Animate and Composite Stylized Renders in Cinema 4D and After Effects with Jake Ferguson

what's up y'all this is jake ferguson and thanks so much for tuning in so today i'm going to be taking you through how to do some stylized animation in c4d as well as compositing and after effects our final product is gonna be this very cool animated loop that looks very flat very anime so i'm gonna be taking you through some of the steps that i take within c4d within zbrush and after effects in order to get a very flat render out of something that's completely three-dimensional so this is going to be the final product that we get to by the end of the demo [Music] pretty cool right it took me a while to kind of crack this code and figure out how to get this result out of c4d you know there are some cell animated aspects in there um but that that's 99 cinema that you're seeing so you know a little about me before we really get into this i'm a freelance art director and cg lead based in los angeles i have worked at imaginary forces elastic the mill carbon vfx mtv i used to be staff at o'toy so shout out to all the octane guys hello um you know i i mostly focus on cg title sequences and commercial work uh i've worked on some features you know but mostly titles that's that's what i like to do the most i actually have an emmy for main title design in 2018 so shout out to karen fong for bringing me on to such a cool project and being such a noble leader as always um i could ramble about myself for a while you know but for the sake of time i'm just gonna show you guys my reel and maybe that will you know help you see what exactly i'm about [Music] so [Music] [Music] so in the demo today i'm going to be taking you through posing sculpting texturing and compositing in order to get this final result so we're going to get there by you know starting with a couple pre-made assets and manipulating them to suit our needs and then we're gonna you know take our own you know means of stylization and get to exactly where we're going uh so i'm gonna take you through just my general practice a little bit of theory in each of these packages and just generally how to you know cut corners and get somewhere kind of quickly in order to get the result that you want without too much frustration or manual labor or anything like that so thanks again for tuning in so the first thing we're going to do is get that pose down so we have our reference of the character and we want to match this pose in 3d you know as fast as possible we don't want to make this from scratch we don't want to do anything like that especially when there's so many good rigged characters online everywhere um so the director actually found a pretty stylized model which he sent me an fbx up so it looks like you're just like typical stylized anime female character now the geometry right now is not really something we should focus on we're really focusing here on how to you know get get just get the pose down you know because we're going to bring her into zbrush afterwards and really start you know sculpting her out to match the artwork so the first thing that we want to do is start off with the pelvis and this is this is kind of the key element here you know you start here and then work your way up and then work your way down that's usually how i do posing so i'll start off with the bigger things first like you know the pelvis then the spine then the shoulders elbows wrists hands fingers that way you're doing your big you know silhouettes first and then you work into some of the fine details we're going to start with the thigh here and just kind of swing that down now it looks like she's got kind of a arc to her hips like that so we're actually we're going to start there we're going to start on the pelvis first and i know it looks weird but we're gonna you know just kind of do something that looks a little counter-intuitive right now by twisting the pelvis to match this alignment so you can see this point here and this point here are the widest part of the hips so they make that type of angle so we're just going to match that same thing and do something like that and then we're going to start you know we can start with the legs because they'll be a little bit easier to get down we're going to start matching those you just swing those over let's see where's the other one here and bring that down i know it looks a little weird but you just have to trust me it's gonna we're gonna fix a lot of this in in zbrush when we make our way over there okay and do the knee looks like your legs back a little bit like that now your ball and socket joints you know feel free to swing around on any axes but you got to make sure that whenever you're doing hinge joints like your knees and elbows um you're only using the the one axis like that because you know that's not how a leg bends that being said this is really stylized so it's like you know if you're in a pinch and that's the only way to make it look right go right ahead you know rules are there to be broken um so we're gonna bring this leg out a little bit and bring the calf down bend her foot down because she's floating not something too weird kind of like that and do the same thing with the toes so her foot's a little flatter okay and let's do her other foot you're not going to really see your other foot so it doesn't matter too too much that's good um yeah looks great so let's keep going um so what we're going to do is just kind of start bringing the spine in a little bit it doesn't matter too much you know you can you can start pushing some of this stuff we're just she's a static piece of geo so it doesn't really matter if we start to displace our bones a little bit just to like get that pose going looks like she has a little bit of a twist to her chest so we can start probably on a lower one like this see so it looks like your shoulders have a cool angle to them like that we want to preserve that because what it's doing is it's creating an angle here and here so these two different angles are kind of working against each other which adds to the you know artistic value of the pose um and that's what we're going to match so we'll worry about our neck afterwards i'm just going to kind of skew her head oh it's so weird her shoulders are attached to her neck bone [Music] if i had a nickel for every weird rig that i had to make work i would have quite a few nickels so looks like her clavicle is actually under her neck joint so we're going to start there on her left clavicle that's her shoulder uh her collarbone right there and that's where we're going to get the general angle for her shoulders like that now your clavicle is kind of a free moving joint so it works if you do something like that uh and then we're going to do the opposite with the other one so that we can get that cool angle mean just kind of move it around like that yeah and there we're gonna bring her arm up like that and kind of compensate a little bit with the shoulder blade or with the clavicle continue with that arm now we don't want to twist it too much because you see it starts pinching the geo and it'll be easier just to get the shape in there like that okay and take the forearm now normally you can't really twist this but we're gonna do it anyway to kind of help her hand out a little bit when we get there so we can get to the hand and twist that around so her finger pose is actually pretty decent i don't really see a reason to mess with it too much um so let's move down to her other hand see we're getting a little bit of a pinch there but yeah you know it's all right we'll fix it uh when we get into the sculpting phase so now we're gonna do our other arm left clavicle so looks like we got that angle pretty good in there we can mess with a little bit more later um then we're gonna get this arm out it looks like this arm is pushed a little bit back behind her so we can't see her elbow too much like it's a little tucked in and her hand her elbow is straight out like that and that's what we want to match [Music] do a little twist and then take her forearm and we're going to do the same thing that we shouldn't be doing we're going to break that forearm and bend it a little bit just to help her hand out and keep her wrist smooth bend her hand up like this and that's pretty decent for now yeah [Music] do a little bit of adjustment on her legs go back down and do those so where are they take this thigh and move it in over a little bit and then take this one and move it in a lot because it looks like it's kind of in all right not perfect but it's close you know and all we really need for this phase is close all right so that's pretty much good for her body for now we'll mess with it more later um we should fix our hair up a little bit just so that we i think it's these see [Music] nope that's not it um oh it's probably gonna be in her head so go to her head bone yeah we should pause that as well let's see so it looks like she's kind of looking up a little bit she's looking at the crystal so we should kind of pose ourselves here and make sure that that kind of aligns but also that it's not too far back that it doesn't look strange from the front because this is what's most important so yes she's looking at it but yes her head sloped a little too far back so we're just gonna you know adjust so that it looks best from the front okay good enough and let's see here we go mirrored so this is probably our pigtails so we're gonna move these over to match that other piece of artwork let's see that was provided as reference and this one all right so it looks like they're just out and they bend so obviously the pigtails that we have in this model they're not ideal you know they're a lot shorter they don't have as many bends but we're gonna fix a ton of that in the sculpting phase so that won't be an issue at all we just need to get the general you know we just need to get them away from the head so because we're going to split those out so the pose here doesn't really matter too much because we're going to change them so much so we just we need to get them push them away kind of like that because we're going to make the we're going to eventually make these their own object when we get to the sculpting phase um and then we'll do the other one this one okay move that over great okay cool so let's um yeah let's move over to zbrush so during this section i'm going to show a time lapse of the sculpting process within zbrush and at the same time i'm going to kind of talk through how to achieve some of those same things within c4d and the sculpting tools here so in your layout section in the top right you can change it to sculpt and it'll give you a ton of tools that you can use to achieve kind of the same things you know in zbrush i'm really only using you know pushes pulls smoothing a little bit of masking and a little bit of topology management you know and a lot of those things you can do here so for the smoothing you know i i use the smooth brush to take out you know areas like this you know you can just run it over and it's like these kind of creases and everything to just like kind of reduce the detail and get a smoother mesh to you know just give us something easier to work with and stylize it how we want to stylize it you know it's like a lot of these just unnecessary details and you can use the the flattened tool as well now it's a it's a little too flat so you can go into your pressure here and lower that and that'll kind of give you still a little too much drop it a little bit more [Music] even more than that there you go something kind of like that you know and that's how you can start to go in and just start you know getting that stuff i personally i use zbrush for just about everything i'm way more comfortable in it i have years of experience using it so that's that's my go-to but the sculpting tools within c4d are fantastic and you can do just about anything in here that you would want to be able to do in there so you know it's like i'm using a lot of these tools as well the grab tool is something that's really good you can just use it to you know quickly start to reposition things exactly how you want to get you know more of a finesse model to match you know the things that you want to do the same thing with the pull tool it'll just pull stuff towards you you know or if you hold down uh control it'll push things away from you it becomes a push tool so that's super handy there's a subdivide feature if you need more geometry you know a ton of these tools are great you know the inflate tool will help you with things like the hair you know if i want to inflate certain sections of it and defl deflate others now keep in mind you hold down control and any brush that you have will do the opposite so pretty much what i'm doing here in zbrush you know i've gone through and smoothed out the whole model and created a mesh that matches the design boards that i'm going off of a lot more and you know it's it's created you know a much thinner uh you know more stylized anatomy than what i originally had and i'm going in and replacing certain sections like the hands in creating new uh sculpts for the hands and putting it onto my stylized model that way i can preserve the detail there and you know the same thing with the head or whatever else i need so for these sections you know i'm creating a very high subdiv model that i can later go into cinema and start to stylize the topology to make something more low poly and ready to project our textures onto all right we're back in cinema um so now her geo you know it's smooth and it works but it doesn't really match the the look of you know her body here and when we do our projection you know the silhouette it's going to have this nice angular lighting but the silhouette is going to be super curvy the way that we have it so what we're going to do is do a quick polygon reduction on the body itself and also do one on the hair all right so we're gonna do a quick polygon reduction on the body and then also do one on the hair so i'm gonna do an alt click on a poly reduction and it's going to process the polygons okay and we're going to crank that number up by default it's 90 we're going to try 99.5 so still a little too many let's try 99.9 that's better but look at those hands oh no the body looks great but the hands are all screwed up again all right turn that off for a sec bring the geo down we're going to split our hands out again so i'm just going to use our lasso tool select the hands right click split go to our original geo delete so now we have our body and our hands as two separate objects so we can do two separate polygon reductions so that the body works on this so we're gonna turn that back on very cool so let's uh yep that works heads kind of messed up we might do the same process to the head that we did the hands um but yeah this looks good this looks like a nice like vector that somebody would draw so what do we what are we using on there 99.9 it even kind of you know the chest it matches that same shape that is being used in the lighting so you know we know that's a good count if that's how it lines up that's great um so we're going to do the same thing to the hair do an alt click on that let it process do a 99.9 too much let's try 99.5 that's cool that looks really awesome all right that works that's cool [Music] and then for the hands we got to do those as well so the hands are kind of a key moment with the camera we're this close so we're going to want to make sure that those both look legible but still you know very stylized [Music] i'll click let it process 99 [Music] close a little intense but that might actually work out just fine what is 99 or 98.5 looks like that's a little better let's do that let's do 98.5 on there just so we have a little bit more wiggle room okay so now we have these polygon reductions we're just gonna hit c and make all this into our editable geo but we're going to keep it separate all right now we should do our projection so now we have our stylized model we're going to just do like a centered cam i'm going to do a psr reset on it so it's perfectly facing the model and we're going to use this to project the body so let's get rid of these textures i'm going to make a new one [Music] by double clicking and i'm gonna go to my color i'm gonna just leave all this the same for now just so i can see what i'm doing so now i'm gonna bring in her body drawing right here and i'm gonna just put that on the body and i'm gonna set this to camera and plug our camera in here and to see what i'm doing i'm going to also change my viewport resolution to something a lot higher so we can start figuring out exactly what's on there so it looks like it's close but it's not really lining up perfectly i'm going to change my camera to match what the drawing was done in i think the drawing was done in an early model in zbrush and the focal length in zbrush is set to 50 so i'm going to set my projection camera to 50 also see all right looks like the looks like it's a little squished so what we're gonna do is go to our coordinates and change our camera scale to 1.4 that should match a little better there we go now we're just going to kind of line the edges up like that cool looks great so that's our uh that's our lighting on our character right there looks a little wacky but it works so i'm gonna look through the camera and just make sure that lines up exactly like i want it to got a little foot right here chest cool now the hands are blacked out and so is the face on that drawing so we're gonna have to do those on our own um for the shader now i'm gonna take this off of color and i'm going to drag it into luminance and put it on here i'm going to turn off color turn the luminance on turn off reflectance and bam we have a flat character that looks cool let's clean this up a little bit first because like obviously the projection has some issues it has stuff that goes through like this foot shouldn't be so lit up these little issues right here so since we have this low poly model we can just select all the problems polygons like that here anything that doesn't look you know correct you can just select those guys like all that that works fine and what we're gonna do is we're never gonna see her back so it doesn't really matter that we're doing this all right [Music] now that you have those poly selected what you want to do is you can make a new shader and just turn off color turn off reflectance and you have a flat black shader and we're going to apply those to the model and it's going to get rid of those problem aspects so if you see any more you know that you didn't hit the first time it's fine just go in and put it back on so we're going to do that for points that we want to be black and we're going to do that for points that we want to be white as well so i'm going to go back and use my selection tool because it's a little bit faster [Music] grab this whole foot because we know we want that to all be black back or leg uh let's see cyber foot whatever that looks fine and yeah cool so now we're going to do the same thing but with a white shader so for that it's a little bit different turn color off turn reflectance off turn luminance on and it looks like our white is not what the value of the drawing that we're projecting is so we're gonna select that as a color so we get this gray that matches and we're gonna go in and select what we want to be white so let's see we know there's a rim light on her arm coming in from the crystal so we're gonna do that [Music] see how intense that is should match up fine all right cool so now we got our arm all fixed up so let's do our hands now our hands are something we're gonna have to do by hand so no pun intended so we're gonna just kind of hit the polygons that are gonna be hit by this top lighting that's lighting the rest of our body enough so that we can just highlight the fingers and differentiate them from the rest of the silhouette when we're that close with our camera okay cool that should do it honestly um there you go bam that works pretty well uh we got a few little stray polis that looks like it belongs to the body grab those hit it with the white shader okay done sweet so yeah she looks pretty cool you know it's like that's some very stylized lighting that would be a nightmare to get with sketch and tune and also with actual lighting but this is just a cheap way to do it with polygons espec if your light doesn't move like why not you know so the hair is just going to be flat black easy doesn't have any highlights we just need the shape and now her face we gotta project that on there so we're gonna do a different a new shader put it on her head and we're gonna do the same thing that we did for the body we're gonna grab the front projection of her head and we're gonna make a new camera i actually want to look through it so i can line it up with her face and i'm going to change the projection to [Music] camera and put the camera in right there and change our viewport size to 4k so we can see what we're doing and we're going to start figuring this out so this is just kind of generally the angle that we're going to project down on so we're going to have to twist the camera a little bit to match a little bit better we'll also change the scale so that's pretty good to get it set up initially i'm gonna hide my other camera so i can see okay um it looks looks really screwy from the side but we're gonna start fixing that so we're gonna do the same thing that we did at the body we're gonna change the scale of the camera to 1.4 so she's not so stretched out that's gonna cause us to push in a little bit look at that it's already working out pretty well cool at least from the front so we're gonna kind of match you know where her nose is like that bring up something like that now the scale looks a little off we might need to go in and do a little special geometry treatment on her chin but for the most part this works out pretty well especially when it's going to be flat so to do that we're going to do the same thing we did the body we're going to take that color projection move it onto luminance turn the luminance on turn color off turn reflectance off now it looks like her head was painted white while her body was painted gray we want these to match so i'm going to do a layer and i'm going to go into there and add a color channel and match that same gray and i'm gonna multiply it over the whole thing so her face should match the body yeah that matches pretty well cool okay great so now let's see how we look from the front i'm gonna make just a default camera psr just so that it's facing our model just kind of get the same framing that's in the board i mean that's not bad you know it's like that's pretty damn close to what we're going for all right we gotta hit this hand too but not by much just a little bit just the top of her arm there but we'll get back to that so now we just gotta kind of clean up her face like this i'm gonna i'm gonna take that camera that we project our head on and i'm gonna start moving around based off of this angle so that i can kind of get a better sense of this move it over a little bit i'm just trying to kind of neutralize the shadow on the right side of her face just see what works out the best ah that's cool that's yeah that's it right there okay so we're going to leave that b hide that camera this looks great so now i'm going to jump out of the camera i'm going to go under her face and i'm going to do that same poly fix that we did on our body grab all these guys grab back here back of her head so it looks like right here kind of cuts into her face not a problem it looks like it'll go with the rest of the drawing i think it'll be totally fine especially from our point of view over here that looks good um so now let's do our camera move so now that we have our model set up we should do our camera move and then you know get the crystal and the background in there and then we can comp so the camera move you know it's an orbit around the model in the background but that's a lot of keyframes that we don't really need to deal with instead we're going to spin the model and the background at the same rate and we're just going to pull back the camera with a camera morph keep it much simpler so we have our model this will be our kind of b position where we want to end up so let's call that chem b and now let's do an a position cam a where we're just a lot closer on the hand and eventually where the crystal's gonna be so it's gonna be something kind of like this but she's on an axis right in the middle like that but her hand is is not you know so when she when we spin her her hand's going to be in a different place than the rest of her body so what we want to do is we want to actually create a new null and put her in it to do this rotation we'll call this shells rot for rotation and i'm gonna go to my overview camera uh top and i'm going to actually line up the axis with her hand like that so that way when she spins change it back to perspective when she spins she doesn't spin around you know her foot or anything she actually spins around where her hand is that it always stays in the same place and so does the crystal so that's exactly what we want to do so for camera a i'm going to actually just center that with the hand something like that kind of put it towards the bottom and now we're going to do her rotation um so this shot is actually only 56 frames long but i'm going to keep the timeline at 120 at 24 fps just so we have some extra room and we can do some cool timer mapping later so this isn't a good starting position because it's not an ideal look at her hand uh so we're going to actually set a keyframe at the 120 second mark for the rotation on her body so that at the end it's at this position but in the beginning we're going to spin her like this see her hand looks way cooler like that i'm gonna set a keyframe there and we're gonna actually move this camera up just a little bit like that now i was lucky enough to find a pretty cool crystal online and i just ran a polygon reduction on it so i'm going to bring that in okay there we go crystal's pretty cool nice and low poly we're going to texture it a little bit differently than we're doing shells so i'm gonna just raise that up just a little bit and i'm gonna put that crystal in the rotation that shells is in so that they move together sweet okay cool so she doesn't have that much of a rotation going on you know it's like she's just kind of flipping from like a side view to a front view now to get our camera to move between these two cameras we're gonna make a third camera and it doesn't really matter the position i'll just do a psr on it and we're going to set the tag on there to a camera morph which is one of my favorite functions in c4d of all time so we're going to use cam a as our first position camera one and cam b is our second position so all we have to do is set the blend from zero percent on the first keyframe to a hundred percent on the back keyframe and we have our camera moving that's it so you should look through that and test it out i'm gonna hide the other two cameras nice not bad a bit slow and drawn out but that's our move generally so that's good we got our character we got our crystal now we just need the background so if we look at the reference the background is split up into a few layers we have the the color all the way in the back we have this middle row of guys and we have this front row of guys um so we're gonna need to go in there and split that out i've already done that and i split out the three different layers with alpha and that's what we're gonna bring in a cinema so i'm just gonna go out of my camera right now and make a cylinder let's see just do something like that and make it editable and then i'm going to cut off the top and the bottom so that we just have this tube and that's what we're going to use to put the background on so i'm just going to make a new texture apply it turn on my luminance channel turn everything else off and i'm going to add in the first layer here now i'm gonna just copy pull that over to alpha and put that on there check alpha on and i'm gonna change my viewport texture size to 4k cool so that looks like it works um now we just need to offset our mapping a little bit so that we get we basically wherever we end up at the end we just want to match that design board so we're going to go into our camera and we want to just make it so that the background fits so what we're going to do is just offset our horizontal mapping a little bit and our vertical mapping so that we can just start to get that same kind of look in there and move our cylinder down a little bit let's see how that works so this is the other thing that we want to do our background cylinders since the camera's not actually rotating and the character is we're just going to take that and put it in her rotation so that ah there you go you get a pretty cool orbit so our camera is not orbiting but you get the illusion of it because the background's spinning at the same rate of the character so that works so to do the other layers i'm going to change this to perspective to do the other layers of the background i'm just going to duplicate that cylinder stretch it out a little bit so that we get these three layers of parallax basically and for the middle one see i'm gonna make a copy of the same texture i'm just gonna change my luminance to the second layer and push that over to my alpha as well and then i'm just going to copy that onto that cylinder and then i'm going to repeat the same thing for the third layer i'm gonna go to my luminance change that to the third layer and i'm gonna just check my alpha off because that's a that doesn't have any alpha information it's just a solid oops more one it's just a solid piece like that so let's go into our camera and just see how that lines up you know it's pretty close already we just need to make a few adjustments to this back cylinder uh let's see so we're gonna we're gonna rotate that a little bit we're gonna bring it down something like that we're gonna also just offset our vertical mapping a little bit so we can just fit some more detail into our constraints okay yeah something like that works maybe a little bit more that's cool okay and then we're going to do the same thing for our background so we may basically just want to get like these eyes the bottom of the gradient so i'm just gonna pinch my vertical mapping down a little bit adjust the cylinder maybe stretch it out a little bit more pull it up like that so that's cool that uh that works all right so we're gonna group these cylinders call that bg so that background that we're seeing is the same color basically as what we're seeing in that last layer of the background cylinders that we made so i'm gonna keep that turned off now we're not getting much light on the crystal because it doesn't have a texture so i'm gonna make just a default glossy texture and put it on the crystal and then i'm gonna go in nothing really matters except for your index just i'm just gonna drop that all the way down and that's going to make it a perfectly chrome material like that now i just need to render each piece and by doing so i'm going to render shells by herself just like this and then i'm going to turn her off run to render the crystal by itself and then i'm going to turn crystal and the shell and shells off and just render the background on a layer by itself and once we have those image sequences we'll be ready to comp all right so now we have all three of these image sequences in here and it looks pretty good so we just want to push it into a much more stylized direction to match our design board which i'm going to park yeah right there's fine open it up just a little bit so it looks like you know the biggest differences between this board and our render is we need that glow on top uh we need a little bit of color on shells we need to you know change her grays to something else we need the crystal to be a little brighter you know towards the end and just you know the background should feel more secondary and not necessarily as imposing as it does here so let's get right into it the first thing that we should do is treat the background so i'm going to put it out of focus first that's going to be our first move i'm going to use fl out of focus and that's from the frischlift package i love this blur it's just like camera lens blur but it renders faster which is fantastic so i'm going to keyframe this actually i'm going to do something pretty high on the beginning maybe like it stops at 50 but for 4k it should be a little higher i'm going to do 80. that looks good 90. just push it over the edge cool keyframe it there and then by the time we get about here ish yeah something like that i'm going to set it back down to zero so that's when our background comes into focus so already you know it's like we're starting to set up a little bit more of a cinematic language than what's already there um secondly we're going to treat shells so this is a little bit more simple i'm going to solo her just so that we can focus on her and i'm going to split her into two layers her first layer i'm just going to do a fill on her and i'm going to make that let's say i'm gonna pull her darkest purple from here yeah something like that you know we can always change it if it's too light and then the second layer i'm gonna do a luma key and i'm gonna get rid of the darks on that so what that's gonna do is pretty much just put her highlights and her darks into two layers cool okay so that's split up um now for shells i'm going to actually put a gradient ramp on her and just use a normal linear gradient ramp that it comes out with i'm going to swap the colors so that the bright spots up here pull it down a little bit i'm going to leave that top part white and then the bottom part i'm actually going to make a pink see she's already starting to blend a little too much for me but i'm going to wait until i get the other effects in to really uh make a decision here so the next thing we should do is the crystal which is the last part and the crystal i don't really want to do too much to it i'm just gonna put curves on there just make it a little darker so we're going to keep that kind of dark now we want to add some overall effects the first thing that i want to do is add these eyes in the background i want them to glow and affect the things in the foreground so to do that we're gonna make this thing call that i call a glow mat so i'm gonna take my background element duplicate it i'm gonna take shells and duplicate her and then i'm gonna take my crystal and just duplicate that and i'm going to cut that version of my crystal out paste it and so i'm going to take this crystal duplication the shells duplication and the background duplication and i'm going to pre-comp those into my glow mat this is just going to go on top of everything for the crystal and for shelves i'm just going to put a black fill on them so i'm going to turn that fill to black i'm going to copy it put it on shelves and for the background i'm going to duplicate the background and i'm going to loom at it with itself and see and i'm going to put a black solid behind that so luma matting it with itself it's already just luma matting the brightest points i'm gonna push that even further by putting levels on the background duplication that it's luma matting itself with and i'm going to just push that even further to make the brights brighter and the darks darker and what that's going to do is just kind of solo the eyes out for me which is exactly what i want so that that's going to give me my eyes as kind of their own separate layer but because i put the uh because i put shells in the crystal in front of that it's always going to mat you know just the eyes so they're gonna have something in front of them so now that i have that by itself i'm going to use our friend deep glow and that's going to give me a really cool glow on these guys i'm going to up the radius something higher and my exposure that's pretty fine let's do 1.5 and then i'm going to add this on top of everything see so what that's going to do is it's going to create these glows that you know when the foreground elements cross the glows see so you get these really nice natural light leaks on there which look just awesome but the only issue is that you know especially in the beginning here our background has a blur but you know our glow matte doesn't so we're just going to copy that adjustment layer that has uh out of focus on there i'm going to go into our glow mat and we're going to just put that over the two background layers like that so it matches bam so even just looking at this i can tell that shells is a little too bright like her darkest points are a little too bright so i'm gonna just keep that same value make it a little darker something like that but now she's starting to blend in with the background which is not what we want so to separate them out a little bit i have a whole bunch of random light leaks and just stuff like that i'm really particularly fond of this set that i have here you know it's just got some very basic nice and this is something that i'm going to use to separate her in the background so by default you know it's uh it's a little too bright it's a little too big it's just you know we got to do a little bit of work on it to get it to be there so we want this to match the camera move on shelves i'm going to solo everything but these two layers of shells and the background so i'm going to screen this on top of our background and i'm going to bring the brightest point there to hug the top of that and we're going to actually do a very minimal uh you know keyframe on here to kind of match what we did with our camera move in cinema so i'm going to keyframe the scale of it so that right here it stays like that and then here it's a little bit you know closer so it looks like we're kind of starting off in the beam of light that is you know being cast on shells and the crystal so that should work just fine i'm gonna do a very simple curve to it okay and i'm going to put some curves on there just to kind of spice it up a little bit now the whole purpose of this purple blowout thing is to separate her in the background so as long as it's doing that it's doing what it's supposed to so i'm gonna unsolo those put everything else back on there we go that looks pretty nice we're getting close you know we're almost there it's already looking pretty similar to the design board we still need a bit more of a glow up top our our image that we just put in it's doing it but it's not really taking it home so that's where we're going to use shine which is a trap code plug-in from red giant and shine is wonderful shine you know if you haven't used it it creates these awesome god rays which you can just use 2d mattes to define and it creates a very cool 3d volumetric feel so i try to use those all the time so we're going to do something kind of similar that we did we're going to duplicate our glow matte uh real layer source project i'm going to duplicate that glow matte and i'm going to call this a shine matte and the reason i duplicate it is because i want to go inside and do things a little bit differently in here so this time i'm not going to luma the background i'm just going to leave it as is i'm going to keep these two mattes the same and i'm going to take a black solid and i'm going to put it over everything and i'm going to create kind of this pretty harsh vignette around everything and just so it falls off to complete black because what's that what that's going to do is it's going to help kind of make it so the the shine layers the god rays only appear as a beam in the middle so that we can focus on shells and on the crystal so that's gonna sit just like that and i'm gonna use shine on top of there by default shine's going to come out right in the middle you know you move it around you can start to see what it does it's taking the brightest points and it's masking with the darkest points so it's creating this really cool lighting effect already um i'm gonna bring it right on top like this so it looks like it's shining down on them that's what we want so it's red right now which is not what we want so we'll go to colorize and we'll set the color to none and that's just going to take the colors of the scene and use those which is ideal um i want it to be a little bit brighter so we're going to up our boost light a little bit so it looks like it comes out at the top and our ray length we're going to drop that just a little bit you don't need a boost like that it's that intense so we're just gonna go to the last frame to dial this in so we're already getting a lot of these really cool um bright spots on here which is super super stylized and cool looking so i'm going to go to my source opacity and drop that and it just creates the beams by themselves it doesn't actually show the mat through there which is tight so then i'm just going to add that on top and bam we got a pretty cool looking glowing effect just coming from the middle of the frame now i want to tighten up the edges just a little bit because you know still it's it's a it's not centralized enough for me so i'm going to do something like that and bring the top of this up a little bit and drop the feather and bring it in just a little bit more there we go okay so it's a little more focused now which looks great all right so i've done a little bit of extra work in comp i've received some assets for you know some glows on the crystal and i've also replaced her cg hair with cell animated hair um i'm not gonna i'm kind of short on time so i'm not gonna go through everything that i did to get those elements in there but i'll show you what it looks like pretty cool right you know it's just about there the last thing that it really needs is a final pass of color correction so to do that i like to use magic bullet looks which is from red giant also so in the magic bullet suite there's a element called looks and this is kind of what i use on everything at the at the very end this is what i do it's like my favorite color correction software so it gives you a bunch of tools for you know footage animation whatever it is just to do your final grade uh color matching rebalance whatever it is you want and it also comes with a ton of presets like really good presets that will get you most of the way there you know you can already dramatically see the difference that it's having on the comp you know it's like it's really just affecting it a lot you know so i'll start with something like this that i think works well and then i'll kind of go through and figure out what each tool is doing and if i even need all of them so i'm gonna go through and solo each one so the first one is cosmo doesn't look like it's doing anything so i'll delete it second one is diffusion which is just a nice glow you know it's an extra type of glow that you can use uh just adjust that a little bit there we go cool and then hsl color doesn't look like it's doing much either it's kind of changing my blue highlights don't need it delete it colorista is a really cool three-way color grade system so it gives you your shadows your mid-tones and your highlights and it lets you adjust the saturation of your shadows same thing with your mid tones and your highlights it also allows you to adjust the lightness on this side and then the hue in the middle which is cool so you can tint your shadows mid-tones highlights however you want um it looks like the preset that came in is doing a split complementary system between uh these teal shadows and orange mid-tones so i like what it's doing to the color i'll leave it no reason to change it um and then the last thing it looks like it just has an s-curve on there so that's just creating some curves that will darken my shadows and blow out my highlights which lends to the stylized look so honestly that's good for me that's plenty hitch hit done and that's it before and after huge difference right all right guys well thanks so much for tuning in uh it's been a blast going through this stuff and being able to share some of my techniques with you guys um thank you very much to maxon and c4d for bringing me on to such a cool event and you know inviting me out here and um you know feel free to reach out to me anytime you guys like i'm always happy to collaborate with people i'm always you know happy to walk people through stuff you know provide some answers or demystify things that i can um you know if you have any extra questions for me or comments just feel free to hit my line uh my email is here as well as my portfolio my instagram and my twitter so feel free to give me a follow thanks again guys

Channel: Maxon

Views: 16,300

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, motion graphics, mograph, maxonvfx, anime

Id: tbLlj90Ifrk

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021