Cinema 4d Tutorial - Make This Awesome Looping Animation (C4D + Octane + After Effects)

[Music] hey so i'm gonna keep these tutorials as to the point as i can but since this is my first one i just wanted to preface it with this short intro so my name is guy i'm a graphic designer 3d artist whatever you call it i do almost anything in 3d except maybe character design and stuff like that i've been getting requests on how i made certain videos and certain projects and i decided to share them through a tutorial um those videos are on my instagram you can go watch them and follow me at ojang i love sharing what i do i love sharing my knowledge it helps me solidify what i already know even more and i guess uh gives me a sense of worth in this life just to know that i can help somebody so yeah it's a win-win situation so that's why i decided to open this channel new plastic to do all that we're gonna go through whole projects or just certain techniques and i just want you to see how i do certain things and how i overcome certain issues so i'm gonna you know it's all gonna unfold in front of the camera i feel like that's the best way to go at it while still keeping it as to the point and you know cut all the fat and all the so with that said hope you enjoy if you have any comments remarks or anything how to make this better please i welcome it all so please uh enjoy first of all we're going to do is we're going to start a new project set it on square octane renderer set on set a plane and uh let's quickly set up hdri link set the hdri lighting i love hdri link i'm just going to choose this indoor lighting from hdri haven which i love and you can download an iphone model for free from anywhere i'm going to put a link to this one and respect to the modeler and i already textured it with the imperfections and everything i'm not going to go over this but we're just going to set it in the scene and just make sure it's the right size i'm going to use real real life scale size for the iphone which is about i guess 15 centimeters so that looks about right i compared it to a 20 by 20 by 20 centimeter box and it looks about right so let's just align it with the floor make sure the that camera knob and the bottom is aligned so it has a little angle to it and um yeah just make sure it's aligned it looks right so let's rotate it towards the camera and start really setting up our scene let's set a camera we're going to set the focal length pretty long so i'm trying to avoid you know camera perspective distortion just so we get that small scale feel and a neater look so we're gonna adjust uh the direction of the lighting playing with the rotation of the hdri just to kind of get it right i like to have it mostly backlit um it's usually the most kind of interesting lighting so let's uh let's set the textures real quick i'm gonna set an imperfection map to the roughness and an imperfection map to the bump i'm going to use polygon imperfections for for the roughness um some floor smudges fingerprints smudges polygon has some great ones so i'll use this and set the color so yeah this looks right now i'm playing with the gamma and the power on the black and white imperfection map to kind of get the look that i want obviously scale to get it to work with the scene but yeah i'm kind of playing with the gamma and power to play with the strength and you know yeah so if i'm i'm soloing the texture you see it better now let's use bridge for the bump kind of scratches and imperfections let's try this one the grain one and i'm just going to copy it from the imported texture and paste it into the to my texture set into bump it's way too big let's scale it down and i'm i'm always soloing the textures to the notes to see what i'm working with better so yeah just playing with the brightness and the gamma i can also do it in image texture node but this is already has a color correction note so i'll do it there but let's use this one i don't really like the other one let's use this one i think it's more subtle so again copy it paste it into the to my texture set it into bump way too big scale it down and yeah play with the brightness play with the gamma which basically gives us uh basically lets us play with the strength of the bump i really wish octane had like a bump strength slider thing but since we don't we can also use a gradient node and really control the black and white strength which really is like the the strength of the bump the the less contrast the less strength right so just rotating the the hdri here and this looks about right i like that bright specular and we're going to set it on five 512 max samples path tracing kernel static noise and enable denoising with the denoiser and 512 should be enough samples and let's increase the focal length so we get less perspective distortion and now i get the i got the character from mixol you can choose which character you want i chose this one and then just choose the animation you want you just type whatever you want and get the run set it in place set the speed in the style you like i think this was my this is the one i liked obviously it's sped up but it's half the time as this one so it's way slower set the right key frame per second you want and import the downloaded animation i love maximo it's great i use it all the time it saves me a lot of work so we're just going to bake it as alembic because um it just gives me more freedom and um flexibility with the character it's just one object one um model that i work with i can loop it i can slow it down faster make it faster all that so we're just going to scale it down to fit our scene and set it place it in the right place make sure it's aligned with the floor looks about right and we got a running animation now we're just gonna loop the alembic and that's it we got a nice animation going let's just make sure see what's the length of the loop it's 24 frames so we're going to set our scene to 24 frames and we got a perfectly looping animation let's just save it because that's important and let's just paste some some um some plants from from bridge i love the plants here they're amazing i always use them let's take i'll get some plots some um sorry some pots some plants and pots some plots and we're gonna model our own planters so let's just get like a nice concrete texture i'm going to select all of our imported textures and reduce the metallic because for some reason bridge imports with the metallic turned on so we're gonna turn it off and scale all of our imported models and just to adjust them you know build our scene real quick make sure everything is aligned with the floor uh we're just gonna scale the y-axis and yeah as you can see they're great great great textures great models i love bridge import a soil texture for for the soil reduce the metallic um let's use a disc for the cactus soil you're barely going to see it but it is uh just that little detail that we need and with bridge is just so quick i just import the material and and it's already there i don't need to create it i don't need to worry about it now for the planter for this planter we're gonna build it ourself with the volume builder so i'm just gonna just put a just a simple cube adjust it to the right size put it in the volume builder now our scene scale is really small so we're going to deal with very small foxhole size i'm going to put another cube to use to cut out of the larger cube and let's just mesh it real quick so yeah i used the inner cube as a subtract mode to cut cut it out of the bigger cube and let's just um make sure it's all placed in the right place and yeah let's cut an edge loop [Music] and select those top polygons and we're gonna not scale it up but extrude it out so i'm gonna extrude it out to create a little lip edge lip thing and since our scene scale is so big it needs to be really really tiny a tiny amount of offset so 0.2 seems about right and we're just going to scale down the base so we have a little tapering thing going on and this looks this looks good you can decrease the voxel size to get more detail and i think we can do that let's just set a location flow smooth layer we don't want too much smoothing but just a little bit and we're gonna texture it with the concrete texture we brought from bridge and because there's no uvs on the volume builder it's kind of messed up but we're just going to set the projection to cubic and it should be fine we'll increase the size and that looks about right i think we can decrease the voxel size even more it looks pretty rounded out so i guess .05 yeah we got a little more kind of edge detail zero eight i guess that's good okay so we're gonna um you know bake it to current state and just use the mesh with um as a as an actual mesh and i like it because it doesn't need to recalculate the the volume measure all the time so we're good let's uh use a little landscape plane as our soil base it kind of has you know its own default displacement so a little more detail to it but again it's not a huge deal put the soil texture on it and yeah this looks about right our soil is kind of peeking out there a little bit but before we're gonna fix that let's just make the cactus texture a little brighter i think the cactus looks a bit dark so yeah this is a bit better the light hits it nicer yeah let's fix our soil peeking out of the planter so it's really just about scaling it down um yeah this this looks about right let's uh convert our c4d material from miximo to octane material and i'm just gonna add a little a little metallic kind of specular to the we're going to set it to universal and then we have we can adjust the metallicness so i'm just adding some metallic to the gloves and the boots and no metallic to the to the clothes but let's try to add some some um subsurface scattering just so we'll just to add more complexity to the clothing i don't know if we actually need it but let's let's just try you know let's see what we get so i'm turning on the transmission all the way and then i'm adding a random walk and i'm attaching the albedo to the absorption layer and i'm just playing around with it well i guess it's called albedo layer here too but the scene is so small the the subsurface scattering is it seems just too strong and uh yeah if i play around with it i don't know i don't know if it's working looks too waxy if we increase the density yeah yeah there's no need for that i'm just gonna yeah add a little bit of transmission which is transparency just a little bit i guess they'll add a bit more kind of light inside though just helps it helps the light penetrate the clothes a bit more now i'm adding area light and octane area light because it helps um it really helps it really helps um add some a little more contour to the lighting i guess um just a little more detail to the lighting sometimes the hdri lighting can get a bit soft and um and a little bit flat so by adding a really subtle area light it kind of sharpens the lighting i guess and sharpens the shadows which you know it's up to you what you kind of feel like looks right and what you're trying to get from the scene but i think what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to separate the model a little bit more from from the background so you see without the hdri i mean without the area light the area light adds a little bit of more of a rim light around the around the model and i think i like that better yeah and it adds a little bit more directional lighting but it's so subtle that it doesn't become you know stylized it's it just emphasizes what we already have which is that directional lighting from the window from the hdri lighting yeah the shadows get a bit more complex yeah i like that okay so let's organize our scene a little bit we're gonna select all the plants group all the everything together and name it it's a very simple scene but it's still important to organize it so there you go now what we need to do is we need to make the animation of the swiping on the on the iphone and we're going to do that in a second let's just play around with the bump map on the floor i think it still needs some some work maybe a bit more subtle yeah that looks good you see the contrast is very very very light on the bump map and it's still you can still very much see it so you can uh you can play with that i'm just going to smooth out our iphone edges with subsurface scattering just just put it at one should be enough and um that's it now i recorded myself swiping on my iphone and i uh imported that video file now what we're gonna do it has this recording bar at the top the red bar so we're gonna get that one out so what i'm i'm doing is i'm going to the first frame freeze framing it and i'm masking out the top layer just that top bar and i'm it's duplicated over the original video so that just stays there and you don't see the red bar so yeah that looks right now second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the first frame where it starts swiping and we're going to time remap it and just add a timestamp a keyframe in the time remap which is kind of time stamping every time we hit a post let's bring it to the top now i exported a little hardware kind of render of the scene just to get the pacing of the running and so we can make sure it's it's synchronized with the running we we're gonna synchronize the swiping with the running so yeah we got one two so we got two two steps one two in each loop right so we need two swipes for each loop and um let's just set it on two loops so it loops twice so it's four steps and then uh the first one and the last one needs to be the same one because we want it to loop so what we're going to do is we're going to start with the second post and then we're going to duplicate it and we're going to bring back so the third step is going to be the first step which ends up in the second step so it loops because we're starting from the second step right you'll see it anyway now what we're gonna do is we're gonna scroll to each time the character hits to the screen and we're gonna move the timestamp of the swiping so it matches with the with the with the steps you see what i mean so i'm kind of i'm moving the time stamp to each time the character hits the floor so let's just add another one this is the fifth one i think yeah and this is the last step and we're gonna match that swipe so now you see the swiping happens this is twice the speed but you can see the it matches with the running and now we're gonna do is we're gonna add we're gonna loop it so we're gonna make our third swipe the first swipe and um for that i'm gonna i'm gonna need to manually position it up move the positioning of the of the video so that it looks like i'm swiping it and i'm just masking the i'm just masking the that part right so this is this is the part that i'm gonna manually swipe in so that we can um it can kind of swipe itself as a loop you'll you'll see what i mean so what we need to do is we need to match the movement of the swiping with the manual movement of that top layer yeah so you see it doesn't really match so all we need to do is we need to to match it but first of all we need to make sure it only moves within within that area you see so we need to make sure it's moving inside the inner area where everything gets swiped so what we're going to do is we're going to create a matte layer that is only visible in that area and then we're going to use that as an alpha matte so it only moves within that layer and now it's not overlapping the bottom bar and i messed up okay so i need i need to mask the inner part of the post and i also need to make sure so make sure it's matted yeah so i'm just again i'm creating that matte layer that is only visible in that inner area so you can see yeah you can see what i'm doing here um so the bottom that that second layer only shows is is masked on its own only the the swiping area is masked and then i'm creating another layer on top of it that's masking the inner area so it only moves only the masked part moves within the mast part i hope it makes sense if you dealt with with after effects it probably makes more sense if not just do exactly what i do here and we're just going to match the movement now so i'm just positioning everything and i'm trying to match it with the movement of the bottom layer now it's not going to move this fast but it's going to move pretty fast still so it's not doesn't have to be perfect at all and i'm removing all the easing and to do that i need to separate the dimensions and now it can just make every movement linear and now it it looks okay it doesn't have to be perfect so that's all we need and that's it and now you see we're ending where we're starting we're going to change the frames per second to 30 because that's our cinema 4d scene we gotta match it and yeah this looks right it loops it moves according to the video to the running and we're gonna export it as a jpeg sequence because that's how octane plays videos it only plays jpeg sequences it won't play an mp4 so make sure you export it as a jpeg sequence and while we render it we're just gonna fix up our scene let's quit after effects and yeah so this is our scene looks pretty good and let's just see you can play around with the imperfections on the iphone again by controlling the amount of black and white you basically control the strength of the of the map so the the the brighter it is the more rough the texture is so i'm just uh i made it a bit less strong but then i increased the black areas which are the least rough i made them slightly more rough and let's just play around with the lighting and i think yeah i don't like that it shows the specular the lighting shows on the floor so i'm just playing around seeing what i like better that's why it's important to have the quickest live viewer response because uh it's i always have to see what i'm looking at i mean you know i'll have to see what i'm working with so we're going to turn up the bloom all the way kind of not all the way but pretty strong and then use the cut off to only focus to bloom on the brightest areas so the only the light the light kind of blooms and not everything and let's import our jpeg sequence now so we got 49 frames so we're going to set this movie and frame to 49 set the fps to 30 and um and that's it and now it's swiping right because we matched the swiping speed to the to the steps of the of the character so yeah it looks it looks it looks right my my iphone is iphone 7 and the model is iphone 10 so it doesn't match perfectly to the size of the screen but it's fine you barely notice it let's just play around with the color and uh maybe yeah just scale up the bump i still don't like the bump on the floor let's play around with the the roughness and you see we always kind of cranking it kind of dialing it in to get the look that we want and yeah just move it around make sure your composition is nice for the composition usually if it's a centered object like that what i do is i look at the outer at the negative space as in as a okay what i'm doing here is i'm testing out the exposure so i'm going to the camera imager and i see the exposure yeah this looks about right one is right let's make the cactus a bit brighter this looks okay and i think i can scale up the the fingerprints on the iphone yeah i know it's there's a bug here that won't allow me to connect the texture projection so let's just set it on box and uh scale it down and move it around so again i'm kind of dialing in the the imperfections on the glass and move it around on the glass to get get the look that you want this this looks okay not too strong not too subtle let's uh dial in our composition so again i'm looking at the negative space around the objects as its own shape and i'm just trying to see if that shape kind of holds everything together and it's really about kind of looking at the negative space as its own shape and this looks right let's test out different lighting and this looks right so now we're just going to bring it down to 1080 by 1080 and render it out and uh let's render it out set our rendering folder and i'm using open exr for that i'm enabling the render pass and i'm pasting in the name and adding some kind of uh indication that some it's the passes i'm using exr octane as the format and let's turn on beauty and reflection and direct and let's turn on the shading normal and also the shadows and for this scene this looks should be right now let's try and see if we need some depth of field this is way too much and because our scene scale is so small you know we're probably gonna have to use pretty large numbers so i'm clicking where i want the camera to focus and i'm choosing the object that i wanted to focus on and then obviously i wanted to focus on the character so i mean this looks about right it's not too strong we don't need the the background to be in and um in in focus so this looks right okay we're gonna render it out and then once it's rendered we're gonna import our exr sequence you're going to import the the passes exr sequence and set up a new composition use extractor on the passes and then adjust the gamma back to 2.2 because we're on linear and this looks about right bring down the the noise layer to mix it with the original beauty and do the same with the reflections indirect this allows me to kind of again sharpen the the reflections make them a bit more precise a bit more kind of uh defined and same thing with the shadows just a bit more definition on the shadows and you can play around with it or you can set it on 100 and then use it as a inverted luma matte layer and then use an adjustment layer as an inverted luma you see so now i'm using curves to define the shadows a bit more yeah this looks this looks good now let's now what i do here is i use the shading normals this gives us the directions of the scene and i can choose the the channel that i want so in this case i chose the blue channel which gives me the i think the x direction so you can see it if i make all the channels the blue channel it makes it white and then i can use it as a luma mat again with an adjustment layer and just just get you see i'm just adding this really subtle rim lighting on the on the character and that's all in post which is great and the overall adjustment layer which where i adjust the contrast maybe increase the saturation just by a little bit and uh add very little glow very low glow the glow really just helps me kind of blend in the colors a little bit just yeah if i use you see how subtle it is it it just kind of gels the image together you don't want too much you just want a little bit unless that's your style right and here we're gonna add some real smart motion blur which is a great great great plug-in i use almost all the time let's save this and you see this is how i compose how i i guess composite the render this is this is how it came out of the program and this is width with all the compositing of the passes and the adjustment layers it just kind of you know squeezes more juice out of the render and that's it so this took me about three hours to make and you can see the original animation that i made that inspired this tutorial um it looks slightly different but i use the exact same techniques same workflow that i used for this tutorial and you can recreate this use the techniques do whatever you want as long as you do you um and that's it you can go follow me on instagram at ojang you can watch this animation and many others feel free to ask me anything if you got any suggestions or comments or remarks or hate comments or anything comment on this video dm me on instagram to slide into my dms you know i reply to anything so hope you have a good one and i hope you have a good one peace

Channel: New Plastic

Views: 21,511

Rating: 4.9732056 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, octane, tutorial, how to, animation, after effects, mixamo, Quixel, Bridge, iPhone, models, 3d, blender, render

Id: 2l602jYjA2Y

Length: 38min 42sec (2322 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HerrSignore]

Pretty intro dude.

Any tutorials on that?

[u/maxmuno]

Please keep uploading tutorials.

Wonderful stuff.