Büro Achter April @ FMX 2019 | Motion Design for LAMY | Maxon Cinema 4D

hello everybody welcome thanking Maxon for the invitation it's really fantastic to be here and to be a part of this show and to have the possibility to give a little bit back to the community and share some insights about our projects my name is Misha rock Stein I'm running a tiny design studio with a strong focus on animation and we are based in Stuttgart in in Augsburg and I'm here today with Mattias line mine colleague that was working on a project that we will show you some hi everyone hello and before we get into details let's have a look at our real [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank thank you let's talk about cinema 4d I'm into cinema 4d since 20 years it's sounds really terrible long and I started out in the area of architecture I studied architecture and design here in Stuttgart and Art Academy and my first tasks in cinema were handling 3d geometry and doing some visualizations so this is my main tool there are many other tools around it but it is our main tool and the other tool that I use even more than two decades some more years with pencils and this will be exactly our topic these are some sketches from the Lummi project that we will show you Lommy is a brand they producing writing instruments and I think they created some really iconic products that probably the most of you will be familiar familiar with at least my time in primary primary school almost everybody had a Lamy Safari so this is quite this was quite a heritage that we are suddenly facing and a big challenge and last year we were asked to produce eight videos to to showcase the new products mainly these are models that they that already exist with new materials new coatings and the first step was to show this within the company so let's have a look at some of them [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] well that's it thank you the campaign worked quite well for our client they were quite happy with the results and also lamby's fanbase but not everybody there are always exceptions you know it's the internet and in terms of our documentation we were using we were searching for some really mean comments about our work we take critics seriously so yeah and somebody told me you should always make your audience laughs you make amazing pens and ink I own a few and love them but this overt 1990 called in once it's 3d animation software back I think it's also nice claim maybe next time should think about it I also noticed the typo say a really excellent yeah and yeah they were like almost right because in the 1990s it's where I started with cinema both take day they caught me let's talk let's start it with the Lamia ion and I will there will be quite a lot of type technical details but I want also to talk about developing abstract content and how you communicate this to your client because this is something that is not that easy and we started for each of the product we came up with a strong title or slogan and we tried to create for each of the products small world that is fitting the peer group or the features of the product and in the in this case of the Lambie ion the slogan was the sound of design what does this mean we try to visualize the process of creating of designing of the process of seeking for a perfect form and for the perfect ratio and for perfect proportions this is just by Morrison the designer of the of this pan and we tried also to imagine how this could look like if you design things if you if you playing with proportions and so on and we wanted to do this on two sides on the visual base and also on the musical base and within our research we found really nice alternative notations for few music graphical notations mainly from the 70's and from the 60s and this was quite an inspiration for this movie but for this video so where is the storyboard because in the usual usual production you come up with a storyboard and and after approving it you just execute what you promise to your client but we wanted to extend the face of playing as long as possible because the longer you can you have the possibility to to play around the more complex things can get the more or probably more also more easy but you can really increase the quality and and usually it's also like the the part that is more fun within the project so we decided for the very first presentation that we did for Lambie to come up with three almost completely finished movies so we presented them the concept they asked the concept the way that we intend to to go and three examples how things could be executed this is a sheet from the from the presentation showing the status of the production and you see they are like three almost already finished clips and it was a quite a little bit risky think because we look quite a big part of the budget on the first presentation but it worked well and we had from this point we had confidence and also the quite a freedom to do things in the way that we would like it we started from two points like really basic graphical approach doing some examinations and we had a look on the proportions and playing around with this and trying to transfer these two simple minimalistic graphic illustrations this is just some some illustrations from the beginning so this is the one side and on the other side we wanted to build up a tool box creating black-and-white animated maps that we would use in different channels material channels in in redshift to example in the bum channel or in the color channels or in the blender channels where you can blend between two different materials maybe you say it's the it's actually the first project you did with red chef right yeah exactly this was the very first project we started several weeks before the production started to play around with redshift and it was really a nice thing to have such a powerful tool suddenly in your new hand work you can really visualize things in like really no time and also like doing animatics you can do it really almost in the final look so let's have a look at the jump to cinema and let's have a look at how we created this animated maps let's get started with a simple disc and a formula performer it would be nice to have some more subdivisions to make things more smooth and to properly to set the fall of the capsule to have more control about the deform put it to the right a little bit and tweak the settings for the size 50 is quite nice value doesn't have to be always the same things can be tweaked to let things look more complex and then we started to play around make things more complex in this case just duplicating the familiar deform lets get rid of the deform in the viewport and also tweaking the values of the formula itself it's quite easy thing because you have an instant feedback what different values are responsible for and let's smooth things out for for a smoother result and lift it's also quite nice value and then we can play around with the position of the deformers and then a further animated black-and-white maps we need a material with a gradient in the luminance channel let's change the orientation and put material on our disk right and let's change let's go to flat projection type so we have different possibilities to adjust the colors because we want to have the whole range from all black in the lowest point to pure white in the highest point you can get different ways you can all put this black and white points in the gradient closer to each other you can squeeze you can squeeze saying things and place them so for the best result so let's get a little bit more down so after that we did several variations of this systems to build up a toolbox let's jump forward because I'm seeing that I'm already delayed okay maybe maybe I can add that this project was done in cinema for you are 19 and probably lots of this stuff is has gotten easier or you can be more creative with new fields so exactly because we have like this step in between doing the layout more graphical layout and combining different different animated maps in After Effects and I think this can be done like really easily now in our 20 and after building up a toolbox with several variations we started to pile it in first tests with with redshift and we tried different approaches we packed this animated maps to also to the reflectance Channel so blending materials as I taught before also it to to the bank Channel and and also its ratchet it's quite easy to it iterate to various tests and then we started quite first with first animatics [Music] so and probably you see now if you compare this what you use on now to depth to the final result it's probably not the straightest way from a 2 to B but at least quite quite playful and one more thing let's have just a quick look at this scene and at the redshift material how this was set up really quite basic we had a texture in the diffusion node in a basic material then we had a red aluminum a basic aluminum material with red tinted reflectivity and for blending between these two materials we were using the material blender and we piped this in to the blend color and another animated map was packed into the displaced displacement texture node and the only thing that you have to take care on the other side in cinema is to place a red shift object on on your plane - to enable displacement and another thing that I wanted to show you really quick is this transition from starting with this disc turning to a sphere and to cylinder and then the cylinders drifting to the side lifting and drifting to the side let's have a look at this we start starting with basic cylinder and turn turning it to sphere by adjusting the filete and height and let's jump straight into animation push the sphere down right now adays of course no deformation we need de forma for that and let's set the type of the solver tool inside stretch and set the cylinder to the object area so this is this is the starting point the secondary or the further animation let's animate the height of the object - let's have a keyframe here and let's change it to think 45 is quite a nice value let's turn it a little bit and push it a little bit more inside the plane and in the end we wanted everything to drift to the left side and leave the screen so let's push up the thing set another keyframe and probably we need another keyframe too I don't want that this thing is going straight to the left side let's have a first impulse that is going straight upwards okay so this is the first step then this is the stiff kind of step when we look at this and by adding a jiggle deform from everything is getting more organic it will be kind of tissue or rubber like by adding a jiggle in the former with quite no values in stiffness and structural and drag then we have to catch this to jump to the next step in this of the scene and I will show you some screenshots of this step that will explain step by step what happened next so we were copying the main cylinder that was deforming the plane adding cloner under it with several smaller cylinders in it and the type of the cloner is radio and we am animated in this moment that the sphere is stretching we animated the radius of the cloner and also the the size of the smaller cylinders then we add rigid body tag to the cloner so that the small clonise wouldn't interact and would we set the follow position and follow value to quite high values so that were that they would stick in the opposite position but not do not intersect and another collision attack to the bigger cylinder and to make it less rigid we had a random de forma changing the position and we animated in this moment of impact at the random seed of the de forma to make things a little bit jittery and a little bit blurry so this was my part it's exactly 30 minutes like the plan yeah amazing yeah Wow and I will hand over too much years and one one more nice comment from our internet community so someone got a new graphics program and tried out all the features out on your advert get the graphics program away from whoever it is and send them outside to smell flowers so I'm taking over to get it away from you maybe you want to smell some flowers yeah fine right all right so maybe you can print this on the packaging I think it's like on the DVDs there's always this excerpts of magazine reviews maybe on something so my part was the Lambie save a pen and it's quite a bit different because the example pen is give away and in the business context while all the other pants are consumer pants and the main theme we created for this excuse me pen was exchange and communication like all this kind of business stuff and probably reaching the gap between the digital and analog world so transforming information trading goods all this kind of busy things going on in the business world and first of all the first difference between this and his clip and property you can already tell by our shirts is because I need this I need it black and the clip itself is like the the dark twin to the clip micro show you it has many similarities in how it looks but also in in the process but there are some key differences and the first thing you will probably see is like the look we had class and flashy lights leds like more like a sci-fi technological thing going on while Michael's last clip was more the artsy paper and like elegant version but I guess I just show you the clip and you see for yourself it's a production wheel [Music] [Music] all right so as you can see it's quite different and it's more in-your-face I guess and the funny thing is that also reflected in the process how we came up with this stuff because the process was also very different because contrary to Michael I don't do sketches because I suck at drawing so my main tool is cinema and cinema and the way he uses his scribbles and sketches I basically try to build quick little setups and cinema try stuff out and for me it's it's easier to communicate ideas that way because first of all I'm more fluent in cinema than drawing and also I can I can show and test how the things behave how they move not only how they look and this led to having lots of different setups and tests over I guess the period of a month almost and what Michael said before is the the good thing was because he all already planted the way because the client was trusting us and so we were free to do almost anything which is of course also creative dilemma because if you have a blank canvas you why do you start and so we tried lots of different things and it's stuff that normally you don't get to show or you don't get to see but now you have to watch it so let's take a look [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] thank you this actually feels good yeah because normally this is the stuff you throw away well it's not not every project has that much of experimentation so this is more the exception than the rule but in general it's all it's all about these things that you try and they are essential for the creative process but they don't end up being in the final project and it it's always hard to to throw things away that you really like and it there's a saying like kill your baby so you have to get rid of the stuff even if it's because you need you need the distance and the the way we did this I just did this lots of these clips and just threw it at Michael and he was like killing babies please that means it's like the shotgun approach I'm like here that's what I did check it out and he was like no this looks like Tron but not good and this looks like Iron Man but not good so we we don't we're not making a Marvel movie please stop yeah no it was it was quite more constructive but that's that's our whole thing yeah yeah that's what I think it's here you can see you know like to the two different poles somebody like Matias creating a Verity and and an opulent visual output and me as somebody that is searching the sweet spot of reduction so what can be be thrown away how we can strike this down to the elements that that we need so yeah yeah and then the danger I mean the the there are obvious possibilities and promising stuff like you see like these four things they all end it more or less being being piped into the final project so we have like these cubes early on were a thing then the the way the the led beneath the cubes react with with the with the light and the transparency refraction dispersion and also that the cubes need at some point like take in information so these were all core concepts that we worked out really really through this process but on the other hand the problem is if you spend much time producing something like this compared to like having a few quick sketches it's it's harder to let go so you always have to be aware that this is what you the stuff that you did is still important and it's still important for the final project because if you wouldn't have done this you wouldn't have ended up with the final thing but part of getting there is like getting over this stuff so and it also gives you the possibilities to pick these things and refine several techniques may I think to keep up sketching world up because I think of course in terms of complexity it's really hard for example to draw a particular simulation but from for for me it's really valuable because if you change that the media also your brain is wired in a different way and this change really evokes quite some interesting output and like on materials I gave up already but maybe an advice for you it's it's less stressful I guess so please follow his advice and also of course please notice the irony because we're designing stuff for a pen sure okay so let's I just want to show you some of the core principles we worked out and how they influenced the final product so let's start with the stuff we design for the LED screen beneath the pen and just to give you some quick technical insights it's it's very easy and it's it's very basic stuff but the good thing about this is it's like the same with ion you can quickly build systems especially with more graph where you can just leave the time line running try stuff out and quickly put out lots of different versions and then later you can like sort through all of them and combine them into into something new and I just want to show you quickly how we did this for one of the animations and it's basically you just have a cloner it's a great it has some big cubes some smart cubes very basic stuff so you don't need to go crazy on this you you what you wanna have is like a quick and easy setup so we have this push apart effector that just keeps them at a distance and prevent prevents colliding when we do our animation stuff and there's the shader yeah I would as you see horizontal it's a shader effector and this shader effect that just pushes the clones in the x-direction position and it does so by having this noise it's a sound noise so you have like these hearts hard edges and depending on the value it pushes them to the left or to the right and what we did is this sound noise you can either animate it it has animation controls or you can animate the seat with keyframes and the thing is once the seat changes the underlying values change so you get this this from one state to the next and if you have this blend effector you can tween in between these states so you can you can you don't have to set keyframes you can use the tween the blend effect and he does all the tween for you so you can change seats and stuff later without going through all the animations again and we have the same thing for the vertical movement and a good tip I guess like we live here is like two separate XY you can use different shader effectors and you can offset them in time so you don't have one movement that goes at the same time in X&Y as you can see now you have like this intersecting interlocking animations and you can throw more effectors on it and you can build up a simple system and just putting on and off the effectors you quickly have like this stack of motions and if you put it in a tracer object you also get these nice speed lines you can also do a sweep and to get some variation and get some thick lines and you see the best thing about is about this is you can even like if you don't have red shift or something like that you can use the most basic renderer because it's only black and white so you can generate masks and later use it as emissive textures and it's very quick no and then you can create all kinds of results once you have your your different systems in motion so you can have something chaotic like this or if you combine several of these systems you can have complex parts of motion and combine them for example and after-effects and you can also this is the good thing if you do this you can somebody else can go on and continue with your work so you can have if you if you several people one can keep producing this stuff and at a rapid speed and the next one can use this as a library to combine it and create something different and you can combine like nice typos everything any of you if you cut it together you end up with something like this for example and you can sync as I said you can sync it up with the sound and you have if you use this as a emissive texture you basically have a complex lighting setup and you don't have to create lots of keyframes in cinema you can basically just smash the texture on the lights or on an emissive object and there goes your disco lighting so what's inside the box is to create the boxes because they're just simply cubes it's like the most basic thing you can probably have and to give them some interesting and haptic texture and surfaces we use the J's placement you may know it it's a it's a cross-platform displacement map generator that creates random these really kind of stuff things and there are several systems you can use they all have different outcomes and you've seen some in the process really they can also use it to do this sci-fi surfaces and yeah yeah it's just a few examples you can also use your own tiles and like use J's placement the same way you use the mograph set up just to do your own thing and create your own style and you can be creative you don't have to use it as a displacement texture you can use it to to pipe into an emissive texture you can as you saw on the processor you can animate the UV offset so you just have like this this data raining wall and these are some of the textures we ended up using you can see and it's interesting because they also look like the the Briar the tactile writing system used by people with visual impairments so it's already in the concept of there's information engraved into the surface and if you combine this with the LED lights and refraction and lots of dispersion you end up with some colorful in yeah some colorful reflections and all that started with just having some black and white masks and piped into the system and depending on the on the animation and on the angle of you you can see it almost looks like also the cube is is doing something like the textures are lighting up and changing but they are not they're just like in the bump channel but because everything else is moving and the light is always changing it keeps this motion going so what you put in the Box well you've seen in the process video we started trying to do something organic some fluid simulations but somehow I mean it looks nice you can you can iterate on that one you can cache it and put it in all the cubes it's easy to create and it has a nice impact motion but also on the other end if you see it's not really fitting because it looks it looks too organic or most it looks like then explosion or something is leaking inside the cube or even when you put it into the Reds it looks like blood so it has more like this gothic thing going on which is not really fitting to our concept so we were looking for something else and then we came up with something like that it's like this is a video of neurons firing and because they receive electrical signals and then we thought well maybe that fits with our concept and the visual style is also nice we can you can abstract this down to something that works in motion graphics and also the idea of transmitting light and electrical signal is something that works with our business and information exchange idea so how do you do that well turns out there's something called diffusion limited aggregation and it's well it's basically it's one of the simplest fractals you can generate and everybody loves fractals right so you can see it in many systems like electro deposition mineral deposits the electric breakdowns copper you know all the stuff if you really want to know what it's about as the intact my guys they know this stuff they also have a nice Houdini tutorial so if you're into that visit that site and I can only show you I can show you how it's done in Houdini but I can show you how you can build something similar in X particles it has this interesting generator that's called XP cell auto and what you can do with it is create something like this it has different modes but you can see there's also this mode diffusion limited aggregation and if you if you add some modifiers you can you can get something that looks nice and it's also some sort of simple system as you can see you just keep the timeline running you change a few parameters here and there and you get nice stuff so I have to have to speed up right behind yeah we just about keep it running for a moment because now it's not looking like much because it's one color not the most beautiful color I might add and if you remember what ended up in in the clip there's something different because you also have like this passing motion and you can change a few parameters for example the the size and if you start using some more beautiful colors or even a gradient yeah maybe not that yeah let's see one more try no I'm not the color not the color right you can use that you can use it in the emitter but even better is it to use it directly in the XP cell OTO generator because you have different methods and one of the methods is change the color depending on the generation so that means the particles that are starting from the seat they become the leftmost color in this case it's the white and every generation goes down the ramp and changes its colors so if you see now it's like going from white to purple and then you can use also a color modifier and the nice thing about the color modifier is you can set it to time dependent and you can give it an amount of frames and then each particle goes through a motion from the first leftmost color over the gradient to the the rightmost color and this in 40 frames and you can tell it to restart and what this does is something like this and then you get this passive motion because the particles that are born earlier start first with their cycle of colors and then you have this offset and this cascading color cycling which looks like something is passing like electrical charges and if you render it out with material in redshift you get something like this and I think it looks pretty nice and if you put it in our cubes you get something like this and once again you have like this this playful refraction you can see there's all sorts of different colors at the edges and then there's only one thing left because we we're talking about pens right there still pens so I can show you this scene and this is like an like an old magic trick you just make something disappear this not too fancy but it's effective it works and it's pretty easy if you use the redshift because you don't have to to fight with boolean sort geometry you can all do like on render time and I just quickly show you how you can see this is the the redshift setup and if you look in the object manager bottom right you can see there's like this retro friend attack and there's the possibility to tell redshift only to show certain types of rays and there's the primary ray it's basically what the camera sees directly and then there's this secondary rays it's all the Rays that go through reflection and refraction something like that and if you key frame this tag and just tell it from one frame to the next to stop viewing the primary race and if you set the camera that at the moment you keyframe and change this everything is occluded you can go on to change this and so you see the keeps go up and if you see it from a different angle the pan disappears but because you see it through the cubes you don't really notice the switch up and once again what is really nice is if you use redshift I mean just look at the render view it's amazing you can work this way it's 20 years ago not even you couldn't do this into two days of rendering and it really helps because you see in the open GL viewport as nice and it is you and see stuff like this refraction and on the left you can you can adjust it and just check if everything is is the way you want it and so you end up with something like that and you only see the pen in certain cubes and we really like how this came out but of course people on the internet they want to see more pens the most pretentious and self-absorbed presentation I can remember seeing in some time I had not the patience to wade through it to see what was actually on offer if you expected panting anticipation you should have spend more time actually showing the pens rather than endless computer graphics fail so thank you very much for your patience thanks for watching my help you have a nice last day of that mix [Applause]

Channel: Maxon

Views: 73,203

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering, FMX, FMX2019, FMX 2019

Id: ljfg7_BxCV0

Length: 56min 8sec (3368 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019