The Designer's Guide to Motion Graphics - Part 1

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, Merrick here and I want to tell you about this tutorial that I created about taking vector shapes and creating three D motion graphics. Eso If you're beginning to intermediate three D motion designer or a graphic designer that's interested in getting into three D motion graphics, this tutorial is definitely for you. I'll be covering a wide range of topics everything from setting up your vector files to importing those paths into Cinema 40. Creating extrusion and simple three D models on those vector graphics from there will build the environment and texture all of the models. And then I'll get into a few different animation techniques, everything for manual framing to using McGrath, cloners and animating along this line. Once everything is animated, I'll teach you how to set up a three point light system. There were under everything out, and we'll jump into after effects will with you some post production adjustments like lighting blows, tinting and adding additional lights. Then we'll get into GarageBand and I'll show you how to create the sound design for animation. Then we'll go back into after effects. Render everything out again on Pete Merrick with triplet three D. You can do this course on skill share dot com. Check it out. Hope you like it 2. Vector Files: to get started. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna pick out some vector shapes or if you want to create your own, that's fine as well. So the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through some of these vectors that go media supplied for this, uh, tutorial on gonna pick out the shapes that I want to use and organize all of those in a one file. So to check out some of go media's vector shapes, go to go media, that us back slash arsenal. So here's some of the vectors that they provided for for this tutorial. So I'm gonna go through all these and then I'm gonna pick out all the ones that I want to use for this for this motion graphics piece. What? Once I decide on the ones that I want to use, I'm gonna create a master file for on my vectors. And I'm just gonna come into one of these templates and hit command see on the keyboard, not go to my master file paste it, command V. And I'll just keep all my vectors on one page like this. Save this file out so I can know Save this file out so I can have everything organized. And this will help me create my storyboard as well. So once, Once you have all the vectors, decide on that you want to use or if you have your own that you created, the next step would be to create to take all of these and break them up into individual vectors. So if we start with, still break him up into the individual files rather. So if we start with these two basic shapes this advantage shape in this second shape over here what I did waas. I created a new file and I imported those. So if I just grab this whole thing, come and see Command V and the keyboard, What I want to do with this file is I literally want to break it up into its basic components. So as you could see, all I have is one basic shape up here. And that's really what I want to work with in three D. So by selecting this violent, if I hit a on the keyboard, that's gonna give me my direct selectable, I'm going to grab this shape and I delete a few times on the keyboard, delete a few times on the keyboard and that I'll just give you one shape that's remaining. Okay, so that's how I created that. The next thing that you want to do, once you have your shapes broken up into separate files like you want, you want to grab the vector and you want to make sure that it's cleaned up. So you want to go to objects and we're going up the path and clean up, and you want to make sure all these air selected and just sit. Okay. Cleanup note. No cleanup was necessary. All these files that I'm using from Go media really awesome. They don't really need to be cleaned up. But just in case you're creating your own or you download some other files off the Internet from another stock vector place, you might want to clean these up because it's gonna be a lot easier once we get into the three D environment. If there's no extra straight points or anything like that, so definitely run that little that little cleanup things. So object path clean up. Okay, once you have your vector shape selected All right. So at this point, what I did was I just went through, and I literally just set up all my files is individual individual vectors. So if we take a look at our master file again, we see that this wing shape actually has two sides to it. It's pretty symmetrical, but for our purposes, what I want to do is I want to go through and just delete half of this, Okay? Because what we're gonna do is we're gonna recreate that the other half of the wing inside of the three D environment. Okay, so I just went through and for the wings, I deleted half of it. Anything that symmetrical, you could pretty much pretty easily create mirror on the other side in the through the environment. So that's why I broke these up into only half. So here's another example of the Circle one We went through here, and as you could see, I deleted a few of these shapes as well. So this is the one that we're looking at. Um, again, What I did was I select that back to shape command, see, And it's just paste it in here. Command v And then what? I did Waas just like we did on the 1st 1 He came in here and just deleted all the stuff that I don't want. And this is Ah, at this point, you can really You could figure out what you want to use in what you don't want to use. I found that it's gonna be a lot easier to just work with individual components instead of having all these spikes on the circle inside of my three d path. Vile, I just want to work with one little spike. So what I did was I came into here, hit a on the keyboard for direct selectable and just went through and deleted all of these other extra spikes So you can go through and do that, or you can leave them in. It really depends on what you want to do with your factor in the three D environment. I found it a lot easier. Just work with one spike. So if you wanted to work with all of these, you could leave those in. But, you know, this is how deleted them. I just grabbed direct select tool, and that was okay. So once you have your file set up. Another really important step is what file version. You save them, too. So let's just go ahead and save this file. Go file, Save as I'm just saving on the desktop for now. So it's just choose Adobe Illustrator, and this is really important step, because it the import into cinema four D is a lot easier and cleaner if you save this file down to an illustrator eight. Okay, so for all of your vectors, you want to save these down to illustrator eight files? All right, just say that hit, okay? All right. A few other extra notes, Um, the vector files that I picked for this particular tutorial I try to choose files that were really simple, you know, that didn't have a lot of stuff going on. I just went through, and I picked vectors that are really pretty straightforward. Okay, Pretty easy shapes to you to work with on the last thing that I want to show you guys. Was these shapes here these circular shapes? Um, I had to break these up a swell, and that was my personal preference. So I'll show you what I did with those swirly shapes circles. Okay, here on my circles. So if we go back in to the inspector file 1,000,000 vector file, copy this, and then I show you okay, is V So all I'm really doing with these groups scale this down uniformly by holding down shift. So I'm really doing with these is taken each individual vector shape, and I'm breaking it up into its very basic component. Right. So with this, I deleted everything besides one of these. One of these sides it's gonna give me it's gonna give us a little bit more flexibility once you're getting that through the environment. But this is really a creative Colin your end, whether you want to leave these shapes as they are or if you want to break them up into the individual components. All right. I decided to work with only the very basic shape and that duplicate these in a circular fashion once we re create him in cinema 40. Okay, so that's the last thing I want to show you about the factor files. So getting back to these vector files created each individual shape as a separate file and I'll show you why Once We're getting a cinema 40. So save all these out, make sure you clean them all up. Object path cleanup. You save it down to a version eight file. Okay, so that's step one. Setting up your files. 3. Storyboard: Okay, The next thing that we want to do is create a really basic storyboard. So before we jump into any kind of three D animation or three D modeling with our vector shapes, let's plan out our work. So the first thing that I do is I go through and I just pull out my sketch pad a pencil and just come up with some notes for myself. Toe, you know, service a robe road map for how this thing is gonna lay out the first thing that did. I just grabbed a vector or a vintage shape, and it just wrote down some notes. It opens with a vintage shape, and the frames are 0 to 50. This could change, you know, it could be 0 90 I'm not getting really, really, really detailed with my notes as faras the frame information. I'm just pretty much laying it out. What? I want to come first stuff like that. So for the second for second sequence is gonna be the hexagon shape. That's our wrote down. A hexagon is revealed that expands and camera zooms in. Okay. And then I have my tech shapes wings, You know, the diamond shapes another set of wings. And I just went through and just kind of planned out my work. How is this thing in a layout? You know, I have some spiral things coming on coming in the scene over here, and the spirals get real crazy with all kinds of duplications. Stuff like that. At this point, I really don't know what's gonna happen in the three D environment before I'm planning my work and get in there and start playing around a little bit. But I'm just visually laying out the plan for this thing. Okay, that it brings us over, Teoh this frame vintage shapes start to twist around one another. So you're storyboard. Could be really, really simple. So then the shield comes in, we're gonna have some heraldry imagery, and then the final couple scenes, I'm gonna have one of the heraldry vectors turn into a bunch of cubes. And at that point on, arrow's gonna come through and just blast this thing into pieces is gonna fall to the ground, Go Media's logo is gonna appear, and we're gonna finish it off somehow. Okay? So I kept this story board really, really basic, and I encourage you to create your own story board for your own piece. It's really gonna help you to get your stuff down a lot faster and give you a really solid direction on where you're going before you ever jump into the three D environment. So just my suggestion. I always do a storyboard, no matter what. If I'm working on the animation, it really helps. Okay, so there's my three three storyboard pages that I created. Here is the first page, second page, third page. All right, so the next thing that I do before I start any project is I really try to establish a salad color scheme with this project. It was really easy toe come up with a scout color scheme. 4. Color Scheme: because Go Media's arsenal already has its own color scheme. So I really had just picked these colors from here and in corporate that incorporate that into my animation. So what I did was I grabbed a few screenshots of Go Media's arsenal and imported them in tow. Adobe Photo Shop. And then I just went through, selected the hit I on the keyboard and just pick some of these colors. So here's a black color, and if I hit X, that's gonna talk about my colors and Photoshopped. Here's a gray on that I started going through and I created created a color scheme while the color scheme was already down. But what I did was I picked the colors from that color scheme and gave myself some reference as far as the RGB colors. So the R, G and B on the black color. If we click on this black color will see right in here in this in color picker that are RGB values are 00 and zero. It's pretty straightforward. No color in that, Uh, and the next thing the great that I picked, I selected that man. This is a little bit different gray but the great that I have is 45 45 45. And then I went in here resumed in real close. I am the keyboard for the color picker. Pick this double click that that color and that I'll give me what I rgb values for the yellow color. And then I just type those in there and I also creating additional gray to give me a little bit more odd options and variety in my motion graphics peace and I want to pick a few accent colors. So from the screenshots, what I did was there is a little bit of an orange and a little bit of red. I know these air little accent colors to kind of make stuff pop, but I really like those colors I thought they could possibly use be used for some sort of lighting in the three D environment or some sort of post production effect in after effects once we get there. So that's why I added these two colors the orange in the red on As you'll see. They'll come in pretty handy for lighting and post production later on, so those are the first few steps Teoh starting to prepare. Our project is organizer factors. Do a storyboard and then come up with the color scheme. All right, At this point, we're ready to jump into the three. D. 5. C4D Tutorials: environment. Okay, so now that we have all our vector files set up, it's time to jump into cinema four D and start extruding these vector shapes. So for those of you that are new to three d, what I would have done is created intro to cinema. 40 tutorials for you eso If you go to my website, it's triplet three d t r i p l e t the number three d dot com and they go to Blawg and from the block if you hit the category Cinema four D that I load all the cinema four D tutorials that I have on here and what I've done is I've created eight intro to cinema 40 tutorials. Eso This will take you through the interface. It will take you through creating objects the different modeling modes using spines and nerves, modelling tools, the former's all kinds of stuff. So it'll give you a really in depth um overview of cinema four D. If you've never worked with cinema four D before eso For the sake of this tutorial, we're just going to jump right in, and we're going to start using it. If you're not familiar at all with cinema 40 I suggest you check out these tutorials that I created for you and get familiar with with a three D environment and the basic tools that we're going to start using back. 6. Extrusions: cinema 40. What we want to do is we want to take those vector files that we created. So here's my folder. Of all the vector files, I have 15 different files that I'm gonna import individually. Okay, so now we're gonna import, start importing these files. All right? So if you go into Cinema 40 file open and that we locate our coat are folder and just open the vintage the 1st 1 So here's our scale. We're gonna leave that at one, connects blinds. We're gonna leave that checked, going to say OK, and now that's gonna import our spines, and that's gonna import into a null object. So what we want to do is we'll grab both the explains and just click and drag and drag him right outside the knowledge and we'll take the null and delete it. And for the 1st 1 I'm just gonna call this vintage. We want to rename all of our paths and this one others call it five sided. Something like that. Five sided, because it's actually gonna have five sides. Right now, it has three sides, but once we duplicate the other side's, it'll be a five sided piece five sided typeset geometry. Okay, so the next thing is at this point, I want zero out on my values. So if we go into arm into that coordinates manager into position, let's hit zero tab zero and then apply. And now that's gonna center our vector shape in the center of the three D environment. Okay, so now it's time to extrude the 1st 1 What we're gonna do is we're gonna go up here extrude nerves, and I'm gonna take this vintage, and I'm gonna click and drag until I see that arrow pointing down and then I'll release. Okay, so now we actually have a a three d shape. So before we before we extruded that if I try to take a render of the scene is just gonna come out all black, there's nothing in there. So once we create this, take this vintage and make it a child of the extrude nerves. Now to take a render. Now we have a three d shape. All right, so at this point, I'm gonna go into my extrude nerves, and I'm gonna add some caps. So it's had a filler cap to the front and a Phillip cap to the back. Okay? It's pretty extreme radius. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this, just take it down at 0.25 0.25 and you can play around with these different types of filler caps. So if you click extruded herbs, there's different types right here. So right now we're at, we have one step specified for both of the front in the back caps, and it's a comeback. So let's just bump both of those up to three. And we really can't see much because right now our display is going on the garage shading. So if I go up just to display your are skating in check guard shading lines, then we'll be able to see our sub polygon subdivisions. All right, so right now I'm reducing it steps. Just increase that to three. Soon you could see what what that looks like. Eso You can go into this Philip type and you could play around with all kinds of different fillets. We have linear you fill it with which you're going to give us just a straight edge convex. That's when we just had on there. There's half circles. See that. But this half circle and you might want to increase the steps a little bit to get a little bit more rounding on that, Philip, there's also two steps. There's a great so play around with all these. Get familiar with how to how to create fillets on your extrusion. So I'm just gonna leave this at come backs. I'll bring these steps down to three. So that's our very first shape. A. To this point, I'm just gonna rename this extrude Teoh 01 vintage shape. And the next thing is, I want to take this vintage spine this path that imported from illustrator and I want to change its ACSI. Okay, so right now, the centre, I'm just gonna click this extrude nerves and turn it off for the time being, just I can explain this to you. So right now that acsi of our of our path is right in the center of that factor of that path. What I want to do is, I want to change it. So it's somewhere down here on the right. Okay, So if I go into the front of you, one of the one of the things that's gonna help is if we jump back into Adobe Illustrator and just take a quick look at her factor. So this is supposed to look something like this. Okay, so here we're working with this particular piece of geometry or piece of vector. And we want this thing Teoh clone right around here. So we're gonna right from the center here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna change the ACSI or are pivot point of this vector shape in the three D environment. Okay, so let's jump into here. I'll zoom into this guy, and here's our acsi tool right here. So if you come down on the left hand column, click that click the move tool and then I'll just move this. And as you could see, it's not actually moving the path. It's just moving. Where are Pivot is? Okay, so moved that here. And then I'll uncheck that pivot point. And now if I want to rotate this or move this, it's gonna move right from that pivot. Okay, so this is gonna come in handy in a second, so turn our extrusion herbs back out and what I want to do now, our position changed again. Because now it's reading it right from that ACSI. I want zero out. This position in our coordinates manager can apply, and that's gonna that's going to center that right in our three D environment. Okay, at this point, I'm gonna actually recreate the shape. All right, so here's our vintage shape, and I'm gonna go up to mow graph Kloner, and I'll take our vintage shape and just drag it until I see that little arrow pointing down. Okay, so now obviously, this is this clone this piece of geometry the wrong way. We want to clone it in a radio fashion. So let's click are Kloner and right here where it says mode, we want to choose radio, Okay. And then we want three copies. So we'll bring that number down and I'll take my radius and bring that down. Okay, so there's our very first vector shape. Okay, So you could play with the radius here, And as you could see, its cloning right from that ACSI point of or the access of this path that I just said. So what we're gonna want to do is we're gonna want to rename. This is Well, I have a tendency toe Always rename my my geometry in my layers so I can keep everything organized. So 01 vintage cloner. Awesome. There's our first shape. So now we're gonna go through and do the exact same thing on our five sided, five sided objects. 7. Animation Basics: Okay, so I will turn all of this off by cooking these checked boxes, and then I want to take this path, and I want to zero out the position. 00 apply. I'm gonna turn off this vintage path as well. All I'm doing is holding down option on the keyboard and clicking these two icons, these little buttons next to it and thats gonna turn it off in the editor in the view port and in the runner. Okay, So here's our shape. Let's go back and reference our vector file. What's it look like? Okay, so here's our shape. So this one's gonna be a little bit more tough, Teoh. A little tougher to recreate, but I don't think it's gonna be too difficult. Eso as you could see, we want to have this pivot point right in the centre somewhere over here. Okay? And I'm gonna duplicate this extrude nerves that we have and I'll delete the path I turn this on. I called the zero to five sided. Just keep us nice. Have organized groups. Percentage cited. Five sided. And I'll take this vector and drop it right inside that extreme nerves. So, by duplicating that initial extreme nerves. What we get right away is we get these filler caps that are the exact same is our 1st 1 Okay, I'm gonna go in here, go to mo graph Kloner, and I'm gonna drop this right inside of a cloner again. The default it wants toe. It wants Teoh duplicate these in a linear fashion. So I want to change this to a radio and I want to start playing around with this until we achieve our look so we can jump into the front view, it might be easier. So if reference our vector again, that looks like So how are we going to recreate this? That's the question. Let's try to figure this out. Okay? So the first thing is, we probably need to change our ACSI for explain. Okay, So go into the transform tab and then where it says rotate right here. We're gonna start rotating this something like this. Let's see a 50 degrees works if we click and drag both the object and transform Tab that I'll bring them both up so we could play with both those primaries simultaneously. Okay, so the next thing we might want to do. Let's rotate this even more. Well, Might want to take this radius out a little bit more. We'll go back in reference our vector. Okay, we might have to rotate this thing entirely. So if I take my Kloner and just rotate this by holding down shift if you hold on shifted a rotating five degree increments, just do it by I. There we go and then we'll just increase the radius a little bit. Maybe it's 12. Or maybe it's 11.5. Try 11.25 That's getting closer. Maybe 1 to 5. There we go. Okay, that's looking kind of close. Yeah, we want these edges to line up a little bit nicer. So let's just go back in and fix that real quick. We could change this. ACSI. I think that I'll help is well, there you go. So I did was I selected my extrude nerves. I click this enable ACSI modification mode enable access, and I'm just moving this around until I get these points to kind of lineup. And when I'm looking at is this corner point some just moving this around a little bit so that lines up and it's pretty close that I could go back into my Kloner and just start increasing in this radius kind of offset to use a little bit. Five. Maybe it's 50.75 and that's looking pretty good. So there's a second shape. Okay, these cloners air gonna give us a lot of flexibility. So if we want to animate the parameter of the counts, we can make it grow. By animating this parameter, we can animate the radius. We can come in here and we could start animating how this thing twists, You know, if it wants twist this way if we want to scale it, All of these parameters are animated and available. If that's a word, we can animate any parameter that has this little button next to it. Right? So we have these rotations and they have this little icon right here, this circle. We can use that to animate it, and I'll get into that later once we get all of all of these extruded. So now we have two shapes. So let's go ahead and rename this zero to, and we'll just call this five sided Kohner five sided Kloner. Excellent. So now let's just save our file. We're going to save these individually as well. Just like we did the vector files. We wanna have these all the separate files, and then we'll composite them all into one file. Once we start animating that way, we can keep everything clean, keep everything organized. So let's just go through. And here's our scenes. See here. So what you want to do is just go file save, and then save your file. What I would do is I would go and, um, three D shapes. What I did was I saved all these out. So I'll just name this is your a one vintage on, Then for the next 102 vintage stuff like that, just keep everything really organized. 8. Tech Shapes Modeling: Okay, so the next step, let's extrude some of these tech shapes. So let's go file new and file open, and then we'll just take one of these tech shapes. Its open that up, and this will come in as a whole bunch of spines. So there's a lot of stuff here. What we're gonna do to do is go through and rename this stuff and just figure out what's what. So let's just take all these lines out out of the no objects, just clicking and dragging and off the lead that no, just take it. All these and zero out the position hit, apply, and that will put our our paths in the center of that through the environment. Okay, so let's figure out what is what. Here. Here's one path. There's another one literally what I'm trying to find right now. So these are the big ones I'm trying to go through and find all these little ones that are kind of duplicated. Okay, so let's just name that small square. And next thing I want to find is this guy. Just call this big square, and then we're gonna go through, and we're gonna extrude some of these shapes. Okay, let's just create a extrude nerves. There's take our first shape, and I'll drop it into an extreme nerves. And that's going to extrude are vector shape. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn off our grid, just so this is easier to view. So go filter greed, not just turn that off. Well, you could see a little bit easier in here. Okay? All right. So let's just go through and do the same thing for our other shapes. Described the 2nd 1 and you might want to play around with the extrusion death. Maybe some of these. You want to be extreme. You wanna have extremely a little bit more than the other ones. Okay. Extruding Arabs. And I'm just gonna play with that depth a little bit as well. Kind of offset these a little bit, Making a little bit more interesting. Okay, Extra damn. Same thing here. I could just duplicate this extreme nerves and just grab this other piece. Drop that right into here in the last one. Okay, so our main elements are created now so we can go through and start playing with some of these extrusion depth go through. Maybe this one's a little bit skinnier. Maybe some of these are a little bit skinnier as well. I'm gonna have some fat ones down here like that. So use your I use your judgment. Whatever you think looks best for your particular a vector graphic. So let's close all of these extreme nerves. And the next thing that I want to do is create another one for these little squares. Okay, so I'm extreme extruding this square. And now what I want to do is, instead of extruding all of these, I want to have a little bit of flexibility with this one little square. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use a mo graft cloner object for this one. Okay, so let's jump into front view, and I'm going through my grid back on. Want to see my grid? Want to see where the center of the environment is? Um, so here's what I'll deal. I'll take this square, get rid of this cloner. I'll take the square path and I want a zero it out. Okay? And that's gonna put it right in the center of the three D environment. Now I'm gonna create another strewn herbs and extra that out again. Just dropping it right side inside the extreme nerves. All right, At this point, I'm gonna take this and I'm just gonna rotate it. It's a 45 years or so. I just do this one by I And next step is McGrath Kloner. I'll take this extraordinary buzz and making a child of the cloner and automatically wants a clone up, which is exactly what we want. But we just want this position to be less so It's going to the McGrath Kloner and right here where it says, P, that's the amount that we're offsetting this. We just want to take that down and I'll take my entire Kloner. You know, I'm gonna put it back into position somewhere up here, so just position that back and then I'll line these close up. So let's rotate thes though with the cloner selected, we're gonna select object and transform will go down to our transform and we'll rotate this So we make that kind of lying to the vector paths and we want to take this back down this position. Maybe it's 0.75 Uh, one looked pretty good. It's 0.875 and then we'll take these and rotator a little bit. They're not perfect, perfectly aligned with the vector shape. But that's OK, because we're gonna use this cloner to create some interesting animation effects. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna clone the accounts of this growing out. So that's the effect that we want. So that's why I created a cloner instead of extruding all of those paths. Okay, so we'll just leave this on three for right now, and then we'll go through and we'll do the exact same thing for this big square. Okay, so let's go into the front view again. And for these other paths, these small squares. I'm just gonna delete those cause we won't need him. Okay, take a big square and zero this out. Going to a coordinates manager 00 Applying now that's in the center of a three d environment. Um, now I want to extrude it. So let's just drop this big square inside the extreme nervous. Their radio now has depth, and I want to create another cloner. Alright, Samo graph Kloner and we want to drop drop of six through nerves inside this, Kloner. And again, what this is going to do, it's gonna clone it upward. That's what we want for this one, and we'll just take the position of the Kloner will move it down. So let's jump into the front of you again. And now we want a reposition this so it lines up with our actual vector. Okay, it's down a little bit. Over. Take this and rotate it. That's what we should have did in the beginning, is rotate this. That gives us our clones. Do you want take a cloner? You want to rotate this thing kind of, line it up, and then go back into our cloner. I want to bring this countdown to this parameter down the offset in the why. And there we go. Now we have those cloned. We can come back in here, delete those paths. And with this particular piece of job injury, we are going to animate this count as well. So we would just want to leave this at three for right now. Okay, that's account. That's one of the parameters that will be animating. Okay, so you just want to say this out as tech shape and There's two other ones that I picked from our go media arsenal vectors. So what I did was add a tick up these remaining to and I did the exact same thing as I did for the 1st 1 Okay, so that's your text shape before we say this out. What we want to do is we'll want to shift select all these right click group objects. Just call this 03 9. Wings: sec. Okay, so let's continue extruding our forms. And at this point, we can actually start creating some animation as well. Some really simple animations. So what's the next thing? The wing is. Okay, so I'm gonna open up this vector path. So again, I want to leave the scale at one. I want to leave the explains, connected and just hit it. Okay, So I will take all these paths out of the I have no object elite to know. I'll select all these, and I will zero out the position in just a life, but tests on the keyboard that I'll frame everything that I have selected. Okay, so here's a wing wing wing. So what we want to do is we want to take all three of these paths we want to right click, connect objects and delete. Okay, So that's gonna create one path for us that's exactly want will call this wing, and this is our circle. All right, So what I want to do is jump into the front view and I'd like to take a list and center senator everything in a three D environment. So what I mean by that is I want the center of the circle to be right in the center of our three d space. Okay, good. So let's take our circle. And that's perfect. That is centered right where we want it to be centered. So this one, we're gonna use a little bit of a different technique. Okay, so we're gonna use a sweeping herbs for this found right here under the nerves. But in order to do that, what we need is an additional spine. So I'm gonna go into the top view, and I will select the busiest lines old, and I'll start from the center of the through the environment and just create some sort of spine, something like this. Maybe with that out a little bit. Answer. Now, we could change these points by going into point mode, uh, beyond, then using the live selection tool. Just select that that in a little bit. If I wanted, or maybe up a little bit, I can use the rotation. Something like that. I grabbed the move to or I can actually see, like, these nodes. Okay. So if I select those nodes and the move tool, actually, it's like we can go in here and change the curve of this. Okay, so right now, now we have to spines. So we're gonna grab the circle supplying and spine we just created, and we'll drop both of those into a sweep. Nerves. OK, so let's grab both of these by shift. Select the ship selecting, and then click and drag until you see that little arrow and we get this craziness, OK, That's not want. So what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna change the order that these two spines are. Uh, we're gonna change the order of these two spines under the sweep nerves. So it's grabbed a circle and put it right on top of the circle. Grab a circle and put it on top. The spine. Rather. Okay, good. So this sweep nerves is really cool. It will give us a bunch of options, and I'll show you how to use it. So let's go to sweep herbs and we'll just push this up a little bit and push the service. You could see what I'm doing. The street nervous gives us a kind of little options, and we're just gonna start animating this thing right now, so we can at least have a base animation work from when we start the animation process. So let me just show you this sweet nerves objects so and scale. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take that and scale down to 0%. Okay, that's gonna give us a nice little taper to our extruded form. Cool. All right, The next thing is the growth. So here's what we're gonna animate right here. We have end growth, and we also have the start growth. So that's the first parameter that we're gonna Anime is the start growth. So we want to bring this start growth to 100%. And right where we have this timeline down here, we want to make sure it's on zero. And right here in the start growth, there's this little button to the left. If we hold down control on a Mac and click that button, that's gonna add a key frame for that parameter. Okay, so that 100% 100% start growth is that was dialed in as a key frame. Okay, so now if we just grab this and scrapped through to the end of the animation or at the end of the timeline at 90 frames, we could take the start, start growth and bring that down to 0%. Now, what we have to do is we have to go back where this little button is and hold on control and click that. So if you notice we have a key frame on frame zero and we have a key frame on frame 90. So now if we hit play, we have our first animation. Okay, so now we want to manipulate this even further. What I want to do is go into the sweep nerves, and I want to give it a little bit of rotation as well. So I'm gonna rotate this, Let's say and rotation. Let's just say something like 1 60 then where that and rotation is framed 90. I'm gonna hold on control and add a key frame for that as well, and then come back over to frame zero and I'll bring this end rotation down to 100 I'll keep friend that as well. So now let's play it now. It looks like it's kind of twisting into shape. I could scrub through this, show you a little bit slower, so it's kind of coming into the scene twisting around and it's coming into position right there. Okay, The next thing that I want to do is animate this thing, this taper tip. I want to animate that back as well, so it kind of grows out, and then it grows. It comes out from this tip and that it goes back down to this to this front. Cool. All right, so let's see here, this end scale, we want to leave that and growth. That's the perimeter that we want to animate next. All right, so let's see, I want this thing to start growing, all right, About 60 frames or so. So at a key frame for the end growth at 100%. And then at frame 90 I want to bring this down to 0% and then animate. That was well or at a key frame. Rather. Okay, so now we jump back to the beginning and we play this. Here's what our animation looks like so far. All right. Perfect. So at this point, what we're gonna dio is we are going to take the sweep nerves, and we're gonna hit command see, actually want we rename this? We'll name this main because that's the main circle. Are we gonna rename it circle either Or circle street nerves? That's cool. And then we'll duplicate this command. See, Commander, be on the keyboard. Since we already have all these key frames dialed in already no sense and doing the work twice, so we'll just duplicate that. And what we'll do is instead of using the circle spine will take the circus plant out of their delete it, and I'll take this wing spine and I'll put that in here. Okay, so now what we have is a wing and a circle animating along that same path along the same spine, which is not exactly what right. It doesn't look exactly correct. So we need to do is go back into the spine and we will. Well, we're gonna need to modify this slightly, so we'll take this wing and I move that over and we can go into our front view for this as well. So if we jump into the front view display strode guard shading, we could take this wing and kind of position in the place. So if I go back into Adobe Illustrator, and I just kind of check out what my wing looks like. It's a right around up here, so jump back into Cinema four d. You know, grab this and just kind of position it into place. That looks about right. Okay, so the next thing is, I want to kind of tweak this blind. So it's not the exact profile of the main portion. So take this, maybe push it out slightly. They push it back. So we'll have to kind of play with this a little bit. Let's go into the perspective, you and see how these two two spines air interacting with 111 another. So if we scrub through this, that's kind of cool. What I think I want to do is I want to grab this point and just bring it in a little bit closer. Maybe I want to grab this point, bring it out a little bit further, and let's scrap the room or time. You okay? That's looking pretty cool. Well, it's viewed from this angle. Make sure we're happy with what we have so far. All right, let's looking nice. Be a little bit top view see if these air interacting. Okay? It's looking pretty good. Very cool. So the last thing that we want to do is obviously we need, uh we need the other side of the swing we need to create that. So we need a symmetrical when you on this thing. So let's take this wing sweep nerves. And what we're gonna dio is create a new symmetry object. All right? With this wing, we'll click and drag and make sure we see that little arrow pointing down. We'll let go. And that creates a symmetry object. Okay, so now when we scrapped through this, here is the animation that we have. So we have two wings kind of crossing one another, Something like that. And what we might want to do is bring this first wing down slightly. You know, you have creative flexibility over this. It doesn't have Teoh replicate the vectors. Exactly. You know, if you see portions that need to change, you know, feel free toe, change him. So that's our That's our animation so far for this portion for this wing. Just play it instead of scrubbing it. There we go. Okay, So that's one animation and What we want to do at this point is we just want to take all of our geometry. Um, shift, click right click group objects and we will name this five wings. 10. Circle Model: OK, moving right along. Let's create some additional geometry. So let's go file open and we'll locate our circle. The 1st 1 and for the sido via illustrator import. We want to leave the scale. One connects Flynt's okay again. I'm gonna take all of these. Take him outside of the no to lead or no object. Grab all these in zero out position, like always. Okay, cool. If we had s on the keyboard that I'll frame everything. Okay, So the first thing that we're gonna dio is extreme. Some of these, actually, what I'm gonna dio is I don't need this center one, so I'm gonna delete that. Okay. I'm gonna recreate it in three D instead. All right, so it's just extrude both of these forms. There's an extrusion on that and I could play with adept of this thing and maybe give us live it a little bit of filler cap on this. That's way too much. So I'll just bring that down a 0.25 It's better 25 again. You could play with these fillets however you want. Uh, I'm just gonna leave it at a linear. Fill it for this one. It's looking pretty good. And I'm just going to duplicate this command C command be display line and grab the first line and drop it right in there. Okay, so now I have two sets of two pieces of geometry here. I'll just rename this spike in the 1st 1 circle when we name the circle. Okay, so now I'm gonna take a cloner, and I'm just going to duplicate these. So no graphic loader drop spike into the cloner. And what I want is a radio, Okay? We're gonna have to play with this a little bit, so let's jump into to the front view. It asked on the keyboard to frame everything. The first thing is, we're gonna position this so it's kind of in the center of this of the circle. So if you jump back into Adobe Illustrator and we just referenced that circle so here's what that looks like. We have these spikes coming off from the edge, So let's jump back into cinema four D. And what we want to do is it's kind of position this on the outside, we can increase the number. And what we want to do is we want to rotate this 180 degrees. So let's play around with this. Okay? What was type in 180 degrees in the each transfer in the rotation right here. And then what we're gonna do is bring this radius back down, okay? And then the end angle. What I'm gonna dio is just take this down. Something like that. I had to take my countdown, and then I play with this end angle, something like that, so that you can create as many as you want from here. You know, we can play around with this. We could play around with these end and start angles as well for some cool animations. So we're just gonna leave it right? Right? We're at right now. We'll leave it like this. It's looking pretty good so far. The next thing that we're gonna do is do the same thing with sickle. So create another McGrath Kloner, You take the circle, put it right inside of there and again, we don't want to duplicate it linearly. Actually, we do take this number down 20 Okay, So the number of copies let's leave at four. And then we'll scale this down the ST 90%. 90%. Something like that. Okay. And then we want to offset it a little bit in the why, maybe want to take this down in 85. 85% may be offset. That a little bit more crank up the number of copies. Okay, this is gonna give us something to play with for animation. This is pretty cool. So the only thing that we're doing here is we're What we're doing is we're cloning it by the scale. We don't want to clone it linearly or radio Lee. We're just calling the size of this thing. So if we increase it, increase the number, we're just gonna get smaller and smaller. Okay. All right. So that's what we want for the first circle. So go ahead and save that out. Before you do that, make sure you shift. Select both of these and right click group and rename this 07 circles. Go file new 11. Circles Continued: and we'll imports those. So he's gonna import with four different four different paths. I think she is more than that. So zero this out real quick and hit us on the keyboard. That frame that. Okay, we have a few too many paths. Let's see what's going on here. Oh, no, that's right. Used to with same. Okay, so let's just take these two paths and it's right. Click connected Leak. Excellent. Okay, so now we're gonna recreate thes. Let's go back into Adobe Illustrator Reference our Erector set. There we go. We'll just create this 1st 1 for you right now. And then you could figure out how to do the other ones. All right. Perfect. So we'll jump into cinema four D and let's turn off the 1st 3 We'll grab this one and will center this from the three d environment. Could apply first that let's go up to extrude nerves and drop that in there. Just threw nothing back. They want a little bit more, a little bit more depth for this thing. And let's check out where we need this pivot to be so literally pivots right from the center. Okay, so we jump back over here, go into our front view. It s on the keyboard. Fairness. It was actually tool. It will move this, accede down somewhere about here. Okay. Do you select axity? And then we'll is your other side again. You know, we're gonna create a mo graph cloner objects dropped. This extraordinary is inside of there instead of linear, we're gonna choose radio, and it's going to start cloning that in a radio fashion. So we needed a little bit more clones. We need to bring down this radius, and we need to increase the count's. Maybe this radius needs that. Get smaller. We can jump into the front view, reference that against our vector image, you can go through and counties if you want. I'm just gonna kind of play it by ear. Played by I rather Okay, and that's looking pretty good. So go ahead and do that for the rest of the circles as well. Same technique using extrude nerves with the cloner object. And you want to go through and name all of these. So we're just name this away circle one or something like that. So just go through and do all of these circles with the same process 12. Heraldry: So let's create a new file file open. Let's just open this first heraldry one. This has given us a lot of paths. Take it outside of the no. Okay, let's go through this and figure out what our spines are. And if there's any extra spines that imported for this, so that's looking good. That's looking good. That Sline doesn't look like it goes anywhere. Let's zoom in. If we delete that, it's no big deal. Okay, what's this one? Zoom into that. I think we could get rid of that one as well. Get rid of that. Okay, so we'll take these two main spines and we'll right click connected elite, and we'll go through and rename this. Okay, we want to do for this is creating extrude nerves. And there we go. If you're getting any weird extrusion on any of these more complex blinds, you can always go into the spine and change the intermediate points to something like natural or uniform. See that slightly change? Is that how it extremes will show you again? See that change the form a little bit uniform, adaptive. So just go through and play around with the use. Autumn intermediate points. If you're getting any kind of weirdness in your extrusion so type, you can also play with that. And that's probably not what you want. Cubic. That's gonna change even more. Just gonna leave it as a busy a. So just go ahead and I say this out. And at this point, what you want to do is you want to import the rest of your heraldry in your shield and your arrows and just put simple, extreme extrusion is on them. 13. Logo: all right for the last step. Let's extra this logo. So let's go. Five. Open will open up logo file for the go media arsenal again. Scale. One can explain. Zero collect Can explains, checked. And let's just take all these and we'll Israel those out. So there in the center three D environment. Now we want to go through and figure out what's what. So we'll just call this one logo and that a e. This is part of the key. Just go through it. Renamed all these really quickly. There's a lot of, um, but it'll take a minute. You just have to figure out what's what. Okay, Professional design weaponry. That's all down here. Okay, so let's take all these up here and it groupies together. We'll just call this pro design weaponry, and we're just going to use that as a his reference. Okay, so let's take the logo on. Let's extreme that So from certain angles, like a little bit weird, But don't worry about it. We're gonna change our camera angle. Really cool logo. But in three D, it does tend to get a little bit skewed looking, so we're going to kind of compensate for that with the angle of our camera view when we animate this. Okay, so let's just duplicate this. Come in and see and we'll take the arsenal, Drop it into the extreme nerves, and you can go through and play around with some of these caps and Phillips and stuff if you want. For the word says professional designed weaponry, we're not going to extrude that. What I use instead is a mo graph mo text object. Okay, so let's create mo text object and will jump into the front view. That's really big. So just pull this ups. It could see what I'm doing. Let's just go through and type in pro fashion. Their own professional design. Well done, three. There we go. Now we're gonna have to scale this down. We'll have to find the funds. Describe. This gets open, Sands. There we go. So we'll have to bring this down and scale it so it matches those letters down, skilled down a bit. Okay, so we'll just play around with these letters. So open, sands. Maybe it's a bold there goes looking pretty good. And what we're gonna do is we will play with the horizontal spacing a bit. That's 0.25 Something like that. Maybe it's a little bit more his 0.5. We want kind of line it up with this L It's looking pretty decent. Okay, Now, I could just go through and delete those plans that were not using, and we'll take all of this. Shifts clicked. Shift, shift, select a mall, group objects, and we'll just call this GM logo. Okay, now we're ready to start animating. 14. Texturing Materials: start creating some materials. So right away, what we're gonna do is we're gonna jump into the material editor and we're just gonna double click in this area. And that will create a default Matt material. And what we want to do is rename this yellow. Now we're gonna go back to our color scheme and reference that color that we Picts Okay, so are yellow color scheme is rgb 2 55 1 97 4 2 55 97 and four. So we will just want to take those numbers into right right here. Does argue be when I before and for Okay, so there's a color we're gonna leave this speculator on, so we just want the color and the speculator. Okay, so the next one that we're going to do is the light grey. So take this material. Note it. Command C command V. Okay. And double click the the material. I'll rename this light gray and then I'll jump back over to my color scheme. And light Grey is 205 to 6 all the way across the board for the RGB values. So to six, five, five. Oops. That was this speculator color. Go back to the default for that speculate color. I see. Command be open this up again. Great. I want to be in the color. There we go. Six 5 to 5. Perfect. All right, let's command command C Command V, that material note again. And what we're gonna do on this one is turn on a luminous. So let's go over to our color and let's right click where it's his color copy And the Luminess Channel. Just paste. That's exactly what. Okay, so now we're gonna create a background material, so we're gonna do that with black and great radiant. So 000 for the RGB values of black and 45 for the Grady's. Okay, that's coming too. Cinema four D and double click to create a new material. And what we'll do is we'll turn off speculum for this one, and in the color, we're gonna add a texture, ingredient, texture. We could right click on this preview. Just make it a plane click on the radiant. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna change it to a circular. Radiant. We'll take this black, push it over to the other side groups note right here. So let's type in 45 in 45. So that's gonna give us ingredient from Grey to black. All right, so now we're gonna create a new background object, and I'm gonna drop this first thing you do is I'm gonna rename this background. So take this and drop it right on my background. And nothing's happening right now. So if we take a render now, I could see that we have a great background. All right? We also want to create some sort of floor that will catch our shadows. OK, um, so let's create a floor. Let's take a render. So right now, this floor is kind of messing with our Grady. Um, what we want to do is we want to grab this background, put it on the floor. Okay, so that's gonna texture the floor. But that's not really what we're looking for. Well, here's what we want to do. We want to take this floor right. Click cinema 40 tags compositing, and we want to check compositing background. Okay, Still not what we're looking for. So we have to grab this texture and for the projection, let's click Frontal. And now we have a seamless background. So what this is doing is the floor is gonna allow us to actually cast shadows from our objects under there. So let's say, for instance, it from created a cube and we created a light. Let's pretend that this cube is our vector objects vector shape that we made in the previous few a few steps. So if I take the slight and turn on the shadow, let's just say a retraced our shadow and take another render that's going to allow that floor plane is going to allow us to catch the shadows. OK, so it'll it'll give us a surface to, I guess project shadows on tour catches shadows however you want. Okay, so let's delete that light. We got our scene set up. We're good to go as far as that goes. So at this point, what we can do is we can import our first vector into this 15. Setting Selections: first extruded shape and that would be are vented shape. So we'll take both of these and we'll hit. We'll go into our object manager shift, select both these Cappy jump into our entitled scene at it paste. Okay, so the first thing that we're gonna dio is take both of these and just kind of lift him up . So they're pretty far off the ground, Something like that. And we're gonna take take this recited object, and what I want to do is first and foremost, I want to make this edible. Okay, take all this rounding in these caps and I will shift Select all this geometry. Right? Click connected the leak, so that would give me one piece of geometry. I'll just name this, um, cube or something. Uh, okay, good. So now let's just go display Greg shading lines. And what I want to do is just add some more geometry into this, okay? Because I wanna if we checkouts this final animation, what I ended up doing for this waas I split this thing up into I applied to materials to this, so I split it up where we have material on the inside here we have a material on the outside, so that's what I want to do right now is just create those two materials. So I'm jumping in new the top view. I'm going to my line mode. Go into the live selection tool. Make sure only select visible armed elements is unchecked. I'll increase the radius and select all the way through this right click and connect points edges. That's gonna give me another line right in the center of my geometry. Okay, so let's jump to the top of you again, and I'll go in my point mode. Just select all these points right here. It's kind of moving up a little bit and then go back into my line mode. So, like, these lines connect bullets and edges. All right, Cool. I'll go back back in the point mode and just kind of tweet this stuff a little bit that down. We could do this by I as well. It doesn't have to be perfectly centered if you want to offset it to one side. That's fine as well. Um, so just kind of play around with this until you get up looking exactly like you want it. Okay? It's looking pretty good. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take those and just push him a little bit closer together. So I just grabbed the scale tool, and I'm grabbing this acsi scaling that in There you go looking pretty good. Okay, so now I want to set a selection for this. All right, So we'll go in our polygon mode, Life selection tool will bring down the radius. Let's say one that I'm gonna select all these polygons right in the middle, okay? And then I go into the perspective. You make sure I have all those selected, They want to go select set selection. Okay, that's gonna give me another little triangle in my object manager right next to my geometry . So let's go in here and just name this white. That's fine. So the first thing that we're gonna dio is we're gonna drop this this yellow material right on our cube, and then we want to take our light grey with the luminous channel. Turn on. We want to put that on there as well. So here's the trick with setting selections. You want to grab your you want to select your material. And right down here in the attributes manager, there's gonna be a little window for a selection. So this last triangle that we created, we want to grab that and just put it right where it says selection. Okay, so now when we take a render, we actually have to materials, honor, geometry.