Cinema 4D Lite Release 21: Create a Cel-Shaded Logo Animation

hello and welcome to cinema 4d Lite released 21 my name is Avinash co-sponsors aka nose man and in this video I will teach you how to create a cel-shaded logo animation with a toonie look inside cinema 4d lite released 21 and then imported and after effects using the sinawe plugin so this is the final composition and as you can see it's comprised of a pre comp that has all the splashes let me turn off the script logo we only have that splashes there we're not going to deal with this in this tutorial and then we created this write on a nice to knee play using cinema 4d lite release 21 and of course we have a background so let's go and delete this from layer stack and let's delete it from here as well the actual project bar is going to be available for download now how do we launch cinema 4d lite well that's pretty simple go to the file new Maxon cinema 4d file go to the appropriate folder which are folder you want to and just write a name and press save and that is sufficient to launch cinema 4d lite so let's begin by drawing the splines in our viewport we are currently viewing the perspective view I want to give you this from the front view so go to this button here click once to go to the four views and you can see each and every one of these panels has another set of these buttons and the one we want is the front and I'm going to click on the appropriate fourth button and maximize the front view and now I'm going to draw some splines in a very similar fashion to Adobe Illustrator or after-effects from a drawing paths so click and hold this and you can see a whole list of different spline objects we are going to select the spline pen and let's start drawing our splines so let's draw a P in a very similar fashion to the way you're used to in any other Adobe product there we go I'm just clicking and dragging to draw this blinds and I'm going to accelerate this so we don't lose any time when you're done drawing a specific segment just press escape on your keyboard a couple of times and this will release the Bezier tool so you can continue doing more spline so let's continue with V a press escape a couple of times and let's do the line and escape a couple of times excellent so now we have three spline objects in the object manager let's go in to rename these so we know what exactly each spline represents double click on the name and let's write P L press Enter double click on the name a Y enter double click and let's call this line and press Enter what I'm going to do is just put them in the right order just so that it's easy for me to understand what begins and what ends play:1 now if you want to go and do some editing to these splines you need to select the appropriate spline make sure that this little button here which is called use point mode is enabled because if this is enabled then you actually edit the object as a whole whereas this one allows you to go to each component like the points in this case we want to adjust the points and go to the move tool this little cross here and now what you can do is hover over the point you want to edit click once and then you can drag anywhere to move it or go to the control vertices and change the Bezier curve and let me go and do this for a few points and just make this look a bit better so don't forget click and then click and drag and move it around and click and drag on these to adjust them whenever you are done with a particular spline just go to the object manager select the other one and continue the same way and I think I'm happy with the state of my splines at this moment I can adjust it further if I wish later on so now let's go and click on this so we're in the model mode excellent now these particular splines now are visible in this flat front panel let's gain view them in the 3d world so click on this to minimize and click on this to maximize the perspective view so I'm going to use a few navigation shortcuts now if I press and hold number one on my keyboard and click my left mouse button and drag I can pan the camera left and right up and down if I press and hold 2 I will dolly in and out where I click and drag my mouse again pressing the left mouse button and if I press and hold 3 and click and drag my left mouse button I can tumble my camera around so by using 1 2 and 3 on the keyboard I can actually navigate to get a view of this little logo from a specific perspective I want to fantastic so I've framed my logo the way I want it and let's go see how this looks when rendered go and click this button to render in the viewport and of course nothing happens because by definition splines do not render we need to generate geometry in order for them to become visible for this to happen we need a generator so go click on this and hold and go and select a sweep generator and I'm going to start with the line which is the simpler of all shapes in order for the sweep to do something to generate something it needs two components it needs the actual line and I dragged the line in the object manager and pull it over the generator until I see that arrow pointing downwards and now the line is a child of the sweep we need one more component and that is the profile and for a profile I'm going to use a circle so go here click and hold generate a circle and then drag the circle between the sweep and the line until the arrow points to the left this is going to make it a child of the sweep and a sibling of the line so these two now are at the same hierarchical level this is a hierarchy with a parent and two children now you can see the circle is too big so if you select the circle and go down here to the attributes manager and select the object tab you can see that the circle has a radius by changing the radius by clicking on the arrows up and down I can make this the thickness I want it to be fantastic now another thing you can do here is change the resolution of your mesh to get a smoother surface if required now I can't see any geometry here so I need to go to the display menu of my viewport and select guro shading lines the lines will show you the geometry let me navigate in here using my shortcuts and you can see that some of these segments are shorter and some are longer it depends on how curved this is this is what we call an adaptive spline so go select the line and go to the object tab and down here where it says intermediate points adaptive let's change this to uniform and increase the number to 15 and we have a denser mesh which is going to render smoother fantastic the other thing I want to do is not have a constant thickness on this line I want this to be thinner on the edges and thicker in the middle and I want to be able to art direct that in order to do that go select the actual generator and in the object term I'm going to bring this a bit further up so we have a bit more space down here go down here and twirl open this little arrow it says details and here we have two components the scale and the rotation this controls the scaling over the distance of the spline if I drag this little thingy you can see now that we have a thin spline on this side where the spline begins to and a thick one on that side where the spline ends and I can go and add points here to sculpt this if I press command or control and click on the spline itself it adds a point and I can move this around and play with a Bezier points to make this look any way I want fantastic so I can drag this down I can grab this and pull it up and you can see I'm creating that tapered shape I'll pull this up a bit and then I'm going to go to the end make it a bit thinner command or control click to add a point bring this down and do that so now I've sculpted this spline to look any way I want if you want these edges to be a bit smoother or we have to do is go to the line and increase the number of segments fantastic the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rename this to line sweep by double clicking on the name adding the line and pressing enter and now I'm going to repeat the same things on the other two splines now I don't want to do everything from the beginning again and again so I'm going to use this line sweet so I'm gonna make a copy of it click and hold and drag down here don't release the mouse press command or control until you see that little arrow and if I release my mouse and now you will see I made a copy of the line sweep I'm going to select the line because we already have that delete it and drag the pl down here until I see the arrow pointing to the left and I've created another sweep generator that has the same profile but a different spline and now I can rename this to PL PL sweep I can delete this and press Enter now let me navigate out you can see it's retained all the thickness and all the sculpting I've done what it hasn't retained is the parameters over the spline so select the spline go to uniform and let's make this 20 and you can adjust that as you wish I'm gonna do the same thing for the last spline excellent so now I can go to each one of these blinds and sculpt them in a way where I'll get the thickness where I wanted and make them thin where I want them just by selecting it going down to the details and I'm going to start adding subtracting points moving them around until I get my desired shape and I'm done with the shape sculpting now you can see that we have these overlaps here if I go closer you will see that the spline because it's generated on a two-dimensional world that front view we had is folding over itself but we have the ability because we are in a real 3d program to move points in and out as well to avoid these overlaps let's go and start with a pl I'm going to go to my PL spline make sure that my points mode is enabled and because I can't see the spline because it's inside the geometry there are a couple of things I can do one is temporarily deactivate the generator by clicking on the little tick mark I can select the point I want to adjust and then activate it again to see how it looks or what I can do is minimize my viewport adjust my view in my perspective so I see the components I'm working on and use one of the two dimensional views to do my selections so with your move tool selected and points mode let's go here and start selecting points and moving them around the way I'm moving them is by hovering over these arrows so I constrain them movement in the particular direction so if I go here and hover over the blue arrow and click and drag I'm moving it in the z direction and you can see how it changes in the rest of the view so you have a good idea of what's going on let it continue here quickly so I get this all done whenever you're ready to move to another spline just go and select that spline and continue appropriately and I think I've resolved most of my overlaps let me maximize my perspective view and let me frame my logo fantastic so now that we're done with the main modeling let's proceed to the animation I want this to write on how do I do that well this particular sweep generator has a parameter if I select it and now we don't need the details anymore so let's just close that little panel you will see in the object tab we have the end growth and currently it's set at a hundred percent now let's go over these arrows click and hold and drag up and down and you can see that this controls the percentage of the object that's going to be generated over the length of the spline that's fantastic because if I animate this I'll make it seem as if it's drawing on so I want to go and set all these to zero so n growth to zero select the other one double click type zero and press Enter select this one double click zero press Enter so now there's nothing written on our screen so let's begin with the PL select the PL sweep and let's go in add a keyframe at frame 0 and this little blue square indicates which frame we're on you can click anywhere in the timeline to control and you can even scrub it so let's put it on zero and let's go here at the end growth and there's a circle on the left that is the keyframe circle now click once and now that red dot indicates that we have the value of zero on the end growth at frame 0 let me go to frame 30 and let me set this to 100% double-click 100 press ENTER and then add one more keyframe in after-effects keyframes are set automatically when you change that value in cinema 4d there is a mode to do that but by default we have to move our playhead to the appropriate frame and then change the value and then manually set the keyframe button so let's go and see what happens if I rewind and press play and we have the writing on of pl rewind press play fantastic let's apply the same thing at different times to the rest of the word let's go back to frame 30 let's go to a Y set a keyframe for 0 let's advance about 30 frames at frame 60 let's set this to 100% press Enter and add a keyframe rewind check our animation PL a y let's do the same thing for the line go here go to frame 60 go add a 0% value at the end growth keyframe let's advance a bit less this time let's go 15 frames or something like that there you go 75 and let's set this to 100% and add the keyframe and what I'm going to do is extend my animation so we have a few seconds of hold so go here which is the end of our timeline double-click and type 150 press Enter and now if you go and extend this all the way to the end now we have a full duration of 150 frames rewind press play and we are writing on play fantastic and then it's holding for the rest all the time and that's it we're done with the animation if at any point you wish to change the timing the speed or the position of the animation it's not that difficult select any object you wish that has any animation find that animated parameter the one with that don't right-click on the name and in the animation submenu go down here where it says show track this will bring up a very detailed timeline let me just bring it over here and the particular parameter is going to show us the keyframes the first one which is 0% and the last one which is a hundred percent with that parameter selected this orange bar here allows us to either click and drag and change when the animation is going to occur so we're moving it in time or go to the ends and you can speed it up or slow it down and it's as simple as that close and all the changes will take effect rewind press play let's make sure everything is fine and I think I'm happy with what I'm seeing I think it's time to move to the look let's add some color let's make this look like a tune so this is going to render and if I render this now it looks some smooth like creamy let's say we want to control the lighting and we want to create a toonie look to it I don't want any gradients here I want this to have some nice hard colors so first of all in order to be able to view the rendered version in our viewport I'm going to go and activate click and hold this little button and let's activate the interactive render region release and get this little rectangle now you can use these thoughts to place it where you want just click and drag this little arrow the smallest arrow in the universe is used for quality if I click and drag it upwards I'm going to get maximum quality and then if you right click on that little error we're gonna set alpha mode that's very convenient because actually it's a rendering but cutting out the Alpha so we can see the background so let me deselect everything and this is the rendered version so we are going to create a material and we are going to apply that material on our logo to look like a tune so go down here to the material manager click on create materials and new standard material this is a material let's drop it on our object click and drag and let's drag it on the line sweep there are other ways of dragging it on an object you click and drag in you drag it on the object itself you can see the color changes and let's drag this one here it makes no difference just make sure you drag it on to the name and we've got these texture tags that indicate that that object has this material now we need to change this material to reflect our look and first of all I'm going to double click on the material and I get the material editor I'll pull it here to the side so we can see everything together let's name this Tunis and press Enter just so that we know what's going on now I'm going to turn off the color and the reflectance and I'm going to turn on the luminance which provides us with flat shading and now I want to control this flat shading using lights go to the texture right here click on this little arrow go down and bring up from the effects the Loomis shader now again it's going to look like a shiny cream or something like that the luma shader is a very powerful shader and don't ask too many details here we don't have the time to deal with it there are plenty of tutorials on sin Aversa T that will give you all the ins and outs of the Loomis click once on this icon and let's do the following select specular one deactivate specular to deactivate and specular 3 deactivate and you can see everything reflects in our render let's go to the shader and let's twirl open the color and make it fully white then change the illumination to 100% and there we go we have the basis for our toon shader now what I want to do is first of all make this shading you can see darker shades and lighter shades this is a gradient essentially the lighter shades being right and the darker shades being black I want to be able to remap these to any colors I want so click on the luminance and with the Loomis already in the little texture click on the arrow once more and select the color Iser this will adapt whatever is inside it so now it says colorized click on this the Loomis is as we say inside the colorizer and the colorizer takes the luminance values that the Loomis generates and maps them on a gradient so if I drag this over here you will see that I'm actually condensing my gradient and what I'm going to do is click on this and then shift click on this to select both nodes and twirl this and I can see all the parameters of the knots select the interpolation and set it to step now if you can't see the gradient just move your mouse over here expanded a bit so now we can see the whole gradient just click on one let's pull this to the other side and now the white one has a heart cut so this is a very sharp gradient and look at that I can actually control this any way I want so if I bring this here I'm actually creating the highlight so let's go and add some color I'm gonna click here and add a knot and I'm gonna make this knot this color fantastic let me just make it a bit redder a bit more d saturated excellent I'm gonna select this and go and make it a dark saturated red so I indicates our shadows now this is not bad but I have one issue the highlight is not in the position I want it I want it to be off on the top left and this has nothing to do with the material so let's close the material we need to change the lighting what you see here is a default light which is very close to our camera so go and click and hold the lighting panel and create an infinite light with an infinite light you shouldn't care about the position it doesn't care about the position it does care about rotation though because it's a directional light select your rotation tool and you can see this rotation gizmo and make sure you click and drag inside this little sphere click and drag and we're actually rotating you can see where the direction of the light is and release and look at that now we have the lighting we want so let's just adjust this the way we wanted to and I think that looks fantastic we have everything we want but know we are lacking one more little detail there's no shadow here we have the shading but we don't have the light shadow so make sure the light is selected go to the general tab and right down here you will see shadows by default lights do not have shadows click on none and set it to Ray traced hard and there you go now we get the shadows as well and I think that this concludes the modeling and shading of our little play logo so let's proceed now by first of all saving it let's go back to After Effects you can see that original play file we created is actually our play low let's track this in our timeline fantastic and let's just scrub and we can see it that's fantastic look at that it's animating just click on your timeline you can see the animation happening but there's no color the reason is when you insert a cinema 4d file and this gets inserted using the sin aware plugin which is already installed in After Effects and the default renderer as you can see here is software and it's optimized for speed if you want to see if your animation speed is correct and so forth I'm gonna click here and set this to standard final and now we get the full effect of our render you have just created a beautiful tuning logo from scratch inside cinema4d light and composite it in after-effects please watch the rest of the fantastic tutorials we have on Senna versity to learn more and thanks for watching

Channel: Cineversity

Views: 14,856

Keywords: 3d, 3d software, c4d, c4d tutorial, cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema4d, cineversity, maxon, tutorial, c4d motion graphics, cinema 4d motion graphics, cinema4d motion graphics, mo graph, mograph, motion graphics, c4d lite, cinema 4d lite, r21 lite, release 21 lite, logo, logo design

Id: 1hfIwGKXzTc

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019