Cinema 4D Tutorial - How to Create Line Art Animations Using Cinema 4D's Sketch and Toon

everyone its EJ from a design comm and today I'm going to be going over a really popular illustrative style and that is line art style Illustrated animations and you can see on the web here it's all over the place it's really getting to be a really big style and has been for like the last year or so so my buddy Brian here he's a super super talented animator and illustrator and you can see that his style is like this line art he's really big and this just really simplistic line art style so check him out on Vimeo brand here and also my buddies from loose keys they are also getting into this line art style for their kind of infographic animations really really cool stuff so you can see what style we're talking about here you can kind of see this kind of offset color thing going on with the line type and I'll actually go over that in this tutorial as well so this is what I created using cinema 4d and what I mean you guys know by now that I really love using cinema 4d for illustrative kind of stuff because you can have a lot more control over everything and especially add depth to your 2d animation so you have this turntable kind of flipping up so you get that 3d depth of the box like you definitely know that's a 3d box you have the turn of the record player spinning around you have the little arm of the needle turning and you have that nice depth so this is a really cool style that I've had a lot of fun exploring and it's really easy to do in sign of cinema 4d so let me go ahead and show you how I did this with using sketch in tune and I did sketch in tune a little bit my last tutorial and I'm going a little bit more in depth into it but hopefully this will kind of open your eyes to the possibilities of more 2d style animations with this flat line art style that you can do just in simha 4d alright so let's just set the scene here we're gonna spin some vinyl today and we got our little vinyl record and I have all our elements here we have some record lines here that are splines that I'll go into later got all of our stuff set up we have all of our materials here that's not blue this is hot pink let's rename that but all these are just luminate 100% Lumina materials and we will be applying sketch in tune on top of that so what we're dealing with is just flat line art style animation so we're going to be using flat colors and just lines so outlines and all that stuff so we have our flat material if I turn on interactive render region here you can see all of our materials are flat as a something that's flat and and what we're going to need to do is just go and apply lines onto this and this is where a sketch in tune comes in now I'm going to go into to get sketch into and I'm going to go and hopefully you guys can see at the very bottom here under effect sketch in tune you can see that immediately when I apply sketch in tune it applies all these lines and it looks cut you know kind of goodbye at default but we have all these types of lines that we can then apply to our scene here and kind of like apply lines to our the geometry of our objects in our scene and what I'm going to do I'm just going to turn these off I don't want to go over all of these line types here but I'll go over a few that are pretty useful in getting this flat illustrative line art style kind of objects in cinema 4d so the first thing is going to be outlined an outline is just outline so it's going to outline all of my objects in my scene so the record is outlined the handle is outlined the two pieces of our little turntable box are outlined but you see we're missing a lot of of our lines that we would need to see eventually so this is going to handle some of the lines and what we're going to put what you're going to find out about sketch in tune is that you want to kind of add together different types of lines to create your your style of line our look so outline you can have it just outlining every individual object or you can just outline children of objects or entire projects so what this will do is actually just create one outline across all the outer edges of all the objects in your scene so you see that we actually lose a lot of our lines here so we totally lose the record-player lines because it's outlying outlining everything outside of it so what we want to do for this is just have self so it's good outline every object itself and then what we're going to need to do is go to overlaps so we want to turn on overlaps and what that's going to do is you can see that now we're getting some of some more lines in here we're also losing some of the other lines that we have in here but we won't worry about that right now but you're seeing that every piece of geometry that's overlapping another we're kind of seeing that now so the next thing we want to enable is creases and you can see that when we enable creases a lot of our geometry kind of comes back here and what creases are is it takes the kind of like the Fong angle of your object and creates a line wherever that Fong tag angle break is so you can see this so let's say these these knobs down here so let's say by default if I reset this the default by default the Fong angle is 80% you can see that those lines that were there just went away because the Fong angle is now smooth so let's actually zoom in on our actual knobs here and let's move this out of the way I'm just going to create a normal gray material for our little nabis here so you can see if I turn off shading let's go to our garage shading and what you'll see here is that at 80 degree Fung angle it what it's going to do is try smooth everything else so that's why we're not seeing a line right now but if we bring this down and you can see that kind of like Pop's that cuts in breaks that angle and we're getting the sharp edge so that is where our creases will draw a line once it breaks that Phong angle it'll draw a line so now I'll just reapply our white materials and let's turn render region back on and you can see that that is how creases works you can also see that we have this minimum angle here so by default a lot of our objects when you create an object a lot of them unless you change it like I've changed some of these in here but by default a lot of our Phong angles when you create an object are defaulted at 80 degrees so what will happen is this creases it has like a minimum threshold of what will be what will have a lines applied to it and right now the minimum is 10 and that's fine oh come on what's going on down there but what you'll find out is that if you increase the threshold now mind you most of the objects that you create by default the the threshold is air the angle limit is set to 80% so if I bring this to 81 watch what happens you can see that a lot of our outlines kind of go away now a lot of our outlines are already taken care of with other stuff but you can see as I really increase this we're losing a lot of our lines because we're increasing that threshold so high so that is how creases work I'll just bring that back down to 10 you can see that by just using the overlaps outline increases and again kind of adjusting our Phong angle limits here to get some of our other bits back so one more thing that I forgot is this little switch here so if we want to get lines but in that little middle part of our switch what I can go is go to my switch object where is it there it is a switch and go to my object go to the angle the Phong tag and then just bring this down until I see those little lines in this middle of my switch there so that is good cool so just bringing that angle limit down I brought back or I'll bring in some more lines because I'm bringing that angle limit down and breaking the Phong angle on that geometry and therefore through the creases we'll have lines rendered in that on that object cool so another thing is kind of like a stylistic thing that you can either want or not want and that is intersections you can see that right now especially right here we don't have lines intersecting this cube and the main box here and that is because intersections turned off once I turn intersections on and change the intersection objects from just the self so we don't want just objects intersecting itself getting line getting lines applied to it we actually want intersections of everything in the project so if I turn that to project you can see a whole bunch more lines start showing up and that is because any time an object intersects another object in this project that'll get stroked so you can see that we're getting a lot of our we're getting a lot more lines here with all the intersections of all of our geometry and like I said you can either want this or turn it off and you can kind of get this kind of kind of cool kind of look where you don't necessarily need sharp lines anywhere so I'll leave it off that's just kind of like a stylistic choice where you kind of get these cool color bleeds without any strokes so it's all up to you whatever you want to do but that is basically in this tab all the different line types that you would need to create stuff the one thing that I missed though and is really cool is the splines option so if I turn on splines you can see that that turns on and let me move this out of the way in the at connect you can actually see I have all these splines all these arcs lines that are creating these little grooves in the in the record so what the spline option does is it just strokes all the lines in your scene so you can also see I have a on this slider I just have a spline just a straight spline and you can see if I turn that on and off that'll stroke all the splines in my scene so that's a really cool handy line type that you can also render with sketch in tune all right now I think we're done with all of the objects that you would probably need to get this line art style of animation and we will go into shading so right now our background is white by default and that is just because our background is set to color you can turn it off completely or you can just choose your own color and I'll choose my own color this little kind of tannish color and you can also go and if we actually had object shadings and lights you can have quantized shading and have illumination and shadows but I'm just going to turn everything off and just use the colors from our materials that we actually applied to our objects here so that is everything's looking pretty good so far but then there's a one thing we need to do and you can I hope you guys can make this out is we kind of have these chunky kind of lines or kind of dots it almost looks like when you draw with with ink you're in kind of bleeds and what we're going to do to get rid of that is go into our sketch material and like I said by default sketching sketch in tune just applying it in the render automatically creates some limes you really this is just kind of setting where lines are being drawn you can't actually control the size of the lines or the stroke width or anything like that and when you actually go into your sketch materials that's when you can have control of that via this strokes option so I'm going to rename this just global global strokes and go into my strokes and right now it's off and again you see these kind of splotchy things but if I enable strokes that kind of smooth everything out you'll see we're also lost some of our edges here some of our lines here and let me just show you that again watch this line here and this line here and those just kind of go away I'll tell you why and that is because we have this filter strokes option set up and what this does is it filters stroke and right now it's set to length so we have a very short length and that is why it's getting rid of it it's filtering out all the strokes that are fairly small so this can be useful to you some in some projects but for right now it's actually removing some of the lines that we want some of the strokes you want so we're just going to check filter strokes and you see we get all of our small lines back so that's good so what we want to also pay attention to is this match and what this is going to do is if you actually had right now our scene is fairly flat there's not a lot of perspective depth or anything like that but since we're using we're wanting to create this flat art this flat line art we don't want any kind of like tapering due to depth or anything like that so we're just going to change our match to flat and then I'll just keep all of our strokes looking fairly flat despite any kind of like depth perspective or anything like that okay so that's it for strokes the other thing you can pay attention to is the color and that is just the color of our strokes and right now black is fine but you can change it to any color here you can also have modifiers and all that stuff as well another thing you want to worry about is thickness so this is just the thickness of your stroke and you can bring that up to three and get a little thicker stroke and I think that looks better so that is looking good and that's pretty much everything that you would need to know about here you can also animate strokes but I'm not going to get into that this time at least so we have our strokes here so another thing that's really handy is that say you want to you have these global settings for everything in your scene what if you actually want to go and change these little groove lines to a different color what if I want to change it to a light gray or something like that now you can easily do that and so I have all of my splines that I want to change the color underneath these two nulls here so what I'm going to do is click on the objects I want to apply in my own kind of different sketch and stroke - I'm going to right click I'm going to go to sketch tags and go to sketch style now what this does is create a sketch style tag where you can actually have local not global but local options for your sketch in tune style on individual objects of what these tags are applied to so right now it has folds creases and border select I'm just going to uncheck those and you can see that by creating two tags that created two new sketch materials and I only need one so I'm just going to drag in holding option I'm going to drag it over to the other one so it kind of combines both of them together I'm going to double click this and rename this stroke material and what I can do is just enable stroke on that and I need to go into my sketch style tag here and since nothing is selected in the line types nothing showing up so I actually need to enable splines you'll see that I'll bring our splines back and you can see that it's a thinner stroke because by default our thickness is lower because if defaults to so we can actually bring that 2/3 to match the thickness of this all the other strokes in our scene or we can make it bigger and you can see that by just having that individual sketch style tags we're just isolating those objects with the tags applied to it so now we can go to our color and we can change this to your like a lighter gray I say that looks pretty damn good right there so notice when you actually have these tags we have this default visible and so you can actually see the stroke material is the one that's applied if I actually went and change that default visible to the global strokes that'll just bring it back to those this stroke or this sketching to material options so something to keep in mind is when you have these separate materials you need to have them also correspond to its own stroke material that you want applied so I want this lighter gray stroke material and you can apply these to a bunch of different objects and have and even have different types of lines applied and activated on the geometry so I'm going to do one more thing and that is on our handle here we are losing there's no line where there probably should be where this handle kind of meets the rest of this you know briefcase so what I want to do is I'll go to this handle group and I'll also create a sketch style and again when it when it creates a sketch style tag it creates a new material and actually we don't want a new material we actually want to use the global sketch Intune material so I'll just drag that global strokes in there and just get rid of the new stroke material that it created and what I want to do is remember we actually have all these local all these line types that are just local to the object with the tag applied so what I'll do is just I'll turn off folds and border and what I want to do is enable outline and enable overlaps and also intersections so you can see that what by enable intersections actually I don't need overlaps I don't think yeah that looks good so remember for the global options we actually turned intersections off because we made that creative choice where we don't want these lines here but it looks it looks okay here but it looks kind of awkward for this bit on the handle so what you can do is apply a tag to that material that you actually want to apply intersections to and go ahead and enable it on just that object so the sketch style tag very handy to kind of isolate objects and apply the own your own line types to it you can turn creases off and kind of get rid of that line there too you know if you like that stick with it if not you know turn it back on and get that line back so you have a lot of control by using not only the different render settings here in the actual line types of sketch in tune but you can also isolate individual objects and have further control over what lines are being applied to individual objects in your scene and even changing colors on certain objects by creating a different color and then in those sketch style tags using a different sketching toon material so that is basically it on how you can use cinema 4d to create this really popular line art in cinema 4d not using After Effects anything like that and you know you actually have this 3d kind of perspective and depth to your scene and I'm also using ISO metric camera so I'm getting this kind of flat kind of cooled a geometrical kind of perspective on my object so the cool thing is is you can actually render this out and render just the lines by itself and also the colors by itself and what you can do is something kind of fun is you can actually bring so I have my lines by itself just did a sketch in tune render by itself just the lines and then just had another pass that just had the materials and you can actually offset and kind of move this around and this is kind of like a popular style to where it's just kind of like offset printing where you kind of get this kind of offset stroke and kind of it gives a pretty cool kind of look kind of like pop art style almost but that's something cool you can play around with as well by rendering both the sketch in tune separately as a separate pass you can go in here and the sketching tune Pass is actually in the post effects pass so if you render a post effects and go into the multi pass and you can separate alpha you can actually separate different line types as well so if you enable this you'll actually have an outline pass and increases pass and you can combine them all in After Effects or Photoshop or something like that if you separate the alpha you'll have your own separate alpha for just your lines so something to keep in mind with that kind of style so that is again how you can create line art style animations in cinema 4d and hope you play around with this if you make something be sure to send it along I'd love to see you guys are making out there and as always thanks for watching guys see you next time

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 97,847

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, sketch and toon, sketch and toon tutorial, mograph, 3d, line art, line art animation, 2D animation, eyedesyn, sketch, illustration, line art animations, cinema 4d sketch and toon, c4d sketch & toon, sketch & toon, sketch & toon tutorial, 2d line art, line art tutorial, tut, c4d tut, how to create line art, cinema 4d cel shading, cel shading, cinema 4d line art, learn c4d, cinema 4d tut

Id: REl-bx-qeOw

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015