Cinema 4D tutorial - Camera projection

hey guys first up if you don't know who a man versus machine are you have to go check them out they're absolutely killing the motion graphics game they've done some incredible work for brands like Nike Xbox and Squarespace but it was actually their rebrand for film for that first caught my attention they created these amazing clips where we exit the scene from the bottom and then reappear in the exact same scene from above there's even a breakdown video of how the whole production came together and it's truly impressive now man vs. machine created these clips with live-action footage but that got me thinking could we pull off a similar result using still photography let's jump in and see how we go all right guys let's get straight into this one I'm just gonna frame up my perspective view a little bit here and then we'll drop a camera into our scene let's look through our camera here and we want to come up to our cinema 4d tags and add a camera calibrator grates in the camera calibrator we've got this image field and this is where we're gonna drop in an image that we're gonna try and recreate so I've got this great shot of a hallway here it's got some really nice perspective we've got that nice back wall it's got some really nice perspective and some nice depth in this photo I picked this photo up from px here it's a great website to download some free images to start having a play with and doing this sort of stuff so I'll pop a link down below and you can work along with us using this exact image what I'm gonna do is drop a plane into my scene and what I want to do is try and reposition my scene so this plane resembles the position of the flaw in the image so while we're looking through our camera with the camera calibrated tag selected we'll actually be able to see we'll actually be able to see the image but it's gonna make it more difficult to see our plane so with the tag selected I'm just rotating around my scene here trying to reposition my view so that plane looks like it's representing the floor we might send a scale airplane down a little bit and to do that we're gonna click off that camera calibrated tag and this is looking better so with the tag selected let's come over to our calibrate tab and we're gonna click create camera mapping tag and create a background object this is gonna do two things for us create a background object with that texture on it but it's also gonna apply a texture to our camera so now we can see our plane easier we can just scale this down a little bit we might need a writer a camera a just a little bit more but now that we've got this in a position that we're a bit happy with take it a step further so let's group our null by holding alt G and what I'm gonna do is copy that texture tag from our camera and apply that to our null and what this is going to do is feed that texture tag to all the objects within the null great so we got that plane here and that's now got that texture as well so I'm just gonna pull my plane down a little bit so in my plane I'm gonna make sure it's only got one width and height segment then I'll hit C to make it editable and now with my edge selected I can individually select these edges and pull them back to the edge of the floor here I'll turn that background object off for a moment so you can see exactly what this plane is capturing we're just picking up a little bit of those walls in the corner there and what I'm thinking we might just rotate a camera a little bit so we don't have to shift their plane so with that camera selected let's just rotate that around a little bit so we're projecting that texture more accurately back onto our plane you can see we're gonna need to reposition that back point to slide it back to where it meets the wall and great now that we're happy with our camera position and how it's projecting this image let's add a projection tag onto it just so we don't move around in our scene or or disrupt that projection so what we're gonna do is use this plane to start building up the geometry for the rest of the scene so while we're in the edge mode I'm gonna hit KL and that's gonna bring up our knife tool what I'm gonna do is make two cuts on this plane where our two walls end finding that base point making it cut then I'll come and find the other base point on the left hand side and do the same let's jump out of a camera for a second so you can see what we've done here we've now on this plane out of these three extra cuts and we're gonna use these to start building out the extended parts of the floor let's jump back into our camera I'm gonna select those two edges on the right side only I'll then hit D for extrude I'm gonna give this a zero offset and then hit apply we can then pull this along way and you can see this is now gonna start and this is gonna start forming the extended parts of that floor let's come and grab that edge now on the left hand side hit D for extrude give it that zero offset and we'll pull that along as well and great we've now got what's going to be our entire floor so let's grab these three back points now give it a zero offset and now I'm gonna pull these up and what this is going to be is that back wall with that blue doors nice this is that look good one thinking now let's build up those walls in the foreground so let's grab all those edges jump back into our camera sent our background back on so we could see how high we need to pull these edges let's hit D for extrude give it a zero offset and then let's pull these up we'll turn our background off again so you can see exactly what's happening on our plane and what we want it to look like is that the camera is in the hallway let's let's grab all the edges closest to the camera and we're going to pull these back and we're going to pull these back so they capture that entire image pull it a little bit further we're not quite there on the left side and great now that camera is within the geometry all right next thing let's close off the roof of this little corridor we're in so let's go that polygon pen and what I'm gonna do is just working on each point before returning back to that original point and great that's gonna create a new polygon for us there now our roof in our corridor is complete alright great we've now got some geometry build up but as I start to spin around in this scene you can see that the back wall is capturing our foreground walls as its texture and that's not quite what we wanted to do we want this to we want to be able to move around this scene and we want to be able to see beyond what the photo can see we want this to look like a complete back wall so what I'll do is grab our polygon select grab those three polygons that are the back wall and then I'm gonna hit right-click and come down to split and what that's now done is split off those three polygons into its own geometry and then we can just delete that from our original plane let's rename a new geometry the back wall and what we need to do now is texture this one a little bit differently so that texture that we have applied to the null let's grab that and copy that to the back wall in our material panel let's make a copy of that texture I'm gonna load in a new image now this image has that extended back wall we've got the complete door you can see even the floor has been extended now I've set this up in Photoshop if you guys would like it tutorial and how to start to set up these images and break them down let us know and we'll jump into something like that we're gonna apply this to the back wall and override that other texture and great now we've got that entire back wall we can look through our corridor and see our complete door we're not picking up any of those foreground walls so you've got the edges of our back wall and just pull them up so while we're looking through this camera we can see all the geometry nice now that we're happy with the back wall what I'm thinking let's do the same thing to our floor here so let's grab the extra polygons we made when we extended the floor so let's grab the extra polygons here I'm gonna split them off the same way and we'll delete them from our original plane we can rename this and this is now our ground it's copy that texture from our null to that ground and we can just override that with our new texture that we applied to the wall as well and perfect we've now got that extended floor this is starting to look cool let's jump back into our main camera here and what we're looking through this camera let's add another camera into our scene and we'll look through that and now when I dolly through the hallway here we actually get that perspective as if we're actually traveling through the hallway now as I've done this I can actually see that I'm picking up a bit of that back wall on our corner of our wall here what I do is grab that edge I'm just gonna pull that over a little bit and I might even do the same on the left hand side just so we're not capturing any of that wall and I'm really happy with this you can see we're moving through the hallway and we're getting this great perspective and we've really brought this further to life all right now comes the fun part of how do we make it look like we're traveling between a couple of separate scenes what I'm gonna do is also describe those I'm gonna grab those couple of edges that are also exposed I'm gonna extrude these to the same height that our back wall is that so I'll jump into our four views I'm just gonna pull these up to it till it's about visually where the back wall is great we're probably gonna reposition these a little bit later but for now keeping them even makes it a bit easier what I'm going to do is just add a new texture into a scene I'm just gonna make this black for now and apply that to our null as well I'll make sure original texture is on top of that and what this is going to do for us is just apply that black material to where our image isn't projecting alright what I'm gonna do is come to our front here I'm gonna grab at the top edge I'm going to extrude it 20 points let's come to the base and we'll do the exact same thing and I'll show you while we've done that in just a moment I grab now we are happy with all our geometry let's remove that protection tag from our camera delete our background object and great now we're left with our know with all that geometry and our camera that's projecting our image onto it all so with all that selected let's ulti and group that and this is now our first level I'm gonna copy and paste that into my scene again and rename that level two now I'm going to hold down shift so I know exactly how many units I need to move this down and it was 440 centimeters now we get this nice intersecting between those two extra panels we made on the top and bottom you can see as I move around here that that back wall and that side wall is actually intersecting into the level above we're going to need to grab those edges on our plane and also those top edges on our back wall and going to pull this down just so you're not intersecting we might need to go to these back edges separately and just pull them up a little bit and nice I'm happy with that now because we're happy with how the back walls are on our second level I'm gonna move that back up 440 because we know that tasks start position and then going to delete a level one and I'll make a copy of level 2 and this is gonna be our new level 1 now just as we did before we know we need to move this down 440 centimeters let's do that and great now we're good at two levels complete so the trick to this is we want to transition between these two cameras seamlessly now before we do that I'm gonna I'm gonna make another copy of my level two this is going to be level three and let's pull this up four hundred and forty centimeters as well and what this is gonna do is just make sure that all the shadows are correct in level two just as they are in level one now the cameras we want to be transitioning between our level two and level one so what I'm going to do is jump into our level two null and make a copy of that camera we can then delete that tag and that texture off the camera now a frame zero I'm gonna add a keyframe on my camera and the great thing with this is we know that we move that other camera down exactly four hundred and forty centimeters let's come forward 90 frames pull that camera down 440 centimeters and add another keyframe let's jump in and have a look and great we've now got this looping animation between these two levels and this is and we're getting pretty close to that final look now what I like to do is just change my keyframes to linear and this is going to help to make this loop seamless another really cool thing with this is because we're using a photo because we're using a photo if we're already happy with how the photo looks we don't actually need to really crank up our render settings we can get away with really simple stuff to to get some fast results still look really cool all right great we've built up our scenes we've got our camera animating we've got this nice perspective from the photo what we're gonna do now is add an object into this scene and it's gonna help sell that hold depth so I picked up this model from flying architecture I'll pop a link down below if you want to grab this exact same one I'm gonna make a copy of this and I'll drop it back into our scene with our levels I'm gonna scale that down so it looks about right for our scene holding down shift to scale down increments of 10 what I'm thinking we'll rotate this a little bit and put it on a bit of a tilt just to give it a bit of interest now all these cameras are just getting in the way of our viewport bits I'm just going to go through our entire scene and just hit those traffic lights and turn them off there we go that's better so with our chair selected I'm just gonna reposition this so we've got two legs on the ground and it's leaning against the wall on the right hand side there once we're happy with this position I'm just gonna I'm gonna make a copy of it and we need to get this into our bottom level as well so let's move it down 440 units perfect we've got these two identical levels and when I hit play we get this nice seamless loop passing between the two different levels and what the chair helps or any objects within the scene just helps sell that depth and what we've altima been able to do is give this image a whole heap more life and and really give it some nice depth so I want to show you with some real basic render settings we can get something looking pretty good so I'm going to swap over into the physical renderer and just add a default ambient occlusion and global illumination now chairs already had this texture tag applied so I'm just gonna select all them and delete we can then grip our chairs into another null and this is gonna be our chairs now and that black texture that we have applied to the let's make a copy of that and I'm just gonna add a bit more reflectance let's let's add a Beckman and we're gonna ply for now to give it a bit of fall-off we'll turn down that reflectance layer a little bit let's hit render and see what we've got so you can see our scenes thinking about it and as it comes through with now got these nice reflections on this chair and that ambient occlusion helps us have some nice contact shadows where this chair meets the wall now what would be really cool is if we can get some reflections of that chair into the ground as well so what I'm gonna do with our original plane selected I'm gonna use my polygon select tool and select all the planes on our ground here now just like before we're going to split these off we're going to split these off and then we can delete them from that original layer and now we've been able to separate that ground layer I'm gonna copy both the black texture as well as that texture from the camera from our nail to that new ground layer let's make a copy of that projection tag and this time rather than swapping out the image we're just going to add some reflection so let's turn on our reflectance layer add a Beckman give it some for an L and we'll just turn it down to about 50% let's apply that texture so it overrides the one on the ground we'll also grab that black texture that we gave some reflection to for the chair and we'll apply that to our ground as well and now when I hit render it thinks about it for a second and then we get some lost reflection about chair within the ground and what I'd like to do is just scrub through my timeline and let's have a look at where this texture ends in our black texture becomes more dominant our global eliminations thinking about it and now you can see as it starts to reveal itself we've actually got a lot of blur from that black texture and we actually don't want any blur in our floor so what I'm gonna do is copy that texture that we applied some blur to and I'm just gonna turn it down now let's apply that back onto our ground so it overrides that other black texture we'll hit render and have another look and perfect now that the way this works and we've now got this nice seamless transition between that texture from our camera and that black material that we've applied underneath and our whole scene starting to look pretty cool here and it's rendering each frame pretty quickly and the great thing with these scenes is we could actually get away with not using any global illumination because we're just rerender emerge and if we keep the integrity of the original photo it actually still looks great now because we gave some reflections to our floor rather than trying to reapply this to our base level I was going to copy our level to rename at level one get rid of that get rid of that other layer now we can just pull this down 440 units and now we've been able to set up that transition between level 1 and 2 and we've got some nice reflection in the floor of each this is how I start to build up these scenes in there actually a lot of fun to play with now I want to show you another scene that took a little bit more thinking we had to think about the background and the foreground with a few extra objects so let's jump into that and I'll show you what we ended up with so this is another scene I prepared when playing around with this technique this was another image I found off px here and I thought this is great I can already see some ways to start to bring this alive now if I hit play we get this nice animation dropping between these two platforms at a train station and what I loved about it is we've got some nice objects in the foreground here we've got the bin the chair and we've even got the framing on the roof which has the sign now as well as that we've got the platform in the front we've got the Train with a little bit of movement and we also got the roof in the background now with something like this you really have to break down your image you can see we've got all these texture tags which have different portions of the image necessary so when we move the camera we actually don't see any of the original original image projected back onto the objects for example in the original photo the bin is the bin is clearly in front of the Train what we need to do is go into Photoshop paint back in portions of the train so our bin doesn't exist and then we can apply that to our train geometry now these scenes are a lot of fun to setup and I encourage you to jump in so I have a bit of a plate and see when I move around this scene we get some nice depth some real simple modeling techniques but we can pull up some really cool looks so this was a lot of fun pulling these images apart and really trying to bring them alive and it's something that I want to keep exploring and I hope and hopefully it's something that interests you guys as well all right I'll see you guys again soon Cheers

Channel: Sean Dove

Views: 101,825

Rating: 4.969965 out of 5

Keywords: CINEMA 4D, C4D, MANVSMACHINE, MVSM, FILM4, PHOTOGRAPHY, TUTORIAL, DESIGN, MOTION GRAPHICS, 3D, MODELLING

Id: 36kdBz3D-0k

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017