Bri Marie @ The 3D and Motion Design Show

hello everyone i'm bree or bray made me do it on social media i am a 3d artist and designer based out of seattle and today we're going to be talking about my creative process um we'll take a look at a few projects and really dive into them break them down and see my process and how i work in cinema 4d before we start i just want to say thank you so much to maxon for having me and everyone behind the scenes that's making this possible i'm super thankful that everyone's still staying connected and we're all creating and being together still even though it's virtual so with that said um let's begin so for a little background on myself i attended ringling college of art and design from 2014 to 2018 which i definitely fell into by chance because i had no idea what i was getting myself into i didn't even know what motion design was but i remember seeing a reel for the first time in high school and just thinking like wow this looks so cool and it looks like a fun job like i don't want to sit in an office all day i want to make art um and so i eventually applied to ringling to study motion design which i got into obviously and i realized that i was actually good at what i was doing and i was really passionate about what i was doing and so i started learning cinema 4d among other things and i really started to fall in love with 3d space and the freedom it gave me but the whole time i was in school i just felt so much pressure to figure out what i wanted to do and i would constantly be comparing myself to everyone in the industry because i'd be seeing their amazing work and you know i felt like my work was really falling short which now if i think back to that it's like you know i was in college i was learning um but i had that hunger to create and i also realized that there weren't a lot of women doing what i wanted to be doing which was 3d so i never really had a role model to look up to that i could relate to and that kind of made me lack the confidence to know that i could succeed in this industry and i pretty much felt like an imposter for as long as i could remember i've accepted awards as an imposter in school i got hired in school as an imposter to work at amazon um here's me showing where i'm going to be working upon graduation as an imposter here's me at buck as an imposter waiting for them to figure out uh that i have no idea what the hell i'm doing i've done a few panel talks as an imposter um i even got my my picture on the wall as an imposter and finally where i am now um i'm at facebook reality labs currently as an imposter also waiting for them to figure out that i have no idea what the hell i'm doing um so i think it's kind of funny to joke about this because i remember the exact moment when i realized that holy everyone thinks the same thing um i remember i was at buck and i was talking to some of the people that i was just like truly inspired by my entire career and looked up to and they were telling me that yeah i'm waiting for buck to figure out that i have no idea what the hell i'm doing and um yeah like i pretty much think i suck and to hear that person say that i was just like what are you so is this life now this is just what we feel um so if i have any words of advice to give anyone today is just to keep going and be kind to yourself and just know that everyone feels the same way and don't let it stop you from creating um but with that said let's actually dive into my work and what i enjoy doing so shame on me because i have not released a reel in a very long time but i do have some pieces in here that i really enjoyed working on both client as well as personal work love super bright colors um character design i'm in love with i think it's super fun i do 2d and 3d but obviously my preference is 3d as i was saying before yeah so the character project in here is actually something i'm going to be breaking down today as well as this microsoft office project so first let's jump into the microsoft office project and i will start by playing it [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] this scene i'm going to be walking you guys through very quickly and there's a few things that i want to show you in terms of my workflow of how i clean things up and kind of optimize my scenes how i organize them which you guys should all be doing and shame on you if you're not because it is a nightmare to work in a messy file if you're working between people um so we'll start off with like my general workflow and how i organize and then we can move into some materials so with that said here's the frame i did for the project um this is after a few iterations of course but it influenced the final design and animation of the piece so this is what we'll be breaking down um but first and foremost i want to go through my actual cinema 4d file and just look how i have things set up so generally like this is how i will set it up i got my library my geometry and my scene going inside library i have materials instances archive and models i'll get into instances in archive in a little bit inside my geo i just have my my working geometry that i'm using and inside my scene i usually set things up between a set we got lights camera and um i'll start naming them set one two lights one two camera one two and that's because if i am using takes it's very easy to um look at these takes so i would name it something um accordingly to 10 depending on what i'm doing for now uh one is fine so if i were to be in this scene you can see that all of these with the stoplights that are turned green are what is in this take and being recorded in here but if i switch it to o2 like you can see i have all the twos set to green um and my my geometry changed a bit so i'm always utilizing takes now it actually took me a while to get into it but i'm realizing now that it's so powerful especially if you're working in really really heavy scenes then you don't have to take up a lot of space on your computer um it's a really great way to work i went ahead and already created what we needed for this project and that's just this super simple stack of paper right here so i have a cube that's inside of a cloner that has a step effector affecting the rotation and position of this stack right here i quickly realized when i was making this that this was not what i wanted i wanted to be able to have a more organic flowing paper with the ability to change the rotation and bends of it pretty fluently so what i ended up doing was making this editable and kind of moving things by hand but before i get into that i just want to show you how i would generally approach this um so i would make a copy of this papers via one and i would i would just put this into the archive folder in case i needed to go back because you never know like you may be really deep into this project and you're on like version 22 of this or whatever and your creative director comes back and they're like wait a minute i actually liked version two um so can you go back and then you have to like stumble through all of your files trying to find it um and it's just a really easy way to be able to quickly move through your project and efficiently start working again if you need to make changes so i always have an archive folder i think it's best practices i think people will love you if you're handing this project off to someone and that's how i always work so let's actually move on um from here i would make this editable but i also want to say you should definitely change this instance mode from instance back to or set it to render instance because it defaults that instance and what this is going to do is if i hit c which is making this editable it's creating instances that are referencing this original cube right here and it actually makes me really sad when people don't work this way because it just makes their life so much harder because it goes so much slower especially if you're working with very heavy objects in your scene um obviously this is not heavy at all it's just a cube but just for sake of showing you guys um and i'll definitely go a step further from this i feel like a lot of people just leave this here um this uh original reference cube but i feel like it's kind of best to hide that because if you're going through something say this stack and you're like i really don't like this one right here i'm gonna delete it and then you end up deleting the entire stack because your reference is actually deleted um that's not good so i will usually just make a copy of one of these instances um i'll parent that underneath this cube and i will reset the psr and if you don't have this um anywhere docked in your workspace you can just hit shift c and then type in reset psr and click that um so yeah i'm just gonna bring that out and i'll name that cube zero and with this cube technically um i can go hide this off somewhere in space but what i like to do is i just bring this into my instances in my library and now it's already out of the way because i have this hidden you can definitely go a step further and take your library and you can lock it so then you won't even click on it at all you can't make that mistake of deleting something but i usually don't keep that locked just because i'm always in and out of this folder alright so as promised i'm going to go over this a few of these textures uh really they're all the same thing it's just like this emissive plastic glassy texture that's giving it this nice kind of sheen um and ethereal look to it so um let's see i'm going to actually just put our render region on so this can run a bit quicker um let's see maybe right here is good okay so let's open this up um open my note editor and this is how it was built so basically um it's it's extremely simple i don't think i changed much in here there's a little bit of dispersion on it to give it some kind of chromatic dispersion on it um index is the same let's see i have a little bit of roughness being piped in because without that it's uh it's it's still doing something but the roughness is definitely giving it a bit more of that emission emissive texture the gradient that's piping into the reflection and transmission is giving it this um this purpley color so if i were to remove this white you can see really what it's doing um but the white is kind of controlling that a little bit but mainly it's this scattering medium with this black body emission plugged into it so if i were to actually unplug this black body emission um you can see that there's really not much going on here um and that's because there is obviously no emission um so when i plug that back in it gives this like this really nice um emissive color coming out of the sides of this one right here in the corner that you can see um let's see it's actually doing the same right here on these corners and i think it just gives it like a really nice touch you can you can adjust how much you uh want this emissive uh texture to come out of by adjusting this density right here um obviously you don't want to make this uh really super high because when you do that it just makes this really ugly texture um so you want to keep it fairly low um i don't think i really had any more crazy complex things in here there was a few i guess this one's a little crazy this is just um it looks like i have just like a normal paper texture going on um with uh let's see like two different textures piping in to the diffuse and it's being controlled by an image texture of some digital dots um let's see and then we have a second material piping into this main material so it's giving it this emissive i believe it's this guy right here so the emissive color is coming through it um but we're also seeing this like uh paper texture so it's a lot of fun to work on i feel like i was just fudging the the um the textures together and trying to make something cool and ended up looking really sweet so um pretty happy with this and again i don't want to spend too much time um you can build these i'm sure the same way in redshift um i just actually started using redshift so i'm not even really familiar with octane anymore so it's kind of funny to talk about now um but yeah super fun to work on um thank you guys for listening and hopefully you guys can try some stuff like this this next project i'm going to be talking about is this backstories project it was so fun to work on lots of fun character explorations um lots of funky patterns and uh it was a huge learning experience for me because i had never really designed characters to this extent so um i'm gonna be breaking down uh how i got here from start to finish um talking about reference and where i got inspired by these because a lot of them were actually from real life things and people that i had met or experienced in real life so without further ado i guess we can move into that and i will start by explaining how i find my reference all right so before we start this um i just want to talk about reference and i'm not talking about going on instagram or behance and finding references or character design that's already been made um i'm actually talking about going and finding something that is outside of what you're doing so for me that's typically looking at fine arts because fight arts to me is very interpretive so for example this vessel if i were to look at this like what i see is i see a body i see a neck i see some shoulders and i see some hips and to me that's a great reference because it it leaves to my imagination what the rest of the character will look like and i won't be influenced by someone else's designs that's already been made so um always looking at fine arts i love looking at fashion just for the materiality of things and the silhouettes are great character poses obviously this is a great place to start and typically where i end up um but i'm gonna go ahead and pull a mood board together and we can break down what i found all right so here's some images that i threw together um i got some character design let's see fine arts fashion furniture um some stuff i saw outside that really inspired me um and i just want to say that you should be really finding images that speak to you and i think honestly you should try to get off the computer as much as possible um there's just so much inspiration that you can see like when you're not confining yourself to a box quite literally so i like to go outside and try to be observant to the things around me i'm actively looking for ideas outside um like for example i saw this like weird statue with uh really strange legs that i really liked and i saw this light pole that i was like this could be an interesting shape for a neck or some legs um i might even make the character's legs look something like this today even like reading books do certain words resonate with you do they can you use that to describe a character um colors so they make you feel a certain way like go to a museum go see things take pictures of them and use these unique experiences in your work because that's what's going to make your work unique um i guess it's like it's like turning your eyes to see things differently like when we were kids and we would look up at the clouds and we'd see like animal shapes um it's it's like training our brains to get back to that um and and just you know to talk about instagram again it's like it's it's so trendy there's just so much stuff it's so saturated that it's it's very hard to make something unique when you're just copying the same thing over and over again and changing one little thing um i feel like that's mostly what's happening nowadays but um yeah so like just get off the computer give your eyes a break um start making things and finding new inspiration so um with that said i guess i'm going to jump in and start making this character i'm not sure what it's going to look like but i just want to show how easy it is to start iterating in cinema 4d okay let's finally start making something um i think it would be a great idea to maybe give sam a girlfriend of some sort because he's lonely um so you can see like it was super easy to make this we just got a cylinder going on um a deformer on the cylinder to bend the arms uh let's see some more cylinders this was a capsule with um a bull shape um got his little hat going on that i think i just did some quick extruding on um his hands are probably the most complicated thing out of everything but even that is really not that complicated i can show you here um it's literally just a tube with some subdivisions and having them extruded and obviously this is not like very proper um if you were to go animate this but um it was great for designing it okay so i think it would be nice to actually give her a skirt or something so i'm going to start with a sphere i'm going to bring it down a lot um that's looking good and we're going to keep this amount of segments in it i'm just gonna select u which brings up my hotkeys and l that's gonna make a loop selection and then fill in this bottom guy by hitting uf um and here's the start of our skirt um so we can start we can drop that into a subdivision surface and uh you can see here that this is not proper topology at all um this is not usually how i work but for sixth time um i'm just going to keep this and try to adjust this accordingly um let's see if i bring that up a little bit that might get rid of that you can start adjusting this guy a little bit um but that looks that looks pretty nice for a skirt um i'm not too mad about that i might just bring that out a bit like that it's not looking too bad and we can always go in and fix this anyway um but the main thing i want to get across is how easy and fast it is to use cinema to start sketching ideas in 3d um generally i start this way i try i try to sketch things but i'm not great at drawing so i usually just jump right into 3d and this is how i start doing it um so i am going to bring out our mesh right here by clicking this right here and now i have this tool box so um i'm gonna use extrude to give this a thickness there's other ways that you can do this um but this is the way that i like to do it um let's see so i brought that out i'm going to switch views so i can see what i'm doing um something [Music] like that looks good um and you want to make sure that your caps are checked on in the extrude but also now we have this problem where the normals are uh reversed so what we need to do is go into mesh uh normals reverse normals cool so yeah now we have our skirt um it's got some thickness to it it's looking pretty good i'm actually gonna add another subdivision right here um yeah so that's not looking too bad uh let's start making actually let's name this skirt and bring that into geometry we'll move our character to archive um and let's bring that up there because that's where the skirt will be so for the arms let's actually get a tube let's bring this tube down bring that up um let's change the orientation to x um something like that it's looking pretty good let's get this to 10 and then eight maybe it's looking it's looking good um i'm gonna hide this character in library in archive bring this tube and rename this arm let's see okay let's get rid of our height segments and we can start making this so um i'm gonna say for the height maybe something about 65 would be good and from here i'm going to again for good practices make a um copy of this and put this into archive just in case we need to go back i'm going to make it editable from here from by clicking c and i'm going to switch into my front view and i'm going to move the axis because i want to put this into a symmetry object so from here again let's just move our axis okay and i'm going to zero out the x so now when i bring this into a symmetry object um it's able to find that and use this axis right here to flip it so we got our arms going um one thing that i know is not going to be right is um the fact that there is some uh topology right here so when i put this into a subdivision surface this gets all messed up so and that's because of um these polygons right here so i'm gonna delete these because we don't need them so now when i drop it into our symmetry object and i'm going to clamp points on axis and delete polygons on axis when i turn our subdivision surface back on it's all connected and good so um the next step would be to add some subdivisions to this so um let's do that uh let's see i'm gonna add about six of them seven eight eight sounds good um so i'll do it to the inside and the outside and that's looking good um add a little bit right there and then maybe one more on the edge but i'm going to turn this quantity subdivision to like five and make sure i do the same thing on this side so it's even and something like that is looking pretty good um the next thing i'm gonna do is drop this into a bend i'm going to turn symmetry off just so we can see i'm going to name all of these arm um so let's let's uh put a bend on this guy uh fit to parent let's keep our y axis length and right away you're gonna see that this is all messed up and that's because we need to rotate this bend um so let's rotate that 90 degrees and then fit to parent again and now we got our arms going um but i'm going to adjust this size a bit and move this to about right here um turn that back on let's see i think this needs to be even smaller let's turn our snapping back off okay i think that's looking pretty good um so our symmetry was made down here so i'm gonna i'm gonna actually move uh our axis back up so i can move this and not have to uh scroll out let's see all right um these arms are looking good for a sake of time um i'm not gonna spend any more time on this let's just plop a little actually i believe it was let's put a tube in here for the little collar that she had where he had to change the height maybe something like that okay um i'm gonna name this neck drag that into geo and let's uh let's make the head capsule i just like to use primitive objects for the most part if i'm just making some quick stuff okay that's looking pretty okay i am not mad about this let's start making this uh leg that i brought in here so i don't even know if this is gonna look good but we can just try it for a sake of trying it um let's start with a sphere um so let's start making this so i got a sphere um 12 is probably good we can adjust that again let's uh let's let's make another copy of this by uh dragging and clicking control change this to like 25 maybe um and let's let's drag another guy from here actually i'm just going to make a copy of this and then i'm going to hit plus 25 in the y so now these are equally spaced i got my spheres i'm going to actually connect objects and delete you can also go into this by right clicking and uh scrolling down here to connect connect objects and delete um from here um let's just delete these polygons and i'm going to do that with a loop selection um and then we can just like combine them or something so let's do that make a loop selection and drag this up um and then what we can do for this is i believe if we select both of these and hit stitch and sew yep we can connect those guys so let's do the same thing for this select both of these and oops well first i want to extrude this and then i want to select both of these and do a stitch and sew that is not right um that's okay there we go so now what that was doing was connecting the geometry so if i were to put this into a subdivision surface you can see what's happening um this uh i'm not entirely happy with but uh let's let's figure it out um what i think i want is these two guys to be bigger let's um let's lock our y and then make them bigger by uh pulling out once we hit t all right so that's that's pretty funky um i'm into that um let's see what it looks like if we actually bring it in here we'll name that leg bring it in here um let's also let's also put a symmetry object on this so we can kind of visualize what we're doing um and then i'm going to actually group this call this leg and i'm going to bring this up um again the axis up and we'll put it here okay let's rotate this a little bit something like that maybe oh i don't know how i feel about this um this is looking kind of strange i feel like if i were to do this she would not have a skirt on like she she just looks very disproportionate right now and i think maybe we can uh get over that bite oh god making them a little bit smaller maybe no this is not right let's see she is very thick you know i tried and sometimes you fail okay i have an idea okay you know what let's just uh we're gonna scratch this we're gonna scratch this idea and we're gonna start from scratch um okay let's actually make some legs um and i'm gonna do this by using a simple cylinder and we're gonna use those uh that weird shape as like leg warmers or something so let me let's just do the same thing um let's give her some chunky legs something like that oop turn my snapping off maybe something like that okay that's looking good let's let's uh let's use that funky shape to make some like warmers so um i'm gonna take a sphere maybe something like this uh let's let's make it editable and i'm gonna i'm gonna squash it down to like 70 or something um and then okay yeah this is looking this is interesting we can definitely use this shape here i was i was getting a little insecure for a second um let's i'm gonna zero these guys out okay and let's uh let's move this down about 20 ish i'm gonna hide this guy so i can't see it and now let's um connect these by hitting this again um let's select these faces and get rid of them and now they're on the inside all right okay there we go um so now those are all deleted um i'm actually going to delete this too because we don't need that right now turn this back on and i'm going to use to select this and i'm going to bring this up and let's do that stitch and sew like that it's looking pretty good let's uh drop this in a subdivision cool now we're now we got some leg warmers i feel like i'm gonna give her rollerblades uh not now because i don't have time but i think she deserves some roller blades uh let's see yeah i think that a little bit smaller let's start extruding this and we'll just make like a little little tiny top to this and i'm just extruding this um it's really easy to just make different shapes in cinema super quickly to get your idea across and that's hopefully what you're getting from this cool that's looking pretty good um i don't know what i'm gonna do for feet so i am just going to like bring these down and make a weird shoe or something [Music] because i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna give her some roller blades eventually but um i do not have time for that so we'll just make these like super long um and they're like covering her feet or something [Music] cool and again i'm just hitting ctrl and like dragging it in um let's close this and add our cuts back in okay all right we got some i don't know could be a leg warmer it could be a weird sock boot thing um but okay i'm pretty happy with it um i think i might change that a little bit yep all right that's looking okay for now um let's name this leg or shoe boot i don't even know what that is this is a leg i can't name this whole group leg and then from here um i'm gonna move the axis to the top right here again so i'm just gonna hit l turn my snapping on and drag that guy up there cool so let's bring that up looking pretty interesting um i just noticed i didn't put any uh subdivisions on this leg and so i'm gonna hide this guy and let's just add some subdivisions there um let's see okay so now i think i'm going to put a shear on this and i'm going to fit this to the leg as a parent um but i'm going to bring it back out here and looks like i need to rotate it and okay something like that and let's get rid of the curvature and now she has a little bit of a power stance so that's what i'm liking um and i definitely want to put this in a subdivision so i can have the other leg i mean not the subdivision the symmetry cool so yeah i'm i'm pretty happy with this right here um i am very into these boots maybe i won't even make them rollerblades um they kind of look like condoms but that's okay okay so for sake of time i just went ahead and grabbed a hair that i've already modeled um but i just want to show you how simple it is really um it's pretty much just a sphere like i i start from sphere a lot so you can see that this was uh maybe a sphere with like eight subdivisions or something um and then i deleted faces of it and just extruded like i've been doing um and yeah so i'm just gonna leave this here for now i'm definitely i'm gonna make this into an actual character and change her hair up a bit um i think we need some more diverse characters but um let me drag that in here um let's rename these legs um let's see what else can i show you today maybe we need to rotate this hair a little bit she's got a massive forehead it's not looking too bad i'm pretty happy with it um let's see what it looks like next to our sam character i'm gonna rename him oh she's very tiny um um that's better okay now they look they look a little better um okay um let me show you how i made her mouth or his mouth actually so what i'm gonna do here is um let's actually take his mouth shape and i'll show you how i made this it's very simple um let me go in here head mouth spine um i'm gonna make a copy of this um i'm gonna turn him back off so we can't see him uh reset this psr cool so here's our mouth um and all it is is just it's just a spline so um you know i'm not even gonna change the way it looks uh let's let's uh put it in an extrude oops here we go and that is obviously way too long um let's change this to like ten no not even ten like three um and i'm also gonna change my spline to uniform that's looking good okay um i'm going to parent this to the head just so it brings it up here um you can already see how this is gonna start looking which is exciting um i'm just gonna bring this out of here quickly um so i can hide this and we can just look at this while we're working so how i did this was with a bowl um i dropped the head in the bowl and then put the mouth in here let's see actually how we wanted it to be was the head first and then the mouth inside of our bowl um and then we have our boolean type set to a subtract b um but obviously this needs way more subdivision so i'm going to just crank that up a bit maybe 64 20 and put a few here that's looking okay obviously this is not proper topology at all um i this is not okay for animation um even for uh putting textures on this but this is this is fine for now so we got our head here um and i am just going to make a copy of this bowl and i'm going to name this teeth let me hide this head real quick and then we're just going to be changing our um our boolean type so now i don't remember what it is ah a intersect b so here we have um what would be our teeth so turn that back on it looks like it's not doing anything and that is because we need to move our teeth um and again it looks like i forgot to center this to our mouth so shame on me i'm just gonna bring this up and put it here [Music] cool so now it looks like we got a mouth going on um and you can see here this is this is how it was so um if i want to change this i obviously can just move uh this mouth that's interesting um just needs to be brought out there we go um it's looking pretty good um pretty happy with this so i'm just gonna drag that back into here and yeah so um this really took me no time to create this character um from here um obviously it's not finished yet needs a mouth and eyes but you know that's that's super easy it's just another primitive um from here i would go and start finessing it and uh like making proper topology and giving some special details to it like how i did on um uh james's character how he had a zipper and just some nice funky glasses and really trying to give this character some personality so yeah um hope you guys enjoyed this part of it um hopefully i didn't go too fast but if you guys want to reach out to me on social media or email me i'm happy to answer any questions like i seriously love doing this so thank you guys for watching all right guys that's it um thank you so much for tuning in and watching my presentation i really hope that you got something out of it um and maxon thank you so much for having me it's always a blast working with you guys um very very happy that we were still able to do this virtually um still sad that we can't be together drinking beers till 2 a.m um but hopefully that will happen again soon so um if you guys want to get in contact with me you can reach me at my handle above at remain me do it um feel free to message me really about anything i'm happy to talk so yeah stay well you guys and i will see you next time so bye

Channel: Maxon

Views: 34,352

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

Id: F3cYQabAVzI

Length: 48min 57sec (2937 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020