Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Jose. More catch. Oh, I'm a graphic designer and half of not any design collective were a creative studio based in Northern California. For this course, I'll be teaching you how to turn your logo or two D design into a three D animated object using cinema 40 light. This class is meant for beginners or anyone interested in creating three D motion graphics for the class Project will be making a simple, looping GIF using one of your design to complete. The project will be using Illustrator Aftereffects Cinema, 40 Light and Photoshopped. So thank you for taking this course and let's go ahead and get started.
2. Preparing Illustrator File for C4D: Okay, so let's get started. The first thing you need to do is to open up your local file and illustrator or your two d design in Illustrator. And right here we have my personal logo. It doesn't matter if your design has a fill or is just a stroke or if the objects are grouped or not. Because when you open up your file in cinema four d cinema 40 will automatically group your object together and there will be no Phil when you open up your file in cinema four D will add that in later. So the next step would be to go ahead and hit file save as and you're going to need to save the file as illustrator eight. Now, the reason why you needed to be ah, Illustrator eight is because Cinema four D will recognize these types of files. So when you import your file into cinema four d ah, you won't have any problems. Okay, So save the file now for the first part of your project, go ahead and take a screenshot of your design that you're planning on turning into three D and go ahead and post that into the project gallery and next up we will go ahead and open up after effects
3. Importing Illustrator File into C4D: So once you have after effects opened up, let's go ahead and launch cinema four D light and you do that by clicking file New Maxon Cinema four d file and that'll prompt you to save it. Go ahead and save it under the same name. Click save. Okay, so that will open up Cinema four D light. And now let's go ahead and import our file. Go ahead, click file open. Go into our three D logo. Open up your illustrator eight file. Go ahead and leave the scale at one centimeter click. OK? And there it is. And if we zoom out, rotated a bit, you can see there is my logo. No Phil for anything, but let's go ahead and add that in in the next video.
4. Adding Depth, Color, and Lighting to your Design: Okay, so now let's get started on turning R two D logo into a three D logo. If you go over here and click on your object. If you click this plus, you can see both of the objects are made into one group. We could just close that to seek and see. I want to go down here to co ordinate, and I want to move this object 2000 on the plane. Let's go ahead and move up. Position the screen right in front of it. Okay, Next, let's go ahead and extrude our object. So hold the mouse down on this icon. Click extrude and you can drag the logo into extrude. Now it doesn't do anything yet. You have to click extrude, go into object and check the box higher article. Or however you say that now, if we rotate slightly around, you can see that the object has some depth to it now. So that's a start. No, let's go ahead and have a little bit more depth. I'm going to increase the value, too. I'll increase it to 60 centimeters. I like the way that looks Okay Now let's style eyes. This a little bit more. You can go into caps and select filet caps. I believe that's how you say it for late caps. I've heard some people say Philip Caps, but filet sounds right to me. Okay, Now you can see it added some edges to our object. You can change the values right here for a radius. You can see that increases it, decreases it. Five. Looks good to me. It's on both sides. Okay, No, let's go ahead and add some color to it. So go down here. I had a new material double click to bring up the options. The only thing I want to change here is the color. So I'm gonna drag these values. I'm gonna make a ruling. Blue, actually. Let's see. I'd like it to be a nice blue is my favorite color. I'm gonna leave all these other options the same. Just going to change the color, leave the reflect INTs. That looks good to me. So let's close it next. All you have to do is click and drag the material you just created. You can drag it directly to the object, or you can drag it up here to the extrude object. And there you go. The color has been added. All right, so if you want to preview this, you can go up here to the Render view. Click that. That's what your object will look like. There's no background right now. We'll add that in ah, later on in after effects. But if you move your viewer around and check out the render view, you can see that it's three dimensional, and it's looking pretty cool. Okay, so let's bring that back around next. Let's go ahead and add a light to our scene right here. Click light like to see the light starts off at the 000 coordinates. So let's change those click coordinates and let's go ahead and move the light back on the Z court in it. So it's in front of our object. I'm bringing the value down. I'll just go ahead and move it down to negative 500. Okay, now, let's preview that again. All right. Looks good. Okay, So for your next project, go ahead and take a screenshot of your render view of your logo or two D design, which would now be three dimensional and upload that into the project gallery and next we'll go ahead and start animating this
5. Adding a Camera: Okay, so now let's add a camera for an emission. Go ahead and click on the camera icon, and that will add a camera to our default view so you can see the camera is placed right here when we don't want that. So let's go and click on camera use camera and will change from default camera to camera. This is the camera that you just placed. Click that, and it will bring you into view. Let's go ahead and change the coordinates. 2000 And we want to change the Z coordinate until our object is in view. So let's go back, okay? And let's remove these rotation values like zero that looks good to me. Now let's lock our camera. So in order to lock your camera in place and save you some headache, right click on the camera. Go to Cinema four D tags and click on protection. Now, if you want to move or rotate your camera around, you can't can zoom. And that's perfect because we want our camera to be locked in place. Okay, and now we're ready to animate our object
6. Animating Your 3D Object: Okay, So for this animation, we just want a simple animation where the object is moving up and down, as well as doing a full 360 degree rotation, and we want it to be seamless. So let's take a look at the timeline right here. You can see that it starts from zero frames to 90 frames. One thing to know is that Cinema four D starts its count at zero, whereas after effects will start its count at one. So if you were to import this into after effects right now, you would have one extra key frame. So in order to fix that, let's go ahead and change this to 89 frames. So there, now we'll be starting from zero frames and a ending at 89 frames. So when we import this into after effects, it'll just be a full 90 frames. Okay, now, let's add the first bit of our animation. First, we're going to start by adding the 360 degree rotation, so make sure you have your extrude object selected and make sure that your key frame is that zero. Now, let's go ahead and lock the key frame and the rotation will take place on this box right here. So go ahead and click this icon, and that will lock our key friend. Now let's go ahead and move this to the end. At 89 frames, change this value to 360 and lock our key frame in place. And if you go right here and click play, you can see your object is moving. Now you can see that the animation kind of ramps up in the beginning in the end, and we want it to be seamless. So in order to fix that, go ahead and click our key frame, and when it selected, it will turn orange. And right here at interpellation, we want to change that to Linear, and we'll do that with the same, uh, same key frame at the end. Go ahead and click it, change it from Spine two Linear. And let's preview that again. All right, so that's better. Just a nonstop rotation. No, let's go ahead and add the up and down motion. So let's move our key frame toe. One click on extrude object again, and we will be changing the Y value. Let's go ahead and lock the first key frame at zero centimeters. I like the height where it is right now, so we'll go ahead and make that zero move forward to the middle at about 45. And we'll bring this value down to, let's say, negative 60 looks good to me. Lock that key frame and then we'll move forward to 88 and changes to zero. Okay, lock that key frame. And now let's preview that. Okay, that looks good to me. Now let's go ahead and save our animation and we'll head back into after effects.
7. Stylizing in After Effects: Okay, now that we're back in after effects, let's go ahead and drag our logo file right there, and that will create a new composition. Let's go ahead and change our render to standard Final. That'll show us what our final project will look like in the render view. It might take a little bit longer to, ah, render this, but it should be fine. And let's make sure that our camera is set to Cinema four D Camera. Okay, that looks good. No, let's go ahead and add a new adjustment layer and let's name this woman glow and we'll go over to our effects and presets. Typing glow. It's right here. Dragged that to our adjustment layer, all right, and that makes our our logo start to glow. Let's go ahead and change the glow radius a bit. Make it a little bit more glowy. I think 20 looks good to me. All right now, let's go ahead and add our background so we'll go ahead and add a shape layer dragged this below our logo, and we have ah rectangle tool already selected. Let's go ahead and drag that. Okay, so my fill is set to a greedy int right now. Ah, I like that. But I don't like the colors. So if we go up to fill click on that, we can change the colors right here. Let's go ahead. And I want to change the white. Actually, it's good and make it a little bit blue. I like that. Let's go ahead and go back to our selection tool. And these handles right here will pull these to change the radiant. I want the great aunt to go from top to bottom, so I'm gonna drag this handle on the right side with the blue dragged that up. Must drag this handle right here. Drag that down a bit, and let's just make it look a little bit more even throughout. So if we drag this up, Okay, that looks good to me. Okay, Now, let's go ahead and preview or composition and let's fit the screen. Okay, That looks good to me. All right. So go ahead and save your file and will export it in the next video.
8. Exporting File as a GIF: okay, before we export our file, let's go ahead and check the composition settings. And let's change the frame rate to 15 frames per second, and that will reduce the file size when we export the Giffen Photoshopped. So now go ahead back to composition and add to render queue. And we can leave these settings as is. Go ahead and name your file and save it to a certain location and then hit Render. Okay, so once that's all done, let's go ahead and open up Photoshopped Press open. Open up the file that you just saved and there's your file. You can scrub through the timeline below to see it. Okay, now, let's go ahead and hit file Export Safer Web legacy And let's make sure that our file type is set to gift for colors. Let's go ahead and leave that I 128 colors did there. Leave that at 100. Make sure Lossy and Web snap are zero and for looping options, go ahead and select forever. Now we want the foul size to be under two megabytes, so that way we can upload it to the Project gallery. So let's go ahead and decrease the size. Make sure that your aspect ratio is locked. And let's go ahead and change the with 2 700 pixels. Okay, that looks good. Now, go ahead and click. Save. Save your file. And then that's preview it. All right. And there you have it. Now go ahead and upload your gift to the project gallery.
9. Conclusion: So congratulations. You finish the course. I really hope you were able to complete the project. And I also hope that you found this class as a useful start to animating in three D. And if you have any questions, go ahead and post those. I'll try my best to get back to those as soon as possible. And I'm really excited to see what you made. And I just want to thank you again for taking this course. All right, take care.
Jose Morquecho, Keeping it fun.
