you want to make that transition
even shorter to make it look like it's going fast
enough. But let's try. This will go up to 36. And then we'll move all the
way up right to the door. Then click the keyframe
on z right there. Now we've got our
keyframe there. So let's rewind this
and check that out. Alright, so that's
looking pretty good. So this is on the first side. Then what we're gonna do is
we're going to jump two, scene two, right here. So what we wanna do is
come up to scene one, go to the Basic tab and right here is where we could animate the viewport and render
visibility on and off. So we need to do both of those. So right here I'm going to
click a keyframe for that. So we want those to turn
off on that keyframe. And then the frame
rate before that. We want those to be on, record, both of those keyframes. So now we go on and
then we turn it off. Then on C2, we will
do the opposite. We'll click keyframes
right there, and it's currently off. Then the next frame,
those will turn on. So let's rewind that,
check that out. There we go until we're
inside of the kitchen. So what we wanna do here is we want to
animate this camera. I'm going to look
through this camera, click on it, go to
the Coordinates tab, and we want to start zoomed out. We're going to basically
finish that quick movement. And it go close. Right here will start
something like this. So right there. And then we'll go about six frames, 123456. Finish that quick movement in. Click that keyframe. And then we'll just do the
rest of this animation. We've got 72 frames
and this animation, and we'll just
slowly pan forward. Then we'll record that
for the very end. So let's check that out. So you notice that we won't
see this first camera animating right now because we're just looking through this. And so the way we can
switch between cameras, it's using something
called the stage object. So that is right here. So just grab that stage. If I click on the stage
and go to the Object tab, this is where we can animate
through different cameras. So at the beginning
of our animation, we want to be looking
through camera one. So I'll drag Camera one
in there and record that. So now camera one right here, this camera is inside of here, and I should probably
name this camera to go back to the stage,
go to the object. Here we are. So there's a keyframe
for camera one. And then at 36, right when we switch, we want to switch
to this camera. So I'll drag that camera
in at 36 and record that. And now we switch
cameras right there. Alright, let's check that
out and see how that looks. Alright, so that's working and
you do notice that there's a little bit of a stutter
as we do that transition. And that's because of the
curves of the animation. So I do have a full
course on curves. So if you want to
check that out, it's here on Skillshare. And we talk a lot about curves, but let's look at the
curve editor so we can open that up by clicking this
little diamond right here. And when I do that and
pull this up right here, we'll see representation of our keyframes just like
they are down here. But this is just a little
bit of a better view. We have more details happening. And what we can do is also look at the curve
editor right here. If I click that. And what I like to do is
you can click on these. And you can see, I can see part of that curve. And what I could do it to frame this as clicked the H key. So if I click h, Now we see
the curve for camera one. And I click that click H, I see the curve for camera two. So for camera to,
what we can see, what's happening with
this animation curve is when you have an animation curve that's
going horizontal, it's slower. And when it's going
vertical it's faster. So what we wanna do
is grab that curve. For all of our transitions. We basically want the
starting point for the one of the animations basically
be exactly the same as the ending point of
the other transition part. If I click that camera, click H, what we wanna do is have this when it's ending right
when we get to the door. So these little squares right here are
basically keyframes, are the same keyframes
we have down here. So this is where
we hit the door, right on 36, where it's
happening right now, is it slowing down right
as it hits the door? And what we want, we want
this to be more linear and going a little bit faster
and more continuous. So right here, this part
right here is going to match. Go to there, click h. What's happening at the
beginning of this one? That would be good to
continuous movement there. And that's the trick with
doing these transitions. So if I rewind that
hit Play, there we go. And now that's a lot smoother. So basically what you can
do next, if you wanted to, you can adjust the timing and do more or less keyframes to make it either go
faster or slower. I think that looks pretty good
for this first transition. I will see you in
the next tutorial.
4. Whip Pan: In this tutorial,
we are going to be doing something
called a width pen. So one thing that's gonna
be a little different in this tutorial than
some of the other ones, is we are going to actually
just have one scene. And what we're gonna do is we're going to use this whip pan to start from something
smaller in our scene, and then whip around and
then reveal a whole world. So hopefully this
will be helpful in doing some kind of transition where you need to do a
tight shot that goes to a wide shot that's
all in the same world. So you can see I've
got my two cameras right here and we just
have this one scene. And inside of this scene is, let me come out of this camera. If I scroll out, you can see
inside of this scene is just basically this kind of big world with some hills and a
few different trees. We're going to start focused
in on this one flower. This flower is in the
center of the scene. Zeros, zeros, zero. And we're just gonna do a
slow rotate around this. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to use our null for the rotation. So I'm going to
click on the null, go to the Coordinates tab. Then let's look and see
what we want to animate. So I'm just going to use this, each value right here
to animate this. And so we'll start with
something maybe like that. So rewind it to the beginning. Click the keyframe. Then
we're gonna go forward. We're going to go to about
30 and just slowly rotate around, something like that. Then from 32, 36, our goal is to do about six frames on each
side of this transition. So a total of 12 frames. Again, you can address that. Something else if you want. That's just a number that I found that it
looks pretty good. Then for this, for these transitions to work
really well for this movement, we wanted to go pretty far. If we don't go that far, it's not going to end
up looking as good. So we're gonna go pretty far. Something like that. We may adjust that
a little bit more. Then at 36, what we wanna
do is switch cameras. So I'm gonna come over to this little thing and
grab our stage object. So click on the stage, go to the Object tab. And then this is where we
want to drop our cameras. So at the very beginning
of the animation, we will be in this camera one. Record that there's a keyframe. Go to right at our
transition point at 36. And we'll drop in
camera to camera two. I actually want to be zoomed out pretty far so we can
see our whole world. And so I'm gonna
click on the camera. Remember we want to
move the position of the camera and the
rotation of the null. We want to always
keep that in mind. And then what we wanna
do here is click on the null and we'll
continue that movement. So I'm going to click
on the H key frame. And actually let's start
this back over here, and then we'll rotate
around to the front. So we'll click there. And then we'll go 6123456, something like that. And then we'll continue on. Let's change this down to 75. And then we'll just slowly
move around after that. Let's give that a shot and
see what that looks like. Alright, so that's
looking pretty good. What we need to do next is
adjust our animation curves. So I click on this diamond right here to pull up this timeline. I'm going to click on this
camera. It's open these up. Click on the curves. Alright, I probably
could have done a better job naming these, but there's no four, that's that camera right there. If I click the H key, that'll just frame this up so we can see what's
happening with our curves. So here's our first keyframe. That's what those little orange
squares are right there. Here's where we start
our transition. The problem that we're having
here is this slowing down, right? When we transition. So we just want to
smooth that out, make it pretty linear. So it's pretty much
straight there, so there's no easing. And then become too. There are other transition point where we're transitioning
to this bigger scene. Click the H key,
that will frame it. If you don't see it, just click the H key right in this
window right here. Here is, we're starting with, it's slowed down in this transition and
then going faster. And what we want,
we want to match this beginning to if I click H, this end, alright, so we have that same seamless
movement happening there. Now we don't have that weird kinda slow down
when we transition. Okay, so that's
looking pretty good. So I will see you in
the next tutorial.
5. Edgar Wright Style Zoom Cut: Okay, In this tutorial, we are going to do an Edgar
Wright style transition. In my project, I basically have this stage object here
that it's going to, that's going to allow us to switch between
these two cameras. And then I have two scenes. Both of these scenes are using this kitchen kind of
model that I have here. The only difference is
that I have this scene. One, the center of the scene
is where this oranges, that's what we're going
to be zooming into. Unseen to seem too is we basically will have a
top-down view of this knife. And the knife is at the
center of the scene. That's just a good practice
that I like to follow. Just keeping the main part of the animation in the
center of the scene. It just helps with
when you're doing rotations and things like that to keep everything
nice and clean. I'm going to turn seen one
back on, go to camera one. And for this project, what we're gonna do is
we're going to animate the focal weight instead
of the position. So I'm at 36 mm right here. So I'm going to click a
keyframe to record that. And actually that should
be at frame zero. And what we're
gonna do is hold on that for about six frames. So record 35, 36 mm again. And then we'll zoom in. So let's try to go to about 14. Let's see what that
looks like. Zoom in. Pretty darn close
the chord that, and let's rewind that
and see how that looks. Let's quickly check out
our animation curves to see what those
are looking like. So I'm going to
right-click Show F curves. And I actually liked
the way this looks. We will see how it looks
in the transition. So one other thing
you could do if you don't want this to ease
out right here is you can just grab this curve and
just make this linear so it comes to a stop a little bit faster. Let's
check that out. I think on this one,
it just depends on the style you want to go for. I'm going to undo that. Let's check it out with the easing at first and
see how that looks. So what we wanna do
next is we want to animate switching from
camera to camera two. So at the beginning,
let's rewind. Dropped camera one
in their record. And when we switch, we
want to switch cameras. Now one thing I did
forget to do is what we want to do actually is hold for just a few frames on
this shot before we transition to match that style
that we're going for here. So let's go to frame 20. And I'm going to hold that number in there just
like we did at the beginning. So we're holding, moving, holding, and then we're
going to move and then hold. So let's check that out. So we'll hold right there. So at frame 20 is where we want to switch
to our other camera. So I'll drag that
in, record that. And then the next
thing we need to do is switch our scenes. A basic right here on 20. We want this to actually be off. And then we'll come back one frame and we will turn that on. Then we'll do the
opposite on s2. So that will be off
right there on frame 19, and then it will turn on there. Let's check that out. Right there we go. That's
looking pretty good. So let's go to frame 20. Let's grab this camera and let's pull this back to
our starting point. So I'm just going to go up on the z-axis to
something like that. Then what we want to do
is go to our object tab. Okay, so let's go to camera two. And what we want to
do is we're going to animate this focal length and we're not going to
animate the position, so we'll have our
starting point. Let's try going back to right
around, right around there. And I'm going to click a keyframe to record
that focal length. And then we will hold
for a few frames, will record that
again, so no movement. And then we'll go
forward a few frames. And then we will zoom into
this, something like that. And if you didn't notice, I do have this little cross hair right at the center
of my camera. And that helps me place things right in the center of my scene. And the way I did that,
if you didn't know, is if I click on the camera, go to Composition, I could turn on this thing called grid. And it defaults to
three right here. And so you get this
kind of grid like this. And what you could do
is go down to two, and it just puts this little cross hair
so you can see what is at the center of your
scene, which is kinda nice. Alright, back to object. We've got our Zoom going in
and then we'll want to hold. Then we'll switch back
to our next scene. And then we'll hold right there. And I'm going to
actually just put this whole project just
to end at 37 right there. So we can see it looping just to see how that
would look in case we wanted to add more of these types of transitions
where maybe we had three or four objects that we're going to do this
transition width, which would actually look
a little bit better. But just to keep the
tutorial simple, I thought we would just do two. Alright, let's check this out. Alright, so I think
that looks pretty good. You can of course
adjust the timing. You can adjust the easing if
you want a little bit more. Easing. No easing. I actually liked the
way that ended up. So I will see you
in the next story.
6. Foward Facing to Top Down: In this tutorial,
what we're gonna do is figure out a way to transition from a scene where
we're moving on the z-axis, kind of going back. And then our next scene
is a top-down view. So what we want to
do is be able to match that top-down
view as we transition. So the first thing we wanna
do is basically set up our basic scene that
we have or we're animating before with
the transition happens. So for this one, I'll just say we'll just stay where it kind of
zoomed in kinda close. So I just put a keyframe on
z at the very beginning. And what we're gonna do
is just slowly Dali back. So let's say we'll go
up to around frame 30. So we'll just slowly
be pulling back here, something like that. And then right here
is where we need to transition to our top view. That way we can match me, show you what's
happening in scene one. Scene two. We can match this view where we're looking straight down on this turntable and
a cup of coffee. Okay, let's look in
camera one again. Turn on scene one. Okay. So we've got our movement
on the camera going to a z. So we're just pulling back. And then right here we're
going to pause for a second and then we'll do a start
at transition rotating up. So I'm going to
click on the null. And we want to rotate
on that access, but on this axis right here, and just rotate,
something like that. So we'll start that
right there on Thursday. We'll go forward about, let's try six frames
there. Rotate up. And so what we wanna
do is we want to do half of this here to
something like that. And then we'll finish that
rotation in the next, with the next camera. So we'll finish that
way. We end up at -90 when the transition
is complete. So I'll record that right there. So let's go in and let's
scrap our stage object. Rewind the camera one in there for the beginning
of the animation. And then right at
36 where we want to switch will drop
camera two in there. Then what we need to do
is animate seen one off. Right there. Go back one frame where it should be
on to be animated that on. So now it goes on right there, it turns off right there. Do the opposite for s2. So it is off on frame
35, 36. Turns on. Rewind that, check that out. There we go. So that's switching
now we have to finish that camera move. So what we can do is go to
the null on camera two. And what we want to do, I'm going to go to the camera. And that one, I just want to zoom out a little bit more, something like that. Maybe frame that up
a little bit better. Let's go to the camera, turn on our grid, turn it down to two so we get that center point
so we can see where the center point
of our scene is. And let's just use our camera to match that
up a little bit better. Then what we'll do
is go to our null. And then this is where we want
to animate this movement. So let's start. I think we're right at
50 at the last one, but I'm going to actually
start a little bit earlier than that and just
see what that looks like. We may have to go to 50 and
we'll go forward six frames, 123456, and then
we'll go up to -90. So we're top-down, it's there. Alright, let's check that out. The last thing that we wanna
do is we want to finish some kind of camera
movement on scene two. So we're not just
stuck right there. So let's do something similar
where we get on camera two and go to the position
and maybe we can just animate pulling back a
little bit on the z-axis. So right after we finish
or rotation on 34, Let's start a z
position animation. So we'll do that.
And then we'll just slowly pull back all the way
to the end of our animation. I'm going to fix this again. So we don't see that edge. Alright, let's check
that out. One thing we can try is we can also try to start this as z animation
on this camera. At the same time that we
started our rotation. Let's just check that out and
see what that looks like. So I'm just going to move
the Z position back. So it starts at the same time. So we're doing that and
rotating at the same time. So a little bit of
a difference there. I think one thing
that could help this, instead of easing
into that Z position, if we grab our curve for the z position of the camera
and just make that linear. So there's no easing
at the beginning. And I think we should do the
same thing for our rotation. So I'm going to click rotation, click H to frame this up. And you can see that we've
got a little bit of easing. Zoom in a little bit at the
beginning of this rotation, which we don't want. We want that to be
linear at the beginning. And we also want our camera. Right-click Show F curves
on this, no rotation. We want this to also not ease in as we're leaving
this transition. We want it to be linear
at the end there too. There we go. That way It's a little
bit more snappy and we can ease into it. But then at the end,
it's linear matching. Right-click on this right-click. Show F curves matching this curve that we've got at
the beginning right here. Alright, so that's it
for this tutorial. I will see you in the next one.
Stereo Stan, 3D Artist & Animator Stuck in the 80's
