Basics of Cinema 4D (Multiple Character Animation)

during this video you're going to use cinema 4d miximo and imovie to create a dynamic animation with multiple characters i hope you enjoy it so to get started we're going to go up to our render tools and we're going to click the icon on the right for render settings for output switch over from 1280 by 720 which is the default size to 1280x1280 go down to frame range and instead of current frame select all frames click the word save and switch from tiff to mov we're also going to add a couple of effects we're going to add ambient occlusion go back to effects and click global illumination as well and instead of standard renderer switch over to physical now we're ready to set up our scene the scene elements that we're working with are housed right here where you see the floor we're going to select a floor go back and click the floor and then select physical sky as well the area that we're working with is this light area which is denoted by this light box in the middle of our viewport the areas to the left and the right that are darker won't be rendered but they're space that you can use to build your scene for the rest of the assets for this project we're going to be using a website called miximo so in your browser type in the word mixamo and this is the website here you can do one of a couple things with this startup page you can either sign up for free or log in if you're signing up for free for the first time click sign up for free put in an email address your first and last name create a password that you'll remember and click create account if you already have an account obviously click login and you'll be greeted by this page notice up top there are a couple of tabs in this ribbon characters and animations you can click the word characters to browse characters that are housed in mixamo these can be auto rigged to animations that you choose or you can upload characters to be rigged as well for this project we're just going to select a few characters and make them interact within our picture plane scroll down through these and notice at the bottom of the page there are multiple pages that you can work with for this example i'll select this character the boss click use this character and then find an animation that i want to use to make him move around in space with notice with the animations there are a lot of different pages of animations that you can choose from you can also do a search up top so if i want my character to be sitting perhaps i can type in the word sitting hit enter and everything that falls under the category of sitting is going to be shown in this case i'll just have him standing hit enter and here all the standing files for this example i'll choose this animation laughing when i click laughing the website will automatically rig my character to that animation i can make adjustments to my animation over here on the right hand side every one of these animations has different parameters that you can adjust to suit your liking i can even click mirror and the website will mirror that action in case i want two characters standing in front of each other doing the same action i'm going to go ahead and click download when i'm happy with my animation make sure you leave the format fbx make sure it's with the skin and no keyframe reduction click download and your animation will download here at the bottom of your page just a couple of quick things before we get back to the cinema 4d portion of this tutorial notice that when i loaded this animation there were 305 frames that showed up just know that you can trim those down or add to them depending on how many frames are provided in the pack with 610 frames this is a much longer animation obviously than the 310 that showed up so i'm going to want to get the most amount of frames that i can possibly get per animation i'll re-download this now i can drag my file to the desktop and arrange it in cinema 4d to start working with our fbx files we're going to drop them directly into our viewport click ok and that character will open up underneath a new project notice that there's a window drop down in this ribbon up top when i click window i can go down and i can see different projects listed at the bottom of that order this project that i'm working with now is titled laughing and the project that i'm pasting into is untitled six this is how we access different projects in cinema 4d when you drop your project into cinema 4d click the play button and take a look at the animation and make sure that everything looks good to you if the character isn't rigged or has some type of issues you'll be able to jump ship and grab a different character if it doesn't look good to you notice this is a longer animation there are 610 frames i don't have to use all those frames and i can trim that down at any point now in order to copy and paste my character into my scene i'm going to go up here to my primitives click and hold and then i'm going to select the null what i'd like to do now is to take these fbx files and that mesh and make them a child of the null so i'm going to click on the fbx files hold shift on my keyboard and click on the mesh and then i'm going to drag the mesh underneath the null you'll know that it's going to become a child of the null when you get that down arrow with a little box under it when i let go both of those entities became a child of this null to simplify things i'm going to go ahead and click this little minus next to the null click the null go to edit copy window select my original project edit paste and that character is pasted into my project i'm going to hit play to make sure that it's working and i'm ready to bring more characters into my scene we'll go back to mixamo click characters i'll go ahead and delete standing and find another character to bring into the scene i'll select this mouse click use character find another animation that might be interesting to interact with my first character perhaps he's running in a circle i can click jog in a circle and i can preview my mouse jogging in a circle again we can make adjustments to the animation make it faster i can adjust the arm space in this case and notice by default i'm getting 100 frames in this view i can add frames by stretching this out to get 452. so this animation will be 452 frames as opposed to the 600 and some frames for the old guy standing there i'm going to go ahead and click download again fbx with skin no frame reduction click download i'll drag that file to the desktop load it directly into my viewport click ok and again the mousey opens up as a separate scene i'll click play just to make sure that everything works now i need to make these two assets a child of a null again so i'll go back to null click my rig hold shift on my keyboard click my mesh drag those underneath and all click the little minus sign select the null go to edit copy window go back to my original project edit paste click play and now i have my mouse and my other character interacting notice that there are only 90 frames showing up down here in my timeline in order to stretch out to get my whole 610 frames i can grab this little tab down here and i can stretch it to the right notice when i do that it populates all of the rest of the frames so when i hit play i can see the entire animation i'm going to hit pause again and notice i can grab this scrubber and i can go backwards and forwards in time and make adjustments we have two nulls showing up here in our objects manager i'd like to start naming things so i know what's what in my picture plane with this null selected i can tell that that's my mouse just by grabbing these handles that are attached to my character by double clicking that word null i can hit delete on my keyboard and type in mouse and i'll go to the other null double click it and type in guy for the old guy now i can go back and forth and select my characters as i wish and move those around in space since they're attached to this null i can move them in space anywhere that i want so i'm going to move my mouse out a little bit click play and now i can see that he's running around my old guy i'm actually going to move him over a little bit so he doesn't bump into him hit play it looks like he runs into the guy just a little bit so i'll move him out again another way to start working and arranging your characters is to go up to this little icon in the upper right hand corner of your viewport click it and you'll get different views there's an overhead view or top view a right and a front view and then your perspective view that we were originally working with notice that in any view as i move any of these characters you can see them move in the other views this is a handy navigational tool i can click play and i can see the animation in these other views as well i'll scroll back to the beginning and again move my mouse to a spot where he won't hit my other character whichever view you want to enlarge just go to that view and click that icon again and it will bring you into focus in that view i'll go back to mixamo and continue to bring in characters to interact within my picture plane some characters that you select may be larger or smaller than the other characters and you may have to make some adjustments to those or just scrap them all together if you drop a set of assets into cinema 4d and there are a bunch of entities with it a bunch of parts you can go to the bottom of the order and just drag across everything and then drag it into a null as well notice that this file is much larger if that happens with any of the characters that you bring in you can decide at that point whether you want to keep it and work with it or not bring at least three characters into your picture plane to interact with at this point after hitting play going through and making adjustments in your split screen to make sure that you don't have any issues it's time to finalize your scene the next thing that we're going to do is go up here and we're going to grab a camera notice when i drop the camera into the scene a couple yellow dots showed up on either side of my active viewport and there's a yellow dot on the top and on the bottom this is the camera view in order to enable the camera we're going to go up to this little icon in the objects manager and click it when it turns white that's saying that okay now we're using this camera for our scene i'm going to scrub all the way back to the beginning of my animation and i'm going to make this animation a little bit more dynamic right now when i hit play i'm fixed in this position and i'm just watching the characters interact i'd like to add a little bit of movement with a camera to bring more interest to the animation start at frame 0 with your camera activated this little icon white we're gonna go down to keyframe and we're gonna click this keyframe icon that drops a keyframe at frame 0. now i'm going to scrub forward a little bit and i'm going to add an action for 200 frames i'm going to go ahead and scroll in using my scroll wheel or these navigational tools up here in the upper right hand corner this navigation tool moves left and right up and down this one allows you to zoom in or out and this one allows you to pan around your picture plane with that movement that i just made and by clicking the keyframe again i can scrub back in time and i can see the movement that my camera took on just by moving the viewport around and having the camera activated i'll scrub forward in time a couple hundred more frames zoom in a little bit orbit around click the keyframe again and then i can go back and view my action notice there is a spline that's created in space above my objects that's actually where the the camera is traveling if i go into split screen i can see that camera and i can actually adjust the spline itself in space at this point with the amount of projects that we have open and the assets that we have loaded into our viewport it's a good idea to save our project so we don't have issues with the application crashing go up to file go down to save project with assets so this will be a cinema 4d file and there will be a folder that will have all the mtl files or material files with it give it a name and save it to your desktop at this point we're going to go ahead and continue our animation we've worked the animation to about frame 400 we have another 200 frames to work with just know that we can also go in and grab our keyframes at any point and we can move those forward or backward in time in this case i'm going to go ahead and scrub out to 600 frames and i'm going to zoom in to where i want my animation to end i'll drop a keyframe and my animation is complete it's good practice to scrub back and forth to see if there are any adjustments that you need to make either to the animation spline or camera spline itself or if you want to go in and highlight keyframes delete those and redo those actions when i'm happy with my animation it's time to go back and save my work so go to file click save and the project will be housed in its original folder when you click out of cinema 4d your other assets will show up those other assets that we were selecting objects from in different windows you can just click out of those we don't need to save them when i'm finally finished with my scene it's time to render it i can go up and click the button on the left render view this will give me an idea of what my animation will look like when it's finally rendered this is time consuming depending on the computer that you're working with a couple of quick hacks to get faster renders are to go back into your render settings and uncheck ambient occlusion and global illumination then if we go up into a split screen we can render just the perspective view and it will render much faster by clicking render view i can get a smaller render and have an idea if there are any inaccuracies that i need to deal with in this case things look pretty good so i'll go back to my render settings add ambient occlusion and global illumination and click the middle render button this is our rendered picture viewer tab click yes and now we'll render our animation the renders will be built up frame by frame here in our picture viewer and then we can save this out as an animation when it's finished when your render is finished it's time to save it out of the picture viewer whether you're using a designated render server or you're using the application from the picture viewer click on the top render scroll down to the bottom hold shift on your keyboard and click the bottom render now we're going to save all these images out as an animation so we'll go to file save as switch from still image to selected frames switch from body paint 3d to mov click ok give your project a name and select where you want to send it to it's good practice to open your file up and preview the animation before you drop it into imovie with this render i can see there are quite a few issues especially with the mouse character he starts to run through the old guy's arm and he's sunken into the floor so i'd go back and i'd make adjustments to my file and re-render for this example though we're just going to go ahead and drop it directly into imovie and go through the editing to work with imovie select imovie from your dock click the button for create new select movie and you can drag and drop your project directly into the timeline down here we can preview the video in the upper right hand corner by hitting play we can crop our video down by clicking the cropping tool in this case i use crop to fill hit enter on your keyboard to crop it and i'll preview my crop in this case i've eliminated the issue that i had with the mouse being sunken into the ground by clipping it out this scrubber allows you to scrub through your video so you can stop at any point and make adjustments to it perhaps i'd want to take a portion of the image out i can click on the video in my timeline right click go down to split clip decide where i want to delete the clip click on that clip right click and click split clip again and then i can go in and i can delete that area if i create an action that i want to reverse i can just go to edit and undo or use command z for this simple project we're going to add a few elements to the animation to make it more interesting we'll add some sound effects and a title page let's start with titles there are several title themes to choose from all you have to do is drag those down before your animation and they will be ordered wherever you want them in this case i'll give it a simple title hit return on my keyboard and the title has been set i'd also like to add some sound effects so i can click audio and i can either choose music that i have in my itunes library use sound effects or i can make my own music in garageband in this case i use sound effects paying attention to how long the video is i'm going to try to match up some type of background music for my animation in this case i have 24 seconds of animation so by clicking time you can scroll down through the sound effects and find an animation time that will work for your animation you can preview the sound effects by clicking the play buttons my sake i'm just going to grab the sitcom laughter and add it to my track i can preview [Laughter] that and then go back in and add tracks as i choose i'd like to add some sound effects for the individual characters so if i think of what the characters would sound like during the animation and try to find some type of sound effects that would match that would work best i'll go down to some shorter clips i can drag those sounds to wherever i want the sounds to be heard and i can even go in and clip my sounds down by clicking on the sound right clicking go to split clip select the area that i want to delete and hit delete on your keyboard i can hit my back button at any point to preview [Music] and i can even add voiceovers by clicking the microphone clicking the record button and i can add sound effects and i can add sound effects when you're ready to save your workout go to file share and select file switch to the best resolution and compress it with better quality click next and then give it a title click save and pay attention to the progress wheel up here in the upper right hand corner it will show the activity for the file to be saved when the share is successful you can click show and we'll preview our work [Music] and i can add sound effects [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Technology Based Art

Views: 582

Keywords: #c4d, #learn c4d, #learn cinema 4d, #easy cinema 4D, #easy animation, #learn animation, #TBAE, #loren burkey, #STEAM, #learn Animation

Id: _VCgvOw04p8

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020